The brunette was standing next to the booth, or maybe it made more sense to say she was damn near draped over it, the sheer red top gaping enough so he knew with certainty that she was braless beneath it.
“This big booth,” she said. “So much space for one man.” She smiled and ran the tip of her tongue lightly over her bottom lip. “Don’t you believe in sharing?”
He knew the correct answer. He’d say, I believe in sharing everything, baby. Where would you like to start?
And she’d laugh and say she was here for the weekend, she had a room nearby, one of the motels on the ocean, probably, and her girlfriends would know enough to stay away.
Or maybe not. Maybe they’d come along, too. Maybe that was her idea of sharing and that was fine.
The brunette leaned towards him.
He could smell her perfume.
Sweet. Cloying. So sweet and cloying it made bile rise in the back of his throat—and suddenly, he was back in a meadow in the high mountains he’d left not forty-eight hours ago. The meadow had been a place of death. Bodies. The burnt remains of vehicles lying, underbellies up, like big dead bugs.
And yet, for all the destruction, flowers had somehow pushed their way above the soil. Their smell was sweet. Sickly sweet, almost like the smell of blood.
Chay and the seven other men in his until had been making their way cautiously through the flowers when he’d heard something behind him.
Or sensed it.
The guys in his unit joked about that ability of his. The sensing-some-other-presence thing.
“It’s what comes of being an Indian,” he’d say, and they’d all laugh, but yeah, he was an Indian. Part, anyway. Lakota Sioux. And even as a kid he’d had that sensing-thing. It had saved his ass a couple of times back home in South Dakota, the feeling that a mountain lion was approaching him from behind or that a bear was noiselessly following his trail.
That day in the meadow, the feeling had come to him again.
Something was coming up behind him.
He’d spun around quickly.
No cat. No grizzly.
A kid.
A boy.
Young.
Ten. Twelve at the most. And when he saw Chay looking at him, the kid began to run. Straight for him and the others, and he had a bulge under his shirt that could have been anything from a stack of naan or a jug of doogh or, Christ, a bomb, a bomb, and he was almost on them so that Chay knew he had all of one second to decide which of those fucking things it was and…
“Hey.”
And it turned out he’d made the right decision, which was maybe his problem tonight because he could still hear the roar of explosives after he’d shouted a warning and the kid had kept coming, so he’d pulled the trigger and, fuck, all these days later, he could hear the BANG, see the flames, smell the stink of burning flesh—
“Hey, dude.”
Chay shot out his arm, grabbed hold of something warm and slender…
“Hey. What are you trying to do? Break my arm?”
He blinked. His hand was wrapped around the brunette’s wrist.
“Crap,” she said. “All I did was snap my fingers.”
The world came into focus.
He let go of her. She pulled back, rubbing her skin, staring at him as if he’d turned into an alien life form.