In the Weeds

by M. L. Buchman

  “I’m not some goddamn idiot, Ivy. I know I’m in over my head. I’ve onboarded enough new dog teams to know irrational panic when I see it. I just don’t know what to do with it.”

  “You act as though everything is fine.”

  He squinted at her.

  “You think I’ve never been scared? Freaking out is part of being a pilot. When tracer fire is punching holes in your fuselage and your Marines are stuck inside, taking the hits with no way to fire back, and you’re just praying to the gods the enemy fire doesn’t punch out a critical system and bring your whole aircraft down out of the sky in a ball of flaming fire. Right then? Trust me, you’re freaking. Training kicks in. You do the next task that’s right in front of you. Chaff release, restore failing hydraulics, evasive maneuvers—whatever you can.”

  “Whatever’s right in front of me?” Suddenly Colby had that half smile he always wore just as he was about to zing her. She’d learned to let him have his teasing moments. Partly because it was usually fun, partly because it made the revenge so much sweeter. But the shift this time was so fast.

  “Exactly!”

  “No matter what the consequences?”

  “Well, hopefully it will fix things, but sometimes not.”

  “And you’re sure about this?” That half smile was still growing. That was one of the things about Colby’s teases—she could see them coming, but even with all the years of practice she could never predict what they’d be. Something about aircraft. Or flying.

  “Worked every time so far.” Maybe about travel.

  “Fine, let’s see how your luck is holding.”

  “My luck? You mean your lu—”

  And Colby leaned across the narrow aisle and kissed her.

  She’d guessed wrong again.

  Colby had expected any number of possible results: top of the list being a head-twisting slap. In anticipation, he’d casually rested a hand on her shoulder, placing his arm as an effective block. Because she was sitting sideways in the armchair, her other hand would be blocked by the back of the chair.

  Instead, her burst of laughter broke the kiss. In seconds, he joined in. There was no way to stop it.

  He and Ivy. There wasn’t a more unlikely couple on the planet.

  It was like they were sixteen and nineteen again, but it felt more as if he was eight and she was five. Except they’d never “stolen” a first kiss from each other. They both would have screamed “Cooties!” and run in opposite directions. She’d grown up sleek and beautiful and he’d really enjoyed watching her once she had.

  Actually kissing her had never been part of any program.

  Ivy managed to catch her breath first. She held out a hand as if to shake his.

  Unsure what else to do, he took it and shook it firmly once.

  “Hi, I’m Major Ivy Hanson.” Not a kid anymore. He heard the unspoken part clear as day.

  “Lieutenant Colby Thompson at your service, ma’am.” And suddenly he wasn’t holding her hand prior to some martial arts throw or grabbing her to heave her overboard. Instead he was holding the hand of a beautiful woman.

  Using their clasp, he slowly drew her back in. She watched him carefully with those wide, blue eyes, but neither did she resist when he kissed her again.

  This time it wasn’t at all about who they’d been.

  Somehow, at least for today, Ivy had become the only sensible thing in his world. A day that had begun so normally had spun out of control. And when she’d explained her theory of panic was the moment he’d understood what was really throwing him off his usual even keel.

  His problem wasn’t all of that other noise—that was merely making him a little nuts. His problem, since the moment she’d stepped off that helicopter onto the close-trimmed grass of the South Lawn, was Ivy Hanson.

  He’d sworn at her, cursed her right to her face, and her response had been to sincerely try to help him. Cool under pressure he didn’t doubt. But there had to be a woman in there somewhere.

  And here she was, clear as day physically—an exciting combination of lovely and lethal. And so straight-ahead. No wonder she was a Marine Corps major. It was as if they’d invented the Corps for people like her—focused, straight-ahead thinkers. That trait was what had always made her so fun to tease: her absolute willingness to walk right into any trap he set for her.

  The combination was amazing, but it was the woman who was dazzling him. He’d never have pegged Ivy Hanson as having kindness.

  Or such a taste. Each moment she let his kiss continue added another layer of richness, of depth, of wonder. He’d been “lucky in love” and knew it. He’d had some fine women share his bed. None had tasted so vibrantly alive as Ivy.

  Her hand pressed against his shoulder as a slow, steady pressure, driving him away even as she leaned into the kiss. Finally, she pushed enough farther with her arm than she leaned in that the kiss slipped apart with just the slightest tug of her teeth on his lower lip.

  Anime girls didn’t have eyes as big as hers were at the moment. Their brilliant blue shone brighter than a DC summer sky.

  Continuing to use her arm as a lever against his shoulder, she slowly pushed herself back into her seat.

  “I could ask why…” But she didn’t.

  He was glad she didn’t, because he had no good answer to that. Any glib response had been erased by the surprising depth of that kiss. Her brow furrowed as she puzzled at it. Ivy really was the cutest thing on the planet. Not physically cute, which was how she would take it if he said anything, even though it was true. But linear, hyper-rational cute. That kiss had just dropped his prior experiences of women right in the deep end of the pool where they’d all sunk with no idea how to swim. And she was busy thinking it through.

  “I think instead I could ask, ‘Since when?’ ”

  “Well, since you’re asking questions instead of running your pig-sticker into my gut, I s’pose I should try to answer that.”

  “Please.”

  It took everything he had not to laugh in her face. Her eyes were still unnaturally wide, her breath was running in short hard gasps, yet her voice was perfectly calm. Marine training he supposed.

  “At first I thought it might be the moment you stepped off that helo this morning without even a hair out of place.”

  “So, it’s just lust.” As if she could deal with that.

  “Then I recalled that red-white-and-blue one-piece you wore at the beach for July 4th the year you turned sixteen. Please tell me you still have that swimsuit. You looked beyond amazing in that.”

  “So you’re just interested in my body.”

  “But now I’m thinkin’,” he stretched out the moment by leaning down to rub Rex, who sighed in his sleep, “I’m thinkin’ that it goes back to maybe when I was five and you were two, following us everywhere. You made Reggie nuts, but…”

  “You’re so warped that teasing me to death was your way of saying you liked me?” Ivy concluded in a tone of judge, jury, and executioner.

  “I was five. Sue me.”

  “And you aren’t just messing with me now?”

  “I’m not a big thinker, Ivy. I’m a Be Here Now sort of guy. And after that kiss, being here now sounds pretty damned good to me.”

  “But—”

  “You’re already thinking six steps ahead.”

  She nodded with a grimace that said it probably caused her at least as much trouble as it saved her. She’d always been the one with a plan.

  “Remember what our favorite books were?”

  “What are you talking about, Colby?”

  “Reggie’s favorite book as a child was written by Julia Child. Yours was…”

  “The Little Engine That Could.” And it had been. He’d helped teach her to read from that book. There’d been most of six months where he couldn’t turn around without finding Ivy clutching her favorite book and looking up at him with her little girl eyes begging him to read it to her. She did that long after she could read it herself.
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br />   “You were always way past the train making it up and over the mountain with a trainload of toys. I bet you have never once thought ‘I think I can.’ You were always ‘What can I do next?’ Pretty damn humbling, Ives. Remember what mine was at that age?”

  “Winnie-the-Pooh,” her voice was little more than a puzzled whisper. It would have been impossible to hear outside the helicopter’s sound insulation.

  “Winnie-the-Pooh,” he confirmed. “Know why?”

  She shook her head.

  “Because I’m like Pooh. He’s the ultimate Be Here Now kind of guy, just dropping in on his other pals in the Hundred Acre Wood. So, no, I wasn’t thinking ahead about messing with you, or setting you up for something. I was thinking about how much I wanted to kiss you. Enough that I didn’t even care much what your revenge might be.”

  “At least I think before I act.”

  Which was true. It had taken him a long time to realize that because Ivy always thought so damn fast, it looked like simple reaction; but it never was.

  “Unlike me. I just wanted to kiss you, so I did. What are you thinking, Saint Ives?”

  “I’m still thinking that you’re messing with me intentionally.”

  He raised three fingers in a Boy Scout salute. “As God and the Scouts are my witness—”

  “Save the shit for someone who cares, Thompson.” But she said it with a smile.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He tried to wait her out, but she wasn’t having anything to do with it. He looked around the helo, even out the windows, but all he could see was a black SUV to one side and the steel side of the C-5’s hull to the other. That left him to think about what had just happened.

  “Hell of a kiss though, wasn’t it?” He’d never actually imagined kissing her, but now that he had, it was hard to think of anything else.

  Ivy just nodded.

  “Want to try it again?”

  She shook her head.

  No! She absolutely didn’t want to try it again.

  Her job, her life did not have any possible interpretation that allowed a kiss from Colby Thompson. The first peck, maybe. It had been almost cartoon funny—even less likely than some of the Captain Kirk kissing the alien seductress scenes.

  The second one, though? Clearly, she’d slid off into some alternate reality. Who knew that hormones could shift her world track—temporarily only, she prayed—to include such a thing? It was a Jean Luc Piccard and Beverly Crusher kind of kiss, full of meaning and history and—

  So not! Where are my damn shields!

  Ivy Hanson and Colby Thompson—that belonged on the far side of the galaxy through a very twisted quantum space that…

  She didn’t know what it did!

  But it certainly didn’t leave her heart racing faster than the time she’d been shot down and saved her crew as much by luck as by skill.

  That was it!

  She must be injured and lying in some hospital bed again, suffering from a painkiller-fueled delusion, like the one time she’d let a handsome Austrian oberstleutnant convince her to try skiing. Southern women should not be made to downhill ski. It had caused her to swear off dating all Austrian military men ever since—and German and Swiss military while she was at it.

  So why in the world did her fantasy include a scorching kiss from Colby Thompson?

  She looked down at Rex. He was lying across Colby’s boots but had his front paws and nose resting on hers. He was looking at her as if telling her to get her act together.

  Ivy didn’t have dreams where she could see each expression as it moved over a dog’s face in real time. Her dreams were crazy, swooping swirls of adventure ever since that Saturday when she was eleven and she’d watched too many sci-fi movies in a row—only to relive them all mashed together in her sleep. Gort and Robby the Robot dancing to the Star Wars theme, while Princess Leia and Spock debated the nature of effective rebellion over a game of holographic chess played between Jurassic Park dinosaurs and Blade Runner replicants all singing the five tones of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in thirty-two-part harmony that slowly fractured as more and more of them were killed off by phaser blast and light saber-wielding Klingons.

  She’d learned never to try and explain her dreams to anyone. Not since the one time she’d tried to explain one to Colby.

  “You laughed in my face.” He had. Years ago. But her present dream had included an undeniably real kiss.

  “No, I didn’t. I kissed you. Well, the first time, yeah. Besides, you laughed first. But that second kiss was no laughing matter.”

  “Then what was it?”

  “Stupendous!”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about.” Kisses with the Colby Thompsons of the world were not supposed to be stupendous, even if it had been. “It wasn’t. It was just an aberration, that’s all. An aberration that’s never ever going to recur.”

  “Ivy, sweetie.”

  “Sweetie? You were doing so well, Colby, right until that moment.” Patronizing bastard.

  “You know it was an amazing kiss.” He offered one of his smarmy Colby grins. “Bet you just can’t wait for another.”

  “I… What?” As if she didn’t know what she wanted. As if she hadn’t had to fight every step of the way to beat her way into the Marines. She didn’t deserve this kind of shit from anybody. Not her brother, not Colby, not anyone.

  Ivy popped the door on the VH-60N, climbed out, and closed it quickly—almost catching Rex’s nose and cutting off Colby’s attempt to backpedal. She didn’t look back to see either of their faces in the window.

  There was no free weight set on this plane. No punching bag to work out on. She needed to beat on something badly.

  There was also nowhere to hide.

  Unless…

  She strode forward as if she had a purpose. As if.

  “Well, I screwed that up pretty royally, didn’t I, boy?”

  Rex sighed and returned to lying on his feet, sprawling out over the President’s carpet.

  “She smell as good to you as she did to me?”

  A second sigh.

  “She tastes even better.”

  Rex ignored him.

  “And she is some kind of pissed right now. I just—” He didn’t know what had come over him at the last second. He’d suddenly found himself pushing Ivy’s buttons—hard—and he knew right where they were. Like he’d backslid into some past version of himself and couldn’t stop it.

  Ivy didn’t mind being laughed with, but she hating being laughed at. Hate was too mild a word. He’d seen her shut out friends for life for doing that to her. In hindsight, he was perhaps the only person he knew of in her entire life who’d ever gotten away with it.

  “And I just told her she didn’t know her own mind. Shit! I guess I deserved her storming out on me.”

  Rex fell asleep.

  “And now I’m sitting in the President’s helicopter talking to myself because even my dog isn’t listening.”

  Nothing was happening.

  “Sitting where the crew chief will shoot us for just sitting, even if you weren’t shedding all over the place.” While probably not true, it was enough to motivate him to get moving. He swung open the door, then roused Rex so that they stepped down from the helo together. When neither of them was shot, he took it as a good sign. The fact that Ivy was nowhere to be seen was, perhaps, less of a good sign.

  He circled around to the other side. The boys of the counter assault team were apparently done checking their weapons but hadn’t gone back upstairs.

  For lack of anything better to do, he flipped down the next seat that ranged along the side of the cargo jet’s fuselage and sat with them. Once he introduced Rex around and had given him a treat for each “positive” he found on all the guys as they petted him, they relaxed enough to start asking him questions. A few were about the White House, most were about Rex and how he could respond to various attack scenarios. Not a single question about Ivy, which was good.

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sp; “You guys are almost human. When did that happen?” Ivy teased the Air Force crew and it earned her a laugh and some flak about being a toy soldier. They had an entire habitat on the upper deck. It stretched from the wings forward with no access to the aft passenger cabin except through the big cargo bay down below.

  It began just forward of the wings where there was a seven-seat area for military couriers who couldn’t risk mixing with the general population of mere soldiers. A small living and bunk area for the relief crew. Typically they were aboard only for long missions—since with midair refueling the C-5s could span the globe. But carrying the President’s motorcade and helicopters, they wanted to be prepared for everything, and an entire second crew was along even for the short flight down the East Coast. In addition to the standard four on the flight deck—pilot, copilot, and two engineers—they also had a navigator who only flew for special missions.

  She’d managed to talk her way into the flight deck’s observer chair by waving around her White House Military Office appointment. It was nice that it had some use other than saddling her with Colby Thompson. She’d also wager that being Lead Dog wasn’t going to get him permission to climb the forward stairway. She could use the distance.

  Out the front windshield, she could see that they were hugging the coast, slipping between brilliant white lumps of cumulus clouds scattered across the blue sky. She could see just a little of the eastern seaboard of the Carolinas below, dotted with giant spots of cloud shadow.

  She’d somehow fallen into one of those shadows down in the cargo deck with Colby, closed inside a helicopter. Now she was once again up in the sunlight, talking about foreign missions, the lousy conditions at different overseas bases, and the food at Ramstein in Germany versus Lemonnier in Djibouti. Familiar. Competent.

  How could Colby never have left the East Coast? Not even to Florida?

  As she chatted with the crew, making a point about how luxurious the Air Force had it with beds and baths and room to walk around, she thought about that.

  Colby had started out the conversation very differently than he’d ended it.