Page 23 of Badd B*tch

"You're not a kid, Jax."

He snorted. "No shit. But that's just what we call ourselves as a collective—the kids. The cousins. It's interchangeable."

I sniffed the hoodie again. "Ya'll must hang out a lot."

"Are you judging me?"

I looked at him, then, because I couldn’t tell if he was teasing or not—he was smirking, so I suppose he was. “Yes," I answered. "I am judging you. Pothead."

Jax adopted an impressively accurate Transatlantic accent—that not-quite-British accent they use in old-timey black-and-white movies and commercials. "Beware the dangers of marijuana! This diabolical substance turns law-abiding young men into demons, hell-bent on raping and pillaging wherever they go."

I snickered. "I'm not sure those old PSAs used the phrase ‘raping and pillaging.’”

"No?"

"No, probably not."

Jax shifted across the bench toward me and then stretched out his long legs at a diagonal, lying back to rest his head on the armrest. "Feeling any less panicky?"

"Yeah, I am." I swallowed hard. "Thanks."

“Hey, what are friends for, crash-buddy?"

"Crash-buddy?" I echoed.

"No?"

"No."

"Not crash-buddies then." He sighed. "That was fucking terrifying."

"Yeah, that was about a seven or eight on the sphincter pucker scale," I said.

"The what?" Jax chortled.

"Sphincter pucker scale. The measure of how scary something is by how tightly it makes your butthole pucker."

"Wow. Just...woooooow." He did an Owen Wilson impression on the last word.

"Ever experienced a ten?"

"Yes."

"Thus the panic attack?"

"Thus the panic attack, yes."

"I'm still unclear as to what exactly the fuck happened, to be honest."

"Fucking geese, that's what happened,” I said. “A gaggle of the honky motherfuckers decided to go for a late evening fly…right into our rotor assembly. It happens a lot more frequently than you’d imagine, actually—thousands of bird strikes happen every year, but only a tiny percentage result in fatalities or catastrophic damage, mostly due to the fact that the vast majority of them happen at low altitudes and thus low air speed and a greatly reduced distance to fall. Helos, obviously, face a much higher risk of bird strike since we operate almost exclusively under three or four thousand feet, which means we share airspace with birds. Most of those bird strikes just kinda hit the windscreen." I gestured at our own shattered one. "It's not normally a catastrophic thing. If it had just been the windshield, I could have brought us down in one piece. Windblown, maybe, but a landing, not a crash. Except one of the stupid fucking asshole geese decided to fly right into the rotor hub, and that's what fucked us."

"Well, fuck those geese."

“Yeah, exactly. Fucking geese. Bastards."

"Tell me how you really feel."

"I was at the beach with my family when I was a little girl, just sort of walking along the water and looking for seashells, y'know? Well, I wasn’t paying attention, and I apparently got too close to some geese, because they started attacking me. They chased me almost half a mile before my dad caught up and got me away. I've hated geese ever since. And now I really hate them."