Page 80 of Badd B*tch

She held two fingers to my pulse and glanced at her watch, counting the number of beats in fifteen seconds. "Twenty. Times four is eighty. So, slightly elevated."

"Which means I'm okay, Tea. I'm sorry you got triggered, but I'm gonna be okay. I promise."

She hung her head. "I'm sorry I freaked out on you."

I held out the joint. "Here," I said around a lungful of smoke.

She shook her head. "No, thanks. One of us needs our wits about us." A glance at the joint, then. "Maybe when we're safe, I'll try it with you."

Another long silence, her thinking and me smoking and watching her.

She glanced at me. "Until I freaked out, that was…" She rubbed her cheeks with both hands. "Jax, it was… what you did. I…I liked it. A lot."

I grinned at her. "I know."

"Cocky," She muttered, rolling her eyes. "I just…it was so intense when I came. Like…almost like I'd never really had a real orgasm before. I have, I know I have, but—"

"There are orgasms," I said, "and then there are orgasms."

"Right. Yeah." She shook her head. "It's not just that, though. It's…it's super fucking hard to even wrap my brain around this."

"Around what?"

She was silent a while. "I…I may need some time with it before I can talk about it, actually."

"Okay," I said. "Whatever you need."

She stared at the fire for a while; I didn’t try to measure the time, but it felt like several minutes, at least, before she spoke again. "It's just…it's hard to come to terms with the fact that I…with you, I feel more…" She shook her head again, her black braid waggling. "More of everything than I ever did with…with Luke. And that kinda hurts, y'know? Like, I fucking loved him. And we…we never really got to have a…a normal relationship. We only got to sleep together in a bed once, when we both got some leave at the same time in Germany. We had forty-eight hours together to feel like a normal couple. Just drinking coffee in a hotel bed, listening to the Berlin traffic. And I remember thinking as we checked out that I couldn't see how I could ever feel anything stronger for anyone than I did for him then, that weekend we had together. We were over there on deployment for eighteen months. That's how much time I had with him. But during those eighteen months, it was hard as fuck to find time to be together, let alone privacy. And he…he's been gone for as long as I had him, which is weird. And—and…you and me…it's only been a few days. So how can I…? How can what I'm feeling for you when I barely know you be more than what I had with him? It doesn't make any sense, and I don’t know what to do with it." She finally looked at me, then. "That's not to say I don't want to feel all this for you, I just—"

"I know," I cut in. "I know I can't possibly get it, but I comprehend. And you have the right to feel whatever you feel, Tea. I'm sorry I triggered all that. I should've…I dunno."

“No," she said, crouching beside me, giving me a soft smile. "No. Don't do that. It wasn't you. I mean, it was, but…" she sniffed. "I don’t know what I’m trying to say other than it wasn't your fault. I'm just confused, okay?"

"I just don't want to make it any harder for you to navigate all this than it already is. If we need to pause the physical stuff—"

She clapped a hand over my mouth. "No!" She laughed at her own outburst. "No. I don't want to. I don't. But I won’t be able to enjoy it if you're in pain, so we kind of have to."

A sound had been plucking at the edges of my hearing for a while, a faint, muffled…something. Not natural, I didn't think. "Do you hear that?"

Tea's head tilted, turned this way and that. And then her eyes flew wide and she scrambled for the bag. "It's them! It's rescue!" She yanked the kit out and fumbled it in her haste, almost dropping it in the fire.

I grabbed her ankle. "Hey, breathe. Slow down."

She nodded, eyes closed as she let out a slow, controlled breath. "Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast." It sounded like a mantra. "Luke used to say that all the time when he was in a hurry. It's an old Army saying."

She moved more carefully, then set the kit on the ground, opened it, and thumbed a flare into the flare gun. She positioned herself in the center of the clearing and turned in a circle, listening. When she caught the distant, muffled flutter of the rotors, she waited and listened hard. The sound was growing louder, but we had to get their attention now, in case their grid search took them away from our position. She held the flare gun in both hands, pointed it at the sky at a not-quite-vertical angle, and fired. A blinding red light seared my eyes, leaving dancing afterimages on my retinas as it launched skyward, trailing a corkscrew streamer of gray-white smoke.

She cracked the barrel, immediately loaded another flare, closed it, and held it at her thigh, waiting and listening.

The rotor thump grew louder and louder, and I finally let myself feel relief—I’d been scared they wouldn’t see the thing and would just keep flying away, which is when I started to realize I probably had more going on emotionally than I was letting on, even to myself. I had a feeling there would be more nightmares in my future. But then, as long as I could wake up with Tea beside me, it'd be fine.

That thought itself freaked me out.

Whee, what a mess I was.

A shadow flitted over the clearing, followed a split second later by the flattening wash of wind from the rotors and the deafening noise that sent birds fluttering away. Tea launched another flare skyward after they passed over us, just for good measure, and then stood there with the empty flare gun, watching the sky.

The helicopter circled our clearing a couple of times, then centered over it and hovered. Tea used a long branch to scatter the coals and kill the fire before the rotor wash scattered sparks and started a wildfire, pouring out the last of our water over it and then covering it with scooped handfuls of earth. She then busied herself packing up our little bag and checking the clearing as the helo hovered overhead, slowly descending until it was just a few feet above the trees—the clearing wasn’t big enough for it to land.