Chapter Twenty-five
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Cash
To stick your foot in your mouth is human. To ask for forgiveness for sticking your foot in your mouth is divine.
“I reallyamsorry. Should’ve kept my thoughts to myself at Port of Call,” I say to Luc as Maggie scrambles up the chain-link fence surrounding the one-hundred-fifty-acre site of the former Six Flags amusement park originally known as Jazzland.
Luc zips his jacket. The November sun shines down on us, warming our heads. But a brisk wind blows, making it feel colder than it is.
“Forget about it.” He never takes his eyes off Maggie as she throws a leg over the top crossbeam and starts clambering down the opposite side.
“So…we cool?”
Now he flicks me a glance. “Go fuck yourself.”
“Yeah.” I grin and nudge him. “We’re cool.”
“You’resuchan asshole.”
“So you keep reminding me. After you.” I motion to the fence now that Maggie has touched down on the far side.
Luc was always an ace when it came to the cargo net obstacle on the ropes course in Basic, so I’m not surprised when he scales the eight-foot barrier like a spider monkey.
“Agile for his size, isn’t he?” I wink at Maggie as I grab the chain link and hoist myself up. “Good thing, too, since he needed to be to save my bacon.Twice.”
“Really?” Her voice drifts up to me as I climb. “Do tell.”
“It was nothing,” Luc is quick to interject. Always so humble. If it wasn’t so admirable, it’d be disgusting.
“Bullshit it was nothing,” I counter. “We were way up in the mountains, the Taliban hot on our trail, when I was knocked unconscious after tripping over a rock.” I throw my leg over the metal crossbeam, breathing heavily. Ever since the bombing, my endurance has been shit. “Luc had to toss my heavy ass over his shoulder and scamper over the foothills to escape. It was a close thing.”
“Good Lord,” she whispers.
“The other time, he caught me by one arm when the cliff face under my boots gave way.” I hop to the ground and dust off my hands. “The only thing saving me from a fifty-foot drop was his catlike reflexes.”
Fear. That’s what I saw in Luc’s eyes that day. There I was, dangling like a marionette attached by one string, and I could tell he didn’t think he had the strength to hold me.
“Let go!” I yelled at him. “Run!”
On Luc’s orders, the rest of our twelve-man commando unit had already beat feet. The whole side of the mountain was threatening to come down.
“Grab on to me, you sorry sonofabitch!” Luc snarled, big veins standing out in his neck, his face nearly purple with the effort to hang on. “Climb over me!”
“Luc—”
“Climb!”
He’d die saving me. That much was obvious. And damned if I could let that happen.
Grabbing the collar of his shirt with my free hand, I began the arduous task of using him as a ladder. Hand over hand, I grabbed fistfuls of his clothes and gear until finally, when too much time had passed, when the low grumbling of another landslide threatened, I found myself lying next to him.
I barely had a moment to catch my breath before he hauled me up and pushed me in the direction of our retreating unit. We made it to safety just as the earth shifted and the path we’d been on disappeared under falling rubble.
“Don’t let him having you believe that whole ass-saving business was one-sided,” Luc says, dispelling the memory. “He kept me alive twice as often as I ever kept him alive.”
“I’d say you probably kept eachotheralive,” Maggie insists. “I still can’t picture y’all as soldiers. I suppose you’ll forever be unruly teenagers in my eyes.”
