“Why didn’t I tell you, you asked,” Kenneth said. “Hello.Thisis why.”
It was then that Jim appeared. He was driving one of Dunk’s golf buggies and as he pulled up by the paintball field fence, he looked from Ashley—standing with Kenneth and Clark—to Bull and Todd.
“Sorry, I’m late,” he said as he cut the electric motor. “My meeting with Senior Chief Duncan ran a little long.”
“You’re actually right on time,” Ashley informed him as he climbed out of the cart. He managed not to wince, but she didn’t miss the muscle flexing in his jaw as he clenched his teeth against what must’ve been pain from his knees.
Still he managed to sound breezy. “Early is on-time in SEAL World,” he reminded them as he moved toward the back of the cart. “And on-time is late. So first round’s on me in the lounge tonight.”
No one responded—team spirit was definitely suppressed—so Ashley spoke up. “You really don’t have to—”
Jim must’ve realized that almost half of the team couldn’t drink, so he quickly amended with, “Or the equivalent in video game plays.”
And although Clark quietlyall-righted, Kenneth’s smile was wan. It was clear that Jim noticed, because he glanced at Ashley again, a question in his sharp blue eyes as he reached for the huge trunk—some kind of storage container made of heavy duty black plastic—that was in the back of the cart.
“Hold up, LT!” No way was she letting him carry that. God, his knees… “Clark and… um, Todd, please,” Ashley called in her best Team Leader’s voice. “Get that trunk. Lieutenant, if you don’t mind, Kenneth needs to speak to you for a sec.”
If Jim was surprised by her commanding tone, he didn’t show it. He simply stepped back as Clark scrambled over to get one end of the trunk. Todd took a little bit longer to snap to, so Jim handed the key to the trailer—old school, on a ring—to Clark. “You’ll need the keypad code, too,” he told her brother, leaning in to share the code in a lower voice that Ashley couldn’t hear. And then, no doubt because Clark had reached him first, he drove home the point that the kid was in charge ofOperation: Move the Trunkby ordering Todd, “Help Clark move it all the way onto the field.” Back to Clark, “Find us a good patch of shade. We’ll be talking safety, and that’s gonna take a while.” And with that, he turned toward Kenneth.
Which left Ashley with Bull.
“Safety instructions take longer when half the team are morons,” the big man informed her with a smugness to his tone.
Don’t worry. We don’t mind going slowly so that you and Todd can keep up.Things she’d never dare to say aloud, because frankly, escalating the hostility never worked. Not only was it rude, it was ineffective. Getting angry didn’t help, either—all it did was make her feel more powerless and impotent, as well as potentially putting her into danger.
Although the sad truth was, Ashley had spent most of her life feeling powerless, impotent, and in danger.But at least no one could ever call her impolite.
That wayward thought reverberated in her head as she gazed into Bull’s mocking eyes, and all she could think was of all the ways he’d beenunbelievablyrude to her over the past few days.
He was an a-hole—no question.
But what wasshe…? She’d earned her “Politeness” Girl Scout Badge a gazillion times over, and… She had exactly nothing to show for it—aside from the giant boot treadmarks on her doormat-of-a-face.
“Hey, TL.” Jim’s voice interrupted her and she looked over to where he was standing with Kenneth, near the golf-cart-dune-buggy hybrid.
“I’m good with Kenneth staying in the program, if you are,” Jim told her. “He says he’s hydrating sufficiently. I’ll inform the kitchen, and we’ll make sure he’s got gluten-free options for each meal.”
“You really can do that?” Ashley asked.
Jim’s smile was infectious. “Navy SEAL,” he reminded her. “Come on, let’s get in there. We got about five thousand safety rules to cover before we get to the fun part.”
“The fun part…?” she echoed as she followed them into the trailer, and then almost immediately out the other side into an expansive fenced-in area filled with trees and other obstacles.
***
“The fun partisn’tgetting hit with one of these pellets,” Jim told his team, after distributing both the masks and the air-guns that were calledmarkersbecause they fired pellets of paint that exploded on contact and marked their targets.
He’d lectured, in some detail, about the tanks of compressed air, as well as the hoppers that fed the marble-sized paintball pellets into the markers. And although both the tanks and hoppers had yet to be dispersed, he’d passed around a handful of the pellets, which were a non-toxic, biodegradable mix of oil, gelatin, and water-soluble dye.
“It stings,” he told them. “The pellets come at you, somewhere between one-sixty and one-ninety miles per hour, so yeah. It stings. Gentlemen, wear your athletic cups. But when it comes to velocity, combined with the three meter rule—which is…?”
“No firing at anyone closer than three meters,” his team all repeated, in unison, although Bull and Todd mumbled unenthusiastically. They’d been through this before and were making sure that Jim knew they were bored.
Tough shit.
Jim hammered it home. “And in American, rounding up, three meters is…?”
“Ten feet,” they all said.
