“I’m not judging,” Aspen assured her. “I’m being jealous. That sounds badass.”
“Oh.” Eve smiled. “Sorry.” She smoothed her hand over Aspen’s hip. “What’s the coolest place you’ve traveled to?”
“Oh, geez,” Aspen delayed. “I dunno? Fiji was pretty sweet. But I got to spend a week on leave in the Baltic before we finished our deployment to Afghanistan, and that was pretty awesome too.”
Eve’s hand stilled on Aspen’s hip. “Did you like being in the military?”
“At times.” Aspen caressed the back of Eve’s forearm. “I mean, between school and the time I was in, I have lots of good memories. There’s just…” She let her voice trail off instead of sayinga lot of not so good ones, too.
Eve hummed as if she’d understood anyway. “Can I ask why you left?”
Aspen sighed heavily. “I just couldn’t handle it anymore. The constant stress. Alarms going off at all hours of the night. Taking off and never knowing if that was going to be the time I didn’t come back.” She sniffed quietly. “It got to the point that any loud noises sent me into a panic attack. Crowds too, for that matter. Which, you know, is less than ideal when you’re living in a fucking war zone. So when my last commission was wrapping up, I decided to call it and retire.”
“So that’s how you knew how to handle my panic attack yesterday.”
“Yeah. I’m mostly better now. When I’m here, anyway. Traveling back to Boston to visit my family can get a littlesketchy, but…yeah.” She pulled a face. “They’re not exaggerating when they say war is hell, y’know?”
“I’m so sorry.”
Aspen raked her lower lip through her teeth. “Thanks.”
A long, pregnant silence stretched between them then until Eve broke it with a softly murmured, “Do you want to hear about the time Michael begged a cop to handcuff him?”
Aspen snorted in surprise. Out of any of the million ways this conversation could have gone, that was certainly the least expected. “What?”
“Well, do you?”
“Oh my god, yes.” Aspen nodded. “I absolutely do.”
“It was his twenty-seventh birthday,” Eve began, and Aspen was immediately pulled into the story as Eve’s fingers started to draw random, swooping shapes across her hip and stomach. “We were at some club in Manhattan—I can’t remember which one exactly, but I do remember that it was too loud and had far too much neon. Michael, of course, loved it, and he was absolutely shitfaced by the time we were leaving.”
“Sounds like Mikey,” Aspen muttered. “And were you?”
“I was definitely not feeling any pain,” Eve allowed delicately.
“I bet that was a sight,” Aspen chuckled.
“Anyway,” Eve huffed and swatted Aspen’s stomach in playful warning. “When we were leaving, there was a cop—young guy, fit, but definite ‘cop’, y’know?—giving some guy a ticket right outside the club, and Michael…”
“Michael has a thing for men in uniform,” Aspen supplied knowingly. “I got him a stripper for his twenty-third birthday dressed like a firefighter.”
Eve giggled. “Oh, I bet helovedthat.”
“A little too much,” Aspen confirmed, smiling as she remembered the way he’d ripped the stripper’s tearaway pants off him. “But, to be fair, the guy did, too. I left before thingsturned too X-rated, but yeah. Anyway, Mikey sees the cute cop, and…”
“Strips off his shirt, hands it to me, and proceeds to do his best drunken sashay into the street with his wrists held out in front of him singing, ‘Mister Officer, arrest me! I’ve been such a bad boy!’”
Aspen barked out a laugh and buried her face in Eve’s hair. “He did not,” she said, even though she could totally see her cousin doing exactly what Eve just described.
“He totally did.”
“What happened? He didn’t get arrested for soliciting an officer or anything, did he?”
“No, thank god. I mean, I don’t think it would have come to that anyway, but the car we’d ordered arrived just as the cop was trying to figure out what to do with him, and I shoved his ass into the backseat and told the driver to get us out of there.”
“That’s…” Aspen laughed and pressed a kiss to Eve’s head before resting her cheek against it. “Amazing. Ten out of ten. Only thing that would make it better would be video.”
Eve’s smile was evident in her voice as she murmured, “You’ll just have to imagine it, I’m afraid.”
