Redeployment(74)

“You should go ahead with it,” he says. He jerks his head in the direction of the girls. “Go tell your war stories. I’ll tell mine to Jessie and Sarah, whenever they get here.”

“Fuck that,” I say.

“Seriously, I don’t mind.”

“Seriously. Fuck you.”

Jenks shrugs, and I stare him down for a while, but then the door opens again and there’s Jessie and Sarah, who’s Jessie’s actor friend. I look up and so does Jenks.

The two of them are like the first pair that walked in the door, one a beauty and one not, though here the difference is starker. Sarah, the pretty girl, is a stunner. Jenks raises a mangled hand to wave them over, and Jessie, the not beautiful girl, waves a four-fingered hand back.

“Hey, Jessie,” I say, and turn to the beautiful one. “You must be Sarah.”

Sarah is tall and thin and bored. Jessie is all smiles. She hugs Jenks, then looks me over and laughs.

“You’re wearing combat boots,” she says. “That to give you extra cred with Sarah?”

I look down at my feet, like a dumbass. “They’re comfortable,” I mumble.

“Sure,” she says, and gives me a wink.

Jessie’s an interesting case. Aside from a missing finger, she doesn’t have any major problems I can see, but I know the Army’s got her on 100 percent disability. Plus, a missing finger is a good indication of something more. She’s not bad-looking, though. And I don’t mean that to say she’s good-looking—I mean that she’s a hair on the good side of ugly. She’s got a fleshy oval face, but a trim, compact body. A softball player’s body. The sort of girl you look at and say, “You’ll do.” The sort of girl you pick up in a club in the last hour before it closes. But also the sort of girl you’d never want to date because you’d never be able to bring her around your friends without them thinking, Why her?

Except when Jenks first met Jessie at some disabled veterans function, he fell for her hard. He’d never admit it, of course, but why else would he be here, with no one but me to back him up, ready to talk Iraq to a total stranger? This Sarah. This pretty, pretty girl.

“Let me get you guys a drink,” says Jessie.

Jessie always gets us the first round. She says engineers reinforced her ECP two days before an SVBIED attack, so she owes engineers big-time. Doesn’t matter if we mostly did pothole repair. She gets me drinks, the only woman I know who makes a point of it.

I point to my glass. “I’m drinking Brooklyn.”

“Water,” Jenks says.

“Yeah?” Jessie says, smiling. “Cheap date, you.”

“Hey, Jess,” says Sarah, cutting in, “can you get me a gin and diet tonic? With lime.”

Jessie rolls her eyes and heads to the bar. Jenks’s eyes are full of her as she goes. I wonder what the f*ck she thinks she’s doing. I wonder what Jenks thinks she’s doing.

Jenks turns back to Sarah. “So you’re an actress,” he says.

“Yeah,” she says, “and I bartend to make rent.”

Sarah’s holding it together well. Apart from the occasional quick sidelong glance at Jenks, you’d think everybody at the table had a normal face.

“A bartender,” I say. “Where? Can we come by, get free drinks?”

“You’re getting free drinks,” she says, pointing toward Jessie at the bar.

I smile a little “f*ck you” smile. This Sarah is way too hot not to hate. Straight brown hair, sharp features, undetectable makeup, long pretty face, long thin legs, and a starvation zone body. Her getup is all vintage clothes, the carefully careless look worn by half of white Brooklyn. If you pick this girl up at a bar, other guys will respect you. Take her home, you win. And I can already tell she’s way too smart to ever give a guy like me a chance.

“So you want to talk some war shit,” I say.

“Sort of,” she says, feigning disinterest. “A couple of the people in the project are doing interviews with vets.”

“You got Jessie,” I say. “When she was a Lioness she was in some real war shit. Hanging with the grunts, doing female engagement, getting in firefights. Her war dick is this big—” I throw my hands out in the lying fisherman pose. “Ours is tiny.”

“Speak for yourself,” Jenks says.

“It’s better than no war dick at all,” I say.