Something Like Normal(34)

We’re both a little breathless when she pulls away.

“Thank you, Travis.”

Her dad and Alison are waiting at the kitchen table as I pass through, the red towel strategically placed to hide wood. He nearly knocks the chair over as he stands up. I can’t even imagine a dad who cares the way Harper’s does. “Is she okay?”

“She’s mostly confused.”

“I was kind of hoping Harper would join us for sushi,” he says. “So she can get to know Alison.”

“I wouldn’t.” I don’t tell him the image of them making out is probably still burned onto her retinas. “She thought this was a theoretical someday event. She needs some time to wrap her head around it.”

“Thanks, Travis.” He shakes my hand. “You’re a good man.”

I doubt he’d say that if he knew I was on my way to take a cold shower.





Chapter 10

A mountain of broken crab legs, empty oyster shells, and peeled-away shrimp skins rises up in the middle of a table on the hotel balcony overlooking the Gulf. We’ve eaten a ton of seafood we had delivered from Pincher’s Crab Shack, and if the number of Corona bottles with squeezed-up limes at the bottom is any indication, we’ve killed a case of beer. We’re all a little sunburned and more than a little drunk. I wonder why Kevlar has not passed out yet.

“The night is young and downstairs is a bar full of young, nubile women.” He comes out of the bathroom wearing a plaid cowboy shirt and jeans so new I wonder if the tags are still attached.

“Look at you,” I say. “Going to the rodeo there, Kenneth?”

“Damn straight.” He grins. “Gonna find me a woman, grab on, and—” He bucks his hips like he’s riding a bull and waves his cowboy hat in the air. “Woo-hoo!”

Moss laughs. “My money says you don’t last the full eight seconds.”

I hit him with a fist bump.

“Fuck you guys,” Kevlar says. “Tonight’s the night. I can feel it. Who’s in?” I glance at Harper, and he groans. “Solo, I never expected these words to ever come out of my mouth, but you, my friend, are whipped.”

I point my beer bottle at him, squinting one eye as if I’m aiming. “Don’t make me come over there and kick your ass.”

“I’m just sayin’.”

“Yeah, well, let’s examine the facts, shall we?” I say. “I am here with a girl, who happens to be insanely hot”—Harper goes pink—“while you are dressed like a Tennessee douchebag in the hopes of possibly getting some trim. Harper could turn me down tonight, tomorrow night, and the night after that, and I’d still have a better chance of getting laid, you inbred hilljack.”

We glare at each other until Kevlar cracks a smile and then starts giggling. Soon all of us are cracking up, except Harper, who looks mystified.

“You guys are so mean to each other,” she says, which only makes us laugh harder.

It’s true. We say the most offensive stuff to each other. Racist. Homophobic. Insulting each other’s moms. Sometimes, every once in a while, it leads to knock-down-roll-around-on-the-ground fistfights, but mostly we laugh because we don’t mean it. Any one of us would take a bullet for the other.

“So are we partying or what?” Kevlar asks, packing some Skoal in his lower lip.

Moss shrugs. “I’m in.”

“Yep,” Harper says.

Kevlar tries to drape his arm around her shoulders as we walk down the hall to the elevator, but it’s kind of difficult considering she’s about four inches taller than him. “You know,” he says, “it ain’t too late to kick Solo to the curb.”

“Why do you guys call him that?” she asks.

“You know how in Star Wars, just before the garbage masher walls are about to start closing in, Han Solo goes, ‘I got a bad feeling about this’?”

Harper nods.

“Well, it’s pitch-black night in the ’Stan,” Kevlar says. “And we’re boarding helos that are going to drop us in the middle of West Bumfuck, where God knows who is going to be shooting at us, and out of the blue Stephenson goes, ‘I got a bad feeling about this.’”

“We were scared shitless,” Moss adds. “But every time one of us would repeat it, we’d start laughing all over again.”

I remember the nightmare feeling when the helos left us there in the black unknown, covered in our first layer of dirt, unable to walk away. Unable to change our minds and go home.

My joke wasn’t prophetic. We raided a couple of houses, rounded up a handful of suspected bad guys, and by the time the sun came up, we felt like cowboys—and I was permanently Han Solo.

I move between Kevlar and Harper, putting my arm around her.

“They also call me Solo,” I say against her neck, making her shiver, “because I always get the girl.”

She side-eyes me. “Han Solo was kind of a tool.”

Kevlar giggles and spits tobacco juice into the mouth of an empty beer bottle. “She does have a point.”

“He’s the one who ran interference against the Empire so Luke Skywalker could blow up the Death Star,” I protest. “He’s a hero.”

“He’s a scoundrel.” Harper smirks at me as she presses the down button beside the elevator doors, and I smile back because she knows her Star Wars.