Chapter 11
Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to Disneyland they go...
“I can’t believe I’m wasting a day off going to a glorified kiddie park.”
“’Tis not my fault.”
“Oh, yes, it is, sweetheart. Danny gave us the perfect opportunity to stay home, alone.”
“Nay, ’tis your fault. You are the one who gave me a hot look.”
“Hot looks are bad?”
“They are when they make me do lustsome things.”
Zach glanced over at Britta in the front seat and smiled.
Danny was sitting in the back seat with Sammy, enthroned in his car booster seat, playing a game of “I see.” The roar of the motor and traffic noises through the open windows made their front seat conversation relatively private.
They were halfway to L.A. and a blasted day at Disneyland.
At least they had V.I.P. passes, thanks to his dad, which would move them around some of the time-sink lines.
“You were incredible last night, Britta.”
“Oh, do not speak of that again.” She put her hands to her cheeks which were nicely flushed. “I was a wanton.”
“God bless wantons.”
“That is profane.”
“Ya think? Why would God create great sex if he didn’t want men and women to enjoy it?”
“This is not a conversation we should be having in front of a child. Or your brother.”
“They can’t hear us back there. I had our whole day planned out.”
“I wager you did! How much of it would have been spent with me on my back on your mattress?”
“Actually, I have a checklist of all the ways and places we were gonna have sex, and only a few of them took place with you on your back.” He grinned at her.
“A checklist? Where is it?”
He tapped his head. “In here, baby. Wanna know what’s on my list?”
“Nay.”
“You on my lap in the vibrating La-Z-Boy. Me nailing you against the mirror on my closet door. On the kitchen table. You straddling a bench. On the deck. In the bathtub. At the top of the cargo net, back on the grinder. Here in the car. With your legs over my shoulders. With me bending over you, doggie style. Hanging from the chandelier.”
“Enough!” she said.
“Hey, I was just getting started.”
“You make my woman’s fleece get damp when you talk like that,” she hissed at him in an undertone.
Her words hit him right between the legs. Slam duck! Erection. “Britta, you are priceless.”
“You should have taken me back to the base. I must needs prepare myself for this upcoming week. Even you have said it will be brutal.”
“Tomorrow’s gonna come soon enough, baby. And, yeah, last week was a piece of cake compared to what’s coming up.”
She groaned.
“The whole point is to weed out the weak ones. If a trainee, man or woman, can’t make it during these evolutions, they’ll never make it out in the field. I for sure wouldn’t want someone covering my back who’s gonna bail at the first sign of disaster.”
She nodded her understanding.
“I have been told all this afore. I am not going to drop out, Zachary. Where else would I go? And, nay, do not offer me a position as nursemaid for your son again. ’Tis not what I am trained to do.”
“Duly noted. Well, maybe I can give you some tips on surviving then. Number one, don’t call attention to yourself.
Number two, take each step one at a time.
There’s a famous Navy SEAL motto: ‘The only easy day was yesterday.’ It’s absolutely true, but you can’t allow yourself to think about what’s ahead, or you’ll give up.
Number three, rest whenever you can. SEALs learn something called REM sleep where they can sleep, standing up, eyes open.
Even if it’s only for five minutes at a time, it can energize you, get you over the next hump.
Number four, make close friends with your buddies.
The SEALs and WEALS are all about teamwork.
You’re as strong as each one of you, but also as weak as any one of you.
Number five, we’ve got to get you some private tutoring.
..reading, English, math, history...before someone discovers you’re not the missing Norse officer. ”
Britta was grinning at him.
“What?”
“You make a good teacher.”
He grinned back. “Don’t you dare tell anyone that, or I’ll be stuck here on base forever.”
“You would rather be fighting?”
“Absolutely. There’s so much bad stuff happening in the world. The government needs every specially trained man to fight the good fight. The demand for SEALs far exceeds the supply.”
“Then why are you on the base?”
He motioned his head toward the back seat.
“Sammy?”
“Yep. I took him out of a foreign country illegally. His grandfather is a terrorist, and he wants him back. That’s why there will always be bodyguards around till this is resolved.
It’s a world class SNAFU.” He was glad she didn’t ask him what SNAFU meant, not sure she would appreciate Situation Normal All Fucked Up.
He decided to lighten the subject. “Hey, you could be Sammy’s babysitter with an AK-47.
Then I wouldn’t need any bodyguards, and you could utilize your fighting skills. ”
“What is an achy-forty-seven?”
“A whoop-ass weapon.”
“Thank you for the offer, but, nay.”
“There would be benefits.”
“As long as I am stuck in this strange land and this strange time, I will train to be with the WEALS, I will survive whatever torture is thrown my way, and then I will go off and kill bad people. And that is that.”
“We’ll see,” Zach said and took her hand in his, lacing their fingers.
She glanced down at their intertwined fingers, then up at him.
“Why didn’t you want to be alone with me today?” He hadn’t realized that he was going to blurt that out. How pathetic did that make him sound? She didn’t answer, at first. So of course he blundered on like a needy teenager. “I thought you liked being with me last night.”
She made a snorting sound. “Pfff! I liked it too much.”
That made him feel a little better. “And?”
“I wanted to know how to have an orgasm, not how to set a record for swiving till my eyeballs rolled back in my head.”
Unfortunately, he’d just pulled to a stop at a red light and her voice carried to the back seat.
Zach heard his brother choke in the middle of telling Sammy, “I see something...cough, cough...red.”
“My father’s face,” Sammy answered.
The snot!
“Didja know my father has a magazine with naked wimmen in it? He hides it under his mattress.”
The sneaky snot!
It was Zach’s turn to choke now. Looking in the rearview mirror, he saw a smirk on Sammy’s face that was pure one-hundred-proof Dennis the Menace.
“There was this one picture where a lady was bending over and ya could see—”
“That’ll be enough, Sammy,” Zach said. He would have to be even more careful what he had in the house. “Besides, I think it belongs to Uncle Dan.”
“Yeah, right!” Danny was smirking, too.
“A tattoo,” Zach lied. “On her thigh. That’s probably what Sammy saw.”
“No, I saw—” Sammy started to say, but Danny clapped a hand over his mouth and said, “Haven’t you ever heard that children are to be seen and not heard, short stuff?”
“Who said that?” Sammy demanded to know. “Musta been a grown-up.”
“I am thinking of getting a tattoo,” Britta said.
Oh, boy! He turned to look at her. “Where?”
“On my buttock.”
Friggin’ A! “My name?” he suggested.
“Why would I do such a thing? Nay, I am contemplating either a longship or my favorite sword.”
“Oh. What’s the name of your favorite sword? Ballbuster?”
“Ha, ha, ha! My best pattern-welded sword was called Head Lopper.”
“Oh, that’s just peachy.”
“‘Twas a jest, lackwit. My sword is named Wound Maker.”
“Oh, that’s better. If I had a sword, I would name it Whoop-Ass.”
“Must you always be so vulgar?”
“Listenin’ to you two is more fun than sex,” Danny observed. “Almost. And to think I was feelin’ sorry for you, all alone here, celibate, practically a prisoner. What a laugh!”
“We’re almost there,” Zach said. Thank God!
Glancing over at Britta, he did a double take. Her mouth was parted, her eyes wide and she let loose with a long sigh. It was the kind of glazed expression a guy fantasized about seeing on a woman’s face the first time he dropped his drawers. But that was not the case here.
“’Tis the most beautiful castle I have ever seen.” She was staring at the gaudy pink Cinderella castle in the distance. “What kingdom is this?”
He grinned. “The Magic Kingdom, baby.”
Her belief, reiterated over and over in the next fifteen minutes, that they must have entered a totally new and enchanted land was reinforced when he read the entrance sign to her:
HERE YOU LEAVE TODAY
AND ENTER THE WORLD
OF YESTERDAY, TOMORROW
AND FANTASY
Splash this!...
The first clue Britta had that a Splash Mountain adventure was perchance not a good idea was when they made her sit down in a hollowed-out log that immediately wet her bottom.
She had been shamed into going on the ride, not by Zachary, but his son, the taunting little devil.
People scared themselves nigh to death for entertainment in this country, as she’d soon learned on entering this Magic Kingdom.
The more they screamed, the greater the fun, apparently.
Rolling coast rides that turned a body upside down and inside out.
Animals walking about hither and yon, though they were not really animals, but people dressed as animals, which was even stranger.
And the animals had names, too. Mickey the Mouse. Donald the Duck. Goofy the Dog.
In the midst of all this confusion, the little boyling, aptly dubbed Sammy the Snot, whom she had mistakenly considered angelic previously, had been jeering at her, “Scaredy cat! Scaredy cat!”
How could a Viking not react to such a challenge?
The log was big and long, situated in a trough of low water. It held six bench seats, one behind the other, for a single person each. Danny sat down in front, followed by Sammy, two rowdy boylings of about ten winters, her, and finally, Zachary.