Chapter 12 #2
Kaci was making gravity the most fascinating concept in the world.
Impressive skill.
Too bad she was afraid to fly. Half the guys who showed up for C-130 training were disappointed they hadn’t gotten fighters. Needed that fire lit under them to love their birds the way Lance did.
He tugged at his collar and sank lower in his seat, letting Kaci pull him out of his own thoughts.
She yanked the pig up until it was at the top of the pulley, about twenty feet in the air, with a red laser dot centered on it.
The dot, he realized, was coming from the laser scope mounted on a crossbow on the table. He smothered a grin behind his hand.
She was going to shoot a stuffed pink pig in her classroom. A pink pig identical to the one sitting on the bar at Pony’s man cave.
“Who wants to tell me what’s going to happen when we fire this crossbow?” she said.
“It’ll miss,” said a girl up front.
“Why?”
“Gravity.”
The door opened behind him. Three older men in slacks and button-downs entered and took seats across the aisle. Two women hovered in the doorway. “Has she shot it yet?” one whispered.
“I don’t think so,” the other whispered back.
The dark-haired one was vaguely familiar—had she been with Kaci on trivia night?—and he was almost certain the short-haired one was the department secretary. She’d helped him get into Kaci’s office to deliver his offer.
“She’s insane,” one of the men across the aisle muttered to his colleagues.
“Can’t believe she’s going to Germany,” another added. “What the hell were they thinking?”
Lance curled his fingers around the armrests. He’d endured years of lectures from Cheri about letting her fight her own battles since they both signed up for ROTC in college. About letting her earn her respect without interference.
Still, he glared at the three dudes until the chubby, balding one who’d called Kaci insane noticed him. “She’s fucking brilliant,” Lance said.
The older man gave him a once-over. “Who are you?”
“Just a guy interested in basic physics.” He jerked his head toward Kaci. “Best lecture I’ve ever seen.”
“You enrolled here?” the second dude said.
“He’s here on a cooperative effort with the base, working to bring attention to STEM careers,” the secretary interjected. “It’s a community outreach project.”
First Lance had heard of it, but sure. “Heard this was the best lecture to get started with,” he said.
“If you like train wrecks,” the third muttered.
“Wasn’t a train wreck until you walked in,” Lance muttered back.
Assholes.
Kaci pointed to the girl who’d said the crossbow wouldn’t hit the pig. “Jess, come on up and do the honors.”
The girl jumped up. She had her hair tucked into a baseball cap, and she was wearing a Dr. Who T-shirt. Kaci leaned into her, pointing to various things on the crossbow, then stepped back.
Jess fired.
The arrow thudded into a strip of Styrofoam on the wall four feet below the stuffed pig.
Several students clapped. A few groaned. Some kid called out, “You shoot like a girl.”
Kaci strung the crossbow and pointed. “All right, Blake. You come do better.”
Lance picked the kid out by the way his friends jostled him and jeered.
But Blake didn’t move.
“Come on up,” Kaci said again.
“I was just kidding, Dr. Boudreaux.”
Kaci took up a perch on the table, ankles crossed, legs swinging. “It’s funny to mock your classmates for their gender?”
The room went deadly silent.
“I’m a physicist, not a biologist,” she continued, “but above all, I’m a scientist. And this idea of gender differences fascinates me. Scientifically, can you elaborate on why having a penis might make a person better able to shoot a crossbow?”
The kid shook his head.
“Sounds like some interesting research, doesn’t it?”
A muffled groan went up among the students.
“Anyone who can scientifically prove to me that having a penis directly correlates to superior crossbow proficiency gets an A for the semester,” Kaci said.
“In the meantime, this classroom will be a safe and welcoming learning environment for everyone who enters that door regardless of age, race, gender, religion, sexuality, or any other discriminatory factor. Understood?”
Murmurs of, “Yes, Dr. Boudreaux,” echoed off the walls.
She hopped off the table. “Can someone tell me how we’re going to impale this pig today?”
“This is way better than last year’s pig-impaling day,” the secretary whispered.
“Y’all must like this lecture,” Lance said to the three men across the aisle. “You come every year too?”
None of them acknowledged him, but the loudest of the group left.
The dark-haired woman took the seat beside him. She leaned in to whisper softly so only he could hear. “Dr. Asshole is on the tenure committee.”
Lance didn’t know much about academics, but he figured that was a bad sign for Kaci.
“If she makes it to Germany for this conference, she’d basically have to be tossed in jail for some kind of heinous crime before they could deny her tenure. She’s eligible to go before the board in another two years.” She leaned back and crossed her arms. “So make sure she goes,” she said softly.
He nodded.
Wasn’t his fight.
But he liked Kaci. And she was good at her job. Also, considering his job depended on the laws of physics, it was technically in his best interest to make sure the people designing those planes had the best education possible.
Just as it was in Uncle Sam’s best interest to make sure every pilot flying one of his birds was as well-trained and motivated as he or she could be.
Lance’s gut tightened.
He didn’t want to stay in Georgia. Didn’t want to give up his deployments.
He shouldn’t have come here this afternoon.
Up front, Kaci moved to the whiteboard. “Okay, we’ll try it this way,” she said. “How are we going to calculate where to aim to compensate for gravity?”
The second man across the aisle left.
Kaci flicked a glance in their direction when she turned to face her students, and a glimmer of a smug smile crossed her features.
The third older dude across the aisle looked at Lance. “You’re right,” he said. “She’s damn good.”
“And he’s not on the tenure committee,” Kaci’s friend murmured.
Twenty minutes later, the kids had figured out a better way to impale the pig that didn’t involve any equations at all, and Jess walked away with a holey pig as a souvenir.
The last dude left along with the two women. Kaci stuck around answering individual questions, but eventually, the last student hightailed it out of the lecture hall too.
Kaci leaned back against her table, arms crossed, and waited until Lance reached the front of the lecture hall. “If you’re fixin’ to start a fight, I don’t have a lick of care left in me,” she said.
He pulled a small box from his pocket and popped it open. “Still owe me some ring disposal.”
She eyed the box with Allison’s one-point-five carat, princess-cut diamond engagement ring and the two simple his-and-hers wedding bands that went with it, then lifted her gaze to his face.
“That’s all you want?”
Not nearly. But it was all he could ask for. And if he had to be stuck here at Gellings, shutting a few more doors on what should’ve been his life with Allison was a good step. “Yep.”
“Huh.” Her redneck side visibly glimmered to life in that smile. “Let me get all this cleaned up. If Miss Higgs is doing okay, I got an idea where we can go.”
God help him, he was irrationally excited to find out what she had in store. “Great lecture,” he said while she shooed him away from the crossbow.
“More fun than cherry bombs in a barrel of fish guts,” she said.
Had any other woman said that, he might’ve laughed. But this was Kaci, and the probability that she’d actually done it was too high. “Have you tossed cherry bombs in a barrel of fish guts?”
“Sugar, if you don’t know the answer to that question, you ain’t half as observant as I give you credit for.”
He was ninety percent sure that was a yes. “Was this sometime in the last few months, or were you significantly younger?”
She grinned. “Bless your heart, you don’t really think I’m gonna tell you all my secrets, do you?”
“Your mother drank a lot, didn’t she?”
“Beauty queens don’t drink. They sip.” She dropped the crossbow in a box behind the table and gathered the rest of her things. “But this former Miss Grits is getting ready to school you in something called closure. You ready?”
He honestly didn’t think he needed closure, but if Kaci was taking him on a field trip to redneck land, he was all in. “Absolutely.”