11. What…? #2
Captain Lyons was a good-looking guy. Young. Clean-cut. The kind of guy I would have wanted to be if I weren’t living in a sleeping bag.
Melody shook her head. “Just friends…if even that. Maybe more like acquaintances?”
She shrugged in a way that told me she didn’t have many friends. But it wasn’t a flaw to me. If anything, it made me want to be one of the few.
Daria shot Taz a look I didn’t understand.
“You don’t need to sleep in the barn, Daria. We’ve got a perfectly good guest room.” Mamma Mack looked confused, as if ready to ask why she’d want to stay in the barn while off from their agency work. “Greg doesn’t even have a couch yet for you to crash on.”
Daria gave me the flirtiest fake smile, which I returned with a warning look. She rolled her eyes.
She didn’t mean it. She could read the room. Flirting with me wasn’t something serious for her; it was just a way to yank my damn chain and make me uncomfortable. She was one of those little tornadoes that just thrived on keeping everyone on their toes.
“Ugh, fine!” Daria said. “Greg, I’d like some tampons, and I know you keep some in your medicine cabinet.”
Melody stiffened in my arms. I groaned. Taz scoffed.
This was absolutely not normal. It was not a thing for friend groups to discuss tampons. But here we were, letting all the flap in the breeze in front of strangers.
“Why not ask the medic?” Griff asked, as if that were a totally normal response. “You always carry it in your first aid, no?”
“Nah,” Goose said. “I, uh…recently used up my supply.”
The fuck? He had tampons for bullet wounds and nose bleeds, and I didn’t recall him having any recent issues with either.
“Oh my god,” Mamma Mack said with a long, almost sad, sigh. “Mary?”
“Yup!” Goose said, eyes wide, face drawn with tension. “Boy, am I not prepared.”
“What the hell, Goose?” Taz walked up to him and smacked him on the chest. “Why didn’t you call us?”
“She didn’t want a bunch of people to know!”
“What?” Taz was pissed. “Why not? This is a big deal!”
“Normal girls don’t want a damn team tracking her cycle for her!” Goose said, smacking his forehead.
At least he knew this was weird.
On deployments—hell, even in garrison—we all knew when Taz was on the rag. We stayed clear of her as much as we could, quietly leaving chocolate and baked goods as offerings to Aunt Flow.
“Taz wouldn’t know normal if it kicked her in the kneecaps.” I said as loud as I could, tilting my head to Melody and hoping they got the fucking hint to rein it in. “Melody, I am so, so sorry.”
“I…” She looked more confused than offended, so I counted it as a blessing.
“Speaking of which…” Goose said. “It’s the 15th. Why aren’t you asking Taz for—”
“God damn it!” Taz screamed, stomping her booted foot on the pebble drive.
“What?” Griff glanced at his wife in confusion.
Oh, shit.
Taz looked helplessly at her husband. “I…wanted you to be the first to know, but I guess we’ll make this a fucking team thing!”
“I don’t understand.” Griff’s eyes went wide with terror. “Are you alright?”
I’d understand how some people were so obtuse.
“She’s pregnant, you idiot.” I reached up to my hair, finger combing it back before pulling it into a ponytail just to do something with my hands, because these shenanigans were gonna give me a headache. It was too weird to try to explain to a sane person, much less one I was head over heels for.
“You’re…” Griff gazed adoringly at Taz. “Pregnant?”
Taz smiled. “Surprise?”
Griff was stunned into silence.
“Great, wonderful. Vitayu! I still need tampons. Come on.” Daria grabbed Taz’s hand, then gave me an annoyed look.
“Show me where they are in that pit of a home you have, and then you can take the pretty girl next door back to her cottage so the little birds can help her sweep the chimney, or whatever it is she does.”
“Seriously? No reaction at all to the fact that you’re about to have a goddaughter?” Griff shook his head and waved his hands as if she were the most insane thing about this whack-a-doo conversation.
“I’ve known she was pregnant for at least two weeks now. Duh.”
“What?” Taz said.
“Please, if you don’t think I saw the pregnancy sticks in the cabin’s trash, you’re crazy.” Then she looked at Taz’s chest. “Also, the girls have been very bouncy lately. Good for you!”
“You went through my trash?” Incensed, incredulous, but also not-that-surprised. An interesting combination from Taz Guerro Griffith.
“Da.” Daria rolled her eyes. “I’m a spy. You can’t expect much better from me.”
Oh, sure. That old chestnut.
“Fact!” Goose chimed. “Befriending spies is basically asking to never have privacy.”
I was officially in hell.
“I…am so sorry.” I looked at Melody, pleading for her understanding of the utter chaos that passed for my home life. “I’m gonna go, because otherwise, this interaction will never end, and I really, really need it to.”
Melody smiled. It was a polite, cocktail kind of smile without any real depth.
“Mellie, why don’t you come into the kitchen to wait on them, and I’ll send you home with something to eat for you and the little ones.” Mamma Mack to the rescue. “I guess they’re not so little, since they are teens. They must eat you out of house and home.”
“You can say that again.” She turned her smile to Mamma Mack and nodded, following her into the house with practiced courteousness that was learned over time. Melody was the kind of girl who was hospitable and polite by training.
Daria and Taz each grabbed one of my arms and dragged me into the barn.
As soon as we got through the door, they slammed it closed and whirled on me.
“So how serious are you about this girl?” Taz had that look in her eye…the look of a fucking interrogator.
“Serious enough.”
“And people are trying to kill her? Is this a damsel in distress kink or something?” Daria pursed her lips.
“Not a kink.” I was trying to stay calm, because who knew where the rest of them had taken Melody and what they were saying to her. What the hell was Griff telling her?
“We should probably start taking some precautions. If she’s in trouble, we need to get the big guns.” Taz would take any excuse to shoot someone or blow something up.
“Not you, preggo. You’re not allowed anywhere near this.” Daria snapped at her.
“I’m not that pregnant.”
“Pregnancy is a pretty binary thing, Taz.” I almost laughed. “You either are or you ain’t.”
Daria agreed. “You can’t do anything that could harm baby Daria.”
“Baby Daria?” I chimed in.
“Da!” She rolled her eyes at me. “It’s obviously a girl, and as the best friend of both mother and father, they would obviously name her after me.”
“Oh…obviously,” I said. “It’s a girl because you said so?”
“No, duroc!” she said, calling me an idiot.
“It’s a girl because little boy swimmers”—she gestured vaguely at my trousers—“are as fragile as the fully grown product. Exposure to radio frequencies, not to mention all the chemicals we probably inhale on every mission, kills the Y chromosomes, leaving nothing but the clearly superior X chromosomes. It’s only logical. ”
“Is the logic in the barn with us right now?” I looked around, feigning a search for the aforementioned logic. “Do you even need a tampon?”
“No, of course not! I had the whole thing removed years ago.”
“Wait, really?” Taz said. “That’s so…permanent.”
“So is a kid. So…” She looked at Taz’s still flat belly and pursed her lips.
Taz had her hands on her hips like an angry school teacher about to scold a particularly stupid pupil. “You know she’s practically a single mom, right?”
“Yup.”
“She comes with two teenage kids, and you’ve been a bachelor your whole life?” Taz clicked her tongue. “Don’t get into this on a lark, VD. If you get in this, it’s not just a relationship with you two.”
“I know.”
“Do you, really?” Taz’s skepticism was starting to piss me off.
The two women stared at me like I was in the hot seat of an interrogation. There was nothing I ol’ Greg “VD” Vedder could do to ever convince them I wasn’t the guy I’d been half a decade ago. They’d never think I was good enough for the likes of Melody Gray.
But I just didn’t care. I was done with this conversation.
“I know exactly what I’m doing with the woman outside, and you can get behind it or not. Either way, no one—and I mean no one—is gonna harm a hair on her head.”
I turned and walked away, going to the only woman who mattered right now.
My sweet Melody.