Page 57 of Lucky Charm
“You want to do the next two hundred with me?”
Doogie hit the floor beside him and started in. He shouldn’t have said that because all the exertion – which usually helped – wasn’t. Cait’s phantom breath skated across his body like a lost limb. The softness of her mouth and tongue left him imagining all the other places that mouth could be. The determined way she clung to him before he left and her soft whisper to be smart out there lingered. His mind was going to short-circuit if he didn’t find another loop.
“You should go see her. Women like consistency. One night by her bedside isn’t going to cut it.”
He kept stubbornly mute. “And you’d be the expert in what pisses women off?”
Doogie ploughed past twenty-five working his way to fifty. “I seem to excel at pissing them off. It’s why I haven’t found one to keep. You should be keeping her.”
He stopped his count at two hundred fifty and let Doogie continue on his own. “She messes with my mojo.”
“She does.”
Hunt rolled and sat, the agreement stinging. He stretched his legs in front of him to ease screaming muscles. “Not a good thing.”
“Your logic is flawed, my friend. When you find a woman who messes with your mojo in a good way, like Cait does yours, you go talk to her, you woo her, for crying out loud.” Doogie turned his head to talk right in his face while simultaneously keeping his rhythm of pushups. “What am I saying? I’m not sure you even know how to woo a woman.”
“I lost it out there.”
Doogie snorted. “You lost no such thing. You were a bit out of whack. Honestly, we all were. Threat assessment was way off. But you held your own, stayed in the game. At the end, you were hell on wheels, my friend. Doc got back alive. That wasn’t a fluke.”
“That’s not how this works. Next time someone could get killed.” He wasn’t even going to approach discussing what happened in that cave. Conflicting emotions warred - worried sick about her and still burning with a hard on that wouldn’t go away. He started doing sit-ups.
Doogie paused at one hundred twenty-five and stared at him. “Someone could get killed every time we go out there. We run into the unexpected all the time. We adjust and sometimes it screws things. But that wasn’t this time, and it wasn’t Cait’s fault.Further, the chances of you ever being in the field with her again are nil. This was an aberration, a mess complicated by terrorists and the CIA.”
“I never said it was her fault. It was mine.” Tiredness washed over him, but he didn’t quit.
Doogie rolled and started sit-ups, keeping in time with him. “Correction, you said she messes with your mojo. That implies it’s her fault. She could mess with my mojo any time she wanted to, but no, she’s gotta want you.”
Hunt stopped mid sit-up. “Keep your hands off her.” He didn’t like the growl in his voice but didn’t correct it.
Doogie gave him an exasperated huff and did another ten sit-ups before stopping and pulling himself to his feet. He was in fingering-ticking mode, so Hunt prepared for a lecture.
“A. She wouldn’t give me the time of day. B. You’re my best friend and I wouldn’t. C. Because no means no and that’s what the Doc would be saying to me, although you obviously don’t understand the guy rules. Any other man, I would have given him a run for his money. I love a smart woman. But if you’re going to back off, I gotta back off, too. That’s the friend rule. But if you’re going to, you should at least tell her, so some other guy that neither of us knows can have a chance.”
Hunt lay back on the floor and shut his eyes. “None of that made any sense.”
Doogie sat on the floor again. “It’s because we haven’t ever been in the situation where we had to understand and agree to rules about women. You’vebeen disgustingly celibate, and the women who are attracted to my black, bald badassness are not the same women who are attracted to your dark, silent warrior persona.”
Hunt stared at him, flummoxed by the sentiment.
Doogie sighed. “You have a master’s degree in mathematics from UCLA, dude, you are not dumb.”
“That’s all logical. It follows rules. It’s math. This is,” he floundered, mulling his words. “Something I’m not equipped for obviously, and maybe it’s something I’m not entitled to.”
Doogie slapped his leg and pointed a finger at him. “Man, if this is about more crap from your childhood, I’m going to walk you straight to the Doc and let her kiss that crap out of you. A good woman can do that, you know. Make you forget. I’m pretty sure, given the way she was listening to you, that she’s the kind that will make forgetting easy.”
He wasn’t going to ask how Doogie had made that assessment. He was going back to silence. Killer ones.
He rose, bent to retie his shoes, and picked up his towel. A quick change and a twenty-mile run would book his afternoon.
“Don’t even think it.”
“Think what?”
“We’re not running in this snow. I already did enough of that up and down the mountain.”
“We can always use the practice.”
