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“Lock it into your shoulder,” he said.
I jabbed it into my shoulder again, retargeting. I wasn’t sure how tight I needed it to be. It felt good enough.
“Take your time.” The tone indicated I was taking a while.
“I do have a loaded gun,” I said, hoping my tone said shut up or I would aim at him.
“Never let intimidation hold you back,” he said in that smoky voice.
I relocked the 303 to my shoulder. I yanked to load up a bullet, and aimed again using the scope, keeping an eye on the target.
I pulled back on the trigger. The gun fired.
The scope cracked against my forehead between my eyebrows. Pain radiated instantly. I put the gun aside, rubbing the spot. It was like banging your head into the corner of a cabinet.
“What’s wrong?”
“The scope is stupid.”
“You were scoped.” He patted my thigh. “Leave the gun for a second.”
I touched my forehead between my brows, wondering if I was bleeding. It didn’t feel like it but I wasn’t sure. I got up on my knees, feeling the heat running through me at messing up my first shooting experience. Thank goodness there was a wall and Raven didn’t see.
Axel crouched next to me and held my chin in his fingers. He brushed aside my hair from my cheek. When I still didn’t remove my hand, he curled his fingers around my wrist. “Let go.”
I didn’t want him to see, but he tugged and I relented. He scanned my forehead, his fingers touching the spot. When his fingers got too close, I yanked my head away. “Ow.”
“Just a fender bender,” he said. “You’ll have a good bump for a while though.”
“Oh great,” I said. “Do I need ice?”
“Did you want to stop?”
I blushed; I didn’t want to. If I stopped after one shot, I was worried the guys would call me a wimp. Plus, shooting wasn’t that bad. It was actually kind of fun, since I wasn’t shooting a person or at risk of getting shot at. I could see doing something like this on days off in the future. Without getting hit in the head. “It doesn’t hurt too bad.” It was partially true. It stung, but I could live with it. “Did I hit the pole?”
Axel looked out, squinting at the wood pole. He dropped down, picked up the rifle, and used the scope to check. “Fucking shit. You nailed it.”
My heart leapt. I dropped down next to him. “I want to see.” He passed the gun over, and I checked in the scope. Sure enough, there was a hole that split the wood, slightly to the left. “Was I not supposed to hit it?”
He clapped me on the back of the shoulder. “You’re either a natural or you’re damn lucky. Go ahead and empty the magazine.”
This time I avoided the scope, and locked the gun into my shoulder better. I aimed at the back dirt pile, simply trying to hit a singular carpet. Dust clouds rose at every place I hit as bullets zipped into the carpets, and I managed to land them relatively close to each other.
After I fired every bullet, I felt a rush. Excitement surged through me to be holding something so powerful. It wasn’t that I wanted to hurt anyone with it. I just liked the control and the risk.
“When you’re finished, you pull the magazine out,” he said, showing me. He also taught me how to make sure the barrel was empty, to check the cartridge.
He brought out another gun, a stage coach rifle, this one I only had to pull back once and after the first shot, it would reload and be ready for the next pull of the trigger. There wasn’t a scope on this one, so I aimed with the barrel sight, trying to hit the pole again. I got it twice more. The pole tilted forward and to the left after so many hits and needed to be replaced.
Axel roughed his fingers through his black hair. “Even with a different gun, you’re still hitting your targets.”
“I kind of like it,” I said.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have shown you this. I don’t want you shooting people.”
I huffed and was about tell him I’d only shoot idiots, but stopped short when a cool black eyebrow lifted on his face. His look stilled me until there wasn’t any fight left in me. It was fear of disappointing him if I even joked about this topic. Did I really worry that much about what he thought of me? I swallowed to shake off the feeling. “I won’t shoot anyone,” I said.
“Good.” He got up on his knees. “Let me check that bump on your forehead.”
I sighed, getting up. That was going to be a pain to explain to the others.
He cupped my head in his hands again, his gaze focused on my brow. “It’s puffy.”
“Can I tell the guys you beat me up?”
“Did you want me to die today? You hate me that much?”
I must have had a temporary brain melt down or something. I forgot how Southern guys usually took hitting girls very seriously. Normally, if a guy hit a girl around here within sight of another guy, he could expect a beating. Once, I saw a guy kick a girl at school, and a swarm of guys swooped in on him. I don’t recall seeing him at school ever again. Probably the only reason Raven got away with it with me in front of the others was because I fought back and you could tell he wasn’t hitting as hard as he could. I was pretty much asking for it every time and it was fun. Probably because most Southern gentlemen wouldn’t ever dream of it. “I don’t want them knowing what really happened.”
“Happens to everyone the first time. Suck it up.” His palms warmed my cheeks and he pressed them until my lips made a fish face. “If you can’t laugh at yourself, you’ve got no sense of humor.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said through my squished lips.
He released me with a slight shove that knocked me back a half step. “Help me clean up.”
I helped by putting the 303 back into the case and collecting the empty magazines and the casings he could find. I worked beside him in silence for a while, trying to figure out if I would get a headache later from the welt on my forehead.
“So,” he said. “You told Coaltar you were a biology researcher?”
I slowed in strapping the gun into place in the case. “Uh ... maybe?”
He had his head bowed, focusing on the gun. “Was any of that real interest, or were you just trying to talk to him?”
“Why do you ask?”
He shrugged, snapping the gun case shut. “It made me wonder why you talk about Wil going to college, but you never mention it for yourself.”
I snorted. “Me? At college?”
“Why not?” He picked up the gun case, carrying it under his arm. He motioned to the wall, back toward the parking lot and started heading that direction. “You’re pretty smart. You could take the SATs and probably start at a community colleg
e for basic classes.”
I shrugged, carrying the gun case and walking beside him. “I don’t know what I want.”
“You seemed interested in the glowing fish.”
“I’m interested in a lot of things. I just never really thought about what I wanted before. It was just always what I could get so I could scrape by.”
We got to the Cherokee and he opened the back. We dropped the gun cases inside. He closed the back again and leaned against it. “If you had to pick something, what would you go for?”
I shifted from foot to foot. The truth was, a lot of things did interest me, like biology and other sciences, and now even shooting guns. It was impossible to pick. “Why do I have to pick one?”
His dark eyes sparkled with amusement. Was he pleased with this answer? “Pick two.”
“I don’t want to pick,” I said. “I don’t want to ...” I didn’t know how to express it.
“Get locked down into one thing?”
I bit my lip to try to stop the heat on my cheeks. I didn’t want to say yes, but couldn’t deny that was how I felt. It was why I’d resisted the idea of college a long time ago and simply never tried at all in school. You had to pick just one type of study that ended up costing a lot of money in student loans and you had to stick with it. Why? I folded my arms over my stomach and leaned against the back of the Jeep. “How did you get into biology?”
“Kind of by accident,” he said. “When I went into the Academy, they encourage you to explore and do what interests you.”
“I thought you were trying to say it was an espionage group. So it is like a school? Like a college?”
“It is more than you think,” he said. “As far as your interests, they offer whatever they can so you can pursue your own talents. Their classes aren’t exactly normal. For example, if you were interested in working with zoo animals, they’d find a place for you at the zoo with hands on training. If you want biology, they stick you in a biology lab.”
