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"Call it whatever you want. It's nutty."
"Be that as it may, the more I think about this, the more concerned I get. I filed all the HR paperwork this morning and that's all ready to go, but I have no idea how we can be a couple and be professionals at the same time," Jade said.
"We'll have to spend a lot of time together."
"We already do that, though. I think we need to engineer some kind of spark or something. Some...flirtatious spirit."
"Flirtatious spirit? Are you serious?" Derrick asked.
"Dead serious. Now, come on. We've got to brainstorm how to flirt."
"Do you even know how to flirt?" he asked, and she blinked up at him with a blank expression before it contorted into something like anger.
"Of course I know how to flirt," she shot back.
"Okay, give me your best come on."
"Well you can't just put me on the spot like that. The best I've got is 'Hey there sailor.'"
"Which would work great if we were in the 1940s."
"Fine then, how do you normally flirt with someone?"
"I don't normally have to try."
She rolled her eyes. "Why is that always your go-to response? Everybody has to try sometime."
"That's where you're wrong."
"Okay, well, um, what if we tried to hold hands?" She rested her palm on the bar top and Derrick reached out to take it. The second his skin met hers, it was like a little electric spark had fizzled up his arm and shot directly into his heart. For an instant, he nearly pulled away in surprise, but then he wrapped his fingers around hers and squeezed gently.
"This is..." He started and she nodded.
"Weird." She finished for him. "So we could, I guess, hold hands during lunch."
"Right, Okay. We can do that."
"And we could also, I don't know, could we have nicknames for each other? Cutesy ones?"
"Like Sugar Tits?" He offered.
"I was thinking a little less graphic."
"Sugar Boobs?"
She frowned at him.
"Okay, fine. I'll come up with something else. I'll call you..."
"You can call me Jay. That was what an old boyfriend of mine used to call me."
Derrick grimaced. He wasn't sure why, but the idea of calling her by some affection another man had given her rubbed him the wrong way. "No, I don't think so. I'm going to call you Champ."
"And what am I supposed to call you? Slugger?"
"No, you can call me Dare. That's what they called me in the service." He said it casually, almost without thinking. In fact, he wasn't sure what had jogged his memory of the nickname to begin with. He hadn't thought of it in years, not since his last deployment. That name was one of the very few good things he had to hang on to from those days.
