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Twenty
DAKOTA
“Go in! Go in! Go INNNN!”
The buzzer sounded, and the lights flashed. My last shot bounced off the backboard and went straight through the net, not stopping to touch the rim as a cheer went up behind me.
“Did it count!?”
My eyes shot to the scoreboard, which displayed a giant dot-matrix 37. We’d won by two points. On my last basket.
“Holy fucking shit, you did it!”
Aurelius picked me up and spun me around, causing my dress to flare outward in a wide red circle. The dress had been a hit so far, but now itreallycaught the attention of the half-dozen or so other SEALs waiting their turn at the arcade-style basketball game.
Oh, and it also matched my Santa hat.
“I think the more you drink the better you play,” said Aurelius, slipping his arm around me. “Let’s go get you another before we’re out of here.”
It was our fifth bar, and our eighth competitive game. So far we’d won at pool, lost at darts, got killed at pinball, and somehow I’d slaughtered everyone I faced at the Ms. Pac-Man machine we encountered at the place we’d just come from.
Whatever you wanted to call it: a holiday party, a Christmas pub-crawl, or just a platoon of elite Navy soldiers dragging themselves from one drink to the next, I could see why Aurelius’s group had kept up their annual tradition. Between them and their significant others, they practically took over every bar they went to. But upon entering, the very first thing they did was order eight pints of beer to be placed in front of eight empty chairs, smack dab in the middle of their revelry.
I didn’t ask who the drinks were for, or the names of the men they’d lost. I knew only that they’d been brothers-in-arms, and whether they were there or not they each got a beer and a seat in every single bar we went to.
And all that was good enough for me.
As for Aurelius’s comrades, I got a quick rundown of the bigger names and more animated faces. There was Boombox, who’d gotten his nickname after bringing a giant radio into camp one day, and Magellan who was infamous for always getting lost. The biggest guy in the room was called Tiny, and the shortest SEAL there was named Legs. One of my favorites though was a tall, platinum blond giant who they just called Teflon, because apparently he’d never been shot, wounded, or even scratched. In even the heaviest of firefights he hadn’t taken a single piece of shrapnel, causing several other platoon members to stick near him whenever things got hairy or out of control.
Accompanying most SEALs were their wives and girlfriends, who all turned out to be way cooler than I could’ve imagined. I started thinking being cool was probably a requirement in order to date such radical men.
“These are from Traci,” a dark-haired warrior told us, before handing us a pair of amber-colored shots. I located Traci not far away in a group of three other girls, then raised my shot-glass in salute. She returned the toast and together the entire lot of us threw back what tasted like smooth, single-still whiskey.
“So… how many bars do you generally make it to?” I chuckled, feeling no pain.
Aurelius reached out with one hand to take my empty shot-glass. With the other, he righted my crooked Santa hat.
“I think my personal record is eleven,” he said, thinking back. “Although by then things get kinda hazy, and we start looping back around to the first few bars again.”
“Eleven,” I swore. “Whoa.”
“Yeah. Last guy left standing with a drink in his hand gets the trophy.”
The trophy, I’d learned earlier, consisted of a dented bronze drinking cup mounted roughly — and not squarely — on some lacquered mahogany base. The general premise was the last guy conscious would do his final shot from the cup, throw his Santa hat in the air, and retain bragging rights for the entire year.
“Of course we can peel off whenever we want,” Aurelius offered. “Voodoo and his lady are long gone, and I noticed three or four others dipped out at that last place.”
“But what about the trophy?”
The dark-haired SEAL’s eyes crawled my body beneath my tight red dress. I noticed they lingered on all the same places he’d so thoroughly enjoyed last night.
“Dakota,you’rethe trophy.”
I laughed nervously, fighting off a strange inner heat. “That’s a damned good line.”
“I’m serious,” said Aurelius. “I’ve done this thing a half dozen times, but I’ve never brought a smarter, funnier, more beautiful woman than you.”
Now I did blush. Between our proximity and the crowded bar, it felt like my whole body temperature went up a few degrees.
