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“Hey,” I said, grabbing her chin to point her face up towards mine, and looking her right in the eyes. “You…didn’tknow what you were doing though,” I teased, laughing when she snatched away from me to head towards the ammo.
“You’re gonna get enough of teasing me while I have a gun in my hands,” she called over her shoulder while I put on my own ear protection and goggles.
“You ain’t gonna do shit,” I shot back, yelling so that she could hear me through the ear cuffs. “Worry about hitting these targets.”
“I’ll just pretend they’re you.”
“Oh you’re not going to hit anything if you do that. May want to pretend it’s Kellen.”
I regretted that shit assoonas it was out of my mouth. Hell, before. But, I said it as soon as I thought it, before my brain could send thethat’s a mistake, motherfuckersignal to my lips.
I hadn’t even been looking at her when I said it – I had turned to pull my ammo of choice from the shelf. When I looked at her, her eyes were on her weapon, but her hands had stilled in the middle of loading her gun. She was frozen.
Yeah.
Big fucking mistake.
“Monica… shit, I amsosorry.”
That seemed to snap her out of her trance, and she shook her head. “No. Don’t be. You’re right.”
“But that wasn’t… I didn’t mean that like a joke about him being dead, I just meant that—”
“That he was a piece of shit?” she supplied for me. “That he constantly disrespected me, had zero regard for our marriage vows, and doesn’t deserve even half of the consideration I’ve given him, since his death? You are absolutely right,” she said, with a heavy sigh. “He treated me like garbage… and that’s just based on the things Iknowabout. There’s probably a whole lot of heartbreaking things I’m – blissfully – not even aware of.” She blinked hard, several times, a move I recognized as an attempt to fight back tears.
Ihatedhow right she was.
“Still,” I said, unable to dispute any of the words she’d spoken about her husband. “I shouldn’t have said that. And I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
She shrugged. “Don’t be sorry. Like I said… you’re right. He may be dead, but that’s no tragedy for me. And he doesn’t deserve for me to act like it is.”
The next twenty or so minutes were… tense. We got her loaded, and set up in one of the two firing bays I had, and then I let her loose with a target page, which she completely murdered with haphazard shots. Then, she carefully reloaded her weapon, and killed it again.
And then again.
And then again.
The tension left her shoulders after that.
Once she seemed a little less angry – and I hoped to God it wasn’tactuallymy face she saw as she was doing all that firing – I joined her on the other side of the bulletproof glass that separated the firing bays.
“Hey… you good?” I asked, approaching her cautiously while she was reloading.
She looked up at me with a smile, and nodded. “Yeah. Sorry about that getting all intense on you like that. I’d had something on my mind, and then your comment about thinking about Kellen as my target kind of… pushed me over the edge.”
“Again, I amsosorry. It wasn’t funny, and—”
“The hell it wasn’t,” she giggled. “Listen… seriously, you don’t have to be sorry about that. It’s not our fault he got himself murdered and I can’t even joke about killing him anymore. He’s even getting on my nerves in death, and it’s pretty annoying.”
I chuckled. “Tell me how you really feel then, damn.”
She took a deep breath. “Yeah… I don’t even know how I feel about anything these days. Everything is all upside down, and I’m just… a little lost. But I’m okay. I’m here, I’m focused. I need to be able to do this, and now that I’ve… wasted all these bullets,” she said, motioning at the shell casings all around her feet, “I should probably get you to help me actually hit something.”
“You’ve been hitting… the page. Which is something,” I said, trying to give her a little encouragement, but it only made her shake her head.
“Uhh, nah. I need to be able to hit a target. With consistency.Help.”
I grinned. “Yeah. I’ve got you.”
