Unspoken(95)

“You’re all, um, enlisted?”

“Your girl doesn’t know much about the Marines, does she?” the longer-haired guy to my left interjected.

“She knows all about me, and that’s all that matters,” Bo replied.

“I’m Gray,” he said and stuck out his hand. I shook it.

“What’s your nickname stand for?”

“That’s not my nickname, sweetheart, just my name.”

“His nickname’s the Fog, because he’s a quiet motherfucker,” another guy at the table contributed.

Bo pulled me close to him so he could whisper in my ear. “Did you buy the black panties?”

“Yes,” I replied as nonchalantly as possible, as if he wasn’t asking me what I was wearing under my dress with all these guys sitting around staring at me as if I were the first female they’d seen after ninety days of isolation at sea.

“Will you take them off so I can put them in my pocket?” he whispered again.

“No,” I told him, biting my inner lip to keep my cheeks from betraying our conversation.

“Knock it off, Lothario. Thought you came to see us,” Gray joked.

I pushed Bo away and silently chastised him, but as always he was irrepressible and I couldn’t stop my own lips curving up in a return smile.

“You still fapping to Wilson’s sister, Hamilton?” Bo said, without tearing his gaze from me, wearing a grin as big as Texas.

“Damn right. Miss February still hangs in my locker,” replied Hamilton.

As if on cue, a guy with dark hair and a thick neck pushed back his chair and towered over the one called Hamilton. “That’s not my fucking sister.” The table cracked up, and Gray and Hamilton reached around to give Bo high fives.

“Wilson’s sister posed for Playboy,” Bo explained.

“That’s not my goddamned sister, you sick fucks. That’s someone else. How many times do I have to tell you this?” Wilson shouted at the laughing table. This only made everyone laugh even harder.

Another member of the table whose name I didn’t know piped up. “I can tell you some shit on Bo, AM.”

Bo’s body tensed next to mine, but I figured this was just more of the same. “Puritan,” Bo warned, but I shushed him with a wave of my hand.

“Sure,” I encouraged.

Puritan, or Jerry Purdy, proceeded to tell the table about of several insane things that Bo had done in high school. Puritan was two years behind Bo and Noah and had followed them into the Marines. From the bored looks on the faces of the guys around the table, they’d all heard these stories before.

“You put cows in the school?”

“They can walk up but not down,” Bo explained. “And they’re cattle in Texas, Sunshine, not cows.”

The stories made Bo sound vaguely like a hoodlum. I wasn’t sure how many beers Jerry had managed to down during the recitation of Bo’s many sins or before I arrived, but it was clearly quite a few. Jerry had dragged his chair around so that he could see me better, or so he proclaimed. He seemed to lean closer with each tale, and I kept moving away. Pretty soon I’d be sitting on Bo’s lap. I squirmed a little in my chair, but that seemed to invite Jerry even closer.

“Want to know why Bo’s called the Baker?”

“Puritan, no one calls Bo the Baker, you dickhead. That’s your own shitty nickname,” Gray interrupted. “Bo and Noah went to grunt school—that’s a good thing, by the way—but Puritan didn’t get in. He’s held a grudge for a while now.”

“I didn’t want that anyway,” Jerry protested.

“Jerry,” Bo cautioned. He’d been fairly quiet since we sat down, not interjecting or protesting any of Jerry’s stories. “I don’t think AnnMarie wants to hear any more of my high school exploits. They happened a while ago, and they’re in my past.” Bo emphasized the last word and placed his beer on the table, the one he’d been nursing since I’d arrived. It had to be warm by now.

“Because he loved to eat cream pies.” Jerry snickered, ignoring Bo’s warning. I looked uncertainly at Jerry and then Bo. Bo’s easygoing attitude disappeared in a flash, and everyone at the table, other than Jerry, seemed to stiffen.

“There’s nothing wrong with liking dessert,” I told Bo. “I love pie myself.” This set Jerry off into gales of laughter. I looked around the table and the other guys had pained expressions. None of them were looking me in the face.

“What?” I asked and turned to Bo. He sighed, scrubbed a hand over his face and then drew me onto his lap, far away from Jerry. Jerry had been leaning in so close that my absence nearly caused him to tip over, in part because he was gasping for breath from his laughter.