Page 17 of The Woman Left Behind

“True enough, as far as that goes,” Snake said. “But, yeah, they’d have to be blind and stupid to buy that’s all you’re doing. Look at you.”

Look at her? Jina looked, frowning. Okay, she wasn’t dressed like someone who normally worked with computers; she knew computer nerds, given that she had one foot at least halfway into nerdhood herself. She should be wearing jeans and sneakers and a tee from some obscure rock concert. Instead she wore lace-up boots that looked as if she’d run a hundred miles in them—she had—and brown cargo pants. She was definitely wearing a tee, but it was a sweat-stained dingy white. “Not wearing this, no, but I can change clothes. I was talking about the hours I spend with you guys, and how dirty I am when I get home unless it’s a swim day.” Thank God for swim days; at least then she could shower before she went home.

Trapper snorted, leaning back on his elbows. “The girl doesn’t have a mirror,” he commented to the others.

“Do too. I brush my teeth and hair every morning.”

Several of them chuckled. She slugged back some water, enjoying the level of camaraderie she and the guys had established, with the exceptions of Levi and Voodoo. Voodoo didn’t like her, but as far as she could tell he didn’t like anyone, so she didn’t take it personally. Levi, though... he watched her with cold assessment, as if waiting for her to screw up so bad he could legitimately refuse to let her join his team. She knew he could do it, too; the team leaders had a lot of autonomy, because a smooth-working team was so essential to their success. She’d busted her ass for three months to keep from giving him that excuse. Whenever she had the time to think about it logically, sheshouldbe giving him that excuse, rather than half killing herself trying to do what they asked of her. Because she couldn’t think of any logical reason for her illogical actions, she had long since given up trying to explain it to herself.

“You’re skinny and tan and have muscles,” Jelly explained.

Huh. According to the scale, she’d actually gained about ten pounds, after some initial weight loss. Despite gaining weight, though, all her old clothes were too big for her now, to the point her sweatpants barely hung on her hips and she didn’t dare wear them out of the condo. But buying more meant going shopping, and she didn’t have the time, energy, or interest. She’d made the effort for boots, but the boots were important. She’d ordered the cargo pants—several pairs—off the Internet. Other than that... meh. She’d shop some other time, like maybe next year.

She hadn’t been heavy before—the description that kept coming to her was “normal.” Not tall, not short; not heavy, not skinny. She kind of wasn’t normal, now, and whenever she caught sight of herself in the mirror she was briefly taken aback, but the truth was that beyond the teeth-and-hair brushing she seldom had time to even check what she was wearing. She’d never been blessed in the boob department, but now they were almost nonexistent because she’d lost so much body fat while adding muscle. She did like her arms, though, liked the definition of her triceps, and being able to pop her biceps up. In just three months she was so much stronger that even though she was always tired at the end of the day she could bound up the stairs to her condo.

“Maybe I could tell them I’ve been working out,” she mused. “That’s true enough.”

Two or three grunts answered that. “They won’t believe that, unless they’re dense,” Boom said. “You don’t have gym muscles, and that wouldn’t explain the tan.”

Well, damn. Her folks weren’t dense. They hadn’t successfully raised five kids by being either naive or gullible. Three months before, Jina wouldn’t have known the difference between gym muscles and the kind of muscles achieved by hard work, but now she did. Gym muscles were for posing; work muscles were for doing, and there was a definite difference.

“Maybe they won’t come,” she said, feeling guilty because not wanting to see them felt awful. She loved her family and normally saw them four or five times a year—until now. Maybe she could go home around Christmas, and by then her tan, attained despite a liberal application of sunscreen every morning, should have faded. And she’d still have to run, even on vacation, because staying in shape was a constant effort. When the guys weren’t on a mission, they were either working out or going through training exercises, keeping their skills sharp. She’d be expected to do the same, so her family would see her running and assume her weight loss and muscle gain was because of that.

“Do your families ever meet the other team members?” she asked, unable to contain her curiosity. To date, she hadn’t met any of their family members or outside friends. Maybe they were like her and were too tired when they got home to hang out with friends.

“Sure,” Trapper said. “There are cookouts, things like that. Boom and Snake both have kids, and their wives do things together, take the kids to do stuff.”

Jina wondered if they’d had any cookouts in the past three months, because if they had, she hadn’t been invited. She didn’t let herself feel hurt; though she’d been assigned to Levi’s team, she wasn’t yet an official member because she hadn’t completed training. If—when—she was cleared and began going on missions, and they still didn’t include her, then she’d let herself brood about it, but that time wasn’t now.

While they were in a talkative mood, she pressed on. “Do your families call you by your team nicknames?”

“In a way,” Snake said. “My wife calls me by my name, but everyone else’s family members call me Snake.”

“Why Snake? Do you crawl fast on your stomach, or something?” She’d wondered about all their nicknames but was usually so busy trying to keep up and stay alive that she hadn’t asked.

In answer, he pointed to the two round scars on his forehead, rolling his blue eyes up as if he could see them.

She gaped at him. “A snake bit you? Really? What kind?”

“A rattler. I guess the only reason I’m alive is it didn’t eject any venom. I about pissed my pants, though.”

“You’d probably be called ‘Snake’ even if you weren’t on a GO-Team,” she muttered. “Why do we need nicknames anyway?” She didn’t like “Babe” at all, would never like “Babe,” and wouldn’t like it even if shewasa babe, which she wasn’t.

“Technically, we don’t.” After their heart-to-heart talk in his truck on the first day, when he was making it plain to her she was the most expendable person on his team, Levi seldom spoke directly to her except in command. Hearing his voice behind her made her heart jump, and her stomach went into the jitters. She didn’t turn to look at him, though, instead holding herself as still as a rabbit being eyed by a cobra. “But we aren’t military so we don’t have the protection of a military structure behind us. We’re civilian, and officially unauthorized, no matter howunofficially authorized we are. It’s safer for us not to have our real names broadcast over a radio.”

She sighed. Unfortunately that made sense, which meant she wasn’t going to be able to jettison the “Babe.” Calling her that was probably already too ingrained, anyway. She wasn’t certain any of them even remembered her real name.

“What about you?” she asked, moving on to Jelly. “What’s behind your name?”

“Nothing as special as a snake bite, I just like jelly.” He gave her one of his beatific smiles that made him look about sixteen.

“On almost everything,” Snake pointed out.

“I like what I like.”

One by one she got the stories behind their nicknames. Boom got his nickname by falling on the top of a vehicle and making a loud boom; Voodoo’s name was because he was from Louisiana; Trapper once constructed a small trap out of sticks and caught a mouse; Crutch had broken three toes the first day of training and gimped around on crutches for a couple of weeks; and Levi was called Ace because he’d once played in the World Series of Poker. He hadn’t won the big pot, but he’d walked away with a couple of hundred thousand. Jina was impressed despite herself; she didn’t play poker, but she’d—out of boredom—actually watched some of the tournament the year before, so she wasn’t completely ignorant. Yeah, she could see him sitting stone-faced at a poker table with a bunch of other stone faces.

“You get the nickname trophy,” she said to Snake, smiling. “Getting snake-bit on the forehead is kind of exotic. Everyone else’s nickname is boring compared to yours.”

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