Make You Mine by K.T. Quinn

23

Charlotte

My entire body trembled with adrenaline from telling my ex-boyfriend off. I’d been avoiding it over the last week, but deep down I’d been fantasizing about giving him a piece of my mind. It was empowering. It was what he deserved after daring to call me to ask for money.

But telling him to go fuck himself didn’t magically make me feel better.

My room was too stuffy, so I grabbed my purse and walked outside to get some air. My feet carried me down the road, then onto main street and into town. I’d already eaten dinner, but I could get dessert at the diner. Mindy sold chocolate chip cookies that were so soft you could barely hold them without leaving a thumb-print in the surface.

But when I got there, I stopped and I looked across the road at Flop’s Bar & Grill.

Chocolate isn’t the vice I need tonight.

The entrance was around the back of the building, away from the road. As I rounded the corner of the bar I saw a familiar white truck parked outside, with cracks in the windshield and a trash bag taped over the broken driver-side window. I smiled at the sight. So that’s why Jayce hasn’t texted me tonight.

It might have been called a bar and grill, but the interior was heavy on the former and light on the latter. Only a few hanging bulbs gave off any light, and it took my eyes a few seconds to adjust. Two pool tables filled the left side of the room, opposite a row of eight rectangular tables with stools for chairs. At the end of the room was the bar, shaped like a U with one long end flanked by two stubby sides. Altogether, there were only five patrons spread around the room, nursing drinks.

I sat next to the handsome man at the bar and said, in a husky voice, “Lookin’ for a good time, cutie pie?”

Jayce smirked when he realized it was me. “Haven’t seen you in here before.”

“First time.” I jerked my head toward the door. “You didn’t want to ride the bike here?”

“They’re callin’ for rain.”

“With a busted window,” I pointed out, “you’ll get almost as wet in the truck.”

“Almost. But a little wetness never hurt nobody.” He sipped from a glass of dark liquor, and then his grin slowly turned into a frown. “You okay, Peaches?”

“I’m just fine,” I lied. “Guess what I did tonight? I dropped an F-bomb.”

His cobalt eyes blinked in surprise. “Oh shit, no kidding?”

“Said it loud and with authority. You would’ve been proud.”

“Who was the unlucky recipient?”

“My ex.”

He nodded, unsurprised. “I’m sure he deserved it.”

“Oh, he did.”

Jayce looked over his shoulder at the other side of the bar. “There’s only a few people in here, but we shouldn’t… uh… you know. Seem too friendly.”

“Right, right,” I replied. “Wouldn’t want anyone seeing us chatting.”

“I’d hate to have to call you a cunt again,” he said with a disarming smile. “But at least this time, you’ll understand why.”

“Even then, I’d rather avoid it.” I moved down two barstools as the bartender, Flop, came out of the back. I raised my finger and asked for a beer.

“Yes ma’am, what’s your brand?”

“Whatever’s cheapest.”

“One can of Natural Light, coming right up for the young lady,” he said in a thick Georgia drawl.

I remembered Flop from the time I saw him drinking coffee in the diner. He didn’t have a single hair on his bald head, and his face was covered with so many freckles they almost blended together. “This is your bar, right?” I asked.

“Yes ma’am!” he announced while grabbing my beer from the fridge. He cracked it open and slid it across the bar, aluminum scraping on old wood. “We don’t have the best selection, but what we got is cold.”

“What more does a girl need?” I took a long pull. “Mind if I ask you something?”

“Don’t…” Jayce muttered under his breath.

“Depends on the question,” Flop replied.

“That’s not your real name, is it? Flop?”

Jayce groaned. Flop’s face lit up like a Christmas tree.

“That’s a great story!”

“Now you’ve done it,” Jayce said, rising from his barstool and walking away with his drink. He shook his head all the way to the table in the corner, as far from the bar as possible.

“It goes back to my time in Vietnam.” Flop leaned across the counter toward me. “I was a Huey pilot in seventy-two. That’s a helicopter. You know why they’re called Hueys? Well, it was made by Bell Helicopters, and its model designation was the Iroquois HU-1, which stood for a Helicopter of the Utility variant. On paper, HU-1 looks like Huey, and bam, it got its nickname!”

I glanced over at Jayce. He was sipping his drink and trying not to smile. Flop continued his speech as if he’d been rehearsing it and waiting for someone to tell.

“Now, they changed the designation from HU-1 to UH-1 in the sixties… hrmm. Was it sixty-two or sixty-three? I don’t remember, so don’t ask. But despite the change, the nickname Huey stuck. Now, I was lucky enough to fly the Bell UH-1N, which was the twin-engine variant that came out in sixty-nine. You know why you want two engines instead of one? ‘Cause if one goes out, you’ve got a backup! Don’t get me wrong; a Huey can’t do much flyin’ with only one engine. But it’s enough to get you out of danger and maybe put her down gently. I didn’t join the Army to crash-land no Huey into the jungle, no ma’am I did not.”

He had bottomless lungs and so much enthusiasm that I couldn’t help but smile while I drank my beer. “So your nickname…” I said gently.

“Right! I was gettin’ to that. Back in sixty-nine, I was ferrying this Sergeant Major from one base camp to another. We were nowhere near the front line, so we thought we were safe. I was flyin’ real low, just over the tree tops ‘cause that’s safest from these new missile launchers the North Vietnamese were using to shoot down our Hueys. If you’re a thousand feet in the air, you’re a sitting duck. Flying low over the trees, you’re safer. But it exposes you to small fire. And that’s where I got into trouble. A dozen Vietcong were waiting, and they opened up like a can of tuna fish on my Huey. Tore it up like Swiss cheese. By some miracle I didn’t get hit.”

I signaled for another beer and said, “Lucky you.”

“Not so lucky for the Sergeant Major,” Flop said while fetching me a fresh beer. “Took a round in the foot.”

“Ouch.” The beer hissed open and was cold in my hand.

“Although that’s the only wound he took, and I wasn’t shot at all, Charlie did manage to hit one of my engines. We lost most of our thrust from the rotor disk in the blink of an eye. Brought her down in a clearing as best I could. We bounced once, and the rotors became unstable. Whole thing tilted sideways until the blades hit the ground, digging up more dirt than a monster truck rally. Tore the blades all to hell, and bent the rotor mast beyond repair. When the rotor finally stopped spinning, the helicopter fell over.” He demonstrated with his hand making a karate-chop motion on the bar, and then falling flat. “Didn’t blow up, though! I got that Sergeant Major out and away, since he couldn’t walk himself. Still get Christmas cards from him every year. Least I did, ‘til he died a few years back.”

He nodded to himself as if that were the end of the story.

“But… the nickname?” I asked. “Flop?”

“Oh! Right. So we radio’d the boys for pickup. We weren’t far from base, so they sent three jeeps over with grunts. They get there and help the Sergeant Major into the jeep, and one of the boys looks at my Huey and asks what happened to her. So you know what I said? I told him, it just sort of flopped over! I didn’t mean it as a joke, but boy, the Sergeant Major laughed harder than a crazy person. Slappin’ his knee and everything. Granted, it might’ve been the morphine they gave him, but when a Sergeant Major laughs, a bunch of privates laugh with him.” He spread his hands. “They told that story all over base for the next week. And the nickname Flop just sorta stuck.”

“Ahh,” I said. I was a little underwhelmed by the story, which could’ve been summed up with it was a nickname from the war when my helicopter flopped over. But listening to his long-winded story had taken my mind off of my own troubles, and for that it was worth the hassle. Plus, he reminded me of my uncle. The one I actually liked.

I raised my beer. “To Flop. Best helicopter pilot in Eastland.”

He grinned as if it was the best praise he’d ever gotten, poured himself a shot of bourbon, and toasted with me before knocking it back.

My phone buzzed with a text message.

Jayce: You’re lucky. You got the short version of the story.

Charlotte: It wasn’t so bad! I like him.

Jayce: You like everyone.

Charlotte: I didn’t like you, at first.

Jayce: So you’re saying you like me NOW?

Jayce: Damn, Peaches. You’re gonna make me blush.

I glanced over my shoulder. Jayce was grinning widely at me. I gave him a playful glare as thunder boomed outside.

Flop patted the bartop in front of me. “Don’t let me do all the yappin’. How’s your night going? Seen you all over town this past week, but it’s the first time you’ve come by for a drink.”

“First time I’ve needed one,” I admitted, ignoring all the beers I’d been drinking in my motel room.

“Tell old Flop your worries. I can’t promise to fix ‘em, but I can listen, and sometimes that’s just as good.”

“I don’t want to talk about my problems,” I said. “I came here to forget them.”

“Come on now. What’s made you crawl out of that crummy motel to have a drink at Flop’s?”

I gave in and told him the abridged version of my story with Scott. Just the highlights: the “break” he wanted to go on, continuing to live and work together, finding out he was seeing someone else, and then the phone call tonight when he asked me for money. Flop’s face was a theater of surprised gasps and bitter curses for my benefit. Although Jayce pretended to be reading something on his cell phone in the corner, I got the sense he was listening.

Flop whistled between his teeth when I was done. “Exes are the worst. I’d damn near kill myself if I had to work with my ex-wife.”

A stout woman with a grey ponytail stuck her head out from the kitchen. “The fuck you say about me, Flop?”

“Nothing, Sandra,” he hastily said.

“That’s what I thought.” She disappeared back into the kitchen. I raised an eyebrow at Flop.

“Oh, right. I do work with my ex-wife,” he said, as if he had forgotten. “We both own half the bar, and we’re both too stubborn to sell our half to the other.”

“How’s that working out for you?”

Flop looked over his shoulder and leaned in close. “It’s hell. But it could be worse.”

I laughed and waved for another beer. A new text blinked on my phone.

Jayce: You keep drinking like this and I’ll have to drive you home

Charlotte: I walked here. No DUI for me!

Jayce: It’s a dark road back to the motel. A car wouldn’t see you until the last second. Safer to let me give you a ride. Not to mention it sounds like it’s about to rain.

Charlotte: Sounds like you’re looking for an excuse to give me a RIDE

Jayce: Shit, Peaches. Now you’ve got me thinking.

I grinned over at him. He casually sipped his drink while reading his texts, never looking over at me.

This was exactly what I needed: some drinks with new people who could make me laugh and take my mind off things. A million times better than drinking a six-pack in my motel and feeling sorry for myself.

Not to mention more flirty texts with Jayce. It was even more fun when we were in the same room together, pretending like we didn’t know each other.

It would have been the perfect night, except for the Copperhead that chose that moment to walk in.