Chapter Text
Five years. Ten months. Give or take a handful of weeks. A number of days.
A shit load of time.
And yet, very little changed at Miramar during it. Sure, The Hard Deck had gotten a new owner who brought out all the bells and whistles; model plans and mugs hung from thousands of hooks in the ceilings. A new wave of steadfast patrons had filed in since the first glimmer of sunset. New beer on tap left the old souls searching for something hoppy but cold, delicious but traditional. The parking lot had gotten a new coat of tarmac. The beach had gotten some new nets for volleyball and trash cans for food. The base had gotten in a new era of plans, a change in CO a few times over, and the barracks had a new splattering of paint on them.
But, as Zoe Preston stared up at the open doors with sandy feet and sunkissed skin, she could still hear the crow of laughter and insults and egos that barely managed to stay afloat atop the jukebox music.
Not much had changed, she figured, not where it mattered.
A group of sailors whistled at her as she strode by. Familiar faces from her stint at Miramar half a decade earlier mixed with some unfamiliar faces that she wouldn’t care to remember come morning.
“Boys,” she winked.
One of them, a mechanic named Mason who had spent more than one weekend trying to buy her a drink, tipped his drink at her. “Back so soon, Preston?”
“You know me,” she gave a lofty glance at the neon sign. “I could never say no to trouble.”
“Yeah, well, trouble is already waiting for you inside. I think you’re the last to show up,” he noted.
He held the door open as she stepped inside, took a deep whiff of sandalwood and spilt beer, watched as the crowd swept around her like she was a buoy out at sea. Penny wiped down the bar top with a rag while chatting amicably with a dark haired man that looked a flicker too familiar from his side profile, but her eyes quickly moved on to the crowd at the pool table just beyond.
A crowd that she knew too well, bickering with a tone that she would never forget.
“I’m surprised that you made it here at all, Bradshaw.”
“Why? Didn’t think I might be in your tail wind?”
“Thought you might run out of jet fuel before you made it to the shoreline,” Hangman shot back. There was the familiar wisp of a smirk on his face as he rattled the pool balls with a swift flick of his wrist. Zoe didn’t need to know whether he was stripes or solid to know that he was winning—it was, after all, the one thing that he did best in life.
Maybe the only thing he did well.
“You know, considering that you always burn your fuel instead of making a decision.”
Rooster shook his head. A few sunkissed wisps of hair bounced on his forehead, and Zoe bit back a smile as she drew closer. Time away had done him good; it had bronzed his skin and made him look a little bit more like the Bradshaw that she knew rather than the one people whispered about when they realized who his dad was.
“I don’t need you to worry about me, Bagman, I made it here all on my own.”
“That’s not entirely true, is it?” Hangman pointed his pool stick at Bradley before turning back to the table with a snicker. He smacked the cue ball once more, sending several balls into their designated pockets, before grinning at anyone who would give him their attention. Meandering—more like prancing—to the other side of the table where the eight ball laid in waiting, he tutted, “Phoenix over here was practically begging for you to show up. She needs someone to keep her tail up, afterall.”
“Fuck off, Bagman,” Phoenix clipped, arms crossed around her beer.
“It’s Hangman. And it’s true. Not to worry though, you got Bob now. That should be great for your skillset. I’m sure he’s worthy of your time.”
The WSO in question—one that Zoe didn’t recognize but could already tell that he might be the brunt of everyone’s humor if his stunned silence was anything to go by—twisted a little uncomfortably at the side of the group, spectacles perched on the top of his nose as he glanced between his new pilot and the man who had just taken a pool stick out of his hands. He hadn’t even put up a fight for it; just let the betrayal happen while remaining respectful to all parties involved.
Phoenix pulled her lips tight as Hangman lined up his last shot, retort coming.
Zoe, not for the first time, beat her to the punch.
“Considering the fact that Phoenix had a better run score than you did, Bagman, I thought you would have been a little bit more appreciative of her skills after all these years.”
Phoenix spun on her heel. Hangman jerked his wrist, sending the cue ball wildly spinning to the opposite corner of the table, missing the eight ball entirely as it rolled off into a pocket without touching a single ball. Yale grinned as Zoe stepped forward into the group; laughter lighting up his eyes as he looked her over.
“Holy shit,” Phoenix crowed. “Buzz! In the flesh!”
“What’d you expect?” Zoe quipped back, arms still crossed as she grinned at the room.
“I expected you to be in a metal grave by now,” Harvard taunted. Though, when she narrowed her eyes in his direction, his face loosened into the flicker of a smile. Odd friends, even odder enemies, she supposed. “Guess the name still fits, though, huh?”
“Yours doesn’t. You’re still the stupidest fucker I know.”
The ones who didn’t know Zoe watched the scene carefully. The ones that did know Zoe let her insults wash over, taking them as seriously as a grain of salt knowing that she was always quick to snarl but slow to bite. Yale snorted as he patted Harvard on the shoulder, earning a glare from the former, but then laughter, true and hearty, broke through the tension. Phoenix cut through the space the quickest to pull Zoe into a bone crushing hug. They knocked boots so hard that the pair nearly went careening down to the floor, and if it weren’t for Rooster propping her up with a warm hand to the shoulder, they might have made real asses of themselves.
“I should have known you would be here,” Phoenix muttered into her ear.
When she let go, Rooster was quick to pull her into a looser, if not warmer hug that made Zoe’s face crack open with a happy smile. It had been too long since she saw them; too long since her and Phoenix were tearing the tarmac up during Top Gun and since her and Rooster were getting drunk at the local bar.
“You think I’d miss this shitshow?”
“Shitshow?” Hangman echoed, offended almost. His face was tight as he looked her over; green eyes scouring every inch of her. She looked the same, she knew, but different in the best of ways. Like how her hair was longer, skin was healthier, and bones were stronger. If he noticed, though, he made no indication. Just let that stupid smirk of his draw his features as he leaned onto the pool table with his cue stick in hand. “I think we’re in trouble if that’s all this is. Though, I get it. The talent is a bit lacking.”
“Self retrospection, Seresin? How progressive of you.”
He snorted. Sorta. It was more a mix of a startled laugh and then an annoyed grunt when he realized she had gotten a laugh out of him at all. She figured that was pretty on par for him, though.
The way his smile seemed to tighten at the edges, however, wasn’t.
“Always quick with the quips, Preston,” he returned to the table. Somehow, despite his mess-up upon her arrival, he was still winning. It wouldn’t take him long now to sink the eight ball into the corner if he was anything like the guy she knew. “Hopefully, you’re just as quick with the maneuvers.”
“Scared?”
“Bored and looking for a good competition.”
The group rolled their eyes in unison at that. Phoenix, maybe, the hardest. Her and Hangman had hated one another since day one when he insinuated that she shouldn’t be a pilot just because she lacked the balls (both physically and metaphorically) for the job. Of course, he had shut up about that as soon as Zoe shot him down during an exercise. Still, the wound had never fully healed over their years apart. It seemed that the distance had only left the wounded ego to fester even further.
She turned her back on him to face Rooster and Zoe.
“Were neither of you going to tell me that you were back in the states?”
They shared a look.
“You want a beer?” Rooster asked Zoe, not even attempting to seem like he was avoiding the argument at hand. She smiled back. “Yeah. I’m gonna get us some beers.”
He disappeared into the crowd. Phoenix put her hands on her hips.
“Coward!” she shouted after him.
“Big words from a little lady like yourself.”
“You’re such a dick,” she said, but the insult was clearly lacking malice. Instead, as the two women stared at one another, they both found themselves laughing at the idiocracy of it all. Phoenix shook her head before pulling two other pilots into the conversation. “Fanboy, Payback, meet my sister from the academy. Zoe ‘Buzzard’ Preston. Buzz for short.”
“You two were in the same class?” Fanboy asked.
“Oh fuck yeah,” Phoenix laughed at the memory as Zoe winked at the boys in succession. “We were the best there was. Other than Bagman, of course. Buzz was almost number one, too; would have been if it wasn’t Seresin’s tendency to leave everyone else out to dry just for the sake of being an asshole.”
Payback laughed. “Yeah, I’m starting to get that vibe.”
“Just wait till you get to know him a little better,” Zoe said.
She wasn’t exactly bitter about the whole second place thing, not anymore anyways. But she still was a little hurt—no matter how much she wanted to believe that she wasn’t—that he had so carelessly tossed their relationship into the trash over such a trivial little thing as a medal. Second place was fine by her, anyways. She got a good station and a successful career to boot. One that brought her back here of all places; right alongside him.
First place couldn’t mean all that much, then, could it?
“I’d recommend never expecting him to be your wingman,” she snarked.
Perhaps, maybe, just a little bit, bitter. But who could blame her? She deserved to have a little bit of bitterness even after all this time. Hangman seemed worthy of it seeing as how his ego had yet to be reigned in after all these years.
“In a bar or in the sky?” Fanboy asked.
Phoenix laughed around the neck of her beer. “Either,” she told them.
The boys shared a look; a silent conversation passing between that could only truly exist between a pilot and his WSO. No one bothered to ask what the conversation itself was about. The girls didn’t care enough to inquire, nor did they want to have a peek into the pair’s head just hours before their first training exercise.
That could all wait till tomorrow when it really mattered.
“So, what sort of name is Buzzard, anyways?” Fanboy asked after a moment.
“I don’t know. What sort of name is Fanboy? You a Belieber or something?”
Payback snorted into his drink, earning a hard elbow to the gut from his WSO. He winced, but didn’t apologize. Just wiped the spilt beer off his chin with a smile and said, “during flight school, he was always ending up in the nursing bay for one thing or another. We joked that it was to make his fans happy. The nurses all had heart eyes for him at one point or another.”
“You accident prone, Fanboy?”
“Just like to please the ladies when I can,” he shot back. Phoenix faked a gag while Zoe rolled her eyes humorously. Not one to let it go, though, he turned his gaze back to her to ask again. “But, seriously? What’s with all the bird names around here? First there’s Phoenix, then Rooster, now Buzzard? I mean, I know that you two are birds and all, but Rooster doesn’t exactly fit the bill.”
Payback snickered. “Well, Rooster does have a co—oof!”
He keeled forward at the waist once more, moaning in pain from where Phoenix had sent her elbow swiftly into his stomach. A little green in the face, he held his hands up as if to offer an apology, while mumbling, “alright, geesh. Sorry, Mom. It was just a joke.”
“Her name has nothing to do with her genitals,” Phoenix tutted, almost proudly.
“A weird way to defend me but still true,” Zoe snarked at her friend. When she got the tail-end of Phoenix’s glare, however, she stepped far enough away that she wasn’t in reach of the woman’s elbows. It sent her backing up into Bob who quickly apologized—as if it was his fault in the first place—before moving to her opposite side so that Zoe had the free space next to the pool table. “How does anyone get their nickname, Fanboy? I didn’t pick it. It was given to me. Take it up with flight school, yeah?”
“There has to be some sort of meaning.”
She harrumphed, knowing damn well there was a meaning. “Well, it’s—”
“They call her Buzzard because when everyone else is dead,” a smooth voice cut through the fold. The four turned to find Hangman standing over their shoulder, bent over the edge of the pool table about to take his turn. He blinked up at the group, green eyes burning a line down her face, before swiftly turning away. “She’s the one left circling the bodies. Earned the name in the early days when she was somewhat good at training exercises. More so that she just knows how to run away without getting shot, though.”
He punctuated his statement by throwing his arm forward. The cue ball clacked against the eight ball, sending it into the corner at the far left of the table, leaving Yale and Harvard to groan about losing to him so quickly. Ego stocked, she watched Hangman stand to his full height with a smirk.
“Isn’t that right, Preston?”
There was something suave about how he spoke, a staccato that Zoe had missed in their years apart, but something burning and sharp and deadly all the same. All those years ago she had been convinced she was in love with him because of who he was beneath the moonlight, but years apart had made her realize that she was really just addicted to the adrenaline of him. It was no different than the job. Her hands twitched and her brow would pool sweat and her heart would thump a rhythm in her chest that made her feel more alive then she would ever know anywhere else.
But then just as quickly when he moved his attention elsewhere, she would return to the tarmac, her head would clear, and she would be forced to remember that who he was in the moonlight wasn’t the real him. Not really anyways. Who he was in the moonlight was just the version of him that she was attracted to; the soft side, the caring side, the side that made her feel seen.
And what good was all that when his prominent side was like this. A total dick.
“Well, you would know,” she shot back. “You were dead all those times, afterall.”
His smile twitched a little, eyes darkening, before he got his footing.
“Still got number one, though.”
Her smirk became a little less of a smile and a little more of a snarl. It was so easy to fall into this quibble with him, fall back into dangerous patterns, and if the bar was a little bit shittier and a little less packed, Zoe might have thought that no time had passed at all.
But it did.
And she was glad for it.
“Still don’t have anyone to watch your back, though. Do you?”
For the second time that night, she watched his smirk twitch a little at the side. Almost as if what she was saying actually broke through his exterior to leave a mark on the man beneath. She doubted that was the case; quickly scolded herself for thinking that he was capable of having a hurt pride at all, let alone from someone like her.
Old habits die hard, she supposed, but they do die.
Hangman cracked his mouth open to make a retort, no doubt rude and egotistical, but before he could the music from the jukebox cut off. The bar groaned, heads turning left and right to figure out what had happened, before someone started keying up the piano. Zoe heard the first notes of a familiar song, and turned to Phoenix with a knowing grin.
“Leave it to Rooster to sniff out a piano.”
“Are you complaining?” Phoenix grabbed a few of the boys; Fanboy, Payback, Coyote, and even Bob, before ushering them excitedly towards the other side of the bar. “I guess you’re not getting that beer afterall.”
“Probably shouldn’t have expected anything less. Rooster is so cheap sometimes.”
Phoenix threw her head back with a laugh before disappearing into the crowd. The pool tables were suddenly much less crowded as the bar patrons slowly started to be pulled to where the music was. Hangman stood amidst it all, cue stick limp in hand, gaping in confusion.
“What the hell happened to the jukebox?” he asked.
Zoe snickered. He blinked at her with a small frown. She just arched a brow in retort before grabbing his beer off the side of the table to take a swig.
“Rooster might not be an egomaniac like you, but he still loves to sing,” she said as if it were a simple truth. “Besides, you do have a shit taste in music.”
“I—I don’t,” he said. Then his frown deepened into a scowl as he snagged his beer back out of her hands. Despite not having qualms when she insulted him earlier, he didn’t seem to be excited about how she was jumping to Rooster’s defense so easily. “What’s with you two, anyways? You fucking or something?”
She rolled her eyes. “As if I’d ever date a pilot again.”
“Doesn’t mean that you’re not fucking.”
“Alright,” she narrowed her eyes in turn, mouth pinching a little bit at the unpleasurable turn of conversation. She forgot he could sour things so effortlessly. “No. We’re not fucking. Not that it’s any of your business if we were.”
“Then—?”
“What’s the saying, Bagman? Birds of a feather tend to stick together?” she said with a forceful loftiness, enjoying his misery a little too much for anything else.
“He’s a dickhead.”
“And you’re an asshole.”
“He can’t fly.”
“He’s here, isn’t he?”
Jake pinched his mouth tighter, gripped his beer a little harder. “He’s a total tool.”
“Careful, Seresin,” she quipped, enjoying his bad attitude even less now that the conversation was beginning to reach murky waters. Still, a smirk and sarcasm were as good as duct tape in a situation like this; able to manage today what she could worry about fixing tomorrow. “You almost sound jealous of him.”
He went stiff beside her.
“Please,” he scoffed as if the entire idea was ridiculous. Though, when his eyes darted to the crowded piano on the far side of the bar where the crowd was now raucously joining in on singing, she caught the briefest flicker of uncertainty. “I’ve heard all about him. He isn’t half the pilot he thinks he is. He’s more likely to stall out than to make a kill.”
“What? Like you?”
“I have the record for a reason.”
“You’re never going to let that go, are you?” she muttered.
“Maybe if someone else here had made a kill, I would. But, I doubt that will happen anytime soon. Especially not when they select me as team leader. I make the shots; both the kill and the instructions.”
Zoe sighed.
Yeah, she thought with a brief flicker of misery, things really didn’t change.
“Glad to see that you’re still the same after all these years,” she rolled her eyes. She watched his eyes brighten, mouth quirking upwards, but before he could let the insult be taken as a compliment, she added, “You’re still an asshole who cares more about being number one than anything else. Like, you know, the fact that not everything is about being a pilot.”
The brightness froze in his eyes instantly, before he was frowning at her, eyebrows knit tightly in the middle of his forehead. It was, perhaps, the most genuine reaction he had given her yet. “That’s not true.”
“See? And you’re still a shit liar, Seresin.”
He stared at her. Gaped, almost. Green eyes somehow both dark and bright as they swept over her features, looking for something, though she wasn’t sure what. She looked back, looking for something, though she wasn’t so sure of what that was either.
“Look, Zoe, I—”
“Jesus Christ, Buzz, what the fuck is going on here?” an amused voice cut through their staring contest like a knife through water.
Zoe turned to find Dylan ‘Stitch’ Chutsky looming over her with damp hair and glistening skin, the curl of a smile burning a line across his pale features as he glanced around the bar. It was easy for him to do given the foot of height he had on Zoe, and not for the first time, she found herself relieved in her WSO’s presence. He had an uncanny habit of showing up at the worst of times with his endless snark and pointed insults.
Right now, however, as she let out a breath of tension that she didn’t even realize that had been holding, wasn’t one of them.
Stitch arched a sharp brow with an equally sharp grin before asking, “are we on American Idol right now or is everyone in the bar just really fucking drunk already?”
She laughed, not even realizing how tense being this close to Jake made her.
“Rooster found a piano,” she said, as if that explained everything.
Stitch nodded as if it did. “The jukebox is out? I thought Penny would have replaced that old shit box with one that worked properly by now.”
“Something like that,” she simpered with a glance at the blonde beside her. She could tell that Hangman was trying to keep that damned smirk of his plastered in place, but as she poked a little more at Rooster’s musical talent, it flickered at the edges. “He always did like the attention, though.”
Stitch hummed. “I forgot he could do that.”
“Sing?”
“Make an entire bar of people fall in love with him.”
“I wouldn’t say that they’re in love with him. He’s just playing a song that everybody knows,” Hangman argued, a little hot for the easy conversation that had been passing between the pair.
They both turned to look at him. Stitch, blinking as if he only just recognized his presence, didn’t seem all that bothered by his acrid tone. Zoe, on the other hand, felt a headache forming when she noted the way his gaze swept over Stitch condescendingly.
“Who are you?”
“Stitch.”
“Is that supposed to mean something to me? I’ve never heard of you”
Stitch let out a bark of laughter; not entirely amused, but certainly not unamused. He always did walk that fine line, enjoying a little bit of chaos in his life as if hurtling around enemy air space inside a jet wasn’t enough. “I’m her WSO, asshat,” he shot back. His tone was just as acrid, but the easy going smile on his face made it seem a little less so. “Who the hell are you?”
“Hangman.”
“You’re Hangman?”
“Heard a lot about me?” he puffed out his chest.
It deflated almost as quickly when Sitch just belted out another mean laugh, shaking his head while sharing a look with Zoe that certainly couldn’t have been construed as complementary. “Nothing you’d want me to repeat. I got to say, though, that you’re a lot smaller than I expected. With all those rumors flying about, I would have thought your shoulders would have been bigger. Y’know, to withstand the weight of your ginormous fucking head.”
Hangman’s smile turned icy, harsh. “Why don’t you dial it back a bit, buddy. You’re not even a pilot.”
“As if I haven’t heard that one before.”
Hangman floundered for a moment at Stitch’s apparent inability to take insult no matter how insulting someone could be. Shaking his head, his eyes darted to meet Zoe’s. She tried to stifle her smile when he did so, but, if she were being honest, it was hilarious to watch Stitch ding Hangman’s vanity without even breaking a sweat.
Especially when she had spent the better part of their first two years together telling Stitch about all the different ways that Jake ‘Hangman” Seresin had broken her heart to smithereens.
“What happened to Nantucket?” Hangman asked her after a moment.
“He got reassigned,” she shrugged. They had been through a hell of a lot back at Top Gun, but almost immediately after he got himself reassigned for losing his temper one too many times. She had been sad to see her partner go after so much blood, sweat, and tears together, but Stitch had been the replacement anyone could ask for. Now, five years after the fact, she hardly ever thought about her former WSO. “Stitch has been with me ever since.”
Hangman harrumphed. “I liked Nantucket,” he said; the implication was clear.
“Well, I’m sure you would, Nantucket never had a problem with you abandoning us during the training exercises because of his little man crush on you. Stitch has a bit more of a backbone. Makes it a lot easier to like someone when they actually have your back up in the sky.”
There was that flicker again in his eyes, the tightness of his smile.
She ignored it to nudge Stitch towards the piano.
“C’mon, let’s go sing. Rooster is gonna want to talk to you, anyways. You still owe him money from that bet, remember? Back in Miami.”
Stitch threw his head back with a groan. “Fuck! I forgot about that. You think he’d take a lap dance as payment? I have, like, ten dollars in my bank account right now. Apparently buying stock in Blockbuster isn’t as lucrative as one might have expected”
She shoved him forward with an incredulous laugh. The things that he said were always so out of pocket that it was almost impossible not to laugh at him, but clearly he didn’t think his financial woes were as humorous as she did, and in response he flashed her a scandalized look over his shoulder.
“I’m serious, Buzz,” he huffed. “I might need to start panhandling for money soon. Or, worse, I might have to move in with you. Imagine the impact that will have on my sex life.”
“Just go,” Zoe gave him another shove, another laugh, and was about to follow when a hand circled around her wrist; gentle but firm, warm but ice cold.
“Buzz.”
Zoe turned to find Hangman staring at her with a look that she couldn’t quite place; a look that she wasn’t sure she had ever seen him wear. Was that regret? Or disgust? Longing? Or was he about to tell her to keep their former relationship to herself because he didn’t want to give the other pilots any sort of leg up on him during training?
She used to think that she knew everything about him. Every quirk, every smile.
But that wasn’t actually true. And it certainly wasn’t true anymore.
“I—” he paused, floundered a little bit, eyes darting around the packed room as he took a deep breath. She furrowed her brows at him with a glance at the hand circled around her wrist, not liking the way her skin still smoldered under his touch after all these years. He noticed her gaze, and a moment later Zoe watched as he settled back onto his heels while licking his lips, hand dropping from her wrist. “Careful trusting Rooster up there. The kid tends to freak out when he’s under pressure.”
She frowned, bewildered.
It seemed like he wanted to say something more, but he never did, and she had grown tired of waiting for something from him that would never come.
Why did she always expect so much from him?
Shaking her own head, she shot him a winning grin that was as acidic as it was bitter along the edges. “I think you’re the last person that gets to lecture me about trust, Bagman.
He frowned at the use of the nickname that everyone had shoved upon him for his behavior up in the sky. And it did hurt a little to say; hurt when she knew how much it actually bothered him. But then she reminded herself that she didn’t care—couldn’t waste her time caring, not again—and quickly started shoving her way through the crowd. Rooster had finished his song now, but there were yells for him to sing something else, and by the time she got to a free spot at the piano, he was already banging another tune onto the keys with his shoulders thrown back.
Phoenix smiled at her, then glanced over her shoulder, and asked, “you good?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Hangman’s an asshole,” the brunette replied, as if that could fix everything from the past. It wouldn’t, they both knew, but it wouldn’t be the last time that Phoenix tried to remind Zoe of that fact. “Don’t worry about him, though. Bob and I got your back. Right Bob?”
The bespectacled WSO glanced between the woman in confusion. “Uh, right. Yep. Yes ma’am. That’s the job, anyways. I got your back.”
“You don’t even know what we’re talking about, do you?” she asked with a wry smile.
He hesitated.
Laughing, Zoe forgave him as soon as she threw a hand over his shoulder. “You and Stitch are gonna get along great. Maybe a little too, well, actually,” she said while rustling his hair. “In fact, don’t ever offer to do him a favor no matter how charming he might seem. You seem a little too nice to end up in the county jail for that idiot.”
Bob didn’t seem too convinced. “Sounds good to me, ma’am.”
Zoe laughed again. There was something entirely too sweet about the little man tucked beneath her arm. Something endearing that would likely get spit out if he didn’t also know how to piss people off.
Maybe Hangman could teach him a thing or two about being upfront with people.
As if knowing where her mind went, Phoenix added, “I don’t know what you ever saw in that guy, by the way. Once you get past the rakishly nice face, you see that everything else is a shitstorm.”
“Since when do you call Hangman rakish?”
“Since I have a pair of eyes and the sunset lighting seems to make his skin glow. Plus, I saw the way you looked at each other, as if no time had actually passed,” Phoenix told her with a knowing look. Zoe scowled a little. Particularly when Bob’s gaze darted towards the blonde in question upon learning that little nugget of information. “It’s hard not to, really. I’m just trying to play along with it so that you’ll finally listen to me this time. No dick is worth that.”
“There’s nothing there, anymore, P.”
“That’s exactly what you said last time too.”
“Yeah, well, this time I mean it,” Zoe rolled her eyes. She shot Bob a scowl when he raised his brows at her from beneath his glasses, clearly not convinced despite not even knowing the majority of her story. He blushed at being caught, but didn’t apologize. Groaning, she said, “I’m serious! Hangman is a has-been. I’m onto better and brighter things now.”
Phoenix rolled her eyes. “Sure.”
“Don’t make me kick your ass, P. It’s early in the night but I will.”
Her brunette companion grinned. “As if you could.”
Zoe let out a noise of incredulity, but before she could make good on her threat, Stitch was inserting himself into the equation with a beer in each hand. Sometimes, she swore that he had a sixth sense about when to interrupt conversations. She minded a little bit less when he offered her one of his beers—half empty already, she noted, but said nothing—before he was sucking down the other with a curious glance at the trio.
“What’d I miss?” he asked.
Zoe glared at Phoenix, daring her to bring up Hangman to her WSO. Wisely, she said nothing. That left Bob to clear his throat and say, “uh… something about shots?”
Stitch didn’t even question it. Just threw his arms up with a wild grin.
“Shots!” he shouted.
Phoenix laughed as she followed him to the bar, Bob in tow, leaving Zoe to shake her head after them with a hearty laugh. When she did follow, she ignored the pair of mossy green eyes that followed her towards the bar, and when she threw her shot back with a cry, she definitely didn’t think about how that has-been still tended to make her feel.