She Just Watched

Rachael pushed through the door of The Rusty Gun at nine forty on a Friday night, already twenty minutes late and blaming the parking lot, which was gravel and potholes and one truck parked sideways across two spaces like its owner had given up on life somewhere between the gate and the bar. The place smelled like fried food and cheap beer, and the jukebox was playing something country that she only half recognized, and somewhere near the back a group of soldiers was laughing loud enough to be heard over everything.

She found Bo at the pool table, and she would have found him anywhere, because he was the only man in the room laughing with his whole body, head tipped back, cue held loose in one hand like an afterthought. He was leaning down to line up a shot while a woman in a green tank top stood at the other end of the table, watching him with a look that Rachael recognized from a mile away, because she'd worn it herself plenty of times in college bars, the look of somebody already doing math about later.

Bo spotted her mid-shot and straightened up, waving the cue over his head. "Rach! Get over here, you're missing history."

"I'm missing history because you texted me the wrong time," she called back, working her way through the crowd. She was twenty-two, she'd been up since six, and her day had been spreadsheets, but the beer he was already flagging down for her was starting to sound like a good idea anyway.

The woman in the green tank top turned and gave her a friendly nod, and Bo made introductions with a grin that Rachael didn't trust at all. "Rachael, this is Sheryl. Sheryl works at the PX. Sheryl, this is Rachael, my best friend, my conscience, and the reason I didn't get a horrible neck tattoo sophomore year."

"Disappointing him is my greatest achievement," Rachael said, shaking Sheryl's hand. Sheryl had a strong grip and a laugh that came easy, and Rachael liked her immediately, which was annoying, because it made the thing she'd noticed at the pool table even harder to unnotice.

They got a high-top near the wall and Rachael let the two of them orbit each other while she drank her beer, because it was obvious within about four minutes that Bo had been working this angle since before she'd even arrived. Sheryl touched his arm when she laughed. Bo stood a little closer than a stranger would. It was all very competent, and Rachael had to admit, sitting there with her second beer and a basket of fries nobody was eating, that her best friend had game she herself had never once managed to locate in a bar.

It was around the third beer that Bo leaned across the table and said, quiet enough that only she could hear it over the jukebox, "Okay, be honest with me. Am I imagining this or is she into it?"

"She's into it," Rachael said. "She's been into it since before I got here, apparently. You've been thinking about this all week, haven't you. You texted me Tuesday that you had a plan."

Bo grinned and didn't even try to deny it. "I have been thinking about this all week," he admitted, turning his bottle around on the cardboard coaster. "Two weeks of leave, Rach. I shipped out in March, and there is a very specific thing I have not done in a very long time, and I would like to do it this leave."

"And Sheryl is the plan."

"Sheryl is the plan," he agreed. "Unless you know something I don't."

"I know nothing," Rachael said, and it was true, mostly, though there was a small thought sitting at the bottom of her third beer that she'd been ignoring since she'd watched the two of them at the pool table, and it chose that exact moment to climb up and come out of her mouth before she could stop it.

"You know, I've never actually seen you with anyone," she said, and then heard herself say it, and winced. "God, that came out wrong. I mean, not like that, I just meant, three years, and I've never once actually seen you with anybody. Like, with them. Ever. That's weird, right? That's a weird thing to notice?"

Bo set his beer down and looked at her, and she watched his expression move through surprised, which was fair, into something more thoughtful, which was less fair, because she had wanted the surprised and then the laughing it off and then the subject change.

"Okay," he said slowly, drawing the word out. "So that's a thing you just said."

"Forget I said it."

"No, hang on." He was studying her now in a way that made her want to slide under the table, and behind him Sheryl had gone to the bar for another round, mercifully out of earshot. "You've thought about that? Watching?"

"I didn't say watching. I said I've never seen. Those are different words."

"They're really not, Rach."

She took a long drink to buy herself three seconds, which was not enough, and then put the bottle down and admitted it, because lying to Bo had never once worked in three years and she wasn't going to start in a bar called The Rusty Gun. "Fine. Yes. Maybe. It crossed my mind tonight, watching you two, that I've never seen it. And I'm curious. Is that so terrible? People are curious about things. It's a normal amount of curiosity."

Bo was quiet for a second, and then he laughed, but it wasn't a dismissal laugh, it was one of his real ones, low and warm. "Oh my god. You're serious."

"I didn't say serious."

"Your ears went red. Your ears go red when you're serious, you've done it since orientation week, you cannot hide it from me." He leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, looking at her like she was a puzzle he was enjoying. "Rachael. My sweet spreadsheet friend. Are you asking to watch me hook up with Sheryl tonight?"

"I am not asking. I said a thing. It was a joke. Mostly a joke." Her stomach was doing something complicated, a slow flip that she didn't have a name for, because the honest answer was no, it hadn't been a joke, not by the time it left her mouth, and Bo knew it, because Bo always knew it.

"Because," Bo said, drawing the word out again, and he had that look now, the look he got when he was about to talk himself into something, which historically had gone badly for both of them, "if you were asking, and I'm not saying you are, I'm just saying if, hypothetically, Sheryl seems like the kind of person who might think that was funny. Or interesting. Or hot, honestly, who knows, people are weird and great."

"You're insane."

"I'm a soldier on leave with a plan and apparently an audience option I did not have when I made the plan." He picked his beer back up and clinked it gently against hers. "Look. Think about it. Don't answer now. Sheryl's coming back. But Rach, real talk, if you're actually curious, and you're my best friend, and it's not, like, a weird thing, plenty of people do weirder, I looked it up once at two in the morning in Korea, there's whole websites."

"You looked it up."

"Everybody looks it up. The point is." He shrugged, casual as anything, but his eyes stayed on her. "If you're serious, say you're serious. And if you're serious, I'll ask her. No pressure, no weirdness, and if you change your mind halfway through you leave and we never speak of it, that's a deal we can have. But you have to actually say it, out loud, with your regular red ears. None of this joke nonsense."

Sheryl was walking back over with three fresh bottles and a smile, and Bo turned to greet her like nothing at all had happened, like he hadn't just dropped a live grenade on the table and walked away from it. Rachael sat there with her stomach still flipping, staring at the coaster, understanding that she was going to say it, that she'd probably known since the pool table, and that the only question left was whether she could get the words out in the right order before Bo finished whatever charming thing he was about to start.

She got the words out eventually, though it took three false starts and half a beer to do it, and what came out was more or less, "Okay. Yes. I'm serious. I'm serious and I hate that I'm serious and please never reference this again," which Bo accepted as a full and binding agreement, nodded once like a businessman closing a deal, and then turned to Sheryl with the exact same casual face he used for ordering fries.

Rachael did not hear the actual ask, because she was suddenly very interested in the wall menu behind the bar, the one advertising a fish special she was fairly confident no fish had ever visited the panhandle to become. When she looked back, Sheryl was grinning at Bo and then turned that grin on Rachael, wide and unbothered.

"So you're the roommate for the evening," Sheryl said, sitting back down on her stool and crossing her arms like a woman settling in for entertainment. "I've never had an audience before. I think it's funny. Bo, she looks like she's gonna pass out."

"She's fine," Bo said. "She analyzed the situation."

"I did analyze it," Rachael said, because it was true, she had, there had been a whole mental spreadsheet with columns for risk and curiosity and how weird this would be on Sunday morning, and the curiosity column kept winning by a landslide, which said something about her life that she did not want examined. "And I want it noted that if this is some elaborate prank you two planned, it's working and I'm furious."

"It's not a prank," Sheryl said, and reached over and squeezed Rachael's hand once, quick and warm. "Honey, nobody pranks with this much effort. We grab a cab to the Sleep-Easy, you sit wherever you want, and you can walk out the door anytime. That's the whole deal. Except, one thing first, since everybody's being honest tonight." She tipped her bottle at Bo. "He knows already, I told him at the pool table, first thing, because I always do. I'm trans. Surgery was three years ago and everything works great, but if that changes the deal for you, it changes the deal, no hard feelings."

Rachael looked at Bo, who just raised his eyebrows at her like, well? "It doesn't change anything," Rachael said, and found she meant it. "It just makes me even more sure I'm the least interesting person at this table."

"Oh, honey, you're the most interesting person at this table. You're the one who asked."

"Okay," Rachael said, and finished her beer so she'd have something to do with her hands.

***

The cab was a sedan the color of an old bathtub, with a dent in the passenger door and a pine tree air freshener that had given up sometime around 2018. Sheryl rode up front because she knew the driver, of course she did, and Bo and Rachael took the back, and Bo and Sheryl talked over the seat the way people talk when they've known each other for a grand total of ninety minutes, easy and light, and Rachael sat with her heart going harder than it had any business going, watching the base lights slide past the window.

This was insane. She had been up since six in the morning, she had spent the day neck deep in quarterly spreadsheets, and now it was nearly midnight and she was in the back of a bathtub-colored cab following a soldier she'd known for three years into a motel parking lot, all because of a question she'd never been able to answer out loud until tonight.

The Sleep-Easy Inn sat just outside the main gate, two stories of cream-colored nothing with a vacancy sign missing most of its a's, and the cab let them out by the office. "I'll wait out here," Rachael said, and both of them turned around to look at her.

"You will not," Bo said.

"Right, no, I know, I'm coming, I just thought I'd say it out loud so you'd both know I considered it."

The office smelled like cigarette smoke from a decade of guests who hadn't bothered with the rules, and the man behind the counter had the kind of face that suggested he had seen everything and been impressed by none of it, which Rachael appreciated, because it meant whatever