“YOU DON’T MIND THAT I spend the day with the boys?”

“For the forty-eight-thousandth time, no.” Bo had been asking me this question on and off since we left Texas.

“I just feel bad about dragging you here and then leaving you.” Bo nuzzled my neck as I was picking through our luggage for something to wear. It was slightly colder here than it had been in Texas.

“Go. I’ll be fine. I have a book I’ve been wanting to read. I’m going to call my mom. The shopping place you told me about sounds fun.”

“Do you want to come with us?”

“What will you be doing?” I was curious what Marines did on their day off. Go to the shooting range? Spend all day in the strip clubs?

“Fishing, maybe. Surfing.”

“No and no. I’m going to this mall. I’d like to buy my mom something.” Every time I’d talked to her, I felt guilty. I needed to buy a gift to make both of us feel better. Or maybe just me. It wasn’t like she was alone. Roger was there with her.

“Bought you a hire car for the day.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I don’t want you to be driving around by yourself in a strange city. This way you’ll have someone with you. And I can be sure I paid for it.” He looked smug.

I rolled my eyes. “God, it’s a good thing that you’ll have me around to manage you. You’d be bankrupt in a year.”

“I like you managing me,” Bo growled against my neck, kissing the sensitive space along my shoulder and raising shivers as he went. “I hope that later you’ll manage me right out of my clothes.”

“Is that all you think about?”

“No. Sometimes I think about food.” He smirked. His hands crept under my shirt to rub my belly and moved upward to cup my breasts.

“I thought you had to go?” I said breathlessly as he began to drag his thumbs across my suddenly-sensitive nipples.

“Not until I’ve had some breakfast.” Bo dropped to his knees, pushed my shirt up with one hand, and pulled my panties down with the other.

After a heated morning encounter, Bo left me lying drowsily on the bed. I was in no hurry to rise and instead simply rolled over to my side to watch him get ready, my eyes already at half-mast. “Why don’t you go back to sleep?” he suggested as he kissed me good-bye. “I texted you the number to the driver. Call him when you’re ready to leave.” I nodded and rolled over, tucking myself under the downy comforter and drifted off.

HOW MUCH LONGER?

I’m still shopping. I want to have the perfect outfit for tonight.

Stop me the next time I say I have a great idea.

I thought you hated texting?

Then you know much I want you here. Now.

Be patient.

Send me a naughty pic.

So you can share it with your Marine buddies? Forget it.

Those fuckers don’t get to see you like that. For my eyes only.

Here.

Oh shit. Buy the black ones!

My lips curved up into a sly smile. So Bo liked black lace. I picked up the black lace panties and matching strapless bra from the pile that had served as my text picture. “I’ll take these.” I told the sales attendant. She winked at me.

“Got a positive response, did you?”

I couldn’t keep from flushing, but I smiled happily at her. “Yep.”

The hire car was waiting for me when I exited the shopping complex. The instantaneous availability of it was luxurious, but I reminded myself not to get attached to living like this. My mother’s frugality was too deeply ingrained. Back at the hotel, I primped myself like I imagined a bride would before her wedding night. Every part of me was buffed, shaved, and lotioned. I spritzed myself with a light perfume from a sample the fragrance counter had given me. It smelled like the ocean and reminded me of Bo’s eyes when he was happy and at ease.

I pulled my clothes on layer by layer, shivering in anticipation at the gleam in Bo’s gaze when he saw the black lace undergarments I’d bought. I realized my sexual appetite for him had become voracious, but he seemed not to mind. In fact, he reveled in it.

I knew he loved that I wanted him and that I couldn’t wait to rush home after class and throw him down and ravish him. He encouraged me to do it; he encouraged me to explore sex in ways that I thought I’d be too shy to do before I met him. I loved going down on him, feeling his thickness in my mouth, feeling him shake helplessly when I brought him to climax. I enjoyed his lavish attention to my body. While the morning quickies were delicious, it wasn’t anything like the nights when he took to exploring every inch of my body.

The thoughts of Bo and I rolling around naked in my bed, his bed, this hotel room bed, carried me into the bar on a wave of anticipation. I saw Bo’s eyes alight on me almost immediately when I stepped out onto the patio where he sat with what seemed like a whole platoon of Marines, all except one sporting their distinct haircuts, which Bo had told me was a “high and tight.”

He didn’t wait like a potentate for me to come to him, running a power play in front of his friends. He got up immediately and came over to kiss me, not a social peck on the lips but an open-mouthed one that smeared my lip gloss all over the both of us. Breaking the kiss, he drew a thumb across my lower lip, wiping off the last of the gloss. I ineptly tried to rub the shiny substance off his mouth, but without a wet napkin, his lips looked glossy.

Bo didn’t care, even though the table hazed him when he sauntered back, one arm wrapped around my waist.

“Boys, this is AM. AM, the One-Ten.”

A round of glasses and bottles met at the middle as they toasted in unison, “The Death Bringers. Ooorah!” Then they drained their respective drinks and slammed down the containers as if one. I guessed they were. Bo pulled out an empty chair next to the one guy whose hair had grown out slightly, as if he’d somehow skipped out on the last trip to the barber. When I sat, Bo reclined next to me.

“What does One-Ten mean?” I asked.

“First Battalion, Tenth Marines. There are thirty-eight battalions in the entire Marine Corps,” Bo explained, handing me a bottle of beer from the large bucket of ice in the middle of the round table. He turned and signaled a waitress for a refill of the bucket. “And it just kind of signifies where we’re stationed, who gets to order us around. That sort of thing.”

“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.

Bo whispered in my ear. “Not the food kind of pie, honey.”

I felt my body flush hot with embarrassment. Of course not that kind of pie. I felt like a fool.

“Stop being an asswipe, Jerry.” Bo curled his arms protectively around me and pushed my head onto his shoulder. He kicked Jerry sharply in the leg.

Jerry sputtered a few times and then managed to catch his breath. He wiped a few tears off his face. “Man, your face, AnnMarie, so innocently talking about liking pie.”

Bo didn’t like this; I could feel him stiffen around me. I pressed my hand on his tense thigh to prevent him from kicking Jerry even harder this time.

“Shut up, asshole.” The disgust in Gray’s voice was evident to everyone but Jerry, who looked bewildered that anyone would take offense to his story.

“Just roasting Bo, man,” Jerry complained.

Even Wilson, who had been the subject of hazing earlier, chimed in. “Not cool, bro, not cool.”

“Why don’t we talk about something else,” Bo said, his voice as hard as his frame. Jerry was determined, however, to tell one more story, and I regretted egging him on. I hadn’t realized that Jerry wasn’t really an old friend, but someone who was eaten with jealousy over Bo’s exploits. This last story of Jerry’s, the one he was desperate to tell and had been building toward since he started, was the coup de grace. Whatever slight Bo had done to Jerry, imagined or real, Jerry had been waiting to repay him.

“See, Bo here, with his love of bets and pie, couldn’t resist his buddy Noah’s bet that Bo here couldn’t fuck the entire drill team, all twenty-seven of them.” Jerry nodded affirmatively. “He fucked them all, some of them two at a time, his senior year.”

I felt Bo’s arms tighten around me, afraid that I was going to jump off his lap screaming. Maybe I would have, before, but not now, after all we’d been through.