Chương 69: Day Sixty-Nine

Dear Diary, So, just one bad nightmare last night. Barely woke me up. Just having Saffron there let me go back to sleep. Then I got the boring one that lasted until I woke up, but that's pretty much not even worth mentioning at this point.

'Trapped in a box! Oh, no! Anyway'. So this week in PT we wound up doing pretty much the same as last week, except duBois had us work with our 'alternate partners' for the first half of the day. Relying on Lancaster to hold me up wasn't fun, but he only dropped me three times. The first might have been an honest mistake, the second time coincidence, but the third time as I rolled out of the fall, duBois got in Lancaster's face.

"Lancaster, you've dropped Diaz more times today than you've dropped Rosen and Rider since we started paired exercises. Do you not get what 'working with someone you don't like' means?"

"She wobbles around."

"She wobbles around what?" Lancaster looked like he'd swallowed a Squadball, but he forced out, "She wobbles around, Sir!"

"Y'know, if you'd dropped her once, I wouldn't have noticed. If you'd kept it to twice, I wouldn't have been watching. But you had to push it a third time. Your job is to keep your arm straight; hers is to balance on it. You shouldn't be moving your arm. You don't do that when you're working with the Dan Cadets, I expect you to try at least as hard with the rest of the class." He loomed over Lancaster, and for all his faults, Lancaster finally took the hint.

He turned to face me and, with a look on his face like he'd just had a lemon shoved so far up his ass he was choking on it, said, "I'm sorry, Diaz. Sabotaging a jumped-up Bag is beneath a Lancaster. I won't do it again." I waited, but it looked like duBois wanted me to respond.

"You'd think a Lancaster would be better at apologizing." I held up a hand to interrupt his rant, "Just don't let it happen again, okay?" If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. He nodded, and we went back to practicing. Now that he knew duBois' had his eye on us, Lancaster wasn't a half bad practice partner. Just about my height, just about my weight, he had a little bit more upper body strength than me, I had more lower body.

That helped even more when duBois called us together and went through the steps of the Tango with us. Once he'd taken us each for a spin to show us how to do it, duBois set us to dancing with our alternate partners. I insisted on leading for the first half to avoid last week's shenanigans. Lancaster fumed, but with duBois' eyes on us, he couldn't really fake stuff, so we managed to get to the end of the first half without him running away or me killing him.

At lunch we had breakfast-for-lunch; spicy eggs and jalapeno scrapple. A little weird having it for lunch instead of breakfast, but as its my favorite I'm not going to complain. After lunch we got back to Tangoing, but this time I had Saffron back. We wowed everyone during the first hour when I remembered a couple fancy moves from one of those dancing reality shows.

I wouldn't have tried them two months ago, but between all the Strength and Agility training duBois had us doing, not to mention how tiny Saffron was, I managed to pull them off with a reasonable amount of success. Then we switched places and learned that a lot of the really cool Tango moves require the lead to be at least vaguely near their partner's weight.

When an attempted dip turned into me pulling Saffron over, I surprised myself by tossing her back upright, then bouncing off my hands and getting back up without actually having my ass hit the pavement. After that we didn't try that particular move again, but at least once she managed to get enough momentum to flip me up over her head. Almost as bad as the dip in terms of physics not liking us trying it, but we'd practiced it for weeks now, so we managed to tell physics to fuck the hell off for the moment.

For dinner we got steaks again, along with some ground beef patties floating in gravy. Everybody at the table wanted to try my impromptu gravy burgers, so I spent way more time and energy slicing bread than I wanted to. I mean yeah, I could have said 'no', but then the gobbos would make puppy dog eyes at me. At some point I really ought to stop calling them that, at least the ones who sat at our table. They'd started following our example, and while they didn't have it down to a habit yet, they tried.

I dunno, maybe 'Junior ROTCs'? Don't ask me, I'm allergic to organization. But Saffron tells me my ass makes up for it, so it's all good, right?