When Alisha woke, she thought she was in heaven. Everything was white. As she focused on the fluorescent lighting, she changed her mind.
“Good, you’re awake,” Sandy said as she placed a thermometer in Alisha’s mouth. “That was a pretty stupid stunt you pulled last night.”
Alisha stared in confusion as Sandy proceeded to give her a lecture on hypothermia. When the medic finally pulled the thermometer from Alisha’s mouth, she tried to sit up. “How did I get here, and what were you told happened to me?”
Sandy gave her one of those “don’t even try to pull the wool over my eyes” looks. “You were brought in by several of your young men friends, who said that while giving them lap dances you had started shivering uncontrollably.”
“Lap dances!”
“Look,” Sandy said. “I don’t give a damn if you screw every man in this camp. In fact, it’s rather refreshing to hear of a female Ryder with a worse reputation than Jack’s. However, take some advice. It’s winter. If you want to do lap dances, don’t do them outside in the buff. You don’t have enough body fat to protect you from the cold.”
Alisha was speechless. She was going to kill Benson.
“Now, your captain’s here to take you back to your quarters. I need this room in a half hour. Anything you wish to do before that is not my concern as long as you keep your activity limited to the exam table, and don’t play with the supplies.”
The second Benson entered the room, Alisha hit him with a jar of cotton swabs. “You told the medic I was giving you a lap dance?”
Benson rubbed his chest where the jar had struck. “It was all I could think of. Don’t throw anything else, and I’ll explain,” he promised.
Alisha couldn’t imagine any explanation that would satisfy her, but she let him approach and try.
“I knew you were going into hypothermia, but if Colonel Dryer were implicated, I’d be done for. The colonel would no doubt receive a reprimand for his part in it, but he’d still be my colonel. Except now he’d be a pissed-off colonel, and I’d be his rabbit. So I had to come up with something the medic would believe that in no way implicated the colonel but would explain how you came to be wearing no clothes. Given your reputation, I said lap dances.”
“What reputation?” Alisha demanded.
“Well…” Benson smiled awkwardly. “You know…”
“No,” Alisha replied. “Tell me.”
“Well, first there was Colonel Logan, then you dropped Logan for Sparkes, which we all understood, then there was Ben, then there was you and Colonel Logan in the tunnel, before Sparkes found you. Then you and Logan right before he left, and then Tucker in tunnel this morning.”
“You can stop now,” Alisha said. No wonder the medic had believed Alisha wanted to sleep with every man in the camp. Rumor had it that she had slept with every man in the camp. She sighed. “So now we add lap dances to the pile of BS.”
“I didn’t see what harm it could do.”
“No, you’re evidently right. My reputation is pretty well dragging the bottom. I must be the biggest joke in the Corps.” She looked up at the ceiling, trying not to cry.
“No!” Benson assured her. “We know you’re something special. Normal conventions don’t apply to you, any more than normal aerodynamics or Corps regulations. You do your own thing and we just watch and marvel.”
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