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greatunironicTitle: Stay in the Kitchen (When the Kitchen Gets Hot)
Rating: R
Pairing: female!Jensen/Cougar
Disclaimer: I don’t own The Losers, unless having all five volumes of the graphic novel counts.
Summary: Look, Jensen doesn’t care what anyone else thinks: she’s got a fucking plan, all right? (The Losers, AU)
This is how Jensen remembers it:
She was in the waiting room outside of some guy’s conference room in Goddamn San Antonio, while her sergeant was trying to get her onto this team so she didn’t get court-marshaled. Colonel Clay, she gathered from the shouting, had a problem getting a girl thrown on his team. But her sergeant just shouted back: she’d be a great addition and that she was just as mad as the rest of them, even though Clay’s mind kind of stalled into 1952 where women were concerned.
Of course, it didn’t help that, when he met Jacobina Jensen, she was looking kind of sickly thin under her baggy fatigues and was sporting one nice shiner from the incident her sergeant called “Operation: Camel’s Back and Straw.”
“Also, my boot camp instructor quit,” she told Clay as she sat across from him—and his assembled team of strangely attractive fellows with odd nicknames—in the conference room. “Allegedly because of me, but, I mean, dude was all ready crazy. They told me he crucified some mice once. Basically, I did Uncle Sam a total solid.”
Cougar snorted and sank into his chair.
“What happened to your eye?” asked Pooch.
“Fist fight.” She grinned. “You should see the other guy.”
“Really?” said Roque.
“No, yeah,” Jensen said. “He grabbed my ass so I hit him with a chair and then it got all kinds of out of hand. I’m told the scrotum recovery is gonna go great though.”
“Fuck it, you’re in,” said Clay.
As far as beginnings go, it wasn’t quite that auspicious. It was kind of ho-hum, really, Jensen would later reflect. But fast-forward and you get an Ed Brubaker style crime drama, with espionage and back-stabbings and a handful of faked deaths, with deadly broads and deadlier weapons, and more espionage and back-stabbings. And a baby.
It was pretty fucking awesome, the rest of the story, though their team fell apart throughout the whole episode—obviously, what with the back-stabbings—and people changed and some of the team had to talk even more than normal to make up for someone else’s silence. Now they’re five again, minus one dude, plus the deadly broad, and living together in a safe house of their own creation—in shitty Pasedena, fuck—with limited contact with anyone besides each other except for shitty day jobs and occasional stupid outings to bring down the man and cryptic e-mails and video stalking.
Jensen pretty much hates everyone in the world.
*
TO: joejoethesunshinebro@yahoo.com
FROM: jenny867@gmail.com
SUBJECT: RE: Chk yrslf
big j,
caught live feed of last game like suggested. \o/ go petunias! saw j jr. lipsynch to journey in victory. she’s totally more mine than yours.
in response to your query, as well as can be expected. tired, rundown, lonely in the way that an only girl gets lonely but have my own bathroom so plus. & no, he doesn’t. trust. i’m a genius.
today i ate a proper tamale: it came from a cart on the street.
<3,
little j
p.s.
miss you.
TO: jenny867@gmail.com
FROM: joejoethesunshinebro@yahoo.com
SUBJECT: RE: RE: Chk yrslf
Little J,
She’s got my eyes though.
I’m giving you a mental hug, I hope you can feel it. & I won’t say I told you so, but…You’re too hard on yourself. Why wouldn’t he? Remember how C1 and I got together, maybe C2 and you will be the same. Trust. You’ve always been kind of dumb.
Today I bought a purple head of cauliflower: J Jr. insists it’s awesome, I think it’s alien.
<3
Big J
p.s.
miss you more.
*
They are in a van, headed for L.A. It’s cramped and the air conditioning unit has apparently been on the fritz since the early nineties and Jensen has pulled herself and her iPhone as far to the side as far is she can, away from Cougar as he creepily cleans his Sig Sauer in the middle seat and Aisha does something even more creepy with a knife on his other side. Her head is basically out the window, blonde pigtails flapping in the breeze, and she prays for release.
Because this is the worst fucking drive ever, not just because they’re heading to L.A. to try to cause some government panic and be bitches, or because they’re doing it in a van that has two seatbelts for the back, effectively tying Aisha, Cougar, and Jensen together for a fun little “we’ll die if we crash or hit a speed bump” journey.
Jensen’s got some other problems she’s working on. You know, personally.
And her most recent e-mail of brotherly concern, along with the seating arrangements, isn’t making repressing and denying for the mission all that easy.
See, Jensen has kind of an upsetting propensity to fall for guys she really shouldn’t—at age nine, it was Mister Cooper, her super hot young math teacher; at thirteen, it was the chain-smoking seventeen year old Tommy; at eighteen, Steve Jobs. And she knows that about herself, so maybe she really should have seen it coming, but she didn’t.
She starts out at one place and ends up in another: in one moment you’re in a conference room about to become some team’s token chick and suddenly you’re behind your best friend, as he kneels, heartbroken, before the burning wreckage of a bunch of kids your niece’s age. Three months later, in a doll factor, pretending you’re not you, because you are a dead girl, you realize you’re in love with the man working next to you, your best friend, who has stopped speaking.
And that you might have always been, since, well, the beginning of everything.
“My life blows,” mutters Jensen to the wind.
“Join the club,” says Pooch, his dad ears all ready fine-tuned for when he gets to finally chill forever with his wife and spawn.
“Hey, you’re not back here,” says Jensen, jerking her thumb towards the creeper twins of evilness.
"True,” Pooch says.
“Okay, let’s go over the plan again,” says Clay, over them.
“We go in,” says Pooch, gesturing between him and Jensen. “We make with the distracting and you two make with the stealing while Cougar watches us from the roof of another building and shoots before we get shot first, should anything go wrong.”
“Yes,” says Aisha.
Jensen looks over at her. She’s pretty much cool with Aisha now, despite her natural craziness and despite the fact that she shot her after having her gun aimed at Jensen’s lady-bits. Aisha has apologized, inasmuch as Aisha can, and Jensen kind of understands and she still gets her own bathroom, since the crazy lady shares with the crazy boss man—so it’s a win-win. And Aisha is super banging at what she does, which is why she gets to copy the hard drive and Jensen gets to be the distraction with Pooch.
It shouldn’t really be that hard. Clay didn’t even tell them how they had to distract the guards. Jensen looks at her pencil skirt and hopes one of them goes for her ass. It’s kind of great.
Not that anyone else in the van has ever noticed.
Douchebags.
*
Neither do the guards, in the end.
But the desk clerk in the lobby with a latte totally does.
Jensen lets go.
“I will bust into your mouth like a Gusher, motherfucker!” she shouts, with a fist punching motion to the air. The guy stares at her. Jensen shouts, “Yeah, you fucking heard me!”
“I’m so sorry about her,” says Pooch, putting his fingers around her wrist. He pulls her away. “She’s pretty sensitive.”
“The hell I am,” she yells, stomping her foot. “Sexual harassment, buddy! I will sue your ass so fast. Give me your fucking ID, I’m gonna get you fired, you chauvinistic pig! I bet you only hold doors open for hot chicks with huge tits, huh?”
His eyes huge, Pooch says, “We’ll go now.”
Jensen shrieks some more unintelligible crazy stuff and Clay says in her ear, “Good distraction, Jensen. Now let Pooch drag you away and go calm the fuck down in the van. I am not driving back to Pasadena with you like that.”
For that, Jensen shouts, “I hate you,” and gives the world the finger.
Aisha and Cougar chuckle over the comms, while Clay just sighs.
Pooch succeeds in pulling her out of the building, around the corner, and sits her down in the front passenger seat. Jensen breathes quietly for a minute as Pooch stares her down.
“I was really getting into that,” she tells him. “Robert DeNiro, who the fuck is he?”
“You want me to find you a downer?” he asks. “This is L.A., it’ll only take me five minutes.”
“It’s okay, I’m cool.” She waves a hand. “Totally chill. No need for you to go on a smack hunt.”
“I was thinking Ritalin,” Pooch admits.
“Oh, fuck you,” she says.
He shrugs. “Got a wife for that.”
Jensen leans her head into the rest. “Are you guys done yet? The distraction is bored.”
“Hang in there for a minute,” says Clay. “Aisha’s almost in.”
“It’s sad when our lives of crime and mystery have turned to stupid,” Jensen tells Pooch.
“Dude,” says Pooch. “I drive things and you’re a hacker. Our parts in the crime and mystery have always kind of been stupid.”
“You have a point,” she says.
On the comms, they can hear Aisha Taser a guy.
“Aisha,” says Clay.
“What,” she says.
“Goddamnit,” he says,
“I’ll be at the van in ten,” she says.
Jensen pulls out her earpiece when Clay starts shouting and Pooch does the same. They lay them in the dash.
“You think they’re still fucking regularly?” she asks.
“Oh, definitely,” says Pooch.
“Yeah,” she nods. “I’m glad my bedroom isn’t next to theirs.”
He makes a face. Jensen chortles.
Cougar slides into the back of the van then, without a sound, his rifle hidden away once more in the guitar case. Jensen catches his glance in the rearview mirror. He tips his hat and Jensen looks away, out the window.
*
Sometimes, she wishes she would’ve fallen for someone else, anyone else. Maybe not Roque, but Pooch, had Jolene ever been out of the picture, or even Clay—that would’ve been so much easier for her.
Them, she can read like html. Long, shoddily written html, maybe, but she can decipher that. Cougar is pages upon pages of beautiful, tangled code, spliced between operating systems and the hands and languages of different people. And code’s her thing. It’s her oeuvre. Not knowing, under understanding—that upsets her beyond words.
*
Eventually, they make it back to their safe house un-followed. They’ve become almost numb to the crazy shit they do in order to find and destroy Max; Jensen thinks they’ll be giddy again over a job on that job, when they’re free. But right now that freedom hangs above them, untouchable and dark.
“Jensen,” says Clay. “You can get cracking on that thing later. Let’s relax tonight.”
He grabs a beer and so does Aisha, going to the living room to booze it up. Cougar sits with them as they drink, but he just cleans his guns, like always. Pooch retreats to the kitchen to cook and Jensen, fingers glancing off the portable hard drive she’s itching to hack, follows him. They had long ago discovered that they were the only ones that apparently learned how to cook in their merry little band. Pooch wants to make something special tonight, so Jensen is playing second fiddle while that happens.
She’s slicing carrots and Pooch has his hand up a chicken’s ass or something, doing his thing, and he says, “You know you quoted the Natalie Portman rap at that guy earlier, right?”
“He didn’t notice,” mutters Jensen.
“Well, it worked,” shouts Clay from the other room.
“What is the Natalie Portman rap?” asks Aisha.
“I’ll Google it later for you,” calls Jensen. “You’ll appreciate it.”
“You made a nice distraction though,” Aisha continues. “Though I am surprised he went for the bait.”
Jensen pulls a face and looks at Pooch, who is pretending he didn’t just hear Aisha call Jensen ugly. Okay, she didn’t straight call it out, but it was close and Jensen is a little offended. She looks over her shoulder to the rest of the guys and Clay is drinking, unwilling to defend her honor.
Cougar has paused. She holds her breath for a second.
He goes back to cleaning, pulling his hat lower and saying nothing. Jensen images ripping the hat off his head and burning it on the stove but Cougar is probably fast enough to stop her before she makes it. She goes back to her slicing, a little faster than before.
“Some guys like geeks,” she comments.
“Jensen,” says Pooch, pointing at her now mangled chop-job. “Drop the knife, girl, the carrots surrender.”
*
It’s like this: occasionally, they forget Jensen’s a chick.
And, you know, that’s okay. She’s one of the dudes. She likes it that way. She doesn’t get special treatment and they don’t look at her like she’s too fragile. She’s not glass; she’s Jacobina Jensen and she is a badass B, all right? She’s a tech god, and she’s a tomboy, and she’s got the brains and the brawn, and she can take a fucking hit like a QB in full gear. So she wears fatigues and silly tees and cargo pants that more often then not she’s bought in the boy’s section at a Salvation Army—whatever.
But—
Before Max—
She wore make-up and had a closet full of impractical bullshit that sometimes she’d throw on when she thought no one was watching and she’d dance herself around her apartment—all designer four-inch heels, skin-tight pencil skirts and lacy camis, and sundresses that swung against the backs of her knees.
She’s in the boy’s club now, forever and always, and she loves these men so much that sometimes she can’t breathe, knowing that if anything happened to them no one could stop her from burning the planet the fuck down and then never stop crying.
But she can’t help missing Sephora, damn it; and Jensen supposes they can’t quite understand ‘cause when they raid the local thrift shops Clay finds his suits, Cougar gets his ratty flannel, and Pooch picks up his ugly ass Hawaiian shirts. They get what they want and she shops with them, in their section, and sometimes she doesn’t really sneak glances at dresses. Jensen buys the jeans with holes and throws on Jesse’s team’s shirt.
Don’t get her wrong. Most of the time she’s grateful; it’s a fucking blessing that she’s with these men who see a genius and no tits, just the chick who has held a gun to a general’s head.
But, sometimes, she just gets kind of lonely.
*
That night, Aisha finds Jensen face down on her bed, arms flung out to the sides.
“Are you okay?” she asks. Jensen can tell it causes her, like, actual physical pain to express concern for another human.
“I’m depressed,” says Jensen, turning her head to be heard.
Aisha cocks an eyebrow.
“Like, severely,” Jensen adds, pressing her face into her pillow again. She mumbles, “Immalovecougs.”
There is a long pause while no one does anything. Aisha sits on the bed, slow and graceful, and she barely moves it. Then, she puts a hand on Jensen’s shoulder.
“I know,” she says.
Jensen sits up. “What the actual fuck.”
Aisha flicks her forehead, quick and sharp. “I am a very observant woman with little to occupy my time.”
“We’re planning an all out siege on the American government,” she tells her, manfully ignoring the urge to rub the spot where she got flicked. “You’re just creepy."
“Cougar watches people through a telescope for hours a day,” Aisha points out.
“Yeah, well, he’s a creeper too, but.” Jensen flails her hands a little. “I hate my life.”
The other woman shrugs. Jensen breathes out hard, looking at her.
They’re completely different, the two of them, stuck in a shitty two floor, four bedroom in Shitty Pasadena, the shithole. They’re two-fifths of an elite and misguided mission to destroy some dude called Max, but she’s a hot ass and Jensen's an awkward white chick. One of them probably has knives in her hair and the other one forgets she owns a gun. Aisha probably never had to walk through a desert in drag before.
But, fuck, she’s the only close female contact that she has that isn’t nine or post-baby hormonal crazy. It like she’s in Y: The Last Man and she’s Yorick and Aisha’s her Ampersand and it’s all the women who died, not the men. Cougar, of course, is 355. It is so unbelievably sad, she reflects.
“You wanna bro out?” she asks, hopefully. “I just bought the Back to the Future trilogy at B&N the other day. There was a sale.”
Aisha stares at her a long time before tilting her head slightly and asking, “How much time to you spend with the three of them?”
“All the time.” Jensen scrunches up her nose. “Is that weird?”
“Yes,” says Aisha. She doesn’t soften the blow, but there probably wasn’t a way to do that anyway. She stands then and holds out her hand. “Come. We’re going to put you in something that doesn’t have writing on it and go out.”
Eyes wide, Jensen takes Aisha’s hand and leaps off into the unknown: Aisha’s closet. Jesus. She has held a gun to a general’s head and she has fought her way through a war and a half and she has never been this terrified.
Aisha has her own room, a door down from Jensen on the second floor, but she never sleeps there. Jensen supposes she probably needs the extra space for her bombshell outfits, after all, and her own weapons cache, which is not a turn of phrase. Jensen can see what used to be the military budget for a small Eastern European country spread all along Aisha’s room.
Jensen can’t even say anything about it. It kind of makes her feel safe to know that that is next door.
Horrified, but safe.
“I will wear this,” says Aisha, grabbing out an outfit in under ten seconds, flat. She tosses it onto a perfectly made bed. To Jensen’s eyes, it seems pretty small.
Aisha searches her closet again, for even longer.
Jensen tries to stay as still as she can, and not touch anything.
“You will not fit in my clothes,” she announces eventually.
“You callin’ me fat now too?” asks Jensen.
“No,” Aisha says. “Built differently but you are not fat. You should perhaps even do with another sandwich now and then.”
She turns and leaves, picking up her outfit. Jensen follows. “Was that a joke?”
Aisha ignores her, per usual. “Am I going to find anything worthwhile in your closet?”
“If not,” says Jensen, “does that mean we are going to Sound of Music this shit up?”
At Jensen’s closet, Aisha gives her a look. “You have looked at this drapes, correct?”
“That was a joke.” She points. “That was a fucking joke and you cannot avoid it. Also, you’ve seen The Sound of Music and not the Natalie Portman rap? I mean, really?”
Aisha rolls her eyes.
“This is not a dropped subject,” says Jensen. “Now, what is the point of this? I mean, I do have work I could be doing—the work of the righteous.”
“We have the night off. We will get your mind off Cougar,” Aisha tells her.
“That—nothing ever works,” she admits.
“Then perhaps you should simply seduce him,” says Aisha as she paws through Jensen’s clothes, “and get it over with.”
“Oh my God, have you met me?” Jensen asks.
“Yes,” she says. “You’d probably fall over in the middle of it.”
“Ouch,” says Jensen, “but not untrue.”
“But I would think about it,” she adds. “Seeing as your soulful glances have gone unnoticed by everyone but me. I apologize for earlier as well. It was a test.”
She flails her arms a bit. “Of what?”
“Both of you,” she says, cryptic as shit, and pulls out a dress, shoving it at Jensen. “This one. Come.”
Aisha turns on her heel, entering the bathroom of Jensen’s room—Jensen’s own personal girl bathroom, free of Old Spice and gross boy things, all in pink, which she thinks was Clay’s doing but Jensen’s always liked pink: it reminds her of her niece—and Aisha strips out of her clothes, unselfconscious and graceful. Jensen trips on her jeans at least twice.
Once dressed, Aisha forcibly sits Jensen down on the clothes hamper, which was hauled in front of the sinks, and proceeds to maul her head under the guise of doing her hair.
“What is your first name?” asks Aisha. “It’s obviously not Jensen.”
She sits there for a moment, sullen, looking at the counter, and then she glances at Aisha in the mirror. “Jacobina. And yeah, it sucked about as bad as you can imagine. Why?”
“I will call you Jenny,” Aisha says, twisting Jensen’s hair violently.
“Clay calls me that sometimes,” she tells Aisha. “When he’s feeling particularly drunk and fatherly to us all. Once he called Cougar Carlos to his face. I thought Cougs was gonna throw right up.”
Aisha gives her hair one final yank and then basically slaps the back of Jensen’s head. “I am done.”
She stares at herself in the mirror. Aisha, behind her, looks on approvingly. Jensen fights the urge to cry.
You know, she kind of wants it on the record that she’s managing this situation—being her raging depression—a lot better than she would have, like, a year ago. In Fucking Bolivia, a little while after, Clay walked in on her when she was passed out on her bed, tear stained and covered in finely shredded cheese straight from the bag, and damn, that is one kick ass way to end the cycle of self-hatred, you know?
So in the grand scheme of things: getting whored up and going out dancing and drinking with a bazooka toting crazy lady? Not that damaging.
“Let us go,” says Aisha, impossibly regal, and she turns to the door.
In the living room, the men are drinking, cleaning guns, and writing love letters or some shit. They look up when they come downstairs.
Aisha descends the stairs, shiny black dress at a length that is probably illegal in most southern states, and it’s totally normal. She’s hot and dangerous and probably packing heat in some questionable areas. Jensen follows her down.
Her, they all kind of stare at for a minute and Clay drops his glass.
“What?” she asks, crossing her arms over her tight red dress. “I bought this at Nordstrom’s.”
Aisha looks over at her, gives her an up and down, and states, “She looks not unlike many women I have seen here.”
“That’s the point,” says Pooch as Cougar pulls his hat down over his eyes further, giving no indication that he cares either way, and Clay basically shouts, “You have legs!”
“So?” says Jensen, jaw set. Aisha has made her points and Jensen is on bored. She just wants to have fun, okay, and forget that she’s in love with her BFF who is so incredibly not staring at her hot body in this dress and it’s pissing her off. And it’s pissing her off more with Clay staring at her as his brain kicks into overdrive, obviously trying to figure out if he can somehow ground them all. Jensen thinks the man is one great commander, now that he’s gotten over a lot of his own bullshit, but sometimes he wakes up and remembers that Jensen is a chick and then he goes all 1953 on her ass.
Jesus, she had one dad and that was enough.
“We’re going dancing,” announced Aisha. “And we are late. Jenny?”
Jensen smiles tightly and leaves, attempting to sway her hips with more finesse then she usually applies even though no one is appreciating it, and Aisha follows her. She slams the door. They can still hear the men inside:
“Jenny? When the fuck did they start getting along?” demands Clay.
“We are all going to die,” Pooch says agreeably.
Jensen and Aisha walk two blocks away from the safe house in complete silence before Jensen stops them at the corner by grabbing Aisha’s arm.
She tells her, “I wanna get hammered.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” says Aisha and hails a taxi.
*
At six a.m., they are sat at the table when Clay stumbles into the kitchen. He’s in pajamas but they’re still dressed in their party dresses, with split lips now all around (and one black eye, for Jensen, which is honestly comforting in its familiarity).
Clay blinks. “I thought you went dancing,” he says.
Jensen waves her fingers vaguely and Aisha says, “We went dancing, and then we went drinking, and then we offended some men because we drank more than them.”
Jensen holds out her arm: there are twelve hash marks in purple Sharpie and a frowny face. She doesn’t know quite what the frowny face actually means, but she basically threw up a gold necklace into the bushes at one point before they stumbled back into the safe house so she’s assuming someone threw down the Goldschläger gauntlet. And she hates that shit. It’s like chilled German urine and then they add cinnamon.
“Fucking Nazis and their Nazi gold,” she mutters.
“The men then insinuated that we were perhaps not interested in their sexual company,” Aisha continues gamely, “because we appeared to be—what was the word?”
“Dykes,” supplies Jensen as she presses her face into the cool Formica table. It feels great.
She nods. “So I replied that we were not but we were merely not inclined to have a sexual congress with apes—”
Jensen pulls her head back up and points at her eye. “And then one dude punched me."
“I then punched him, Jenny smashed a beer bottle over a second assailants head, and that was when the brawl started. We left before the bar caught on fire though,” Aisha finishes.
Clay just drinks his coffee. He’d always said spit takes were for lesser mortals.
“You always did look good with black eyes, Jenny,” he says.
“Are you drunk still too?” she asks.
He smiles, stands, and goes to be manly and smoke on the porch.
*
Pooch and Cougar wander in together sometime later. Aisha has left to shower and Jensen has changed out of her dress, into a flannel shirt she might have stolen from Cougar while they were in Fucking Bolivia and old jeans. She has, however, returned to the kitchen table. She’s thinking about grapefruits.
Cougar sees her first and gestures to his own face with a circling motion.
“Sky diving, hard landing,” she grunts.
“Aisha told us about the bar fight all ready,” says Pooch, pouring himself some coffee.
“I hit a dude with a beer bottle,” admits Jensen.
“And then caught the bar on fire,” Pooch adds.
“That was later and probably Aisha,” she fires back.
Cougar snorts.
Jensen nods. “Trust.”
Pooch shakes his head. “I’m going to go e-mail my wife and child.”
“Good for you,” she says.
“You’re a bitch when you’re hung-over,” he comments.
“Who says I’m hung-over?” Jensen asks.
He laughs as he leaves the kitchen.
For a minute, it’s just her and Cougar in the kitchen. She’s at the table, he’s staring into the fridge.
“Are there grapefruits in there?” she asks.
“No,” he says.
“I really want a grapefruit,” she tells him. “I would hit twelve guys with beer bottles to get a grapefruit.”
“You will throw it up,” Cougar says.
Jensen shakes her head and immediately regrets the motion. “No I won’t. I’m great. And were you raised in a barn? Get whatever it is you want and close the fridge. I’m not paying for the electricity you’re wasting.”
He closes the fridge without getting anything and opens up a cabinet. “Have you gotten into the hard drive yet?”
“I barely got into these pants,” she says. “I’m not going anywhere near that thing until the Third Reich has returned to the Rhineland.”
Cougar turns to look at her, eyebrow raised and holding a box of Rice Chex.
“It’s a long story,” she tells him, standing up and waving a hand.
“Did you fight Nazis in that bar last night?” he asks, going back to the fridge.
She joins him. “No, but I’m going to start telling people that. That’s awesome. Aisha and Jensen, Nazi Hunters. We’re a modern day Cap and Bucky.”
He looks at her and smiles, opening up the fridge then and all but hiding behind it.
Jensen thinks about what Aisha said, before, and stretches herself out against the other side of fridge, a hand curling over it.
He closes the door and sits down at the table with his cereal and bowl and milk.
She drops her arm. “Oh, fuck this,” she says, under her breath.
“What?” asks Cougar.
“Nothing,” she says, slinking back to the table.
Cougar pours his milk into the bowl and looks up at her. “Is that my—”
“No,” says Jensen. “Gimme some of those Rice Chex.”