In the bar, on the dance floor, even on the train home, the banter had been fun and light and charged with possibility. Sexual comments had flown freq...uently and with targeted nuance. And now it had become challenging. Todd had been bragging about his equipment, as usual, and Elaine had called him out on it. Todd's boast was that once he took it out, whatever girl he was with couldn't resist sucking him off. Elaine called bullshit on him and the challenges had progressed to this. I felt my face. An artillery shell landed just down the hill from him. The flash overwhelmed his visual mode. The concussion hammered into him hard enough to drive some of the air from his lungs. Several pieces of smoking shrapnel came flying into his firing hole, one of them pinging off the side of his helmet."Jesus," he mumbled, just as another one exploded a little further up.Mortar shells, fired from behind them, began to drop in the midst of the APCs, their proximity fuses causing them to explode about. ”“That’s stupid, I didn’t even graduate high school,” answered the young man.A woman’s voice from off-screen said, “Introduce yourself, idiot. They got no idea who’s talking.”The young man shrugged and said, “I’m the California Kid. Don’t know why you’d want to know that. Black George says that you want me to tell you how to avoid becoming one of us. I figure you already know that -- you’re graduating college. Probably got pretty good jobs lined up and all. Of course, some of the folk on the. . But I think that’s what made it so exciting. We small chat for a bit. Finally after 15 minutes or so he asked if it would be alright if he got undressed. So we both did. He had already put a towel down on the couch I was sitting on and he had a towel underneath him on the chair. We were facing each other. Without a word we both started to awkwardly fondle ourselves. Finally I took a huge gulp of wine for courage and then sat back, spread my legs with my feet on the table in front of the.