Battleship

active bar. “This is not closed. I want a chicken burrito. I just drove from North Shore.”

“Kitchen closed,” said Akau, regarding her with a bored expression, clearly not the least bit interested in diving into her eyes or any other part of her. He just wanted to be left the hell alone.

Like a dog with a bone in her teeth, the blonde wasn’t about to let it go. “You can’t stick a burrito in a microwave?”

“No,” he said flatly. He picked up a glass that was already clean and started wiping it.

Stone was determined to drag Hopper’s attention, kicking and screaming, back to their underwhelming—but still sincere—birthday celebration. He made an effort to straighten the candle and then lit it. He snapped his fingers in Hopper’s face, startling his brother back to the real world, a world that the gorgeous blonde was not, in any way, shape or form, going to be a part of. “So,” Stone said before his brother could refocus on the girl. He had removed a small folded piece of paper from his shirt pocket and was reading from it. “In the great Hopper family tradition, I, on the day now of your twenty-sixth birthday—”

“Twenty-fifth,” Hopper corrected him.

Stone lowered the paper and stared at his brother incredulously. They were going to argue about this now? Was there anything the kid wouldn’t argue about? “Twenty-sixth,” said Stone.

“I’m twenty-five.”

God, give me strength. Speaking very slowly, as if to an idiot, Stone said, “You were born on March 11, 1980.”

“I know when I was born.”

“You’re just on a power trip,” the girl’s voice came from the bar. She was dripping with sarcasm. “The keeper of the food. Power trip. Would it really crush your little world to break the big rule and fire me up a burrito?”

Hopper was starting to lose focus on his brother, something that Stone was determined to avert, because there was no way that any involvement between Hopper and that particular girl could end in anything but disaster. “You are twenty-six years old,” Stone said with determination. “It’s March 11, 2006. So, 1980 to 2006. Twenty-six- year difference. Makes you twenty-six years old. I’m twenty-nine. You are twenty-six. That’s never changed. Impossible to change.”

The fact that Stone was right shouldn’t have deterred Hopper in the least. All that was required for him to become intransigent was for Stone to make an assertion, and Hopper would promptly dig in to a contrary position. He was perfectly capable of claiming that it was, in fact, 2005, just to keep the argument going.

In this instance, Hopper quickly said, “Okay.” Stone should have been pleased that his brother was willing to drop it. Instead he was concerned that the only reason Hopper conceded the point was because he wanted to go back to looking at the girl. Determined to make certain that Hopps didn’t do something stupid like follow the impulse, Stone raised his glass to keep the celebration on track.

“From John Wooden,” he said with great solemnity. “ ‘Adversity is the state in which man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then.’”

Hopper stared at him blankly. “What’s your point with that one?”

“My point is: happy birthday. I love you, and I’m wishing you growth and success. May this be a great year for you.”

They both downed the shots. It wasn’t the world’s greatest whiskey, or even the tenth greatest whiskey. But it still caused a pleasant heat as it went down, and Stone briefly allowed it to dull his brain and take some of the edge off his normally edgy personality. Then he saw that, once again, he might as well not have been there insofar as his brother was concerned. Hopper was watching the damned girl, who was still locked in battle with Akau. At least she was locked in battle. Akau was ignoring her, so it was more or less a one-way fight.

“Don’t you dare,” said Stone, knowing what was going through his brother’s mind.

“What?” Hopper gazed at him with that patented look of disingenuous innocence.

Stone pointed at the candle, indicating the flickering flame. “You actually need some wishes to come true. Some real wishes, big life wishes.”

“It’s my wish,” he said defensively.

“Don’t you waste it.”

Hopper was smiling at the girl. “My wish.”

“Do not waste your wish on a girl,” Stone warned him. “Not now. Especially not on a girl who is way, way above your pay grade. Wish for a job. A family, children. A job.”

“You already said a job.”

Stone wasn’t going to be distracted from the central theme of his premise. “Don’t waste it.”

Hopper blew out the candle, never once removing his gaze from the girl.

His brother sighed heavily. “You wasted your wish, didn’t you.”

“Let’s find out.”

Hopper slid off his seat… and nearly kept going, heading to an inevitable date with the floor. As far as Stone was concerned, that would have been far preferable. Having Hopper sprawled unconscious on the floor was definitely a better outcome than the certain train wreck that was going to result from him hitting on the blonde.

Unfortunately Hopper managed to catch himself at the last moment and keep his feet. Very carefully, he stood up to his full height and began to half saunter, half stagger toward the bar.

Stop him. For God’s sake, stop him. Stone began to rise from his seat and then, with a resigned sigh, sank back down. His brother was twenty-six (not, as rumored, twenty-five). Sooner or later, Stone had to stop working overtime to keep him out of trouble. Perhaps if Hopper got his nose good and bloodied, he might wind up listening to Stone instead of disregarding his counsel.

Besides, he was sitting in a run-down bar at just past midnight. One had to find entertainment where one could.

“Policy change,” said Akau in his same, flat, disinterested voice.

“Policy? Really?” The calmer the bartender got, the more agitated she became. “A policy is something that you have on immigration, education, invading a country.”

He was not remotely persuaded. “Policy change,” he repeated monotonously.

Hopper had a self-image of being smooth and charming. The reality would not remotely have matched up with what was in his head, had he been able to see it. Fortunately for the tattered remains of his self-esteem, he couldn’t. He slid in next to the blonde and said, in his best imitation of the guy from Friends, “How you doing?”

“Hungry. Starving.” She wasn’t addressing her comments to him. Instead she was lobbing them like poison spears at the bartender. Akau continued not to react in the slightest.

“I’ve got a cupcake. It’s my birthday cupcake.”

She still wasn’t even deigning to look at him. Instead she closed her eyes in annoyance, as if wishing she could open them and find herself someplace else, where eats were plentiful and available in an inverse proportion to the availability of drunken idiots. “I don’t want a cupcake. I want food.”

“Can I buy you a drink?”

With a sigh she finally turned and looked at him with those gorgeous blue eyes that a man could just get lost in. She didn’t seem to be losing herself in his, however. Instead she looked vaguely bored. “What’s your name?”

“Hopper,” he said eagerly.

With overstated, weary patience, she informed him, “I don’t want a drink, Hopper. I don’t want a cupcake. I want a chicken burrito. That’s all I want. A chicken burrito, and this jackass won’t give me one. You want to buy me a drink? Get me some food.”

It was obvious that she wasn’t expecting him to do anything of the kind. It was just the simplest and most expedient means of getting rid of him. That, however, did not deter Hopper. If anything, it only provided him with incentive. “Done. I give you my word. Two minutes. Will you give me two minutes?”

In spite of herself, she smiled ever so slightly. He was amusing to her. “You’re on the clock,” she