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“Uh oh. That sounds like a private sauna situation,” Mary smiled.
“Indeed. And as it turns out, when you are new to a team, it is polite—or so it was explained to us—for the office to host a sauna to welcome the new member.” He pulled his phone from his thigh pocket, and as expected, he had no cell tower bars.
“Like, I don’t know anyone here, so let’s get naked and hang out in a very hot room kind of welcome?”
“Yes. Exactly. That.” He pulled his sat phone from his pack, raised the antenna, and tried to call Nutsbe to get the current read on the weather and check in. But the cloud cover was too thick to make the connection.
Max’s tongue was out, panting and chomping the way he did when he was stressed.
Glancing around and not seeing animals of any kind, Halo decided to unclasp the lead so the leather wasn’t soaking in the water.
Max’s behavior primed Halo’s nervous system. He just didn’t know why. His whole body was yelling for him to act, act now. But he saw nothing to act on.
“You were working close protection. Did you go into the sauna with your client, or were you outside of the door?”
“If I were outside the door, I wouldn’t be protecting my client.” She had floated toward the center of the pool, and Max was inching closer, front paws in the water, barely resting on the vegetation.
Mary raised her brows. “Did you do this naked?”
“When on duty, I’m required to be in full uniform.”
“In the sauna.”
“Quite warm.” He decided to go ahead and get his pants off. If he were going in, the survival supplies in his pocket would weigh him down.
“With your naked client. Female?”
“I was with my client. And the rest of the office workers, both male and female.”
“Hell of a way to get to know your boss.”
“For my client, yes,” he was picking over his words like produce, making sure that there were none in his basket with bruising or blemishes, nothing that would give away a client’s private information. “Culturally a non-issue for the others, it was quite a shock to my client. They were very uncomfortable throughout but tried to mask it.” He dragged his pants over his feet and piled them on top of his boots. Mary didn’t seem to notice.
“And you were melting like butter.” Was she slurring?
“That would be a fair description.”
“Wow.”
“Yes. It was quite wow, especially for an American. Other countries are less timid with nudity. Australians, in general, don’t mind much. How are you doing in there? Everything okay?”
“It’s nice.” She offered up a contented smile. After a moment said, “Yeah, I don’t know about myself. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation outside of the gym or that females-only sauna I mentioned where I was challenged with just pulling off my clothes in front of strangers.”
“You did to save that family.”
“Not naked and no room for ego,” She said as she started twirling around and around in the water like a ballerina. “To be honest, there wasn’t even room for thought. My body began moving, and I began to freak out whenever I started processing things. So I did what I trained myself to do in the ER.”
“Which was?” Her words sounded cogent and intelligent. But something wasn’t right. Halo thought if he could keep her talking, he might figure it out. In his mind, he was working his way from the point where they got on the trail forward. Had he missed something along the way? What was happening here?
“Get out of the way of my brain. My brain had the training and a broader ability to observe and know the right action. This messed me up so much in school. I would answer the question, then second guess myself and change the answer when it was the first one all along, the one my brain sprang forward. But I guessed that if it came easy, it had to be wrong. Things needed to be hard. I worked on not doing that all through nursing school. But the test came when I was an emergency room nurse. With lives on the line, I had no time for second-guessing. Just let the brain do its work. That’s the mantra.”
“Let the brain do its work.” He repeated as he thought that through. “Right, well, that’s what we do, too. Lean into the training; don’t second guess. Hesitate and die.” He stood up and cast an anxious gaze around him. “And feel the fear later.” Suddenly, the smell of ozone tickled his nostrils.
That wasn’t good. Time to go.
Mary was treading water. “Oh, yum. Can you taste that?” she asked.
“Taste?” Smell ozone, yes. Taste?