The Nitro Queen

Chad could feel butterflies in his stomach. He was sitting across from his girlfriend at a dinner table. The young man waited for the right time to propose to his girlfriend, whose name was Veronica. 

"You okay, baby?" Veronica asked her boyfriend while stretching her petite hand across the table toward him.

"Yeah, I'm cool." Chad smiled at his girlfriend while taking hold of her hand. He cleared his throat while sitting up straight. "I was just thinking about something." Chad played with his girlfriend's hand with his gentle eyes studying her face. The young man began fidgeting with his earring and he tried to stop himself from being nervous.

"What are you thinking about?" Veronica smirked at Chad. Her full red lips gave off a sensual shimmer. 

Chad took in his girlfriend's Middle Eastern beauty for a minute before answering her. "I was thinking about how happy I am to be your man." Chad adjusted his necktie while leaning forward. The young man moved his dark shoulder length hair behind his ears. "I keep seeing our future together. We've been together for two years. I keep seeing us living in a big house on an island raising our baby, or our babies. Do you want kids?" Chad asked through a soft chuckle.

"Yes, I want kids." Veronica whispered passionately to her boyfriend. "I want a boy and a girl." 

Chad nodded, feeling more confident about his proposal as he listened to his girlfriend.

"I think I would make a damn good mother." Veronica's words caused her boyfriend to laugh softly. The young woman wanted to move her curvy physique closer to her boyfriend. She wanted to touch more than just her boyfriend's hand. Veronica could feel the sweat on the palm of Chad's hand. She knew that he was tense about something. 

"You would be a great mother. You saved those children hostages." Chad brought up his girlfriend's recent heroic action. The young man was in awe of his girlfriend's beauty and her heroic nature. He knew that Veronica would downplay what she did because of her humble personality.

"God helped me save those babies." Veronica stated through her sexy, melodic voice. "It was terrifying to be trapped in a hospital space station with terrorists. Our team subdued the men, but somebody still had to disarm the bombs." Veronica hesitated, licking her lips. The young woman reflected back on what she had to do to disarm five explosives that were attached to five children. 

"You're a phenomenal woman. Those babies survived because of you. You were the only one who could disarm those bombs." Chad kept praising his girlfriend through whispers and a smile. The young man knew that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with Veronica. He couldn't wait to pop the question, but he wanted to do it at the right moment. Chad wanted to propose to Veronica, but for some strange reason a voice in his head was telling him to wait. 

"My job was to disarm the bombs. A soldier is trained to save lives." Veronica shrugged her shoulders while giving her boyfriend a wink and a smile. 

Chad smiled back at his girlfriend and he thought about when he first met Veronica at his brother's wedding. He thought about how they danced together and got drunk. 

"You're thinking about something again. What is it?" Veronica wished she could read Chad's mind. The young woman kept showing her dimples every time she would grin at her boyfriend with a curious sparkle in her hazelnut brown eyes.

"I was just thinking about when we first met at my brother's wedding." Chad chuckled. "You were so beautiful. You had on that low cut dress that looked like a white silk negligee. You were so sexy." Chad's words were simmering out of his mouth. The young man placed his eyes on his girlfriend's busty cleavage. While he was talking he looked back up to see a slightly confused look on Veronica's face.

Veronica looked lost for a second, but she nodded, pretending to know what her boyfriend was talking about. 

"We got drunk and wild that night." Chad went on talking. "We left my brother's wedding and we went to a nightclub. We had more drinks at the nightclub and then we left. We were gonna go to my apartment, but we ended up having sex in a cemetery. Don't tell me you don't remember what we did that night?" Chad gave his girlfriend a mischievous gaze as he stroked his fingers across his girlfriend's hand. 

Veronica nervously giggled. "Of course I remember!" The young woman's voice squeaked through her soft laugh.

Chad could sense his girlfriend's uncertainty over what he was telling her. At times, he felt like he was talking to a stranger. The young man wondered if memory loss came with the job of being a military astronaut. He stopped talking about how he met Veronica when he could clearly see the far away look in her eyes.

"What's a matter? Why did you stop talking?" Veronica exuded a pitiful gaze through her doll-like eyes. The woman shifted her slender body when she could see that Chad was giving her a disappointed stare.

"When I brought up how we first met you were looking at me like you had no idea what I was talking about," Chad explained to his girlfriend while smirking at her. "Remember, your boyfriend is a doctor. I've treated amnesia patients. So I know what it looks like. All of my amnesia patients have that same disheartening distant look in their eyes when you're trying to get them to remember something."

Veronica scrunched up her slender nose while softly laughing at her boyfriend. "What are you trying to say? You think I have amnesia? I remember when we first met." Veronica protested while gently squeezing her boyfriend's hand. 

Chad wanted to believe his girlfriend. "I believe you, babe. I was just concerned for a minute. I've heard that astronauts can have memory loss. Also, being in the military can cause post traumatic stress. I just thought since you're a soldier and you were out there in space trying to rescue those children, It probably brought tremendous stress to your body and your mind." Chad closed his mouth when his girlfriend leaned further across the table placing her fingers over his lips.

"Stop talking," Veronica told Chad through a half whisper. The woman shook her head with a smirk of unbelief blooming beneath her nose. "I'm fine. There's nothing wrong with me babe." Veronica tried to reassure her boyfriend. The young woman fixed her lips to say something else to Chad, but her lips froze when her eyes targeted a group of men who were standing on the far side of the restaurant staring at her. Veronica's trained eyes looked past her boyfriend and she spotted the men within a second. The men were donning pristine black suits and they had on sunglasses. One of the men spoke into a receiver in his sleeve, which let Veronica know that these men were soldiers. 

"I just want to ask you one thing." Chad went back to speaking to his girlfriend completely unaware of what was going on. "What was the name of the rap song we were dancing to at my brother's wedding? We even said that we would play the song at our wedding. We called it our baby making song." Chad chuckled while waiting for a reply from his girlfriend. Instead of getting a reply, Chad watched as his girlfriend abruptly stood up from the table. "Where are you going? You didn't answer my question?" Chad tried to reach out to retake his girlfriend's hand after she walked around the table.

"I have to go to the ladies room. I'll be back." Veronica tapped a kiss on her boyfriend before strutting past him like a fashion model on a runway. The young woman clutched her purse while straightening out the see-through sleeve on her elegant green and gold Versace palm dress. Veronica kept her cool as she glided through the restaurant with her shapely hips swaying her long flowing dress from side to side. The restaurant was crowded, but Veronica still managed to slide her high heels between waiters and patrons. The young woman moved like an exotic dancer as she scooted past people. Veronica was getting closer to the ladies restroom. She never looked over her shoulder to see if the men were following her. Veronica never looked over her shoulder, even when she felt cold steel pressing against her lower back.

"Keep walking, bitch. Don't turn around or I'll shoot you right here." A woman's sultry voice tingled the hairs on the back of Veronica's neck. Veronica kept moving like she was told. She tried to ignore the feeling of an automatic pistol pressing against her spine.

Within minutes, Veronica and the mysterious woman were in the ladies restroom. When Veronica heard the mysterious woman lock the restroom's door, that's when she attacked. Veronica swung her leg around kicking the woman's gun out of her hand. The gun spiraled through the air before crashing into the bathroom mirror.

"Bitch!" The mysterious woman shouted before tackling Veronica. She threw Veronica into a wall before driving her elbow into Veronica's jaw. Veronica rammed her high heel shoe into the mysterious woman's torso, knocking her into one of the bathroom stalls.

"You look like me but you can't fight like me!" Veronica growled at her enemy after snatching off the woman's sunglasses and her skull cap. The mysterious woman who Veronica was fighting was an alternate version of herself. The mysterious woman was Veronica. She was the real Veronica who wanted her life back.

"I knew you were The Nitro Queen!" The real Veronica, who was wearing an armored, black leather, bullet resistant dress, yelled down at her imposter after punching her and knocking her to the floor. "Who are you? I can't believe you're me!" The real Veronica kept talking while flipping the imposter Veronica on her back. The real Veronica became enraged when she saw that her imposter Veronica was wearing her dress.

"Believe it or not, I'm you! We're the same girl! The only difference is I was born on another Earth. I didn't like my life, so I found out about you. I located you and I hijacked your life through a terrorists attack!" The imposter Veronica hissed at her cosmic twin while putting her enemy into a choke hold.

"On the Earth where you come from, you're a terrorist! You hijacked a hospital space station and you tried to kill those babies so you could invade my life!?" The real Veronica preached out her words while driving her elbow into her imposter's stomach. She forced the imposter Veronica to remove her choke hold. "We look the same, but I am nothing like you! I would never strap an ion explosive on a kid who's battling cancer. I'm the one who had to disarm those bombs that you strapped on those babies. I had to stop a little girl from hyperventilating because she thought the bomb was going to detonate on her! I held a 2 year old boy in my arms. The baby's mother pleaded with me because she thought I wouldn't be able to disarm the bomb that was locked around her son's neck! Do you know how it made me feel to see babies going through chemotherapy with bombs strapped to their necks!" The real Veronica punched the imposter Veronica in her nose and she didn't care about punching a mirror image of herself.

The imposter Veronica fell down on her back. She looked up at the real Veronica with a murderous gleam in her eyes. "I'm sorry that I traumatized you. I didn't know you were so weak." The fake Veronica still had a lingering evil smirk on her face and she used the back of her hand to wipe the blood from her pretty nose. "We all have copies of ourselves out there in the vastness of space and some of our copies are evil. You just happened to run into a bad copy of yourself while you were on your little military space mission. I crossed over into your dimension and I decided to hijack your life with the help of my men. I got tired of being the bad terrorist girl from another universe. I wanted to visit your universe so I could see how it feels to be a military hero." The imposter Veronica justified herself for terrorizing a hospital space station. While lying on the floor, the imposter Veronica allowed a minute to pass before using her left leg to knock the real Veronica's feet from beneath her. 

The two Veronicas went back to fighting each other. Both women were dancing around the ladies restroom, delivering punches and high flying kicks to each other. The women looked like two ninja ballerinas on a battlefield. Elbow strikes, roundhouse kicks, body slams and hammer strike punches were all being administered at lightning speed. 

The imposter Veronica pulled a knife out of her purse to see if she could slice and dice on her cosmic identical twin. Before the imposter Veronica could swing her knife at her enemy, her arm became locked in a self defense move. 

The real Veronica grabbed her opponent's arm after dodging the knife. She snapped the imposter Veronica's wrist, forcing the woman to drop the knife. After disarming her enemy, the real Veronica kicked her cosmic twin in her stomach, sending the evil woman flying backwards. 

The imposter Veronica crashed into the restroom's door before landing on her butt. The bomber was in pain but she didn't let her broken wrist stop her from reaching for her opponent's gun, which was lying on the floor under the bathroom sink. The imposter Veronica almost got a hold to the gun, but she screamed when the real Veronica brought her foot down on her hand. The imposter Veronica could feel every bone in her hand snapping apart from the blow. The woman didn't know that a high heel shoe could cause so much damage to the human hand. 

"You tried to steal my life and now you're trying to steal my gun? I don't think so." The real Veronica twisted the heel of the shoe down into her opponent's hand. She towered over the imposter Veronica after bending down and snatching up her gun. "What are you smiling about, bitch? You lost the fight." The real Veronica talked down to her enemy while folding her bare slender arms.

The imposter Veronica grunted while sitting up slightly. She swallowed hard while holding her broken hand and wrist. "You won the fight, but you lost the war. Remember, I'm The Nitro Queen, which means your boyfriend is in danger. Just to let you know, I placed an explosive device under the table where he's sitting. It's a dirty shaft bomb with an electrical cut switch. You'll have to cut the right switch input or the bomb will detonate. You have five minutes." The imposter Veronica unleashed a cackling laugh. The woman threw back her head while laughing so hard that veins protruded from her slender neck.

The real Veronica turned her nose up in disgust. The young woman brought the butt of her gun down on the imposter Veronica's head, knocking her unconscious. After knocking out her enemy, the real Veronica called for her team of men through a receiver in her wristwatch. She unlocked the bathroom door, waiting to see a group of men barge into the ladies restroom to arrest the imposter Veronica. 

***

Chad was sitting at the table patiently waiting for his girlfriend to return. The young doctor pulled an engagement ring out of his pocket. He took an exasperated deep breath while looking around the restaurant to see if Veronica was approaching. He had no clue that a bomb was attached beneath his table and it was steadily ticking down to its detonation time. Chad couldn't wait to propose but he couldn't understand why his heart was beating so fast.

"Hey babe! I'm sorry I took so long." Veronica's sweet voice came out of nowhere and it caused Chad to flinch. "You okay?" Veronica touched her boyfriend's shoulder after she saw him jump at the sound of her voice.

Chad nodded eagerly. "Yeah, I'm good. Your voice just surprised me." Chad regained his girlfriend's hand. The young man swallowed hard before slowly rising from the table and getting down on one knee in front of his girlfriend. 

Veronica choked on her heart when she saw what her boyfriend was about to do. The young woman needed to get to the bomb under the table and her boyfriend's proposal was coming at the wrong time.

"You never answered my question about our favorite rap song. We called it our baby making rap song." Chad wanted to hear his girlfriend say it.

"It was Drake's Toosie Slide." Veronica answered her boyfriend with panic in her voice. Her eyes kept falling on the table. "Hey baby, I dropped my earring under the table. Do you mind if I—" Veronica stopped talking when Chad pulled out a sparkling diamond engagement ring.

"I know this seems sudden. But will you marry me?" Chad lifted up the engagement ring while gazing up at Veronica through starry eyes. He knew people were watching his proposal, but he didn't care. Chad disregarded his nervousness. He pretended that him and his girlfriend were the only ones in the restaurant.

Veronica started sweating while adjusting the sleeve on her green and gold dress. She took in a gasping deep breath before taking hold of her boyfriend's hand and saying…"I'll marry you, baby. I just need to get under the damn table so I can disarm the bomb!"