by Naomi Niles
I’d seen how Carson navigated conversations with women, and I knew this was the point where he would panic and say something awkward or insulting. There were a couple of more effective approaches you could take: you could be swaggering and cocky, or you could be charming and polite. Then there was a third option, what I called “sheer cunning.” I decided to go with cunning.
“Yeah, there was a man over there in a coat and scarf.” I pointed to the lounge area, around where Carson was sitting. “And I think he was trying to flash a couple of grade-schoolers.”
“Are you serious?” said the flight attendant (the name on her nametag said “Madison”). She walked away from the counter, peering into the distance. “Do you think you could point him out to me?”
“I’d love to.”
Only when we were midway between the ticket counter and the seating area did I turn to her and say, “So I guess this is the part where I come clean. There was no flasher.”
Madison looked up at me, startled. Confusion and something like worry were plain on her face. “You mean you lied to me? Then what did you bring me over here for?”
This was the part where the conversation could have spun rapidly out of control. Carson definitely wouldn’t have known how to deal with this. But I remained calm and unruffled.
I turned and looked her straight in the eyes; she had the most gorgeous dark eyes, offset by long lashes. “Well, to be perfectly honest with you, I’m a Navy SEAL, and this is my last day in America for at least a year. And I saw you walk by and I knew if I didn’t make an effort to meet you, I’d be kicking myself for the rest of my deployment, and maybe for the rest of my life.”
One thing I’ve learned about girls: it never hurts to mention that you’re a Navy SEAL. Maybe it’s because here in America we have an ingrained sense of respect for men in uniform. I don’t know what it is, but the words worked on her like a magic charm, immediately putting her at her ease. “Are you really a SEAL?” she asked.
“I am,” I said proudly.
She asked, a little shyly, “Can you prove it?”
Without hesitation I reached into my shirt pocket and pulled out my SEAL pin, a golden eagle clutching a pistol, anchor, and trident. She gazed with a kind of reverence that made her face glow like an angel’s. I could tell by her expression that she was being won over.
“Where are you stationed?” she asked, quietly.
“Somewhere deep in the Congo. Couldn’t tell you more than that; it’s confidential.”
“And when are you coming home?”
“Next summer. That’s if I make it home at all. Not everyone does.”
Madison nodded. She seemed to be trying to decide what to do with this information. I could tell part of her knew she needed to get back to work. The other part of her was demanding to be better acquainted with this mysterious young man she had just met, and whom she might never see again in this life.
“Madison—” I said.
“Please, call me Maddie.”
“When do you gotta be back at work?”
She smiled. “I’ve still got a few minutes.”
I could sense victory was imminent. Confidence is a heady drug and I was delirious with it. She was hungry, I could tell; eager to be near a man in uniform; thrilled that I would deign to talk to her. This drove my self-regard to new heights, which made me seem even more desirable, creating a spiral of lust that was begging to be consummated.
“You know what I’m thinking?” she asked me, batting those dark lashes.
“Hmmm?”
“I’m thinking we need to give you a warm send-off.”
“Be my guest. Is there a place in this airport where we could go and not be disturbed?”
Madison didn’t hesitate. I had an uncanny feeling she had done this kind of thing before. “There’s a storage closet about a hundred yards down the hall, full of mop buckets and old uniforms from the ‘60s, back when all flight attendants were required to wear short skirts. We don’t even use that closet anymore because there’s a new one where all the cleaning supplies are kept. Kids sometimes use it to make out.”
“And do they ever get caught?”
Maddie smiled, a roguish twinkle in her dark eyes. “I’ve never told on them.”
She turned and began heading off in that direction, swinging her keys and whistling like she was on patrol. I walked a few paces behind, not wanting to make it obvious that I was following her. She paused when she reached a non-descript blue door that looked freshly painted. Pulling it open slowly, she stepped inside.
A thrill came over me as I stood at the threshold of the door. I had no idea what would be waiting for me on the other side, what we would do together. I just knew whatever it was, I wanted it. Needed it. And I was ready.
I opened the door and went in. She stood at the back of the closet, pulling her shirt over her head to expose her ample stomach. Underneath, she was wearing a white bra with lace trimming. I was relieved to see that under her clothes she was what you would call buxom or well-endowed. Somehow the fact that she kept her bra on instead of taking it off made her boobs seem even more tantalizing. I could feel myself being drawn toward them as if by a powerful magnet.
Maddie seemed to have learned the strategic power of less being more. She paused with her hand on her belt, then shook her head with a smirk as though thinking better of it. I found it weirdly alluring and irresistible. There she stood half out of her work clothes, and I couldn’t have wanted her more if she had been completely naked.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked as I came forward and rested my hands on her shoulders.
She smiled. “None worth talking about.”
I leaned over and kissed her on the neck and along the side of the face. She accepted without resistance. It was odd how much more satisfying lovemaking could be than mere animal sex. In high school I had had romantic trysts at parties in the backs of closets with girls I had just met. I always walked away feeling unsatisfied. Looking back, I think it was because I hardly knew the other person. Maddie, though, seemed like someone I could get to know, or someone I already knew. The sort of girl who wore fetching hats and dark leggings in the winter and spent her days browsing the shelves of a used bookstore in the Bronx. If I had asked her to put her glasses on before we made out, she probably would have.
“You mind?” I asked, reaching behind her and feeling around for the back of her bra.
She shook her head sadly. “I’ve gotta be back to work soon. Otherwise they’ll come looking for me.”
“We’d better make this quick, then.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll make it worth your while.”
***
When I returned to the lounge a few minutes later, my head was buzzing. The light seemed oddly bright, and my ears registered even the faintest sound. It felt like one of those lucid dreams I used to have as a boy where I would try to make my girlfriends appear in front of me so I could have sex with them. Only I had never quite managed to do it. I had much more success with that kind of thing in real life.
Carson folded up the newspaper he was reading and gaped at me with an incredulous look as I sat down.
“That was awful quick,” he said. I could tell he was dying to know what we had done together, but I figured it would be more fun for me to keep him guessing. I leaned back in my seat, both hands on the back of my head, and began to whistle. Carson went on gaping. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t conceal his jealousy, and somehow that made the experience all the sweeter.
“Did you at least get her number?” he asked me, looking both impressed and resentful.
I shook my head. “Nah, I don’t really have time for girls.”
The announcer, the one who had been talking to Maddie earlier, called our seats. Together we grabbed our carry-ons and clambered onto the plane. I took a seat near a window looking out on the wing of the plane. Below me, men in orange vests sipped coffee and talked to each other. None of them knew what had just gone done
in their closet; probably none of them would have cared. By the time we reached London, I’d probably have forgotten it myself.
Chapter Two
Kelli
Renee woke me up that morning before the alarm did.
I felt something crawling on top of me, and of course my first delirious thought was that I was being attacked. But when I opened my eyes, a wave of relief came over me, and I let myself breathe again.
“Thank God it was just you,” I said.
Renee grinned mischievously. She was sitting on top of my legs, wearing a pair of dark yoga pants and gold loop earrings, her hair done up in a top knot. As I raised myself into a sitting position, she reached over and stroked my arm as though in apology. But her eyes continued to shine with feline cunning.
“Word of advice,” I said. “Don’t ever make me think I’m being attacked while I’m sleeping. I can’t be held legally responsible for what I might do to you.”
Renee stood up and patted me on the legs. “You’d better hurry and get up, or you’re going to be late for class.”
My sister was one of those irritating people who radiated joy and enthusiasm from the moment they spring out of bed. I’m not even functional until I’ve had my bagel and coffee, and even then it’s probably not wise to try to talk to me before noon. I’m not known for having a terrible temper, but my co-workers have learned to tread lightly around the office until then.
We lived in a studio apartment with a magnificent skylight and a pair of French windows opening out onto a narrow side street. Since I was a girl, it had been my dream to live in New York and work for a big city paper like the Times or the Wall Street Journal. Last year, after about twenty rejections, I had accepted a position as a reporter for a website known as the Daily Bugler. It wasn’t the most prestigious job—the Bugler had a liberal slant and was known for printing stories like “CIA Planning Soft Coup! Shocking Insights from a Deep State Whistleblower.” But between this and the money that Renee brought in from teaching yoga, we were able to live reasonably comfortably in an Upper East Side apartment.
“So let’s talk,” said Renee, seating herself at the table near the French windows and shoving a kale smoothie toward me. She must have made it while I was asleep. I groaned at the sight of it: no matter how many times I tried to tell her I hated her smoothies, she was always insisting on making them because they were “good for me.” I retaliated by playing “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” by The Smiths on permanent loop. Can you tell that we loved each other?
“What’s up?” I asked, sitting down across from her. “Did Adam Driver finally file that restraining order?”
“No, but it’s just a matter of time,” said Renee. “What I actually wanted to tell you is that I’ve started seeing someone.”
This was about the last thing I had been expecting, and for a moment I stared at her in shock. “Who?” I asked. “You never even bring any boys over. How long have you been seeing each other?”
“For about two months.”
I nearly spit out my smoothie, and not for the usual reasons. “What’s his name? Why haven’t you ever mentioned him?”
Renee stared down at the table. I had known her long enough to know she was avoiding my gaze because she was embarrassed about something. “Well, it’s not something I’ve really wanted to talk about. I only decided to come clean now because we’re pretty serious about each other. I didn’t want you to find out I was engaged over Facebook.”
“You’re ENGAGED?” I shouted, half-rising from the table.
“No, no!” said Renee quickly. “But if it gets to that point, I thought I should at least let you know I was dating someone.”
This whole conversation was mystifying. I studied her face carefully with a mixture of shock and suspicion, half-wondering if she was pulling my leg. It was plain from the way she was blushing and averting her eyes that there was still something she hadn’t told me. “Renee, I’ve always been the first person to know when you had a boyfriend. What gives?”
Renee took a deep breath and gripped her mug tightly with both hands. “Well, that’s just the thing. I haven’t wanted to tell you because I wasn’t sure how you would react. See, Max is a former soldier. He spent five years in the military in Afghanistan.”
Oh, of course. Now it all made sense. Renee knew better than anyone my aversion to men in uniform. She knew how badly I panicked during routine traffic stops, and how often I had walked out of the coffee shop at the sight of a man in uniform.
“But if you would just give him a chance,” she pleaded, “I think you would really like him. I admit, I was a little wary at first when he told me he had enlisted straight out of high school after 9/11 to fight the Taliban. I think anyone who’s been through the things we’ve been through and seen the things we’ve seen would be nervous. But he’s retired from the military now, and it’s not like if we got married he would be dragging me back overseas. We wouldn’t be raising our kids in some hovel.”
I raised my brows at the mention of kids. “Have you talked about starting a family?”
“It’s…come up a few times.”
“You must really like him.” Renee had never been the sort of person to make serious commitments. Her longest relationship to date had lasted about a month, and she had ended it when the guy broke down and confessed that he hated musicals.
“I do,” said Renee. “That’s why I want you to meet him. You know I wouldn’t ask unless it was really important to me.”
I took a last, foul-tasting sip of my drink and said in a quiet voice, “I’ll think about it.”
Renee looked disappointed, but under the circumstances I suspected she knew that was the best she could hope for. “Thanks,” she said. “That’s all I ask.”
We left the apartment and caught the train to 66th Street to the studio where Renee worked, navigating our way through traffic and around scaffolding. Construction workers in yellow hard hats seemed to outnumber pedestrians, standing under their blue tarps with coffee in hand to escape the summer heat. One of them whistled at us as we walked past, and I gave him the finger, but Renee merely smiled.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” she said as we stepped through the door into the relative calm of the studio with its polished wood floors. “There are so many things to see and explore in the city on a summer morning. I’ve lived here for about two years, and I still don’t know the names of about half the things I see on our morning walks.” She motioned through the window to a bed of yellow flowers standing in a windowsill over the dumpster. “What are those called? I still don’t know. And the bird that flew past us as we were coming out of the subway?”
“That was a crow,” I replied.
“Yes, but why did it have a knife in its beak?”
I smiled in spite of myself. Though I loved to give Renee a hard time about her unquenchable enthusiasm for life in the city and her tireless curiosity, she was one of the only things keeping me from outright despair. During the few years we had lived apart after college, I had sunk into a deep depression, sitting naked on my bed eating Top Ramen as I stared out the window of my Cincinnati apartment. That might have gone on indefinitely if she hadn’t talked me into joining her in Manhattan. For that reason alone, I felt I owed it to her to give her new boyfriend a chance.
As soon as yoga ended at 11:00am, I took a taxi down to the Bugle’s office. I found the team gathered around a table in the newsroom with a TV overhead turned to CNN, which was showing helicopter footage of the recent oil spill disaster in the Gulf.
Evan, the news editor, stood watching the TV with a look of intense fascination. A passionate and charismatic young man with a scruffy beard and a thick head of dark hair, he had effectively taken control of the website shortly after graduating from Columbia a few years back.
“The important thing about the disaster in Galveston,” he said, never taking his eyes off the screen even for a moment, “is the political angle. How is this affecting the president’s chances of
reelection?”
“It’s his Katrina,” said Karen, the features editor, peering sharply at him from behind her beetle-like black glasses.
“Yes, let’s go with that,” said Evan, rubbing his hands together. “Just as importantly, how is this playing in the heartland? One of the quirks of our political system over the past twenty years is that a president can’t expect much support from Americans of the opposite party. They’ll say he’s doing a bad job no matter what he does. But in a highly polarized environment like ours, a president only faces real trouble if he starts losing the support of his own party. We’ll want to interview some of the men and women who voted for him and find out whether they’re having buyer’s remorse.”
“My family back in Ohio voted for him,” I said. “Half of them support him passionately, and the other half aren’t too happy about it. My cousins think he should have been out there helping with the recovery weeks ago. It’s created a rift in the family.”
“Any of them who would be willing to be interviewed on the record?” asked Evan. “I’m thinking of doing a major feature on the political fallout from the hurricane, in which case we could use an inset article reporting dissatisfaction among his base.”
“I’ll call them,” I said. “It wouldn’t be too hard to dredge up some quotes.”
“Fantastic.” Turning to Karen, he said, “And I would like you to be in charge of putting that feature together.”
“Consider it done,” said Karen, setting down her pen and folding her hands together.
On the screen above us, the news shifted to a report on Navy SEALs committing atrocities in the remote mountainous regions of Afghanistan. A middle-aged reporter stood in the desert with microphone in hand, his expression tense and sober.
“Local villagers and Afghani officials allege that the SEAL team stationed here has shown a, quote, ‘complete and total disregard for human life,’ indiscriminately killing women and children,” he said. “During a recent firefight between Islamist radicals and members of SEAL Team 6 flying in Chinook attack helicopters, the Chinook reportedly fired a furious fusillade of bullets that killed up to a dozen children, who were then hastily buried by the military in an adjoining ravine.”