by Naomi Niles
“I saw what it was like to be you,” I replied. “I don’t ever want to put myself through that. You’re about the bravest woman I ever met. I’ve faced down bullets, but I’ve never put my name to an article threatening to expose military secrets. That shit’ll get you killed if you’re not careful.”
“Well, I got death threats,” said Kelli.
“I know you did.” I pushed my tray aside and reached for her hand from across the table. “I know a lot of people, even a lot of my buddies, were pissed at you when you wrote that article. I’m not gonna pretend they weren’t. But when I read it, I had a completely different reaction. I think it pretty much clinched my being in love with you. Because anyone who could spend a month embedded with us, and then go and write that piece, knowing how much it would cost them personally and professionally, must either be some kind of crazy person or the smartest, bravest woman I’d ever met. You know who you are? You’re Joan of Arc.”
Kelli smiled a shy smile and dropped her eyes to her plate. “Joan of Arc was actually one of my heroes growing up. When I was ten or eleven, that old black and white movie The Passion of Joan of Arc was playing at a local theater. You know, the one from the ‘20s? I asked my parents if I could go see it. They told me I wouldn’t be interested, but I talked them into letting me go. I sat there in the glow of the screen and was just enthralled. The things those men put her through, the suffering on her face. When the movie was over, I was just stunned. I’d never seen anything like that. And I stayed there for the next screening, and the next, and I must have watched it four times that day.”
She shivered and let go of my hand. She had that look on her face like she thought she had said too much. But I couldn’t stop looking at her; she was just radiant.
“I don’t know what it is about you sometimes,” I said. “I feel like when I met you, I stumbled on one of God’s most perfect creations. The best day of my life was the day you walked onto our base, and I don’t know if there’ll ever be a better one.”
***
I paid for our meal, and we walked outside into the cool of a late-summer evening. We passed a long row of hipster boutiques with antique movie posters in the windows. A man in a cashmere coat was trying to explain to his girlfriend who Greta Garbo was and why she had once been so famous. A few shops down, an old woman with dreads in her hair was sharing an ice cream cone with her golden retriever.
I asked Kelli if she wanted to get gelato, and she shook her head no. “I just want to get home,” she said, adding in a quieter voice, “your home.”
Everything that transpired after that had the feel of a dream about it. The whole night, it felt like I was having dinner with someone who had just come back from the dead, and the feeling peaked as I led her up the stairs to my apartment. We ran through the halls together like a couple of teenagers afraid of being caught by their parents.
By the time we reached the door, my hands were shaking, although not from cold.
“You gonna be okay?” asked Kelli in a concerned tone.
I handed her the keys. “You do it. I’ll never be able to unlock the door at this rate.”
I stood there waiting semi-patiently while Kelli placed the key in the lock and turned once. She did the same with the bolt, and the door opened.
I didn’t even bother taking the key out of the lock. As soon as the door was open, I grabbed her from behind and threw my arms around her. She let out a surprised, delighted scream and turned to face me. Then, knowing that I probably couldn’t manage it on my own, she began unbuttoning my shirt.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Keli
One of the things I really loved about Zack was that he could never hide what he was really thinking. All through dinner, he had been thinking he wanted to get me in bed. I could see it in the way he fidgeted uncomfortably as if struggling to keep himself in check, in the way he raced through his meal as though eager to finish the date and get back to my apartment (a motivation I think he was only dimly aware of, if it occurred to him at all).
I could tell the longing had been building inside him all night, and probably for a lot longer than that. It had been weeks since we’d slept together; we hadn’t done it at his parents’ house for fear of being caught, and I don’t think I’d realized how much my body missed him until I was sitting across from him at dinner thinking about how his beard was coming in and how it made him look handsomer, fuller, and more mature. He had the look now of a college professor struggling to explain an important problem in physics, especially when he got really passionate and began waving his arms in the air like a conductor.
I had a feeling when we finally made love it would be powerful, and the longer we talked that night, the more I wanted it. When I asked him if we could go back to his apartment, a light shone in his face. It was like I was giving him permission to do all the wild and terrible things he had been imagining himself doing to me all night. But it was like I was giving myself permission, too. There’d been countless times in the last couple weeks when I’d told myself I would never be loved by a man again, that I didn’t deserve the love of a man like Zack, and I would probably be single for the rest of my life.
So when I asked him, it was as much for myself as it was for him. I wanted this. We both wanted it.
And when we finally made it into the apartment, when he pushed me against the wall and put his arms around me, I felt a sense of release like I had rarely felt in the past. This, this was what I had wanted: the brush of his lips against my neck, the feel of his hands around my waist. We were hungry and we both knew it; if I hadn’t been, his intensity might have scared me, but as it was, it was a perfect reflection of my own hunger.
“I don’t even know if I’m going to make it to the bedroom,” he said as he tore off his pants, nearly falling over in the process. “Shit, we’re lucky we even made it through the door.”
“It’s important not to get arrested, but I don’t know, it could have been worth it. Maybe they’d have put us in the same cell, and we could have had passionate jail sex.” I was kneeling on my legs on the kitchen floor, still wearing my blouse and blue jeans. Zack was just about out of his clothes, all but his boxers. I couldn’t get over how finely sculpted he was, how perfectly formed in every crest and crevice of his body.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever wanted anything as much as I want you right now,” he said in a low growl. “Almost makes those months in the desert worth it.”
I smiled and wrapped my arms around his neck, kissing him once on the mouth. “Imagine if every SEAL had this to look forward to when they came home from deployment.”
“Getting to sleep with you? I think morale would improve.” He pulled me close and tucked my head under his chin for a moment as though praying. I could feel every tremor and exhalation of his body. Then, pushing my bangs out of my face and kissing me fervently and repeatedly on the forehead, he said, “Now let’s get you out of those clothes.”
He stood up and took me by the hands, pulling me up with him. For a moment, he stood there in his boxers looking me over as though trying to decide what he wanted to remove first. Or maybe he just liked to stare at me, I couldn’t tell.
“You want me to help?” I asked quietly. His thighs were warm against mine.
“Not this time.” With an air of resolution, he reached for the button on my jeans and began to unzip them. He pulled at the legs, and I assisted by shrugging them off until they lay in a pile on the floor at my feet.
I was wearing a tiny pair of gray silk underwear, the kind with little ribbons on the front on either side. Zack knelt down and ran his hands along the top; I shivered at the touch of his skin against my waist beneath my belly button. With a firm tug, he pulled them down, around my waist, around my knees, all the way down to my ankles. I gave them a final kick, and they went flying across the kitchen floor.
“I just want to know one thing,” he said as he buried his face in my thighs, and I bit down hard on my lip to keep from crying ou
t.
I grasped at the tufts of his hair with both hands, holding on as tight as I could. “What’s that?”
“How are you so perfect?”
This time I couldn’t help it: a shiver of pleasure ran through my body, and I let out a yell that could almost certainly be heard across the hall. I hadn’t even removed my shirt yet—was still wearing my glasses, even—and already I was experiencing a level of ecstasy that other boys had not managed even in our most intimate moments. Pleased at the effect he was having, Zack pressed on, and I screamed more and more loudly until finally, not able to handle it anymore, I fell over face-first onto the floor and pulled him with me.
“Lordy,” I panted, reaching for his hands, “if that was—we’re not even—”
Zack laughed and pulled me close for a kiss. “It’s okay, you don’t have to be articulate all the time,” he said, and I felt a surge of appreciation coursing through me. “Sometimes you’ve just gotta be still and surrender yourself to the moment.”
And over the next hour, that was precisely what I did.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Zack
That night, we lay in bed for some time after we’d finished, pondering the mystery of each other. She ran her fingers along the tattoos on my back and the stab wound in my side from the time I had been knifed in San Francisco by a deranged ex-Marine. The light from a flickering neon sign cast its green glow over the window.
“Sometimes it doesn’t make any sense to me, these bodies,” she said after a long silence in which we were just two creatures without names.
“What do you mean?” There was something oddly endearing and sexy in the strange philosophical insights Kelli always seemed to be having.
“Just the way we express love, and fear, and hope, and anything else worth sharing. There’s something mysterious and ineffable about it, this intertwining of soul and flesh. The spirit and the body.”
“Care to elaborate?” Maybe I shouldn’t have laughed, but I did.
Kelli sat up, looking a little frustrated. “It’s just that everything worth doing is done through our bodies. But we’re more than just bodies, or at least I think we are. When we make love, your love shines in your eyes and your whole self, and I never doubt that you love me, even if you never say it in words. You don’t have to. It’s the mystery of sex but I think it’s really the mystery of life itself: how is it that we become conduits of eternal things? I mean, if you turn off your penis and think about it for a minute, sex is actually pretty gross, but it’s how we show love and there’s something really good about it. Does that make any sense?”
I shook my head. “No, you sound so high right now, but I love you.”
It was the first time I had ever told her I loved her, and the words seemed to have a calming effect. She smiled a tranquil smile and said in a quiet voice, “You too.”
“Have you ever thought about becoming a college professor?”
Kelli shrugged her bare shoulders. “I’d have to go back to grad school. I got into journalism right out of college.”
“You ought to think about it.” I leaned over and kissed her bangs lightly. “Sometimes when you get going I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about, but I bet there are a lot of students who would love to hear it.”
I lay back down and for a while longer continued to run my fingers along the smooth skin of her arm. But Kelli sat up hugging a throw pillow to her chest with a pensive expression; she looked oddly beautiful in the glow of the neon light. “Professor Pope,” she said quietly. “I like the sound of that.”
***
By the end of the next week, Carson and I were back at the high school. But this time we had visitor’s passes, and no one was going to ask us to leave.
At the doors of the Taft building, we were met by a smiling woman in her mid-twenties wearing a blue cardigan over a striped green and white blouse and a pair of loose-fitting khakis. The tag on her blouse read “Sheryl Caine.”
“It’s only the beginning of the trimester, but my classes are already getting antsy,” she said as she led us through a low-ceilinged hallway filled with rows and rows of blue lockers. “We’ve watched Zoolander twice in the last week.”
“Hey, it’s a good movie,” said Carson.
“But I think they’ll be relieved to have a break from biology. I know some of the boys are going to be really fascinated to hear what you have to say—some of the girls, too, probably. A lot of these kids come from really low-income families and will be lucky even to graduate high school. And even if they can manage that, the best they can hope for is to eventually become a manager at Domino’s.” She paused at the door and turned to face me. “So what you’re doing today, it’s important. You’re not just coming in here to talk for a few minutes. You may actually be giving them a future.”
“Well, we’ll do what we can,” I said. I didn’t like having my job built up like this. But at the same time, it was encouraging to know that even if the kids looked bored, it didn’t mean our time had been wasted.
She led us into a classroom where about two dozen kids were seated. There was a desk in the corner of the room by the window looking out on the courtyard. On the dry-erase board at the front of the room, Ms. Caine had been writing out complex formulas. A copy of a Bill Nye DVD stood on the chalk tray beneath it.
I hadn’t been in a classroom in so long—when I graduated, Facebook wasn’t even a thing yet. It was all so familiar and yet strange at the same time. I wondered if they still used the boxy TVs we’d been forced to watch in the early 2000s, or if they’d upgraded to flat-screens.
The students were between the ages of fourteen and fifteen, and they all looked exhausted, like they had been forced to wake up before dawn and run for an hour in the pale daylight. A girl seated three or four seats from the front was quietly reading a novel. I decided to leave her alone, figuring at least she wasn’t plugging away on her phone.
Carson and I stood together at the wooden podium.
“Hey, listen up,” I said, and two dozen pairs of eyes looked sleepily up at me. “Today we’re gonna be talking about something that you’re gonna want to listen to. Because it’s about more than whether or not you pass an exam. This is your future. Everybody with me…?”
Chapter Forty
Kelli
Two years later, and I was in graduate school studying world cinema with a concentration on early twentieth-century Expressionist films. Two nights a week, I taught a class on film theory over at Columbia. I was too busy to spend more than a couple days every week in the office, but Evan had graciously allowed me to retain my position as executive editor.
Zack and I had moved into a studio apartment in Bushwick. He was still employed as a recruiter and finishing his book in his spare time, though mostly for therapeutic reasons. There had been no further outbursts like the one on the trail back in Texas; the worst fight we had ever had was over a movie. (He wanted to watch Attack the Block; I wanted to watch Garden State).
Work and school kept me busy. Some nights, we barely saw each other because I had a mountain of papers to grade in addition to writing my master’s thesis on the use of intertextuality in the early films of Fritz Lang. In the last couple years, Zack had been made to watch more German films than he cared to remember. It was a testament to his devotion that he never complained about it.
One evening in late September when I was up late hunched over my desk, he came into the room carrying a plate full of cookies and a glass of hot cocoa.
“Thanks, sweetie.” I gave him a quick smooch on the lips. He was wearing a ridiculous-looking apron with bears on it, and the apron was covered in flour. “Hey, you wouldn’t happen to know where the flash drive is, would you?”
“I haven’t seen it lately,” he replied, pulling up the other swivel chair. “How soon do you need it?”
“I just need to transfer some files through Gmail, and it won’t let me load them because there are too many. Anyway, I’m sorry. This is
boring. How are you?”
Zack laughed lightly. “Girl, you don’t ever bore me,” he said. “You could sit there and read to me in German, and I’d listen. Wouldn’t understand a word of it, but I’d listen.”
“That either means you’re a good person or you just really love me,” I said with a smile. Even though he was relentlessly encouraging, I never felt like I was being doted on. Everything he said felt right and sincere, even when I thought he was being too kind.
“I know things have been hard lately, what with both of us working and you in school.” He took my hand and massaged it lightly. “But that just means we’re on our way in the world. Someday we’ll have reached the top and we’ll be able to relax a little.”
“I can’t imagine ever relaxing.” I reached for my cocoa and held it in my hands, letting it warm me. “Like, what do you do? Do you sit on a beach? Do you go bowling?”
Zack shrugged. “Beats me, but that’s the kind of woman I’m dating. You’re too hard-working and ambitious to let up even for a second. Anyway, what’ve you got going on tomorrow?”
“Evan wanted me to come in early tomorrow,” I replied. “Says he’s got a story he wants me to cover.”
“I thought you gave up reporting when you started school.”
“So did I, but he says I’m really going to like this, and there’s no one else in the office he would trust with it.” I let out a sharp laugh. “Like I haven’t heard that before.”
Zack grinned. “Maybe me and Carson need to go pay him a visit.”
***
In the two years since I’d taken the editing position, the Bugle had left the basement and claimed about half of the first floor of the Frost Building. When I came into his office that morning, I found Evan seated at a large semi-circular desk playing the Killers on Pandora and scrolling through our main page. He glanced up excitedly when he saw me.
“So here’s where we’re going; are you ready for this?” He lifted a fat binder and shoved it into a handbag. “One of the old trees in Central Park is slated to be torn down, and there’s an old woman who’s chained herself to it. She’s been there for three days with a water bottle and a bag full of sub sandwiches. You and I are gonna go over there and interview her. I’ll take pictures while you talk to her.”