Poked (A Standalone Romance) (A Savery Brother Book)

by Naomi Niles

  “You’re forgetting that it was Chuck who rescued him,” said Bernie, speaking up for the first time. “Jake froze on his way up the ladder; he had that deer-in-the-headlights stare. He would have died if Chuck hadn’t dragged him up.”

  “Stay out of it, Bernie,” muttered Carson, giving him a nasty glare.

  “No, but Bernie has a point—” I began, but stopped abruptly when I heard a noise of footsteps at the end of the hallway. A second later, a slender figure came into view: the fair but unwelcome form of Kelli Pope.

  “A point about what?” she asked, looking around at each of us uneasily.

  We glanced nervously at each other, none of us wanting to be the one to explain what was going on.

  “I happened to get here a bit early this morning,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting you to be out of bed yet. And why are you all grouped around the medical office?”

  Carson shot her a filthy look, the sort of look he usually reserved for militants and liberals. “Nothing that concerns you, princess,” he said, and, pushing past her, he stalked out of the hallway.

  Chapter Ten

  Kelli

  I didn’t like the feeling of being shut out by the guys. Ever since my arrival at the base, it felt like they were closing ranks trying to keep me from learning anything of value. In some cases, as on the night when Jake was shot, there was no good reason for this. There wasn’t some vital strategic interest that was forcing them to withhold information; they were doing it purely out of spite.

  If it wasn’t for Sergeant Armstrong, the whole trip might have been wasted. He was the one who took me aside on the morning of the ambush and explained what had happened. Of course I knew about the militant raid on the boarding school, having already heard about it from Evan. The rest I could pretty much piece together myself: the SEALs had undertaken a moonlit excursion during which they presumably parachuted into enemy territory.

  “It was a brave thing they did,” I said to Sergeant Armstrong. It was early morning, and the only thing keeping me on my feet was adrenaline and spite. “I don’t understand why they would be reluctant to talk about it.”

  “I think I know why,” said Armstrong with a vexed smile. “They’re embarrassed by the fact that Jake was wounded in the line of fire. They think it could have easily been prevented, and they hold themselves partially responsible. But there’s more to it than that, I feel.”

  “How do you figure?”

  Armstrong sat down at his desk, removed a pipe from one of the top drawers, and lit it. He waved it in the air as he spoke without once putting it to his mouth. “Because I think from the moment you arrived on base, they had you pegged as the enemy. Some of the guys, they see the world in terms of ‘us’ vs. ‘them,’ and your fact-finding missions just reinforce their sense of being oppressed by the all-powerful media.”

  “Right, so how do I combat that?” I hated the feeling of shunned and held in suspicion no matter what I did, simply because of who I was. It was like a permanent knot in the pit of my stomach.

  Armstrong shrugged, as if it wasn’t his problem, which I suppose in a sense it wasn’t. “You’ve just gotta show them that you’re a person first, before anything else. You’ve got to get them thinking you’re one of them. Until then, I’m afraid they’re always going to be reluctant to open up to you.”

  I kept coming back to this conversation again and again during the next two weeks as I quietly went about my job and the SEALs continued to keep me at arm’s length. I knew I shouldn’t take it personally, but it was hard to ignore the feeling that they were punishing me just for doing what I had come here to do.

  I talked it over with Azzadine as we ate breakfast together in the lobby of the hotel on my last Thursday in Kinshasha. We were eating a traditional Congolese meal of goat stew and cassava leaves with smoked fish, eaten with a sweet and slightly tangy sauce whose name I did not know.

  “I know at first you didn’t wish to come on this trip,” he said, reaching for his mug of tea. “But now that you’ve settled in, I would think you would not want to leave.”

  “I’m actually looking forward to being home,” I said with a trace of bitterness in my voice. “At least back in the office, I’m only ignored by two or three people instead of the whole team.”

  Azzedine peered at me quizzically for a moment, as though attempting to extract my innermost thoughts. “Do you feel that you’ve been mistreated?” he asked.

  “I do.” I scooped another spoonful of rice from the side bowl onto my plate, smothering it in the tangy sauce. “I won’t be upset to see the back of the Congo. You and the sergeant have treated me well, and I’ll miss both of you. But I think the rest of them will be as relieved to see me go as I am to be gone.”

  Azzedine steepled his fingers and rested his chin on them thoughtfully. “And what reason do they have to be upset with you?” he asked.

  “No reason that I can think of. Because I’m a reporter and I insist on doing my job, they all hate me.” There was no use trying to keep the resentment out of my voice; it had crept in despite my best efforts.

  “But if you’ve done your job,” said Azzedine slowly, “isn’t that something to be proud of?”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “Then you have nothing to be upset about. You are free.”

  Azzedine seemed to think that settled the issue, though I didn’t think it was so simple. In my head, I had always known I shouldn’t be troubled by what others thought, but in my heart, I took their rejection as proof that I wasn’t doing my job right. In school, I had valued the good opinions of my teachers better than perfect scores on tests; being subjected to their disapproval, regardless of whether I had earned it, was worse for me than failing a class.

  We arrived at the base that day at around mid-morning. The air was cool, and the summer sun shone in a golden haze through the tops of the trees. Though the rest of the SEALs had been awarded an off-day, Sergeant Armstrong’s platoon continued to toil away with extreme focus. Carson groaned in exasperation as he sat up for what must have been the hundredth time; it couldn’t have helped that most of his buddies were out playing basketball on the tarmac. I wondered what kind of intense determination it must take to keep doing that day after day and to force yourself to go on when your whole body was crying out for relief.

  Sergeant Armstrong led me to the medical ward, where I found Jake sitting up in bed looking surprisingly cheerful. He grinned at me boyishly as I came in.

  Feeling encouraged by this reception, I pulled up a swivel chair and sat down beside him. “You feeling any better?” I asked.

  Outside the window the basketball game was getting heated. For a moment, his gaze shifted to the window, and when he turned back to me he looked surprised, as though he hadn’t seen me come into the room. “I’m feeling loads better, actually,” he replied. “Dr. Owen said I should be able to leave within the next week.”

  “It must be a relief to have had a few weeks off.”

  I regretted saying it almost instantly; it couldn’t have been much of a relief to be fired upon in the dead of night and to have doctors picking metal out of your body, but Jake only smiled. “I feel lucky in some ways. While the rest of the team is out there languishing in the intense heat, I’ve been reading Our Mutual Friend. It’s the one Dickens novel I’ve never finished.”

  “Can’t say I’ve ever read it, though that is really impressive.” Remembering what I had come in here to ask him, I said quietly, “Listen, I know there’s been some discussion that one of the other guys might be to blame for your injury.”

  Jake’s smile froze instantly; the effect was more unsettling than if he had been glowering the entire time. “Who said that?” he demanded.

  “Just something I heard through—”

  But Jake cut me off. “Nothing and nobody is responsible for what happened to me except the bastard who fired the gun. Chuck and Zack, they saved my life. So you can go back to your website and let them know we’re the go
od guys.”

  He gave a small snort of contempt, and I could see there was nothing more to be gained from the conversation. I thanked him for taking the time to talk to me. But when he didn’t respond, I turned and left.

  Before I left for the hotel that night, I stopped by Sergeant Armstrong’s office to ask him a favor.

  I found him seated at his desk rubbing his eyes wearily, a pile of papers in front of him. He had lit at least three cigarettes, then snuffed them out into an adjoining ash-tray, apparently without even having placed them to his lips. A tall bottle of sherry stood at the corner of the desk, unopened.

  “Hey, Kelli,” he said absently as I came in. “What do you need?”

  “There’s something I’ve been thinking about,” I said, pulling up the only other chair in the room and sitting down across from him. “In the three weeks I’ve been here, the only guys who have treated me with any decency have been you and Zack.”

  Armstrong looked up at me, his brows knitted with concern. “Do you need me to talk to them?” he asked. “Have they been bothering you?”

  “No, it’s nothing like that,” I replied. “I’ve felt really safe here apart from that one incident. But everyone seems reluctant to talk to me, and I can’t fault them for that. That’s why I was wondering if I could take Zack out for the day tomorrow—with your permission, of course. I still don’t think I have enough material to write a full report, and he could help me. You and him are the only guys who have been willing to give me the time of day.”

  Armstrong frowned pensively, as if weighing the repercussions of losing one of his men for the whole day. “How much time do you need?”

  “I was thinking we could meet over breakfast at my hotel. It might be good to get away from the base camp for a while. I think he would be able to relax and maybe open up more.”

  It wasn’t the greatest sales pitch, and I fully expected him to say no, or to promise me he would “think about it” until I was already safely gone. So I was surprised when he rose from the desk and said, “Yeah, take all the time you need.”

  “Great!” I exclaimed, sounding maybe a little too excited. “Do you want me to tell him?”

  He shook his head. “Nah, I’ll let him know. I need to talk to him before he goes, anyway.”

  I turned to leave the office, feeling elated, but as I reached the door he called my name. “Hey, Pope.”

  I froze in the doorway, fearing he had already changed his mind. “What’s up?”

  Armstrong smiled. “Don’t let the other guys get you down too much. I know you’re doing good work, and you know you’re doing good work. That’s all that really matters.”

  Radiant with encouragement, I returned to the hotel at twilight. For the rest of the night, I checked my phone every few minutes, fully expecting Armstrong to email and tell me Zack had cancelled, that he wasn’t interested in talking to me. In a way that would have been a relief—Zack had left a deeper impression on me than any of the other guys in the platoon, largely because he had been the only one who treated me like a human being, and for the first time in my career, I found myself dreading an interview because I was too shy.

  Chapter Eleven

  Zack

  On Friday morning, I had just gotten into formation when the sergeant called me into his office.

  “Pop a squat,” he said, motioning to the chair in front of his desk. I sat down. “You’ll be relieved to hear you won’t be doing any training today. I’m sending you out on a special assignment.”

  He sounded unusually cheerful as he said this, and the tone of his voice made me instantly suspicious. It felt like he was trying to flatter me into going off alone on some dangerous mission. I placed a hand to my chest. “Just me? What about the other guys?”

  “No, she specifically requested you.”

  Now it began to dawn on me what he was talking about. “This is about the girl, isn’t it? Matter of fact, where is she? She should’ve been here about ten minutes ago.”

  Sergeant Armstrong walked over to the windowsill and watered his scarlet geraniums out of a tin pot. This done, he set the pot back down on his desk next to a shapeless ragdoll that had been a gift from his youngest daughter. Evidently, he wasn’t in a hurry to answer my questions, and I felt myself getting annoyed.

  “Are you going to answer my question?” I asked.

  “Are you going to continue to disrespect me?” the sergeant shot back in a loud voice, so loud that I jumped. Without waiting for my response, he said, “I’ll answer your questions when I’m good and well ready.”

  Seating himself on the top of his desk, he pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and placed it to his lips without lighting it. “Didn’t know you smoked,” I said, surprised.

  “I’m trying to quit,” he replied. “Here’s the deal: you’re gonna meet Kelli for breakfast at one of the Cité hotels in Kinshasha. I’ll give you the address. I want you to answer any questions she might have and, just in general, try to cooperate and be civil. More importantly, I want you to remember everything she asks you and report it to me later.”

  I raised an eyebrow, taken aback by his cunning. “Is that what this is? You want me to spy on her?”

  “No, it’s nothing like that,” said Armstrong, throwing the cigarette down on the desk and folding his hands together in a business-like manner. “I just need to know her angle. I want to know what she’s thinking and how this story is going to pan out. We’ve been burned by reporters before, and I don’t want it to happen again. But we’re the only two people she trusts, so we’re the only two in a position to stop it if it gets out of hand.”

  “But if you’re worried about what’s going in that report,” I asked him, “then why are you telling me to give her my full cooperation? Wouldn’t it make sense to follow the lead of the other guys and just stay quiet?”

  “No, because I need to know what’s going on in that brain of hers.” Armstrong had a determined look in his eyes; I wasn’t entirely sure he was listening to me. “I realize she’s leaving in a couple days, so if there’s something dangerous to the long-term reputation of the SEALs in that story, I need to know about it and soon. Then I can start bringing pressure to bear on her and Evan to keep the story from being published.”

  I went back to my room and changed out of my uniform and into a stylish mint-green Polo shirt and a pair of cargo pants. It was the first time I’d gotten to wear them in ages; one didn’t get the chance to go on many dates in the middle of the Congo. I could feel the guys watching me with envious eyes as I got into one of the Jeeps, put on a pair of sunglasses, and took off down the trail out of sight.

  As I rode through the jungle blasting an old Tupac anthem my head was still buzzing from the conversation I had just had with the sergeant. I couldn’t believe he was asking me to be his personal spy. It might not have bothered me so much if I hadn’t already developed an attachment to Kelli. If she had been just another reporter I would have reported our conversation to the sergeant with no qualms of conscience. But we had spent enough time together by this point that I had begun to think of her as a friend. That’s the problem with the culture of loyalty that the army enforces: once you turn it on, it’s hard to turn off.

  I found Kelli waiting for me in the dining room of the hotel, reading over her notes from the trip. She… was not dressed the way she normally dressed. Nothing skanky or anything. Just instead of her usual grey and white striped pants and bulky camo shirt, she was wearing a pair of shorts and a loose-fitting pink tank top the exact color of the geraniums on Sergeant Armstrong’s windowsill. My sense of confusion intensified. At a moment when I would normally be thinking about how I wanted to get her in bed, I was reminded only of my loyalty to my commanding officer.

  “Hey, you,” she said, glancing up with a start. She turned her notebook over on its face, presumably so I wouldn’t see what she had been writing. “Have you had breakfast yet?”

  “No,” I said as I took my seat on the opposite en
d of the table. “I was waiting to eat with you.”

  “Maybe not the wisest choice,” said Kelli, grimacing adorably. “I’ve been looking over the menu, and I think every item comes with cassava leaves. Which is fine, I enjoy cassava leaves as much as the next person, but I’ve been eating them every day for three weeks, and they do begin to wear on one.”

  I leaned forward as if speaking a secret meant for her and her only. “Well, how would you like to go somewhere else?”

  Kelli looked surprised by the question. It was like she had come to this hotel and decided it must be the only building in Kinshasha, and that there was therefore no need ever to venture outside. “What sort of place did you have in mind?” she asked.

  ***

  We ended up eating breakfast at the Limoncello, a fancy Italian and Mediterranean restaurant with an outdoor patio. She ordered an eggplant parmesan and a glass of water while I ordered a penne al salmone and a cherry cola.

  “Didn’t realize you were vegetarian,” I told Kelli, transferring my coke from a can into a glass. I could already feel it warming in the heat of the morning sun.

  “I’m not, actually,” she said. “I rarely eat meat if there are other options. And you know, after going without it so long, I can honestly say I don’t miss it. Once you’ve weaned yourself off of meat, the taste is rich and overwhelming. It’s more than I can handle, and I struggle to finish it.”

  It felt strange to be sitting out here on the patio talking about vegetarian meals and to realize I was completely absorbed in the conversation. So far, we hadn’t even talked about the report she was supposed to be writing. If she was trying to get me to relax, it was working. Between the food and the soda and the pleasure of her company, I was having the best time I had had in weeks. Since I had left the states, at least.

  “You ever dated anyone?” she asked, so suddenly that I blinked back surprise.

  “Is this for your essay?” I asked.

  She shook her head, waving a forkful of eggplant in the air. “No, I just really want to know about you. You interest me.”