by Naomi Niles
I tried not to let her see how flattered I felt; nothing boosts a man’s ego like the interest of a young woman. “Yeah, I’ve dated a few girls here and there. Mostly in high school. Nothing too serious.”
Even though she had asked the question first, she didn’t seem to like having it turned on her. “I’ve dated a couple times,” she said in a faint voice. “I was even engaged once when I first moved to Manhattan. Didn’t last long.”
I wanted to bring up the fact that we both lived in New York, a fact which surprised me, but it didn’t seem important at the moment. “I’m sorry that happened.”
She shrugged. “There’s not much you can do when the other person doesn’t understand trauma. I wanted to make it work, but it became clear he was going to have to put a lot more work into the relationship than he was ready for. I don’t think he realized how broken I was. The second he did, he split.”
I listened with a feeling of increasing disquiet. “You don’t seem broken to me. You seem like a talented, professional woman with a bright career ahead of her.”
“You can be all those things,” she said, “and still be broken.”
She paid for our meal, and we returned to the hotel. I walked alongside her feeling a strange level of affection for this woman I barely knew. Everyone back at the base camp had been wrong about her. She wasn’t the enemy, she was…complicated. Intelligent and winsome and wistful and melancholy and intensely vulnerable.
I began to feel the natural pull towards her that a man feels toward a vulnerable woman who pays him the compliment of listening to him. I thought back to the interest she had expressed in me, in my life, and wondered if she had really meant it. Her work must have brought her into contact with thousands of other more interesting people, and it seemed hard to believe that I could stand out after all that.
Kelli paused abruptly at the door leading into the dining room, looking like she had just remembered something.
“I wanted to ask you a few questions,” she said, “but I left my computer and recording equipment in my room. You mind if I run up and go get it?”
“Sure, go ahead.” I felt a faint sense of disappointment that the personal part of the conversation was over and now we were approaching the formal interview. “I’ll just go find us a table.”
“No, come with me,” she said, motioning me up the stairs.
I’m not sure why I obeyed. Maybe because she was already running off ahead of me and I felt compelled to follow; maybe because when a beautiful woman invites you up to her room, even for a second, you must never turn down the invitation. Whatever the reason, I followed behind her up the winding narrow staircase, feeling like I had stumbled into an adventure whose end was nowhere in sight.
Chapter Twelve
Kelli
I’m not sure when I first realized what we were going to do. I guess there had been warning signs throughout the day. The way he glowed when I asked him to tell me about himself, like he wasn’t used to girls asking about him; the way he looked at me with a mixture of tenderness and pity when I told him about my broken engagement. Unless I had profoundly misread his intentions, which I grant was possible, it seemed like he was beginning to reassess how he felt about me.
“You still haven’t told me very much about yourself,” I said as we sat together in my bedroom with the windows drawn. I had just finished checking my work email and was now absently scrolling through Facebook. He was sitting on the edge of the bed watching me with a look of tireless curiosity.
“Not much to tell,” he said.
“You sure? I feel like you’ve told me more about your brothers than you have about yourself. I know all about Marshall’s gambling addiction and Curtis’s new girlfriend, but I couldn’t tell you what your hobbies are, or what you like to read, or who you voted for…”
“I never tell who I voted for,” said Zack. “Especially not when I first meet a girl. Nothing kills the mood in a room faster than finding out you have completely different political views.”
I smiled, which probably seemed like a weird response. “So I’m a girl to you now?”
He seemed perplexed by the question. “Aren’t you?”
“I mean, not just a girl. I’m obviously that. I figured you just saw me as that annoying reporter from Manhattan who kept following you around asking questions you didn’t want to answer.”
I felt like I was just rambling now, but Zack saw what I was getting at. “You mean would I bang you?”
The question surprised me, and I surprised myself by laughing at it. “I mean, yeah. I wasn’t going to put it so bluntly, but sure! Would you bang me?”
Zack smiled, a shrewd look forming in his dark eyes. “I guess we’ll just have to see.”
In the silence that followed, the room around us came into sharp focus. I could hear the faint buzzing of a refrigerator or air-conditioning unit on the other side of the wall. My eyes caught sight of the cockatoo flowers wilting in a vase full of stagnant water on the windowsill that had been sitting there since my arrival three weeks before. I wondered when was the last time room service had come in and cleaned this room. At the same moment I realized, with an unshakeable sense of certainty, that Zack and I were about to make love.
Zack rose from the bed and came toward me. Although not by any means a large man, he was impressively sculpted, and I might have been frightened if I hadn’t already granted him a degree of trust. Taking me gently by the shoulders, he lifted my chin and kissed me, repeatedly, on the face and lips.
After this had been going on for some time, he broke away slightly and looked me deep in the eyes. His own eyes were lit with a strange light.
“Before we go any further,” he said, “I just need to know one thing: are you willing?”
I nodded, feeling apprehensive but eager. It had been a long time since I’d done anything like this, and I could feel a thrill of nerves in my stomach. I had half a mind to pinch myself hard and make sure I wasn’t dreaming, but if it was a dream, I wasn’t sure I wanted to wake up. It hardly seemed real, what we were doing. Here I was, alone in a room with a SEAL. My SEAL.
Zack paused, as if thinking carefully over how he wanted to word his next statement. “Do I—” he mumbled, looking embarrassed.
“Pardon?”
A pained look came into his face, as though it hurt him to have to say this. “Do I have your full consent and permission to do what I want to do to you?”
I shuddered, but not from fear. “I guess it depends on what you want to do to me.”
There was a fierce look in Zack’s eyes as he said, “Oh, I think you know, sweetie.”
The intensity of his gaze was so strong I could hardly bring myself to look him in the face. “You have my consent,” I said finally. “If I should start to feel queasy or uncomfortable, I’ll let you know. I’ll say no. But if we’re being fully honest with each other, I’ve wanted this. I’ve wanted it since that day on the tower.”
Surprise shone in Zack’s face. “You did a good job of hiding it,” he said. “I’d never have guessed even for a minute.”
I shrugged. “I had a job to do, and you didn’t seem all that interested. I was just gonna let it go.”
I set my computer on the floor so it wouldn’t get knocked off the bed, then searched through my Spotify playlists for an appropriate artist. He objected to Coldplay and Taylor Swift, thought Radiohead was too depressing, and thought Travis sounded too much like Coldplay. “How about some Bastille?” he said finally, so I put on “Snakes,” which I had been playing almost nonstop since my arrival in the Congo. It seemed fitting, somehow, and I really tracked with the vibe of the song: pretty much no one in the world can be trusted, but for now, babe, we’ve got each other, so let’s hold onto this moment while it lasts.
“About time,” said Zack with a sardonic smile as I returned to the bed. “I was beginning to think we would never agree on a song.”
“Didn’t you grow up in Texas?” I asked him as I lifted my shir
t over my head and threw it on the floor, exposing my blue bra. “I bet you listen to a lot of country music.”
“You would think, but that’s more my brothers’ territory,” Zack replied. “I’ve always been more of an indie guy. Elliot Smith, Fleet Foxes, Vampire Weekend…”
“Oh, I love all those bands.” I sounded more surprised than I’d intended; I guess up until now I had still harbored a vague notion that Zack was some kind of uneducated rube from the sticks. In the three weeks I’d been in the Congo, it never failed to amaze me how cultured and intelligent some of these SEALS were.
“Put on some Vampire Weekend,” said Zack. I got up out of bed, clutching both arms to my chest as though trying to hide it—which was ridiculous, number one, because I was still wearing a bra; and number two, because he would be seeing more than that in a minute.
I put on Modern Vampires of the City and returned to the bed. “I have to say, this beats the heck out of—”
“Out of what?” Zack grinned. “Doing your job?”
“I mean, yeah.” I couldn’t help laughing, a little. “Brunch at a decent restaurant, some great songs, not having to worry about this stupid assignment. You must be relieved to have gotten out of exercises.”
“Yeah.” Smiling, he leaned over and kissed me on the neck. “But I’m finding ways to stay active.” And over the next couple of hours, he proved it.
Chapter Thirteen
Zack
After it was all over, we lay there for a few minutes admiring each other’s faces. She was surprisingly athletic, and I had somehow pulled a muscle in my lower leg. It didn’t bother me unless I moved too suddenly or tried to stand up. Because I didn’t feel like crawling over to the side of the bed, Kelli picked up my shirt and handed it to me, but instead of getting dressed herself, she returned to bed and lay there with the blanket wrapped around her chest.
“You gonna be alright?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” I replied, feeling both moved and annoyed by the tone of concern in her voice. “We never did get around to that interview, did we?”
It wasn’t until just then that I remembered my promise to tell Sergeant Armstrong everything we had talked about. I wasn’t about to tell him how the meeting had really gone. “Ask me a couple questions, real quick.”
Kelli smiled and raised herself from the bed. “What, why?”
“Because, I need to have an answer ready in case anyone asks what we talked about. Just indulge me.”
So for the next hour, we raced blandly through her list of questions: how did I like being in the Navy? Had any of my colleagues, to my knowledge, ever killed someone in cold blood? What was the toughest decision I had ever had to make? Not the sort of questions that I was expecting, but I was tired and my head was still buzzing from the more physical portion of our interview, so I just went with it.
She didn’t show up the next morning during PT, but she might as well have been standing in front of me for all the thought I gave her. I was still so caught up in my memories of the previous day that the rest of the world seemed to fade around me, still in a mild state of shock after the recent unexpected turn of events. If it hadn’t been for the pain in my leg, I would have drifted through the exercises without paying them any mind. As it was, they flew by, and the sergeant dismissed us for lunch after what felt like only a few minutes.
The fact that she was still on my brain, consuming my thoughts, was a little worrying. Normally I forgot about a girl approximately three seconds after climax. But Kelli was still there, crowding out everything else. I kept replaying the events of that afternoon in my head: the way she defended Father John Misty as one of the great artists of the twenty-first century, the way her hair fell into her face and her tits jiggled when we made love.
This wasn’t what I had intended. All I had wanted to do was sleep with her and move on, but now she had taken up residence in my brain, refusing to be evicted. I wasn’t supposed to have feelings for her. I wasn’t supposed to have feelings for any girl.
Carson, sensing my malaise, asked me about it at lunch.
We were all gathered around the table eating steak, potatoes, and boiled carrots. Chuck and Jake were both saying how relieved they felt that she would be leaving in a couple of days, and the way they were talking about her frankly made my blood boil. “She’s great to have around if you want some eye candy,” said Jake. “But she makes the same mistake that most women make.”
“What’s that?” Carson asked.
“Opening her damned mouth.”
“If only women knew they were just there to be looked at,” said Carson sadly. In the mouth of anyone else, it might have been a sarcastic statement, but Carson meant it.
They went on like this for a while, and I sat there seething in silence, growing more and more angry. Eventually Carson turned to me and said, “You ought to have an opinion, Zack. You’ve spent more time with her than anyone.”
“Yeah, how’d your interview go, anyway?” asked Chuck.
I blinked a couple times, as though coming out of my own thoughts. “It was alright, I guess. Nothing much to talk about.”
“What’d she ask you?”
This was the question I had prepared for, and I stumbled numbly through the answers I had been rehearsing during PT. “Just your standard interview questions: what made me decide to join the Navy? Did I ever worry that I wouldn’t make it through recruitment? Have I ever killed anyone?”
Chuck banged his hand on the table. “Typical gotcha questions,” he muttered. “God, I hate that shit.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” I said mildly. Belatedly, I realized I probably shouldn’t be defending her like I was; eyebrows were being raised up and down the table.
Carson laughed and said, “It’s okay, Zeke. You can tell us what you really did yesterday. Dude probably got a better workout than any of us!”
The rest of the table laughed, but I continued to sit there unsmiling. This only provoked them to more questions.
“Was she hot?” asked Chuck.
“Did you do the cowgirl?” asked Carson.
“What did her boobs look like?” asked Bernie.
“Right, like I’m going to tell you that.” I suddenly had a vivid image of Bernie sitting in his bed trying to draw Kelli naked based on my recollections. “It was nice to have a day off,” I said to the rest of the guys, “but I won’t be sad to see her go. She’s been hanging around here too damned long.”
That much, at least, was true. She had hung around just long enough that I was beginning to fall for her.
Carson wasn’t fooled, though, and after lunch he came striding up to me with a conspiratorial air as I stood at the soda fountain. Overhead, the XM radio was playing “Speak of the Devil” by Pirates of the Mississippi, and for a moment, I was transported back to my childhood in east Texas.
I shut my eyes, and when I opened them again, Carson was still standing there, studying my face with a knowing look.
“You okay, man?” he asked me. “You seem sort of out of it lately.”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said with a shake of my head. “It’s just been a week, is all.”
“You sure? Anything you need to talk about?”
Carson didn’t usually show this level of concern, so I instinctively recoiled in suspicion. But the more I tried to avoid his questions, the more suspicious he was going to become. Realizing there was no other way out of this, I said, “Listen, don’t tell anyone else, but something happened between us yesterday.”
I tensed up, as though bracing myself for the moment when he turned around and told everyone. But instead, his eyes glittered with pride as he said, “There wasn’t much of an interview, was there?”
“We talked for about twenty minutes. The rest of the time, there wasn’t a lot of talking.”
“How long did it take you to get her undressed?”
“Believe it or not, I didn’t have to work that hard at it. She was the one who invited me upstairs.
I think she had an inkling what we were going to do, although I don’t think she even realized it herself until we got up there. It was a pretty mutual decision on both our parts.”
Carson couldn’t have looked happier if it had been him instead of me. “Are you going to see her again before you leave?”
“Probably not,” I said sadly. “At least, not in any private capacity.”
“That’s probably for the best,” he said. “This really couldn’t have happened at a better time. You get in there, you have some wild sex, she goes away, and you never have to see her again. Just like last time.”
“Last time?” I had nearly forgotten about the encounter in the airport closet. I felt like I had lived several lives since then.
Despite his vicarious enthusiasm, the look of concern still had not left Carson’s eyes. “It won’t take you more than a few days to forget about her, I would hope. She’ll be on that plane flying over the Atlantic, and you’ll already be thinking ahead to your next big score.”
There was more than a hint of a warning in Carson’s voice. It felt like he knew what was going on inside my brain and was determined to punish me for it, like some Inspector Javert of the Navy.
“Anyway,” he said, clapping me hard on the shoulders, “it’s probably best that you don’t catch any feelings. You know how women are towards men in the Armed Forces. If y’all were going out long-distance, she’d be fucking some other guy in a matter of weeks, and you’d never know.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” I said without much conviction. “Better that I save us both some trouble and cut it off now.”
“The thing about women is you can’t let yourself get too attached to them,” said Carson. “They’re there to be fucked and to raise our kids. And frankly, I’m not too sure about the kids.”
He turned and headed back toward the table. I watched him go, feeling strangely disgusted with his attitude. It took me a moment to realize I had said basically the same thing not too long ago.