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

by Naomi Niles

  “What’s up?” asked Carson, looking slightly irritated. It was raining outside the windows, and the room was dark enough that he had to turn on a lamp to see me clearly. Rubbing his tired eyes, he said, “We’re not going golfing again, are we? In this weather?”

  From the way he was clutching his temples, I suspected that Carson was suffering from a hangover. Either that or he really hadn’t gone to bed the night before, in which case being woken up like this was probably torture. His pants were draped over the arm of the couch; reaching into the pockets, he pulled out a cigarette and lit it, letting the smoke rise to his nostrils without once setting it to his lips.

  “You know you’re not allowed to smoke in this building, right?” I reminded him.

  Carson shrugged. “I’m not smoking.”

  Eventually I was able to coax him off the couch and into his clothes with the promise of breakfast and coffee. It’s hard to explain how good it felt to be back in the city after hiding out in the boons for a week. I wanted to run through the streets like Gene Kelly marveling over every hydrant and lamp post. It was all so big, so magnificent. But we had things to do.

  “So where we going?” Carson asked as we tore down Tenth Avenue. The rain was falling thick and fast, and I could barely see more than a few yards in front of me. On the sidewalk, a large Samoyed dried itself with a tremendous shaking motion while a couple of kids carrying subway sandwiches hugged them protectively to their chests like some treasured family relic. A girl in a short skirt and a blue sweater ambled idly over wet oak leaves and damp, discarded flyers, seemingly oblivious to the deluge happening all around her.

  “We,” I said, “are going to have a chat with Kelli’s boss.”

  Carson stared at me as if I had gone mad. “And by ‘chat’ you mean—”

  “Exactly what you think I mean. This guy’s been giving her a hard time, so I figured it’s time we went over there and gave him a hard time.”

  The car drove through a puddle, splashing a couple of pedestrians on the sidewalk who were crouched under an awning trying to get out of the rain. “You sure this is a good idea?” Carson asked. When I glowered at him he added in a meek voice, “I don’t wanna do anything illegal.”

  “Carson, when you can explain to me why you thought it would be a good idea to stalk a high school girl who had stolen your wallet, then we can talk about the difference between right and wrong. Until then, spare me the lectures, please.”

  Carson was silent for a long moment, as though trying to think up a counter-argument. But I was saved from ever having to hear it by our arrival at the Bugle’s offices.

  “Stay close to me and don’t say anything unless I tell you to,” I said as we stepped out of the car into the pouring rain. “All you’ve really gotta do is look threatening.”

  “This is where the Bugle is located?” asked Carson, staring in disbelief at the old and dilapidated warehouse with its peeling paint and torn awning. “Somehow I thought it would be better than this.”

  “They don’t even own the whole building,” I said, leading him through the front door and down the hall. “We’re looking for a dank basement.”

  “The way it’s coming down out there,” said Carson, “the basement’s probably flooded. We’d be better off coming back tomorrow or some other day when it’s not raining.”

  “There it is!” I said, motioning to a steel door at the end of the hallway. When we opened it, we found a flight of stairs leading up and another flight leading down. We followed the descending stairs and within a few moments we had entered a dark room lit only by a dim bulb and the glow of a few computer screens. It smelled badly of mildew and cat piss, and there was a constant drip of water that was somehow louder and more insistent than the one in my bedroom.

  Kelli’s boss was sitting at a desk in the corner of the room surrounded by pipes. I recognized him from the awards banquet, but he must not have remembered us because he stared blankly at us as we came in and tapped his pen against the desk in agitation.

  Carson and I strode up to him with stony faces. “Mind if we talk to you for a minute?” I asked him.

  “What do you need?” He didn’t look too happy to see us, probably because he sensed that we could break him just with our eyes.

  “Heard a rumor you’ve been giving a friend of mine a hard time about a book I’m supposed to be writing.” I leaned against the desk with the easy confidence of a man who knows he can’t be bullied. Behind us I could hear someone playing “Fireflies” by Owl City, very loudly, from their laptop. Turning around and giving him a death glare, I said, “Do you mind?”

  He shrugged and lowered the volume, looking irritated. I turned back around. “Let’s get a few things straight here. I’m not writing any book that you or your reporters need to be worried about. The Navy would appreciate it if you’d lay off of us. We got into enough trouble after your girl, Kelli, wrote that piece about us.”

  “Did you not think she did a good job?” her boss asked.

  “I thought it was excellent! That’s just the problem. You’re sending in brilliant reporters, like her, to expose all the rot and filth in the military. Some of that stuff don’t need to be talked about. Hell, she’s smart enough that you could promote her to an editor’s position and we wouldn’t have to worry about her no more. Next time you wanna do a piece on me, or one of my books, or the Armed Forces in general, send in one of your hack writers who takes shortcuts and don’t know what they’re doing half the time. Send in that kid.” I motioned to the guy who had been playing Owl City, who could sense he was being talked about and glared at us. “But don’t send in your best. Don’t send in Kelli.”

  “But she’s my best reporter,” he said in an annoyed tone. I got the impression he didn’t enjoy having strangers wander into the office and make staff recommendations.

  “And she’ll make a great editor. If I come back and find out she’s still writing about us, there’s gonna be hell to pay.”

  The boss-man rolled his eyes. “And just what kind of hell are you planning to unleash?”

  I nodded to Carlson, who picked up a loose tube of metal pipe and bent it in his hands like melted butter. Tossing it down on the desk, he said, “Now imagine that was your finger.”

  The boss nodded, looking distinctly impressed and a little scared. “I’ll talk to her when she gets in and see if we can’t work out a compromise.”

  By the time Carson and I emerged onto the rainy street a few minutes later, we were giddy with triumph.

  “DID YOU SEE THAT?!” Carson shouted, punching me in the arm. “That was just about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!”

  “I’ve gotta admit I feel pretty damned good about it,” I said as we climbed back into my car. “Only sad thing about it is, Kelli wasn’t there to see it.”

  “She’ll be hearing about it, I’m sure,” Carson replied with a smirk. “I hope she likes being editor.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Kelli

  For about a week after Zack broke up with me I could barely bring myself to get out of bed in the morning. If it wasn’t for my job and my sister’s persistence, I might not have. I kept thinking of all the things I could have done differently to save the relationship, but it all went back to the same thing: I should never have asked him about his book or volunteered to help him.

  “You’re looking at this the wrong way,” said Renee as we sat in the kitchen together eating cereal one morning a few days after the breakup.

  “How? Tell me what I’m not seeing here.” My tone was challenging, but I sincerely wanted to know.

  “You’ve gotten this idea that if only you hadn’t said this one thing, he would still love you and your relationship would be perfect.”

  “Maybe that’s because he did love me and our relationship was perfect.”

  Renee ignored the edge in my voice. “If he’d break up with you over one thing, then the solution is not to go back in time and not say that one thing. If it wasn’t th
is, it would’ve been something else. He gave you no time to explain, no time to correct yourself, no time to talk it out. Anyone who treats you like that would have eventually blown up over something. Frankly, I think you deserve better.”

  It was gratifying to hear her say this, but she hadn’t been in our relationship, hadn’t seen the way he looked at me sometimes when we were in the car together, hadn’t heard the sincerity in his voice when he whispered the things he loved about me. If I hadn’t been so convinced of his love, the betrayal wouldn’t have hurt this much.

  In my head, I knew what Renee was saying was probably true, but I couldn’t convince my heart of that. I still revered and respected Zack like no other man, and if he didn’t think I was worth dating, then there must have been something wrong with me. I began spending hours in the bathtub. I would lay there until the water had all gone cold, and my skin was a bundle of wrinkles. I bought a couple bottles of scented lotion from Bath & Body Works and rubbed them all over myself. I used so much in one day that I emptied an entire bottle.

  When I went into work, I barely paid attention to anyone. I’d spend a few hours shuffling papers and occasionally typing, trying to look busy. No one asked how I was doing, and I began to wonder if they hated me as much as Zack did. Maybe they all wanted me to go somewhere else where I wouldn’t ever bother them, but they were too polite to say anything. Maybe it had been like this my whole life and up until now I had been too oblivious or self-deluding to notice. I began to hate the fake smiles and to wonder what they were hiding.

  So it was all the more shocking on Monday morning when I came into work and Evan informed me that he was giving me the new position of executive editor.

  “Pardon?” I said with a blank stare. “I didn’t even know we had an executive editor position.”

  “We didn’t,” said Evan. “But we do now.”

  He said it so simply, as if he regularly made up new positions and handed them out to undeserving employees. I sank down into my chair wondering if I had heard him correctly. Dennis smirked and applauded.

  I sat for a long time with my hands folded over my mouth trying to figure out how this had happened. It was like one of those dumb ‘90s movies where some regular schmoe becomes president of the United States. I didn’t feel remotely qualified to be the executive editor, whatever that was, and I couldn’t understand why Evan had thought I was.

  Once the meeting was over, I questioned him about it.

  “Hey Pope,” he said as I approached his desk. He was scrolling through CNN on his laptop. “Did you hear about the mass shooting at the maritime museum in Brighton Beach? The gunman killed three people before being impaled by a harpoon.”

  “Yeah, hey, I just had a couple questions.” I sat down in the hard, wooden chair across from him and folded my hands in front of me. “Why are you giving me this position?”

  “I’ll be level with you,” said Evan, leaning forward with the air of a spy preparing to divulge state secrets in a public restaurant. “I think you’ve proven yourself more than up to the challenge of editing our digital publications.”

  “I thought we had Bryan for that.”

  Evan winced, as if it had just become painfully clear to him that I had no idea what an editor did. “Bryan’s a copy-editor. He fact-checks the work of our reporters and makes edits for spelling and grammar. You’ll be a content editor, which means you determine what stories are printed and where. You’re choosing the tone and layout of the website. It’s a high responsibility, not one I would entrust to just anyone.”

  “Great. Why?”

  Evan rubbed his forehead wearily with his wrist. “Let’s just say that last week I had some words with a couple of very persuasive fellows who recommended you.”

  Something in the tone of this last remark struck me as decidedly eerie. “Very persuasive fellows? You mean, like, the mafia?”

  Evan shrugged, as if he regularly dispensed jobs under duress. “They could’ve worked for the mafia. Look, the important thing is that now you’ve gotten what you wanted. You have a position of actual importance within this organization, and I don’t have to worry about getting my fingers broken.”

  “Fingers broken?” I half-rose in my seat, goggling at him. “Did they threaten you?”

  “It doesn’t matter now!” said Evan, looking harassed. “I’m sorry I capitulated, but they were going to bring very serious action against our website unless I took you off the news beat and elevated you to a senior position. I promised them we wouldn’t be doing any more investigative reports on the military, so we won’t have to worry about this happening.” Reaching behind him, he picked up a rod of metal pipe and threw it across the desk. It was bent in the middle, like it had been heated and then twisted by powerful hands.

  It was the most bizarre thing. Why would a couple of shady guys threaten Evan with physical violence unless he threatened to give me a promotion? Did I even have any powerful friends? For that matter, did I have any friends?

  “Evan, these guys you met with,” I asked him, “what did they look like?”

  Evan had to think it over for a minute. “They were both tall, jacked; one of them had stubble and the other was clean-shaven; they were wearing Polo shirts—I wasn’t paying much attention, I was too distracted by the fact that they could break me.”

  Now it felt like we were getting somewhere. A new sense of urgency crept into my voice as the truth became clear to me. “What about their accents? Did they have one?”

  “The one didn’t speak much, but the other one sounded vaguely Southern—Texan, in fact! He was Texan.”

  Without another word, I shot up out of my chair and ran to call Zack. If this was what I suspected it was, I knew he would answer—and he did, on the third ring.

  “Hey, what’s up?”

  It was like the last two weeks hadn’t happened—like he hadn’t blown up and put me on a plane back to New York in the middle of our late-summer Texas vacation.

  “Hey…” I said slowly. “Did you confront my boss and threaten to break his fingers unless he made me an editor?”

  “Did he?” Even from the other end of the line, I could almost hear him smirking.

  “Did—did you bend a metal pipe, hoping it would scare him?”

  This time Zack laughed, as if to confirm all my suspicions. “It was Carson that did that! Me, I couldn’t bend a toothpick. You should’ve seen the look on that man’s face when he did it. Damned near called you up and offered you the job on the spot!”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was weird and unexpected and strangely touching. “Why would you do that?”

  “Because I’ve been doin’ some thinking.” It was obvious he had spent most of the last couple weeks at home, as his accent had reached Peak Texan. “I’ve been thinkin’ a lot about us and about how I treated you when we were home, and I wanted to tell you I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have flown off the handle like that; I should’ve told you what was bothering me, talked it through, and then we could’ve gone back to the house and had orange juice and baked apples. I just made things a hundred times worse, and I’m sorry, and I’ll understand if you don’t ever want to go out with me again.”

  “Zack—”

  “I just—baby, I don’t know what came over me out there on the trail that morning. I knew as soon as you left I should’ve gone running after you, but I kept on like the stubborn fool I am and just about ruined the best thing I ever had. So, just to make it up to you, I want to take you out tomorrow night.”

  “Zack, you already made it up to me.” I was so surprised and moved I could hardly speak. “You’ve more than made it up to me, but yes, I would love to go.”

  “Really?” It was obvious from the tone in his voice that he hadn’t expected me to say yes.

  “I’d love to have dinner with you. And, just to show you there are no hard feelings, I won’t force you to eat fancy French cuisine this time.”

  “Baby, that’s all I ask.”

&
nbsp; Zack was still laughing when he hung up the phone. I hadn’t known it was possible to miss someone’s laugh that much.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Zack

  I hadn’t felt this alive in so long.

  The thing I had loved about being in the Navy—what made all the weeks of tedium and training worth it—was those moments when you got to experience something unique and unrepeatable. I had a friend in Baghdad who, at the height of the fighting, ran into a building where guns were firing in every direction, raced up a flight of stairs and pulled a friend to safety, without getting struck but once.

  Or those moments when you’ve stayed up all night and you get to watch the sun rise over the mountains in the most vibrant colors. It’s like something not of this earth. It’s what all the great stories are about, only most of us don’t get to live them.

  Moments like that get the adrenaline flowing. They remind you why you signed up for this job.

  When it happens, you feel like you’re standing on a mountain that no one has ever climbed before. You tell yourself, “There’s no other feeling in the world that can touch this.”

  That was how I felt in the thirty-six hours between my phone conversation with Kelli and our date on the following night. Was I really planning on hurting her boss? Of course not. But I had secured Kelli’s promotion through a combination of courage and quick thinking. Most guys wouldn’t have thought to go charging into that office with their best friend; fewer still would have actually done it.

  But we’d done it; and we’d turned things around. I had no hope, going into that meeting, that I’d ever be back with Kelli. I had made too many mistakes, I’d come too far, and I’d all but ruined our chances. But now we were together again, and I had never wanted her more.

  Before meeting Kelli, I’d had a reputation for being able to get it whenever I wanted it. But this was a new experience for me: wanting her like I wanted air and having to wait for it.

  When I went up to her apartment on Tuesday night, Renee opened the door. She was wearing a pair of gray athletic shorts and a pink “I heart boobs” t-shirt, sipping a mocha Frappuccino.