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

by Naomi Niles

  “Hey, come in.” She led me eagerly into the kitchen and pulled out a chair. “Kelli will be right out.”

  She had her laptop out on the table and “Don’t You Want Me, Baby?” was playing. I watched her as she danced through the kitchen, putting up dishes and humming softly to herself.

  “You seem to be doing better,” I pointed out. “Did one of your uncles die and leave you with a small fortune?”

  Renee shrugged and smiled. “I guess things are just looking up, is all. And I guess I was just tired of being sad all the time. I used to lecture Kelli every day about staying fit and taking care of herself even on the days when she was too depressed to get out of bed. Lately, she’s been having to remind me of that.”

  “Has she been doing all right?” I asked quietly.

  “I mean, these haven’t been the greatest two weeks of her life, but she’s hung in there. I think the past couple days are the happiest I’ve seen her since she left for Texas.”

  While we were talking, the door of the back bedroom opened, and Kelli came walking out. She was wearing a tight-fitting burnt pink shirt with three-quarter sleeves and a pair of blue jeans that hung low on her hips. She’d even curled her hair, which framed her face in ringlets. She must have remembered I loved it when she wore her hair like that.

  It was the first time we had been in the same room since the day I sent her home, and there were about a thousand different things going through my head as she walked into the kitchen.

  Kelli stood there looking at me for a moment as though not sure what to say. The silence was apparently too much for Renee, who said, “Are you two going to talk?”

  “Hi,” Kelli said shyly.

  “Hey, girl,” I replied.

  There was another lengthy silence during which Renee shook her head in disbelief. Kelli took off her glasses and wiped them down with the front of her shirt, briefly exposing her midriff. This done, she smiled up at me and shrugged her shoulders in the cutest way. “You ready to go?”

  “If you are.”

  The truth was, I wanted so many things. I wanted to take her aside and apologize over and over again for the way I had treated her. I wanted to let her know how good it felt to have her back in my life after a separation that had briefly threatened to become permanent. I was hungry and I wanted to eat, but I also wanted to skip dinner and show her in more than just words how I had ached for her every day she was gone. I wanted to do it all at once.

  We ended up eating at a downscale burger and sandwich shop in SoHo. She ordered a mozzarella meatball sub while I got the artichoke burger with honey barbecue sauce and a side of curly fries. I was so hungry and yet so absorbed in our conversation that I hardly noticed my food. About midway through the meal, I was surprised to glance down and discover that I’d already eaten about half my burger.

  It was a relief to see Kelli grinning again like nothing had happened. “So, a little bird whispered in my ear that you’ve given up on your book.”

  “Did your boss tell that?” I asked.

  “No, Dennis. He apparently recorded your whole conversation on his laptop and was ready to call the police if things got out of hand.”

  I rolled my eyes. “For the record, we were never going to do anything to him. It wasn’t like that. But yeah, since he brought it up, I’ve put the manuscript away in my desk. I think I might just leave it there.”

  “Why not try to get it published?”

  “Because I have too many friends, and I’ve got too much to lose if I went through with it. Plus, if we’re being honest, losing you really spooked me. If it’s the kind of thing where I’m going to lose my temper and cut my best friend out of my life, it’s not worth it. I hadn’t even really started writing the book yet, and it was already costing me friendships.”

  “It must have been a sensitive subject for you to react that way,” said Kelli. She seemed relieved that I had broached the subject instead of avoiding it. “I had never seen you so angry.”

  “Ask my family or anybody—I usually don’t get that angry. I’m a pretty chill guy. But once we start talking about what went on in the Navy, there are a whole bunch of issues that come up related to privacy and confidentiality and the threat of lawsuits—and the more I thought about it, the more defensive I got.”

  “I guess if you’d written it,” she said, taking a sip of her lemonade, “you’d get to experience what it was like to be me.”

  “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 out.

  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.�
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  ***

  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.