by Naomi Niles
“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.”
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.
“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 thi
ngs 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 w
eeks 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.”