Soak (A Navy SEAL Mormon Taboo Romance)

by Loren, Celia

  How weird, he thought for a minute, as the silence seemed to mount around them. Mere months ago, he’d been filthy, up to his waist in mud. Shells had cracked around him, their sounds louder and more terrible than anything he’d heard before—though nowadays, fireworks came close. There would be the soft whistling sound, and then the hearty explosion, and then the screams. No movie had prepared him for the particular sound of his screaming comrades, or enemies. They weren’t the dignified growls or gasps of war flicks. The screams of dying men could shock you with their plaintiveness, in the ways they reminded you of children. High-pitched and desperate and all about fear.

  Wally had experienced the same, or worse. According to the abridged file Dr. Fisher had given him, Lance Corporal Steenburgen had led a raid on a small camp that was thought to be hosting “infidels.” Some wire had been crossed, and several civilians had been shot before a commanding officer had halted the bloodshed. “We think one or two may have been children,” Dr. Fisher had said, rubbing his brow.

  “I’ve read that one,” Wally blurted, nodding at the book cover. “It’s funny.”

  “Oh, yeah? When did you read it?” If this was the biggest opening he could hope to get, Ryder was going to climb in, damnit.

  “High school. It’s funny.” Wally suddenly looked like a deer in the headlights. He snapped his attention back to his own book.

  Ryder cracked his knuckles, frustrated. Was this how he’d made his therapists feel, in Utah? Had he really been this closed off? There’s a whole world of people waiting to help you, he wanted to shout. All you have to do is want it.

  “My book club is reading it,” he heard himself say, instead. The lie almost made him laugh. He recalled Dr. Fisher’s joke, at the interview. “Book clubs,” were the kind of thing his Aunt Tilde liked to organize—fussy little affairs full of old ladies and tea sandwiches. The very idea of his fictional book club, complete with bulky marines and floating joints, made him bite his tongue.

  “Oh, yeah?” Wally lowered his Kindle. Ryder forced himself to meet his young friend’s gaze.

  “Yeah. You know, it’s casual. Just some book-lovers, doing some good old-fashioned debate. We’re critical. We eat...subs. It’s chill.” Where was this bullshit even coming from?!

  “Sounds chill,” Wally said. They continued their game of eye contact chicken, while Ryder tried not to give himself away. Finally, after a long silence, Wally leaned in.

  “I’d be down to pop by. If that’s not too weird?”

  “Oh man, of course not! I mean, if it’s cool with your...doctor.”

  “I’m not committed, Lieutenant. I checked myself in. I come and go as I please.” He sounded a little flinty on these words, but Ryder appreciated the “lieutenant.” Though he’d never told him his precise rank, if it wasn’t Wally’s intuition, it was a joke. Either boded well.

  “Great. Great.” Only now he had to orchestrate a fucking book club. How many people could his two other friends in New York scrape together? And how many among these could be counted on to have read A Confederacy of Dunces? Shit on a sandwich. “So, it’s tomorrow. Come over around...8pm? I’ll write down the address. It’s easy on the subway.”

  “I like the subway,” Wally said. It was clear from his tone that the conversation was just about over. “Dig their sandwiches, too.”

  “Ha,” Ryder said, weakly. But Wally smiled like a kid on Christmas. I can do this, Ryder resolved. The kid needed a book club? He’d get him a book club. Easy peasy.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Helllooooooooo,” called a voice from the hallway. The one voice Chloe had come to know well, in her week and a half in New York. Lexi was in the habit of waking up the Hampden House girls at a “respectable hour,” which usually meant eight o’clock. Chloe was glad for the company and the group breakfasts, but as a woman who’d never really gotten the chance to sleep in, she also resented these dawn visits.

  “We’ve got breakfast tacos today!” Lexi hollered. The sounds of other women waking up slow crashed against her bedroom door like waves. To her right was Therese, who was studying to be an Episcopalian priest at Yale Divinity School and was taking a semester off to docent at The Cloisters museum, way uptown. To her left was Angela, a schoolteacher who’d recently divorced her husband and left her two children. “It wasn’t for me,” she told anyone who (rudely, Chloe thought) demanded an explanation for such “selfish behavior.” “You think you can fake motherhood? Or love? Let me tell you: you can’t.” Angela was bawdy and fun, the one woman on the floor who could be relied on to know the neighborhood bars. On her second night in town, Chloe had made the mistake of going with Angela to the Oak Room, where a man in an expensive suit plied them with drinks. “We go way back,” her new friend had said, introducing the mysterious—and much older—gentleman. Chloe couldn’t remember how she’d gotten back to Hampden House that night, and she’d never been so sick in her entire life. Binge-drinking, it turned out, wasn’t something she minded missing for twenty-six years of Mormon living.

  Already, the week and a half in New York had contained a miniature life-time. Though the job-search, which Chloe pursued daily, was so far a spectacular failure (turned out her charming, virginal veneer did not trump her utter lack of experience), her afternoons and evenings had been a whirlwind of fun and excitement. She’d visited Therese at the beautiful Cloisters, delighting in the wildlife she’d assumed wasn’t to be found anywhere in New York. She’d also attended several masses and services with her pious friend, who was open and warm and fascinated by Chloe’s Mormon background. She’d never met someone who both made her think about her beliefs and didn’t judge her for holding them. Not even Ryder had been so open.

  Attending other churches had been a hoot and a half. She delighted in the songs she recognized, and the songs she didn’t. On Sunday, Therese had shepherded her way uptown, to the Abyssinian Baptist Church. What a colorful, exciting service that had been. A little old lady in the pew before them had cried out “God is joy!” many times over during the sermon. The words both excited and saddened Chloe, who had never felt so good in her own church. But was it about “feeling good?” She remained on the fence.

  When she wasn’t sinning with Angela, and basking in her empowered friend’s refusal of her mother/wife role, or carousing with Therese, or pounding the pavement, Chloe walked the streets of the city alone. She couldn’t afford anything she saw in the many elegant shop windows, but looking was enough. She loved that she could get lost walking in any direction out of Hampden House, but the city’s grid-like lay-out would eventually set her on the right path home. From the brilliant lights of Times Square down to the old brick townhouses in the West Village, Chloe fell in love with every inch of New York. Sometimes, Provo felt like a dream. The life of another woman entirely.

  She missed her family, though—in spite of everything. And for some reason, Lexi-the-concierge was the most recipient to her midnight break-downs on this subject. A few nights had seen Chloe to the edge of tears and terror (what am I doing here? Alone and broke in the city? What on earth will happen to me?), and each time she’d wandered down into the lobby looking for comfort, Lexi had been on duty. She was a good listener, just like Therese. They’d spent one late night chatting over hot chocolates until the sun started to seep through the old stained glass windows.

  During these talks, it had come to light that Lexi was a lesbian—a fact that shocked Chloe, even as it delighted her. (For what better fuck-you could she have for the Christiansens than, “I moved to New York and became best friends with a lesbian!”) But she soon stopped dwelling on her new friend’s sexual orientation. Lexi was kind and funny and full of love, this much was easy to see. She spoke at length about her girlfriend, a flaky-sounding yoga teacher named Mirabel, and Chloe was immediately reminded of Ryder. “I’ll have days when I can’t concentrate on anything,” her friend had said. “I can’t think about anything but her. And it happened so fast.” Chloe had nodded, without offerin
g her own story. She knew, after all, exactly what that feeling was like—and it somehow felt better to hear another person describe it than to wallow in her own recent pain. Saying his name out loud still felt...unsafe.

  The days of adventure and the evenings of fellowship were certain to be curbed, however, if Chloe didn’t find herself a damn job. Gwen had only arranged for her to say at Hampden’s for two weeks at a discounted price. She also wasn’t any closer to finding Ryder, and not for lack of trying. On her first day in the city, she’d had a defeating afternoon at the VA’s office, after being told by three different secretaries that they could procure personal information, “if you just sit tight.” The whole day had passed before some kind admin had told her straight-up, “we never release mailing addresses. Not without a sub-poena.” That had been another crying night.

  But it wasn’t all about Ryder anymore. Her heart was heavy and sore and bruised, but in some ways she felt more alive. Just being in a new place, introducing herself to new people, seeing new things—all of this made Chloe feel as if she was closer to knowing herself. She’d spent so long being tentative about her wants, her dreams, her fears. She didn’t want this journey of self-discovery to end.

  “Princess, did you hear? We’ve got breakfast tacos!” Angela was bellowing into her tiny single room as she peeled several foam curlers from her hair. That was another nice thing about living with all ladies: you didn’t have to worry about how you looked when you went down to breakfast. Chloe pulled on some sweatpants (borrowed from Therese) and moseyed down the grand staircase, joining a procession of her peers. Everyone waved blearily. People started groping for coffee.

  “Yo, Christiansen. I have something to ask you about,” Lexi bustled over. Despite having worked the night-shift at the front desk, she was the only one who looked ready for the day. Chloe didn’t think she’d ever seen her new friend without a full and perfectly-applied face of make-up. “You’re a nerd, right?”

  “Umm...”

  “Well, I mean—you like books.”

  Chloe relaxed. Last Friday, she’d finally sent herself to the New York Public Library, where she’d marveled at the elegant staircases and the green Tiffany lamps of the reading room. She’d felt just like Belle in Beauty and the Beast.

  “Yeah, I like books. Why?”

  “Okay, so this friend of mine is holding together some kind of rag-tag book club thing? Super dorky, I know, but he needs people to fill it out for some reason. I thought of you.”

  Chloe smiled, pleased at the invite. She had yet to be introduced to any real social circles outside Hampden House, and this might be a nice change.

  “What’s the book?”

  The sound of porcelain breaking filled up the dining room, and Lexi screwed her eyes shut in annoyance.

  “Damnit, I need to go deal with that. Err...it’s about the war, or something? A Confederacy of Dunces. You read it?”

  She saw, for an instant, his jutting jaw. The way his eyes squinted when he was caught up in some beloved passage. She’d only caught him reading a few times, but it was those moments, almost more than their shared bliss, that lingered in her brain with the force of conviction. When she pictured him reading, she felt certain that he was the man she’d always be dreaming of. The man who got away.

  “Meet in the lobby at seven and I’ll give you details? I need to clean that up before Risa comes in for her shift.” Before Chloe could reply, Lexi had bustled off in the direction of the breakfast catastrophe.

  A book club. How...quaint. Chloe tried to picture this strange, New York event as she heaped hash browns onto her plate. Lexi had mentioned a male friend—what kind of male friends would Lexi have? The hipster types she’d seen wandering the East Village? Or maybe someone more zany and old-school, a rockabilly boy like herself. Yet she couldn’t get past her idea of a book club as something Oprah endorsed. Back in Provo, her parents were part of book clubs. Her father’s constituted a bunch of elder Elders reading true crime and drinking tea once a month; her mother’s was basically the same, except with women and romance novels.

  She took a third spoonful of hash browns when no one was looking, banking on the fact that this way she wouldn’t need to buy lunch. Plus, there was one unsung asset to New York City life on a budget. You could eat as much as you wanted to when a feast came up, and walk it off later.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “What I don’t get is why you had to make up a club,” Mirabel said, pretending to fluff a pillow. “Why couldn’t you just invite the guy out for drinks like a normal person? We’d all show up and be nice, and wouldn’t have to pretend we read some book.”

  Ryder frowned at her half-assed primping, crossing the room and re-fluffing the pillow himself. “I told you,” he huffed. “Wally’s really fragile. And the only thing that gets him hot on god’s green earth is apparently books.”

  “Still seems weird that you lied.”

  “Yeah, well.” Ryder didn’t have a come-back. To cover his ass, he went to his Aunt’s fridge and pulled out a lemonade, after passing over a lone, cold Budweiser. It was only noon, and he was still enjoying being good.

  “Lexi just texted. She says she can bring someone from her ladies lounge.” Mirabel laughed, then pressed herself into a Downward Facing Dog. Her shapely ass drew Ryder’s attention.

  “I know what that means,” Ryder pretend-groaned. It was a running joke in their trio that Lexi’s “ladies lounge” was a Manhattan haven for single ladies who sought the company of... other single ladies.

  “Don’t assume, Strong,” Mirabel said, pressing herself into some kind of lotus. Ryder wasn’t good enough at yoga yet to remember all the poses. “When you assume, you make an Ass of U and Me.”

  The doorbell rang, and Ryder went to pay for the improbable six foot sub he’d ordered. He continued to kick himself mentally for all the fibs, but not all of him was sold. There was still a chance that tonight could be fun. If nothing else, he and Wally would get to talk about his favorite book. Who knew what the Lance Corporal would have to say.

  “Should I do a beer run?” Mirabel finally returned to standing. Ryder shook his head.

  “I think we’re cool with snacks and soda,” he said, clapping his hands together. “And all the fly, untouchable sapphic scholars as entertainment.”

  “Har dee har har,” his friend said, tossing a pillow at his head.

  Chloe’s hands shook. She’d been fooling herself, all this time. Pretending to be a real New Yorker. She’d mastered the above-ground grid, but it turned out that there was a whole, huge world below the city. It was called the subway, and it was terrible.

  Lexi had totally hung her out to dry, leaving some message at the reception desk about a “last-minute emergency.” She, apparently, had to take a cab back to Brooklyn, but had left “explicit” instructions for navigating the train to a place called Bed-Stuy. Chloe already regretted the choice to go anywhere alone at night. The subway smelled weird, and everything she touched was dirty, and none of the signs for trains made any sense. What was the difference between ‘Express’ and ‘Local?’ How come some trains were the same number and color, but went to different places? She hated it, absolutely hated it. When her new bag was caught between the unforgiving metal doors, she thought she’d never missed Provo more. Quiet Provo, where people drove cars, and didn’t do terrible, gross things in public.

  After much trial and error, she was finally on an A train, holding her cheap secondhand paperback copy of A Confederacy of Dunces. She tried to keep evil thoughts at bay. There was no way Lexi was leading her into some kind of trap, right? Maybe all this time, her new friend had been lying in wait to kidnap the quiet Mormon girl, and hold her hostage. It had happened to smarter women than she.

  “This is a coincidence,” someone said, on her left. At first, Chloe tried not to look. Though no one had told her, it seemed like subway etiquette that no one struck up conversations with their stranger seatmates. But the dude was persistent. He leaned ov
er and wagged a book in her face, and a small laugh escaped her when she read the title. A Confederacy of Dunces.

  “Any chance you’re headed to Bed-Stuy?” the man asked her. He was sort of cute, but bore an intense expression. His dark eyes were ringed with circles, as if he hadn’t slept in days.

  “Bed-sty? Is that how you pronounce it?”

  “I think so. But I’m new in town, too.” The boy reached out a quivering hand to shake. “I’m Wally. How do you know Jughead?”

  Jughead. That was a weird nickname. For the first time, it occurred to Chloe that she hadn’t asked a thing about her host. She’d merely drawn a picture in her mind based on Lexi, and the kind of book-club hosting friends she imagined Lexi must have. A boy named Jughead didn’t quite fit the profile.

  “It’s the hair,” her seatmate explained. “Shaggy in the back, you know. He’s got the same hair as the comic-book guy.” In another surprise move, Chloe felt her heart sink. If their host had long black hair, he probably wasn’t...no, it didn’t make sense. It was impossible. It was best that she’d never quite articulated the hope.

  “I don’t know him, actually,” she said. “I’m a friend of Lexi’s.”

  “I don’t know Lexi.” The man said this with so much unexpected harshness that Chloe didn’t know what to say next. They rode the rest of the way in an awkward silence, and she was worried when he rose at the same time as her for the doors at Nostrand Avenue.

  “I’m sorry,” Wally said, as soon as they’d both breached the salty Brooklyn outside world. Chloe was immediately struck by how different this part of the city was from her relatively clean corner of Manhattan. The streets were diverse, full of dark faces she’d so rarely seen in Utah. She could smell something tasty cooking, but for the life of her couldn’t triangulate what kind of food it was. Ditto to some music with a bass beat; a shop on the corner was blaring a heady dance tune. People passed by its doors without even seeming to notice.