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.
That in itself was a measure of how dangerous the situation with Kelli was getting: she was forcing me to rethink my feelings toward women in general. If a woman tried to go down on me in an airport closet now, I wondered if I would even let her. More likely, I would feel like I was cheating on Kelli, even though we weren’t really dating. Even though in two days she would be flying out, and I would never see her again.