Soak (A Navy SEAL Mormon Taboo Romance) (13 page)

Chapter Twenty

Lance Corporal Wallace
Steenburgen, twenty-three, was not a fan of noise. He was not a fan of music of
any kind, or what he dubbed “small-talk” (a lot of things counted as
“small-talk”), and he wasn’t above shushing anyone. “I like my quiet,” he told
Ryder, at their first meeting. And then he’d proceeded to return to his Kindle
for the next hour, where he always seemed to be reading from some mysterious
text.

Ryder figured that Dr. Fisher
had given him a difficult case for a reason. Even though Lance Corporal Wally
didn’t look “difficult,” on the outside. Unlike himself or Johnny, the guy had—thankfully—not
suffered any lasting physical damage during his tours, though the experience
had left him all-but-mute. When Ryder saluted him at their first meeting, Wally
just snorted. Apparently, young Wallace retained nothing but contempt for the
military.

So, Ryder’d tried to go at his
new project sideways. He brought a deck of cards to their next meeting—but
Wally didn’t like “competitive sports,” it turned out, which left Ryder to fume
for sixty minutes over a game of Solitaire. He’d tried to engage his new mentee
with stories from his own life, as he’d done with Dr. Fisher, Nabby, Mirabel
and Lexi. But Wally wasn’t to be charmed by the long story of his detour
through Mormonland. The only thing he’d said after Ryder had laid out the most
humiliating part of the story—the moment when he and Chloe had been caught
(literally red-handed) by the pill-popping brother—was, “Man. Extremists,
right?” This cryptic remark marked the end of their conversation.

Wally was handsome. He had dark,
tan skin, and lustrous hair and eyebrows to match. It seemed a shame that he
appeared to have given up on a normal life so soon, though Dr. Fisher had told
Ry several times “not to think of it as ‘giving up.’”

“Just like you, with your
nightmares, the boy has an illness. He’ll always have it. It’s our job to
simply ease his pain, and make ourselves available listeners.”
The advice
only works if the kid fucking talks,
Ry had retorted in his head. More than
once.

Today, as the sun was setting
over the West side, Ryder was prepared to play his last hand. He’d brought his
own book. The old favorite,
A Confederacy of Dunces.
Instead of trying
to engage his mentee, he merely greeted him with a smile and cracked its dusty
surface.

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 offering 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.