Into the Storm (11 page)

It was freaking amazing. Maybe it was because Jenk had dreamed about this moment countless times that he felt oddly detached. Distanced.

Even when she moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue.

“I’m listening,” he said, because she seemed to need some encouragement.

But she didn’t speak. She just looked at him.

So Jenk did the only thing he could do, given the moonlit circumstances.

He kissed her.

He caught her off guard, and he tasted her surprise, along with a little salt from her recent trip to Margaritaville. Her mouth was soft and warm and sweet, and his heart should have been pounding because, for the love of God, he was finally kissing Tracy Shapiro and instead of pushing him away, she was kissing him back.

Her arms were around him, pulling him even closer, her hands on his back, in his hair.

Her incredible body was pressed against him.

His heart should have been hammering, his knees turned to Jell-O, his brain seizing.

Instead, he was thinking an entire array of stupid things.

His cell phone was in the front pocket of the shorts he’d borrowed from Gillman, who’d had his seabag in the trunk of his car. Would Tracy feel that as he kissed her, and think he had a hard-on? If she did, would she also think, because his phone was tiny, that he wasn’t very well endowed? Or would she know it was his phone, and therefore notice that he
wasn’t
revved up? And would she realize that he wasn’t revved up because he’d self-gratified in the shower he’d had back at Tom Paoletti’s house after the hamburger in his pants incident? Would she then think he was a perv, jacking off in his former CO’s shower, too turned on by picnic food simply to let his overly enthusiastic body subside on its own?

Truth was, it wasn’t the hamburger that had turned him on.

And where
had
Lindsey gone, leaving so abruptly like that, while he was getting cleaned up? She hadn’t even said good-bye.

His cell phone rang its standard ring, bumping and vibrating, and he pulled back.

Tracy turned away, breathless and gorgeous and quite possibly trembling, as Jenk took his phone from his pocket.

“Sorry,” he said.

“No,” Tracy said. “It’s probably a good thing.”

He glanced at the incoming number and…

It was Lindsey. Why was she calling?

The devil in him wanted to answer it, but that same devil had provided some truly genius ideas in the past. Snowboarding off the roof when he was ten, with a bedsheet for a combination parachute and sail. That had worked out well.

As had the drinking contest he’d had with Alec MacInnough, the officer known in the teams as Big Mac because he was enormous. Or that time that he and Silverman had borrowed Chief O’Leary’s motorcycle without asking. Sending flowers to blowhard Admiral Tucker’s wife with a card that said, “Thank you, darling, for your very special personal contribution to my campaign,” and signing the President’s name. That impromptu trip to Hawaii, to stand up at Knox’s equally impromptu wedding—his first one—that would have made Jenk UA if the senior chief hadn’t saved his ass…

Jenk silenced both that devil and the ringer, putting his phone back into his pocket, where it continued to shake.

Tracy, meanwhile, had opened her car door and tossed her handbag onto the passenger’s seat. “That was a mistake,” she said, with her back still to him, talking about that kiss.

“It didn’t feel like one to me,” Jenk countered.

“Izzy told me you like me.” She turned to face him as if that news created some kind of problem for her.

“I do,” he admitted.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Tracy told him. She was really upset, but of course she’d always been into high drama. “But that’s what I’m going to do.”

“I appreciate your concern, and consider myself warned.”

“I’m serious,” she said.

Maybe her problem was that she was always too serious. Everything was life or death with Tracy. She couldn’t just relax and let life happen. But, man, she was pretty.

His phone beeped again. Lindsey had left voice mail. She’d probably been unable to resist making one last hamburger-in-his-pants joke. He smiled, which pissed off Tracy.

“I am,” she insisted. “I’m going to end up going back to Lyle,” she told him. “I always do. That’s what I was going to tell you. I mean, I want to punish him, but…”

She wanted to
punish
Lyle. Okay.

“Look, maybe you’ll go back to him, maybe you won’t,” Jenk countered. “I think it’s worth a gamble.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “Yeah, well, it’s not,” she said. “I’m not worth it.” She got into her car, started the engine with a roar. She put her car into drive, and then, as if on second thought, she lowered her window. “Don’t follow me,” she added.

I wasn’t planning to,
definitely wasn’t the right thing to say. And yet she seemed to want some kind of response.
I think you need to find your melodrama button and dial it down about seventeen notches.
Also not a good choice.

God, he was exhausted. Talking to Tracy was a workout and a half. Far harder than looking at her, that was for sure.

“I don’t really know you,” Jenk finally said. “And I’m pretty sure you don’t know me. I think we’ve both changed a lot since high school. So maybe what we should do is go out sometime. Just the two of us, though. No Lyle. No talking about him, no thinking about him even.”

She was already shaking her head. “That’s impossible.”

Jenk laughed. “Yeah, see, you really don’t know me, because if you did, you’d know not to say that. I don’t accept impossible. I never have, never will.” He knocked on the roof of her car before stepping back. “Drive carefully.”

And then, thank you Jesus, she was gone, the taillights of her car fading into the night.

Jenk took out his phone and dialed Lindsey’s number as he walked home. His apartment was just a few blocks away. It wasn’t worth bothering Izzy for a ride.

“Hey.” Lindsey answered the phone. “I didn’t expect you to call me back.”

“You called me,” he pointed out.

“I left a message,” she said.

“I didn’t listen to it,” Jenk admitted. “It was easier just to call back.”

“Are you always so lazy,” Lindsey asked, “or did your ground beef body wrap tire you out?”

He laughed. “I knew you had to make just one more hamburger joke before you could go to sleep.”

“Just one?” she said.

“FYI, I’ve got fifteen messages. I’d have to wade through all of them before I got to yours. So are you going to tell me what’s up, or are you going to make me work for it?”

“I solved the mystery of…” Lindsey paused dramatically. “The green poop. In the spirit of Sherlock Holmes, with a kindred quest for knowledge, a restless thirst for answers…” She switched back to her regular voice. “While you were in the shower, I asked Kelly Paoletti what Charlie had had for lunch, perhaps…spinach? Why, indeed, he did. I questioned her further, and discovered yes, that would give him, ta-da, green poop.”

“Hey, why’d you leave so soon—running home to catch the end of
American Idol
?” Jenk asked.

“Ha, you’re almost as funny as your friend Izzy. No, actually, my dad called me on my cell,” Lindsey said. “We hardly ever get to talk—we play a lot of phone tag—so I left to take his call.”

“Ah,” Jenk said. “Tommy told me your dad’s some big deal professor at Stanford.” As the words left his mouth, he kicked himself. That was not a hey-we’re-just-friends thing to say. Letting her know that he’d been asking Tommy about her?

She didn’t seem to notice. Or if she did, she hid it well. “Yup. Economics. Kill me now. I’m one of those people who can’t even balance her checkbook, and he’s always trying to talk me into investing. We couldn’t be less alike if I were adopted. Anyway, by the time I got off the phone with him, it was too late to head over to the Ladybug. Was it fun? Did you and Izzy get up and pole dance? I would like to have seen that.”

“It’s not that kind of bar. No poles, no dancers.”

“Too bad.” He could hear laughter in her voice. “Anyway. I just called because I didn’t want you up all night fretting over the diaper thing.”

“Thanks.”

“We still on for Monday, Hamburger Buns?” Lindsey asked. “Get this op scheduled and ready for go-time?”

“Yes, but did you really just call me…?”

“Yeah, that was a good one, wasn’t it? And by the way, after tonight, the bad jokes are done. Finito. This won’t go on and on, ad nauseam. I promise.”

“I’m going to hold you to that,” Jenk said. “Thanks again for helping me tonight.”

“Anytime.” Lindsey’s voice was warm in his ear. “See you Monday.”

She cut the connection before Jenk could ask her about tomorrow—if she was going to the wedding. But it was probably just as good that he didn’t ask. Besides, if she
were
going, he’d see her there.

He pocketed his phone.
Hamburger Buns.
He walked the rest of the way home, smiling, through the quiet of the night.

Izzy was getting another beer from the bar when the door opened, and Tracy Shapiro came back in.

She stood for a moment, looking around. Scanning the place as if she were looking for someone.

As her head slowly turned toward him, Izzy shifted, turning, too, so that he wasn’t looking directly at her, but rather monitoring her in his peripheral vision.

As he watched without quite watching, she found the person she was looking for and began moving toward him.

Toward
him.

Yes, there truly was no God. She’d been looking for Izzy.

He had two choices. Ignore her and hope he was wrong, or turn and watch her approach. She was a good-looking woman in repose, but when she was moving…

Ouch.

There was a third option. Run like hell.

“These colors don’t run,” he said to her in his best John Wayne when she got within earshot.

She stopped short. “You know, half the time, I don’t have the slightest clue
what
you’re talking about.”

“I gotta be me,” he told her. “Where’s Mark?”

“He went home,” Tracy said. “I was halfway to my apartment when I realized I left my jacket here. So…I came back for it.”

Her body language was damn near making his head explode. She was contradicting herself all over the place again—open, closed, inviting him closer, warning him to stay back. And then there was the subtext behind her words. She left her
jacket
here. Of course, Izzy was willing to answer to just about any name she wanted.

Or he would’ve been willing, he reminded himself. If Tracy weren’t the future Mrs. Jenkins. God, wouldn’t
that
suck—if Marky really did marry this crazy chick…

“Did you find it?” he asked, even though he’d been watching her since she came back in, and she’d picked nothing up.

“Yeah,” she said. She was a terrible liar, and to top it off, she was carrying nothing in her hands.

“So what’d you do, lose it again already?”

“No,” she said. “When I got here, I realized that it was in my car—on the floor in the back—all that time.”

So she’d come back inside to…? Izzy didn’t put his question into words. He just raised his eyebrows and waited.

She chewed on her lower lip, and wrapped her arms around herself and lied her ass off. “When I tried to start my car again…it won’t, it doesn’t…I don’t know what’s wrong with it. I was hoping you could maybe…help me?”

Waka-chicka, waka-chicka.

Word for word, it was the kind of dialogue that would show up in a low-budget porno flick. Spoken breathily by some buxom brunette nympho who had more than car repair on her mind.

“Why sure, lil’ lady,” Izzy drawled. John Wayne as porno star. “I’ll he’p you out.”

The look she gave him was lacking a certain
come do me
quality. In fact, it was almost a hundred percent
what the fuck was this asshole doing, talking like an idiot?
Still, she led him out into the parking lot, where the moon was hanging like a swollen blister in the hazy night sky.

Tracy stopped short, and he nearly bumped into her.

“Whoa,” she breathed, entranced. “We don’t have moons like that back East.”

Maybe Izzy had been a SEAL for too long, but he just couldn’t look at the moon and ooh and ah over how pretty it was. For him, first and foremost, the moon was a pain in the ass, lighting up the protective dark cover of the night.

Although he had to admit that Tracy looked particularly lovely bathed in its light. And yes, probably if she danced for him, naked, on a moonlit beach, he’d regain at least part of his lost appreciation for the damned thing.

“I always wanted to be an astronaut,” she told him dreamily. “When I was little, I was sure that someday I’d walk on the moon.”

Okay, so that wasn’t part of a typical porno flick’s dialogue. Unless walking on the moon was a euphemism for, say, sex on a trampoline or maybe in a zero-G chamber.

But, hello. There her car sat, at the edge of the lot, with its hood up. As if she were really having trouble starting it.

Maybe she was telling the truth.

She was still gazing at the moon, lost in a time long past in which she still allowed herself to dream that which she now deemed impossible. When had it happened? When had she changed from the little girl who was convinced she had the right stuff, to this desperately insecure woman who was so wrapped up in the mundane, daily problems of life that she couldn’t hold a simple receptionist position without messing it up?

Tracy turned back to him, back to business. “When I turned the key, nothing happened. The engine didn’t even whatchamacallit. Turn over.” She laughed. “God, I’m a ditz when it comes to cars.”

Like being a ditz was something she was proud of…?

“Sounds like it might be the alternator.” Izzy took a brief look at the engine—everything seemed fine in terms of hoses and connections—and then opened the driver’s side door for her. “Let me take a listen.”

She sat behind the wheel and her skirt, already short, rode even farther up her smooth, tanned thighs. She didn’t push it back down, didn’t close the door. “It won’t do any—” She turned the key and it started. With a roar. “Oh, my God, thank you so much!”