Soak (A Navy SEAL Mormon Taboo Romance) (11 page)

Chapter Seventeen

“...and that was my favoritest
day in the country,” Freddy Eyring concluded, clearing his throat for
punctuation. It took a surreal amount of energy to smile, as if this forty-five
minute anecdote had been in the least entertaining. But Chloe mustered,
twisting the ends of her lips.

“More water?” Freddy asked. But
before she could respond, he was filling her glass. Which about explained
Freddy, in a nutshell. Perfectly decent on paper, albeit not a great listener.
At least he wasn’t still tormenting fat kids on the playground. That was
something.

“So,” he said, after an awkward
lull. “What do you like to do? In your free time?”

All of my time is free.

Pine for a boy.

Plot my escape.

“I did Geography and Languages
in colleges, so...that, I guess. And I like reading.” Freddy nodded. Chloe
hated how lame this sounded even as the words entered the restaurant’s air.
Elder Eyring had clearly been hoping she’d say something fun and sporty and
game.
I like traveling. I like skiing. I like tennis. I like massaging my
good Mormon husband’s shoulders before I cook him a fatty feast.

“What do you like to read?”

Nothing you’d have heard of,
jockboy.
But no—Chloe had made a
decision in the car with her father the other day. If she was going to submit
to this part of herself, the cowardly, home-loving part that feared change more
than it craved newness—she was going to do it right. She’d said yes to the date
with Freddy, and in a tacit way this meant she’d said yes to all her father
implied. Besides. Ryder wasn’t coming back for her. What was so wrong with a
second-place life?

She took Freddy in, as if for
the first time. His fork was poised over a small pillow of mashed potatoes.
He’d gotten handsome since grade school. He had sandy hair and avid green eyes.
He was on the thin side, but tall. His jaw was firm and set, but the skin of
his face was pocked with some acne scars he’d acquired in high-school. His
teeth were blindingly white, and when he smiled she was reminded of a Ken doll.
And when he’d picked her up in his reasonable Prius, her father had grinned
like a kid on Christmas.

“Novels, mostly,” she said,
trying her best to sound sincere. “Classics. I like Woolf, and Flaubert.
Dickens. The Russians are okay—I think Kafka’s my favorite? If I had to choose
over like, Dostoevsky and those guys. I like Yates, for the twentieth century.
And God, of course the Brontes. George Eliot. Jane Austen. Some Italians...”

Freddy’s fork continued to
quiver over the potatoes. His smile remained fixed.

“Oh my God, that was so dorky.
I’m sorry.” Chloe felt her face turn its trademark tomato.

“No, no! I think that’s so
neat,” her date continued. “I haven’t read a fiction book since high-school.
But I think it’s groovy that you like that. Makes you different from most of
the dummies in this town.”

There it was: the fine edge of
cruelty. A little vestige from his days on the playground, perhaps. She could
tell that Freddy wanted her to lean in conspiratorially and make some mean
remark about the dummies in Provo, but she couldn’t muster the energy. Besides,
who were they to make fun of their families? Their homes? It wasn’t like either
of them had gone very far from their parents. To the rest of the world, they
looked exactly like the next Mormon couple on a parent-arranged first date.

“I’m sorry,” Freddy blurted.
“That wasn’t nice. I love this town, obviously. I’m just a little nervous.”

“Nervous? Why?”

He finally set his fork down,
and placed his beefy hands on the table as if to steady himself.

“You, silly!”

“Me? Why do I make you nervous?”

Ken-doll rolled his eyes and
smoothed back his hair. He was relaxing into the evening, and Chloe was
surprised to realize she was doing the same.

“You’re like the smartest girl I
know,” he began. “You only ever talk to your sisters or your brother or that
girl Gwen. Even when we were kids, there was something sort of stand-offish and
too-cool about you. You knew who you were and what you wanted in a way the rest
of us didn’t. It was...freaky.” Freddy’s eyebrows turned into one another,
making him look for an instant like a caricature of a sad clown. For a weird flash
of a second, Chloe wondered what it would be like to be naked with this man.
His slightly concave chest. His freckly arms. She shook the thought away.

“You have no idea how wrong that
is,” she said instead, sounding more sad than she meant to. “I don’t have
anything figured out. I mean—I didn’t. Not back then.”

“Well, you sure fooled this
town.” This time, when Freddy sought her gaze, Chloe didn’t turn away. She kept
her hand on the table, inches from his own. She tried with all of her might not
to think about Ryder, and what he might be doing at this very moment. Who he
might be out to dinner with.

“That’s sweet,” she said,
sincerely. She smiled.

When Freddy dropped her off (at
a reasonable hour, like the perfect gentleman), Chloe watched Celeste and Marie
dart away from the front window, where they’d clearly been spying. She tried
not to let this bother her. Her sisters were younger and in some ways flightier
than she had been at their age (she’d once compared them to Kitty and Lydia in
Pride
and Prejudice
), but even so—their readiness to see Chloe fixed up with a
milquetoast Mormon of their father’s choosing was a little disappointing.
They’d never exactly had a girl’s pow-wow about Ryder’s leaving—in fact, no one
in the family had so much as uttered his name since that horrible morning—but
Chloe thought she could tell that the twins had opinions on the matter. Perhaps
because they were still in school, where modern girls were supposed to be
learning how to think for themselves, a part of her had hoped that they’d offer
their encouragement to the dangerous marine who’d set their young hearts
atwitter. But Chloe also knew she couldn’t exactly fault them for forgetting
about Ryder. It was possible, she admitted, that they only wanted to see their
big sister happy.

“Those two must keep your mother
on her toes,” Freddy said, gesturing toward the window. He Ken-doll smiled
again.

“Oh, Celeste and Marie? Yeah,
they’re a hoot. Very...energetic.”

“They’re gonna make some BYU
boys very happy,” her date continued. This led to a confused silence. “Not that
I...that’s....oh, man. Another foot in your mouth, Elder Eyring.”

Chloe laughed. She had been a
little haughty about Freddy after all; his self-deprecation surprised her.
Without quite thinking about it, she moved to put a comforting palm on his
hand, which lay on the armrest. His skin was smooth, touchable. He wore some
kind of man-lotion.

No sooner had their bodies
touched, than Freddy lunged over the armrest and took her neck in his hand.
With the urgency of a fifteen year old boy, he mashed his lips—also lotion-soft—into
hers, shortly following up with his muscular, fleshy tongue. Chloe was so
surprised she didn’t know how to react for a moment. He was clawing at her,
moving his hands like he hoped to enfold her. Eat her.

Finally, reason returned.
“Excuse me!” she cried, pressing her hands into Freddy’s chest and shoving with
all her might. She felt fear in that instant, when her own weakness came up
against his strength. Even given the tentative muscles of his chest, she knew
that he was strong enough to make her do whatever she wanted. This knowledge
shook her to her base.

Luckily, Freddy could take
physical repulsion as a hint. He demurely wiped the back of his mouth with his
hand, and for a moment it seemed like nothing had happened. Maybe Chloe had
dreamed the past moment. Maybe her new, sexual self had an overactive
imagination.

She waited for him to speak, on
the off-chance that she had misinterpreted something. When Freddy said nothing,
she readjusted her blouse and made for the door-handle.

“Well, this was fun,” she heard
herself say, sounding confused and rattled. “But I—”

“I don’t understand,” Freddy
said, in a low voice. “Everyone talks about it. And now you’re too good for me?
After I bought you dinner?”

It was like the blood in her
veins turned to ice water. Chloe’s grip on the door hardened, but she couldn’t
bring herself to leave.

“What are you talking about,”
she replied, matching his tone.

This time, Freddy made no show
of his Ken-doll grin. He snarled the next words. “It’s all over this city that
you fucked that little soldier boy. But when an actual clean, good man takes
you out to dinner, you’re too good for it?” He thumped his head against the
back of the carseat, laconic. “It’s as bad as your brother says. Must be.
You’re nothing but a filthy, ruined little pricktease. A
whore.
”

The numbness chose this moment
to return, and thank God. Chloe peeled herself out of Freddy’s car, dragging
her heels. In the cool autumn air, she felt immediately, sinfully exposed in
her thin cotton baby-doll dress and stockings. She hated the thought of Freddy
watching her as she walked into the house, but when she heard the wheels of his
car spin off into the road fast as lightening, she felt even worse.

A filthy, ruined little
whore.

Chloe hovered outside her house.
She wasn’t sure she could face her mother’s giddy “how did it go?” Or her
father’s rare smile. Not tonight.

So instead of going in, she
turned back toward the night and sat on the stoop. She let the numbness
permeate, until it seemed like her heart was slowing down. Each time it beat,
she heard the words again:
Whore, whore, whore.

Just then, a strange thing
happened. Instead of giving in to the numbness, as she’d been doing for weeks,
some new emotion clicked over. Her blood started to run hot once more. She saw
her recent days in Provo like a flash of images, a movie montage: her poised,
perfect behavior in the temple and outside of it; her perfect daughter routine.
The absence of all her beloved books. And now, this? Had her life finally come
to this? Had she allowed her life to be so inertia-driven that she would
tolerate a bully’s assault, his cruel taunts, and turn around and smile to her
family that it had gone “okay?”

Chloe stood, and shook the
gravel off the back of her dress. She wrenched open the doorknob, feeling
powerful for the first time in who knew how long. Well, then again, maybe she
knew exactly how long. Since twelve weeks ago, when the one person who’d
decided to understand her had been driven from this roof.

Johnny’s was the first face she
saw, hovering by the front door. Her brother had been acting even more strange
than usual lately, and according to scuttlebutt (Celeste had a flirtation going
with one of Johnny’s bowling buddies), the new mood swings had something to do
with a medication he was trying to go off of. Try though she had to be
sympathetic to Johnny’s outburst and condemnation in recent days, it was still
hard to imagine forgiving her once-best friend for his cruel words. And now
he’d gone and told Freddy something terrible, too?

Yet John tried to play the
amiable part when she caught his eyes in the foyer.

“How was your date,” he
murmured, a little shyly. She didn’t respond. She was worried that if she
attempted to speak, she’d spew a black stream of furious bile all over her
brother.

“Where’s Mom and Dad?” Chloe’s
heart was racing. Johnny pointed in the direction of the kitchen. As she
approached the familiar hearth, she heard the sounds of her loving family,
cooing and chatting in the silky tones they always did. But for the first time,
this did nothing to her heart.

As soon as she’d wheeled into
the room, her parent’s faces fell. They could read her expression. Elder
Johannes opened his mouth to speak, but Chloe held up a shaking palm.

“Wait, Daddy. I need to say
something.” She took a shaky breath, summoned all the courage she required.
“I’m not going to teach at the school anymore. I’m not going to lead or attend
any classes, or ceremonies. I don’t really feel like going to church, either.
That’s both because I don’t feel welcome in this community, and because I won’t
have my faith feel like a punishment.

I’m twenty-six. I’m not your
baby anymore. In this country, thank God, I can go and do and say what I want
so long as I’m not hurting anyone. I’m sorry Ryder made you feel less powerful.
I’m sorry he and I brought some vague shame on your precious, pristine house.
But you should know that he’s the only person who’s ever actually tried to
understand me, or make me happy. You should know that not all of us want your
and Mom’s life. Or even your and Mom’s idea of God.”

To her shock, her parents just
stood there, taking it in. This, then, was a third and most powerful
incarnation of a new self—a Chloe 3.0. She felt like she could swallow the
world.

“I’ve been called a lot of
things lately. In this town, in this house, in this very room. They say I’m a
harlot. A fallen woman. A whore. Well, only two people have ever made me feel
like a whore, Daddy. And that’s Elder Eyring, and
you
.” She turned to
go, feeling lighter than she ever had before. But instinct spun her heels. “Oh,
and one more thing. I want my fucking books back.”