by Zoey Oliver
I know my mouth is hanging open like an idiot. I can’t seem to form any sort of coherent sentences. Cochran Securities Ltd has been in our family for three generations, and now my father, James Cochran, is taking the company public for investors. It’s all he’s been worried about lately: keeping our image squeaky clean so we can avoid any scandals before the announcement. My getting into a bar fight with a senator’s son? That definitely doesn’t fit into his plan. But forcing me to enlist in the Navy? Hell, nah.
“This is fucking insane, Dad. No way. I just graduated college. I’m supposed to work here, with you. And what about Arie? You’re telling me to just leave her?” I can feel the bile rising in my throat. Logan has always been the boy scout, the good kid. He always wanted to be in the military. But me? I’m not cut out to serve and protect… anyone. But dear old Dad holds up his hand, cutting off my rant.
“It’s all settled, Pierce. There is nothing more to discuss. And frankly, Arie is a lot better off without you. You’ve been a drain on her for as long as I can remember. She deserves someone who won’t string her along.” He’s not even making eye contact with me now. He’s looking at something on his computer and scanning sheets of paper on his desk. I’m getting increasingly pissed.
“String her along? Do you have any idea how long I waited…”
My father shakes his head, his disappointment palpable. “I’m not talking about just fucking, Pierce. I’m talking about being a man, about stepping up and taking responsibility for your actions like an adult. You’ve never done that for her. You’ve never done that for anyone in your life. And it’s time for you to do it. You wouldn’t be of any use to me here acting the way you do now. And you damn well won’t be of any use to Arie.”
I start to protest, but I can tell by look in his eye that the conversation is over. It was over the minute he made up his mind about me joining the Navy. I stand up from the chair across from my father and leave his office with my shoulders practically drooping down my knees. When I get out of the building and onto Fifth Avenue, I grab my cell from my back pocket and dial Arie. She answers, her voice hesitant.
“Hi, Pierce.”
I take a deep breath. “Arie, can you meet me at the coffee shop next to my dad’s building? We need to talk.”
When Arie walks into the coffee shop, she is wearing what looks like four layers of clothing, including a giant baggy sweater, even though it’s May and hot as a whore’s ass outside. When she sits down across from me, she crosses her arms over her chest and doesn’t make eye contact. I feel like an asshole, though I’m not a hundred percent sure why.
“What’s wrong? Are you sick?”
She looks at me like I’m a massive idiot, then hugs herself tighter. “Half of the NYPD saw me naked, Pierce. At any given moment, I could run into a cop who has seen my tits. So, you’ll excuse me if I don’t feel or look my best right now.”
“I don’t… I mean, I guess I’m sorry but you can’t really blame me for that.”
Her face turns bright red and I see a kind of anger in her eyes that I’ve never seen before. “What do you mean I ‘can’t blame you?’ Who the hell else should I blame, Pierce? You had every opportunity to warn me what was about to happen and instead you just let me be humiliated. There were reporters at my house, Pierce!”
My stomach drops. “Reporters? Did you tell them anything?”
When she slaps me across the face, I’m more shocked by it than anything. Suddenly, every eye in the coffee shop is on us, and I try to smile at them. “It’s fine. We’re fine. Mind your business.”
But Arie is seething. “Are you kidding me right now? All you’re worried about is whether I outed you to reporters as the naked guy that was dragged out of The Carlyle? How can you be so selfish?”
“Practice,” I answer absently. “Look, I have to tell you something.”
She doesn’t seem to be listening to me, so at the same time, we blurt out what we came here to say.
“Dad is making me join the Navy.”
“I can’t see you anymore, Pierce,” she says, before I can say anything else.
“What?” we sputter over top of each other.
“You’re breaking up with me?” I ask, suddenly incredulous, even though I was here to do the same.
“You’re joining the Navy? What? Did your Dad offer to pay you?”
“Well, that was uncalled for. No. I don’t exactly have a choice. If I don’t enlist, that senator and his douchebag son are going to sue my father, and by extension, the company. It’ll ruin his IPO. You know he’s not going to let that happen, so as soon as this fucking concussion heals, I’m gone. But back up for a second here. You’re dumping me? You’re dumping me?”
Arie pulls her sweater tighter around her and shakes her head with a sad smile. “You make it sound like I’m breaking up with the perfect Prince Charming. I just can’t do this anymore, Pierce. You made your priorities more than clear that night in the hotel, and they don’t involve me, or my feelings. Or my safety. So yes, I’m dumping you. Prince Pierce Cochran, he who deigned to date the garbage man’s daughter all these years. The scholarship student. I know you probably think you were doing me a favor, but…”
Tears start to form in the corners of her eyes, and my stomach hurts in a way I’m not used to. Is this guilt? Is this what guilt feels like?
“Hey… It’s not like that. It was never like that. I… I love you, Arie.”
She shakes her head again. “I don’t think you know what love is, Pierce. But maybe you’ll learn. One day.”
With that, she gets up from the table and walks out of the coffee shop, without so much as a backward glance. And I’m left sitting alone, consumed by an emptiness I didn’t even know I was capable of feeling.
I let her walk away, and I have a sinking suspicion I will regret it for the rest of my life.
Arie
New York City, 2014
Since I left Pierce sitting in that coffee shop on Fifth Avenue a month ago, there’s not a day gone by that I don’t feel sick about it. It’s not that I didn’t love him, that I don’t love him, but after that night in the hotel… there’s no chance he’s going to grow up. He’ll just never be the kind of man I need him to be, and I can’t change that. I can’t force him to take responsibility for his own life.
Mr. Cochran apparently still thinks there’s hope for him, making him join the SEALs. I can’t picture it. Pierce was never good at taking instructions, or advice, or responding to any sort of authority, so the idea of him surviving six months of extreme training is above and beyond anything I can imagine. Since it worked out really well for his little brother Logan, I’m not entirely surprised that Mr. Cochran hoped it would do the same for Pierce. I know what Logan went through during his time in California, and it was no joke.
The truth is, since the hotel, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Pierce. I don’t exactly miss him. The last few years of our relationship felt kind of like we were on auto-pilot. Neither of knew how to get out, so we just kept going, hoping the other one would do something to save us. Even if it’s over, and the humiliation of the hotel room is fading, I’m not sure that the lingering haze of our relationship will ever fully leave me.
It’s ten in the morning, and I’m sitting behind the counter at my Uncle’s auto shop. Nobody’s called yet today, and there’s no simple work like oil changes to keep me busy, so my mind is obsessing over what happened with Pierce. I’d like to figure out something to do to keep my mind off him and to help my uncle and cousins keep this place afloat, but I look around and there’s nothing. It’s a tough city to succeed in at the best of times and my family has always struggled.
The only reason that I could even afford to go to the same high school as the Cochran boys was because I got in as scholarship student. Then, while Pierce was off at Columbia studying, I was working three jobs to afford night classes at a tech school. Now, at the ripe age of twenty-four years with no degree, here I am swimming in s
tudent loan debt, spending my days arguing with people over coupons for lube jobs.
Not to mention my boyfriend is gone.
This is not how I imagined my life would turn out.
I’m totally lost in thought when my Uncle Sal walks into the lobby from the garage, wiping the sweat away from his forehead with a grumble.
“Hot as hell today, huh, Arie Belle?”
I nod, leaning into the desk fan to try and clear some of the nausea that has been plaguing me since the summer heat set in. I seem to have lost my tolerance for it this year.
“It feels worse than usual this year. And earlier than usual too. I just want to go jump in the Hudson, sewage and all,” I say as I wave an order for parts in his direction. He walks up and takes it, then eyes me suspiciously.
“You look a bit green, Arie. Are you sure you don’t have the flu? Should you go home? I can call your Aunt Marie down to cover the phones.”
I shake my head. “I’ll stop by the clinic in the drug store on the way home, just to get checked out. They don’t charge as much as a walk-in and I’m… between insurance policies at the moment.”
Uncle Sal frowns and reaches into his jeans pocket, coming back with a fifty-dollar bill. I try to shove it away, but he won’t let me. “We both know I don’t pay you enough, Arie. The least I can do is slip you some cash to see a doctor. Working in this sauna has probably given you heatstroke.”
I cross over from behind the reception desk and give Uncle Sal a hug. But the minute he squeezes me, I feel my stomach start to roll, and I run for the wastebasket, where I empty the contents of my belly in one swift hurl. When I turn around, I’m not sure if my cheeks are burning from fever or from embarrassment. Uncle Sal just shakes his head and points toward the door.
“Would you get out of here, kid? Please? I’m calling Marie. Go to the doctor!”
I grab my bag and squeeze his hand as I walk out onto Avenue C with an achy sigh. The heat outside is no better, and the buildings are blocking any airflow, so it’s even more oppressive on the city streets. I love New York, but sometimes… I wish I could pack my things and move to a ranch in Wyoming. Sure, you can’t get a decent Pad Thai at three in the morning, but at least there is always fresh air.
After walking six blocks to the pharmacy I’m informed that there’s a two hour wait. Since I don’t have a smart phone, unlike the rest of even the most destitute New Yorkers, I pick up an eight-month old magazine to pass the time. The celebrity gossip is as new to me as it would have been when this thing first came out. The time creeps by slowly. It feels like a lot longer than two hours before I’m finally called to the cubicle. I sit down nervously, my stomach pitching like I’m on a boat. The nurse practitioner looks at me with bored eyes and taps her pencil against the desk.
“What are your symptoms?” she asks.
“I think I have heat stroke or something. The last few weeks, I’m dizzy and nauseous all the time. Headaches. It’s not debilitating or anything, but I’ve thrown up a few times.” I scrunch up my face, trying to remember. “And thirsty. Oh my God, I’m thirsty. All the tiem.”
The nurse twirls the pencil around in her fingers. “When was the date of your last period?”
“What? Oh, I don’t… I don’t know. Last month I guess? The month before? Honestly, I’ve had a lot going on, and they’ve never been that regular. I guess I haven’t been keeping track. But why would that matter if I have heat stroke?”
The nurse gets up for her chair with a weary sigh and disappears down one of the aisles of the pharmacy. She comes back a moment later holding a box, and she hands it to me without a word. It’s a pregnancy test. I look at it nervously.
“I don’t need this! There’s no way...” I bite my lip. It was only one time.
“Have you had sexual intercourse recently?”
I feel my shoulders inadvertently slump. “Well. Yes. But…”
“Did you use protection of any kind? Are you on birth control?”
My mind starts spinning. I find that I suddenly incapable of understanding words. Where am I? What is protection? Birth control? Shit. She sees what must be an expression of pure panic on my face and softens a little.
“Honey, just take this and go in the bathroom. Bring it back out to me when you’re done. When we know the results, we’ll go from there.”
I take the box from her with a shaking hand and wobble my way to the bathroom at the back of the pharmacy. There’s a dick drawn on the wall, and I stare at it while I take the test. I keep staring at the wall for a long time after that. I’m not even sure how long I’m in there. Without looking, I shove the little cap back on the pregnancy test stick and hide it inside the box. When I finally get up and exit, the door to the bathroom slams a little too loud. The nurse looks up at me. It looks like she’s been drawing doodles on an old prescription pad, but I can’t be sure. She gestures to me, and I walk towards her. It feels like a mile instead of a few feet — that’s how unsteady my feet are. The queasy feeling in my stomach could be from anxiety. But it could be from pregnancy. I could look at the test, but I don’t. If I don’t look, maybe it won’t be real. Instead, I put the box down in front of the nurse, who sighs heavily.
She takes the box from me and points back at the chair.
“Have a seat. It will only be a couple more minutes. We should wait the full three minutes to be sure.”
I don’t hear anything but the second hand ticking away on her watch. Time is moving in slow motion, and the bottomless swamp of chaos that is my life only seems to be getting deeper and more overwhelming with each passing second. Finally, I hear her tapping the desk with her pencil, trying to draw my attention back to the present.
“Honey, the test is positive. You’re going to need to make an appointment with an OB in the next day or so to confirm with bloodwork, but given your symptoms and what you’ve told me, I think it’s pretty likely you’re pregnant.”
I’ve had sex one time and one time only, and my luck, I get pregnant. Fuck. I should have known. I should have thought. All I wanted in that moment was him. And here I am.
Pregnant.
Pregnant.
The word is the last thing ringing in my ears before the spinning in my head becomes too much.
When did I eat? Was it this morning? Last night?
Bile rises in my throat, mixing with the cold, metallic taste of fear. I close my eyes to steady myself, but it doesn’t work.
My vision turns to black, and I pass out, collapsing onto the scratchy pharmacy carpet.
Pierce
Location: Classified, 2015
The rotor blade on The Nightstalker helicopter escorting us to our destination is humming quietly above, and I’m trying like hell to focus on the mission at hand. We were given almost no details before leaving our installation in Mina Salman, Bahrain. We were only told to prepare for a covert reconnaissance mission with limited human interaction. We were also outfitted with our underwater demolition equipment and given a dossier on hydrographic reconnaissance under an unnamed arms manufacturing facility. All of this adds up to mean we’re about to get into some crazy shit.
I am secretly grateful that Force Master Chief Wallace, my dad’s buddy from his days at Cornell, made it his personal mission at BUD/S to kick my ass.
I hadn’t been in Coronado for more than six hours when Wallace cornered me in the mess hall and told me he was going to break me like a horse. I fought him like the bastard I was, but by the time we got to Hell Week, half way through Phase One of physical conditioning, he could have saddled me up and ridden me like a pony. I tried to quit on at least seven different occasions. I was pretty fucking close to giving up when, after four hours of sleep, we were forced to lay on our backs in freezing cold water until it felt like we were going to die of hypothermia. But Wallace told me if I could survive Phase 1, I could survive anything. I kept that in my mind, pressing forward, keeping on. I was changing. I needed to change. For my dad. My mom. For Arie. Wallace said it was
time for me to stop being a selfish loser. To prove I was more than the sum of my privileged parts, and commit to a greater whole.
In the middle of the shivering, so hard I thought I was going to die, something clicked. Wallace was right. Only a fourth of the people that come into BUD/S actually finish, and I wasn’t about to scrub out. I wasn’t going to quit or fail at something again, like so many other times in my life. After that, the next seventeen weeks flew by, as I trained in undersea and land warfare, learning how to engage in hand-to-hand combat underwater, or how to rappel silently in a small brush of trees. At the end of it all, I was standing in front of my friends and family in my Navy Uniform, graduating from the program and meeting the teammates who would have my ass in the SEALs for years to come.
The next day, I was given my assignment. I’ve been bouncing from location to location since then. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been successful at. Sometimes I think it could be the thing that changes me for good, that leads me back to Arie. But that’s all wishful thinking. The humiliation on her face is still crystal clear in my mind after all this time.
Tonight, I have no idea where we are. Once we left the airspace above Bahrain, we could have been anywhere. They usually don’t give us full mission details until we’re airborne, but tonight seems especially covert, which means it’s likely a high-stakes situation. Our mission leader, Daniels, is focusing exclusively on his briefing packet, and isn’t paying any attention to us, so we’re all trying to get in the right headspace for whatever may be lying ahead. There is no question that we’re nervous, but part of being a SEAL is shoving down those nerves and choosing instead to run on pure adrenaline. At the moment, I’m having trouble accessing the adrenaline, so it helps when Daniels finally looks up and addresses us.
