“What was I thinking: let me run to the store to get some.” Elle didn’t bother to hide the wryness in her voice. “I don’t have any here. He just left, like, five minutes ago.” That was why she still felt numb. She was in shock, right?
Marni was still studying her. “Do you want any cookie dough?”
“Probably wouldn’t be the best for my tight body.” She struck a pose for a moment before slumping back on the couch. Marni, of course, had noticed her body getting lean as she progressed through her physical conditioning to become field rated. Elle had blamed it on wanting to get in shape and look hot for Lyle.
Yet she still didn’t know where in the world Marni was going with this. “Especially now that I’m back on the dating market again,” she continued. That was a depressing thought. The last time she had been on the market, she’d spent a, well, interesting evening speed dating. It was how she and Lyle started dating.
“I just can’t believe Lyle broke up with me over- over that,” she finally said.
Marni bit her lip, uncharacteristically hesitant. Elle raised a brow. Typically, her friend was not one to hesitate to speak her mind.
“You-” Marni bit her lip again before squaring her shoulders and looking straight into the web camera. “You are pretty busy.”
Elle let herself sink further back into the futon with a groan. “Et tu, Brute?” She hadn’t been able to hang out with her friends as much as either would have liked over the past year. She’d missed a couple of Tina’s visits to Charlottesville as well as Marni’s visits to New York City because of work. Elle and Marni shared an apartment in Charlottesville, so they saw each other at least once a month, but it wasn’t like when they lived together in college and started off every day together with a coffee run. Nonetheless, did Marni have to start complaining about it right this minute? “Maybe I should sign off and go get some cookie dough: at least it tastes good-”
“I know your job keeps you busy.” Marni’s reply was hasty. “It’s not your fault. But it does make you unavailable.”
“You never hear this complaint about a guy!” Elle knew she was close to whining and worked to keep it out of her voice. Was it a crime for her to have professional ambitions? She was only twenty-three, and while she wanted marriage and a family one day, that day hadn’t come yet. In the meantime she wanted to see what she could do in the agency. She’d worked her ass off over the past year for the chance.
“True. I’m not saying you should do anything differently. Go make that money.” Marni shrugged. “It just makes you less available for a relationship.”
“Now how fucking fair is that?”
“It’s not.” Yet another shrug from Marni. “It sucks.” She fixed Elle with another searing look. “But you’re not eating cookie dough, so it can’t be that bad.”
“What is it with the damn cookie dough?” Elle paused before her indignation put more words in her mouth. She wasn’t as upset as she’d been with Preston because she hadn’t seen Preston’s dumping coming.
Well, she hadn’t seen this one coming either. However, Lyle had been upset, and Preston hadn’t been, so that was different: she knew he wasn’t happy. And it wasn’t the first time he’d been upset about her not being available. But seriously, dumping her over it?
She sighed. “Maybe I’m getting used to being dumped.” She wasn’t sure she wanted to expand on that line of thinking, so she gave a shrug of her own. First Adam cheated on her, causing her to dump him, but Preston and now Lyle had both done the dumping. Even with Adam, Elle may have dumped him, but he’d pretty much forced her hand by cheating on her repeatedly. All three had said she was a “great person,” or some variation on that, but it hadn’t stopped Adam from cheating or Preston or Lyle from walking out the door.
Maybe she…
“Put away the violins.” Marni rolled her eyes. “Maybe you’re just more focused on work.”
Elle thought about this. For the past year, between the physical conditioning, training on things like surveillance tactics, interrogation strategies, behavior management of assets, weapons, physical defense, and social skills for undercover situations and different cultures, she had barely had time to breathe. That didn’t include maintaining her cover jobs. Yeah, Mason had reduced her workload somewhat, but it wasn’t like she could just disappear for a year.
It had been exhausting. And exhilarating.
Elle had been pushed beyond all of her known limits and succeeded. As a student, she’d earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in four years at college. She was used to being the favored pupil, the teachers’ pet, as a student. She hadn’t realized how much she enjoyed that status until she was confronted with Mason’s undisguised lack of faith in her ability to transition from an analyst to a field agent. His ongoing doubt had been a shock, present even when he wasn’t physically there watching her. She began to use it as fuel to motivate herself to keep going. And she had done it.
She didn’t want it to cost her Lyle, but it had. Even as the idea that she was once again single settled into her brain, the disappointment couldn’t extinguish the thrill and bone-deep satisfaction about becoming a field-rated CIA operative. The thing that sucked the most was not being able to share her accomplishment with anyone besides, well, “doubting Thomas” Mason.
“All it means,” Marni said, breaking into her thoughts, “is that right now, a relationship doesn’t need to be at the top of your priority list.” She gave a decisive nod of her head. “You’ll just have to go jump some hot sailor’s bones when you have an itch to scratch. Guys go out and have hookups when they aren’t ready to settle down. It’s the twenty-first century. Why shouldn’t you? ”
Elle couldn’t help but laugh. “Does Daniel know about your obsession with Norfolk’s navy community?”
Daniel was the law student Marni had actually begun to spend a lot of time with lately. She refused to call him her boyfriend, but having met Daniel, Elle had full confidence in his ability to wear her friend down. Eventually. “There is such a thing as over-sharing.” Marni grinned. “I’m simply advising you to take advantage of a good opportunity.”
“Maybe I’ll do that. Right now, I’m going to go run out and get some cookie dough, since I don’t have a sailor here to scratch my itch tonight.” Time to be kind to herself again. Was this the beginning of a ritual?
“What about your hot bod?”
“I’ll workout hard tomorrow.” She sparred twice a week at a local gym to keep her combat skills sharp, and lucky for her, she had a session tomorrow. It would feel good to kick some ass.
***
After getting off the internet chat call with Marni, sadness started to sink in a little as she looked around at her empty apartment. A year ago, she had wondered if she should leave the agency after a CIA target drugged her and broke into her Charlottesville apartment, resulting in Marni being seriously hurt. She’d always wanted a career but not at the expense of her personal life. Yet the excitement of being in the field- and the chance to protect herself better within the agency- prompted her to get further in rather than leave.
The idea of keeping her professional life separate from her personal one in order to work for the agency was one she had had to accept. Was it different from any profession that required confidentiality, like medicine or the law? It wasn’t, but in medicine and the law at least family and friends knew the score. They couldn’t know “about her association with the agency.” Period. When she had talked about telling her family and friends about working for the agency, Mason had been very clear: violating her agreement could be considered an act of treason. At the time, she’d only been an analyst. The need for secrecy was heightened as a field operative: she couldn’t risk having her cover blown when she was out in the field.
Yet it was Lyle’s difficulty understanding why the hell she had to work so much that seemed to cause a lot of his frustration. Dammit, dammit, dammit.
She turned on the TV just for some background noise before cu
rling up on the futon. She would miss Lyle. Really. It wasn’t the bone-deep pain she had felt when Preston dumped her, but she did feel sad, and it was more than just a passing “Oh too bad” sadness. His mother had just started to warm up to her a little. He may have wanted her to be a little more playful at times, but she would have continued to get better. As for her family… she didn’t know what to do about that one.
It was clear, though, that his questions and desire for spontaneity weren’t going to go away, and she wasn’t giving up the CIA. She’d worked too hard.
She thought back to what it had been like when she was dating Preston while Marni and Tina had been abroad for vacation. Betsy was a good friend from work, but Elle had spent a lot of time alone in her apartment since Preston had been gone on ops. Work would keep her busier than ever, but she didn’t want to return to that existence of working hard and nothing else, either.
Her mother’s warning from their last conversation came back to her.
“I’m only twenty-three,” Elle had told her. “I think I’ve got time before I can’t have a family.”
“I was pregnant with you at twenty-three,” her mother said.
“You were divorced before you were thirty.” Elle knew she was being bitchy, but she couldn’t help herself.
“And had enough time to get re-married and have more children.” She spoke the truth. Elle had felt like the unwanted leftover in both her mother’s and her father’s “second families” as she grew up, which was why she was so determined to have a full adult life. However, she wanted it on her terms. Was that too much to ask?
“Lyle sounds capable of providing a good lifestyle for a family.”
“I have a job-” Elle pointed out, but her mother continued.
“Don’t let him slip through your fingers. You can’t have it all.”
This was another point Elle and her mother disagreed on. She knew her mother felt a lot of pressure to ensure her second husband was happy to avoid a second divorce; her mother had no marketable skills for a career. She never wanted to be dependent on a man like her mother was; she’d rather have her own career and be with a guy because she wanted to rather than feeling like she had to be with him in order to survive.
It was a good thing Elle and her mother didn’t talk all that often. She tried to check in a little more frequently to make sure she was okay- her mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer and didn’t tell her, for God’s sake- but their conversations didn’t need to be too frequent.
Now, sitting alone in her apartment, Elle felt a flash of fear. Did her mother have a point? Three relationships hadn’t worked out. If Elle was being brutally honest with herself, she wasn’t repeating the same relationship mistake like so many women she knew: each of her relationships had been different. She was the common denominator.
Adam had wanted to continue their plans to get married but not enough to leave his class partner alone, so she’d been missing something for him, even if he always refused to admit it. Preston had said she was an “amazing woman” who shouldn’t sit around waiting for him- quite a line of reasoning- but she wasn’t amazing enough for him to keep in touch with in between missions. And Lyle couldn’t see her often enough, so he broke up with her, too. She guessed it was a plus that the issue wasn’t that he saw plenty of her but just didn’t like what he saw: he was dissatisfied because he couldn’t see more of her.
The bottom line was that none of them loved her enough to stay with her. No one chose her.
She shook her head to clear it. She wouldn’t go there.
It wasn’t like they found her repulsive and couldn’t get away from her fast enough. Well, three guys hardly made a representative sample of a population, so there was no use drawing inferences from these experiences. Every relationship and situation was different. Things just hadn’t worked out, and this latest time it was because she had a lot going on.
Plenty of women worked and had personal relationships. She would, too. One day. Right now, she was in the middle of a big transition with her job. She was just getting started as a field operative. That needed to be her focus.
Maybe it was time to follow Marni’s advice: have a fling with a hot sailor. Yet the last time she tried to have a fling with Preston, the break-up had been horrible. Elle stretched out on the futon at the memory of dragging herself around, feeling like a walking corpse.
But she’d survived. Not only had she survived, she had gotten herself together (with Marni’s pushing), gone out, and encountered, of all people, Lyle.
She’d done it once. She could do it again.
Hell, hadn’t she just surprised everyone (well, Mason) by successfully becoming field rated for the CIA? This geek girl could now kick some serious ass (physically as well as with a number of ordinary items that no one would suspect could become lethal if used in certain ways), not to mention shoot a number of firearms. She wasn’t a naïve coed anymore.
And while she may focus on her work, it didn’t mean she couldn’t, well, “scratch her itch” here and there, as Marni said. Besides, she really didn’t want her life to be all work and no play, no matter how exciting the work was. Maybe Preston, who spent most of his time in the field as a spy, was right: this job didn’t allow for serious relationships. She wouldn’t be running around in the field forever: while she was, she could enjoy some flings until she was ready to settle down.
Elle stood. She was going to go out and hookup.
Chapter 5
Reese Beckwith took a deep swig of his beer as he surveyed the crowd at Shore Leave. The usual for a weeknight. Not too many chicks, unfortunately. The few who were there were the frog hogs (SEAL groupies). He didn’t necessarily mind hooking up with a frog hog, and had hooked up with plenty, but he wasn’t in the mood for one of them tonight. He wanted something different, even if he wasn’t sure what that “different” was. Looked like he might be in for an evening of watching the Yankees kick some team’s ass before heading home. Alone.
“Slim pickings,” Gabe Hesse noted as he took a swig of his own beer.
Reese nodded his agreement. The two had been friends for years, from their time at Annapolis through BUDs through rising within the ranks of the Navy SEALs together. Each commanded his own platoon, but they led sister platoons, meaning they got stationed together and went on ops together if enough guys were needed. Extensive verbal communication wasn’t a necessity between them.
“Donna likes you.” Reese nodded towards a blonde in short-shorts and a midriff baring top. He’d have thought she’d be chilly, but she was already stumbling a bit: the alcohol probably kept her warm.
“Yeah.” Gabe drank some more beer. “Her friend Lindsay’s here, too.”
So she was. Reese hadn’t missed the leggy brunette. He just knew he wasn’t interested in swimming in those waters again. She was a dedicated frog hog, looking to upgrade her status with a ring for her finger. Her many questions about what he was looking for in a wife in addition to her repeated reassurances that she was fine keeping house while her man was deployed overseas told him she was on the hunt. Reese wanted to get married one day, but he wasn’t looking for that type of commitment right before shipping out for a six month deployment.
At this point, the goal was to get laid as often as possible in the evenings while training hard during the day. He just wanted some variety. A six-month deployment on a sub meant his sex life would become non-existent: women weren’t stationed on subs. He’d see a hell of a lot of action, but it wouldn’t be the sexual kind.
Drinking some more beer, Reese watched a girl he’d never seen before saunter into the bar. She looked leggy, but those thigh-high boots could be deceiving, nearly as bad as those damn push-up bras. But she had curves in all the right places- that top she wore hugged where it needed to- and long hair. It had been a happy realization indeed to get back from his last deployment and see that leggings were back in fashion. Why women thought they were pants was a mystery to him, but he was up for it: he got
to see plenty. She walked in far enough for him to see her in profile. She had a nice ass, high and round. Yet something was different about her.
She cased the joint like a pro with her systematic scan of the area. Reese automatically stayed still so as not to draw attention to himself. Navy SEALs were taught all kinds of tricks to avoid detection, and one of the easiest ones, when not in full combat gear, was to just be still. Movement attracted the eye. She was dressed to show off her assets but didn’t give off even the slightest “come hither” vibe that most chicks emitted in this bar. She stood, looking indecisive for a long moment, before focusing on the bar. Then she headed straight for the bar, her decision evident. Her step was confident; her hips had a slight sway. She was heading right towards him and Gabe, but her focus was on the bartender: she didn’t give them even a glance.
“Ever seen her before?” Reese asked his friend. When they were in town, they hung out at Shore Leave often enough to get a good sense of the regulars.
Gabe shook his head. “Our usual?”
Reese felt a stirring of interest. “Sounds good.”
If the girl ordered a cosmopolitan, Gabe got first dibs. If she ordered a margarita, then he did. Anything else called for a discreet round of rock-paper-scissors. She stopped just a couple chairs down from them. Perfect.
“I’d like a-” She hesitated for a moment, scanning the menu above the bar. “I’ll take a margarita. On the rocks. With salt around the rim.”
Gabe lifted his glass to Reese in a mock salute.
***
Elle made it to Shore Leave a little after nine pm. She wondered if she was getting there a little too late, since it was a weeknight, before she remembered she was heading to a bar. It was probably just getting busy. Shore Leave was known as a hangout for sailors and the more-than-occasional bar fight. She could handle herself if one broke out, though. Really, she didn’t know of anywhere else in Norfolk to go to look for a fling: the city wasn’t exactly a bustling metropolis although she needed to learn more about it. Her ops would always take place on foreign soil, but who knew what she might need to know about the local area on short notice?
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