She rang the bell again—just as the door swung open.
“Sorry,” she said. Oh, that was a brilliant start. She tried to smile. “Hi.” Even better.
Complete surprise crossed Senior Chief Wolchonok’s face as he looked at her. It didn’t last long. It was just an almost imperceptible flash before he assumed the neutral expression she recognized as his parade rest face. It made him look completely inscrutable.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “This is probably a bad time.”
She’d woken him up. That much was obvious. He wore a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, but his hair was a mess. It stuck straight up in places, and his feet were bare.
She turned to run away, but he stopped her. “No. I was— Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m . . .” Honest. She had to be completely honest with this man. It was the only way she could do this. She forced herself to look right into his eyes. They were blue—a fact she’d discovered to her surprise two days ago, when he’d followed her and Joel into the parking lot, when he was so impossibly kind to her.
She’d never dared to get close enough to the senior chief to really look into his eyes before.
“No, I’m not all right—I mean physically, I’m all right. Really,” she quickly added as he started to react, “but . . .” She took a deep breath. “I’m taking you up on your offer of help, Senior Chief. That is, if it still stands.”
“Of course.” He didn’t hesitate. “I just didn’t expect . . . Um . . .”
She knew it. She shouldn’t have come here, to his home. This was a mistake.
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of going to your office,” she admitted, “and I wasn’t even sure I was really going to come here at all until I came here and . . .” Her voice shook, dammit, but he saved her dignity by pretending he didn’t notice.
“It’s not a problem.” He opened the door wider, stepping back. “Come in. Please. I’m not exactly dressed for visitors, and the house isn’t really . . .” He tried to smile at her. “But now’s a fine time. I am glad you came, Lieutenant. And it’s absolutely fine for us to talk here. It is.”
If he said fine one more time, she was going to turn and run.
But his entryway smelled like freshly brewed coffee, and she went inside instead. Teri had expected more of a men’s locker room ambiance from the senior’s house—old socks and dirty laundry—but not only was that coffee she smelled, it was good coffee.
And the interior of the bungalow was as perfect as the outside. The woodwork gleamed. The entryway wasn’t an entryway, she realized, but rather a cozy living room. It had a fireplace made with huge smooth stones like giant, rounded beach pebbles. It was beautiful. The entire place was remarkable.
“Come on into the kitchen,” he said. “Are you hungry?”
There was, however, no furniture in the room.
Only a mirror on the wall, and as the senior chief passed it, he caught sight of himself and quickly tried to fix his hair.
“God damn,” she heard him mutter.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” he said more loudly. “I was up early this morning—I went out for a run. I have to go over to the base, but not for another few hours, so I was just kind of vegging out on the porch when you buzzed. Dreaming about breakfast. You caught me in scumball mode—I haven’t even showered—so make sure you don’t stand downwind. Coffee?”
“Thanks.” The kitchen was right out of an old black-and-white movie starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Big gas stove with a griddle. Rounded refrigerator. Separate pantry. There was a table in here, but it had only one chair.
As Teri watched, Stan took a pair of mugs from the pantry shelf and poured two steaming cups of coffee.
“I hope you like it black,” he said. “I ran out of sugar and milk about two years ago.” He set one of the mugs on the table beside her. “That’s why I usually have to settle for dreams of breakfast—I’m too lazy to shop for anything but coffee. And I only buy that because I’m addicted.” He toasted her with his mug and a smile.
He had a lovely smile. It completely transformed his face, and Teri found herself smiling tentatively back at him.
She knew what he was doing. He was talking to fill the potentially uncomfortable silence. He was trying to soothe her with his easygoing, quietly matter-of-fact, one-sided conversation, to make her feel less on edge. He was being impossibly nice—again—especially considering the way she’d barged in on his Sunday morning.
“Hmmm.” He was looking at the single chair now, frowning at it as if it were at fault for not being two chairs. “Maybe we should go out onto the porch. Go ahead, Lieutenant, right through the back door there.”
Holding her coffee, she obediently stepped outside onto a concrete terrace. It was surrounded by a low, rimmed concrete wall, with an overhang providing shade from the second floor of the house and two sturdy pillars in each corner.
There was only one chair out here, too, a beach style lounge chair. But Stan brought the kitchen chair with him in one hand, mug of coffee in the other.
He seemed to know that she’d prefer sitting in the kitchen chair. And instead of lying back in the recliner, he sat on the wall, facing her.
“So.” He got down to business. “You want to tell me what’s going on with you and Joel Hogan?”
Teri carefully set her mug down on the terrace, relieved he’d opened up the topic for her. “I’m not sure exactly where to begin.”
“Why don’t we start by agreeing that whatever you say here today doesn’t leave this room.” He looked around at the lack of walls and made a face. “You know what I mean.”
She nodded. She did know. And she trusted him. She wouldn’t have been here if she didn’t. “Thank you.”
“Why don’t you get me up to speed on the ways Hogan’s been harassing you. I know he’s been touching you and making inappropriate comments. I witnessed that myself last week.” His eyes were so kind and warm, it seemed crazy that she’d ever thought he was scary looking. “Anything else you think I need to know?”
God, there was a lot he needed to know, most of it embarrassing things she didn’t want to remember, let alone share with anyone. And there were things he couldn’t know, things she’d never told a soul. Things he’d probably wonder about, anyway.
If he asked her, point-blank, would she tell him the truth?
She honestly didn’t know.
She started with the easy stuff. “Last night Joel was waiting for me, on the porch of my apartment, when I got home.”
“God damn it. What the f—” Stan took a deep breath. “Excuse me, please. I hear that, and I just don’t know what this . . . guy is thinking.”
Teri knew that there would never be a better time to say it. “He’s probably thinking, ‘Gee, I don’t know what the problem is. She seemed to like having sex with me nine years ago.’ ”
She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see his reaction. But she heard him sigh heavily as she rubbed her forehead, her elbow on the arm of the chair.
“Okay,” he said. “Yeah, I can see how a past relationship would complicate things.”
She opened her eyes and looked out at him from between her fingers. “No, Senior Chief, it’s worse than you think. There was no relationship.”
He took a sip of his coffee, his eyes narrowing slightly as he gazed at her from behind the steam. He waited for her to continue.
She forced herself to put her hand down and look at him squarely. “Whatever you’re thinking, it’s ten times worse.” Her stomach churned but she made herself continue. “In fact, it’s about as bad as it can get. I picked him up in a bar. We had sex in the backseat of his car, in the bar parking lot. And no, I’d never done anything that stupid before, and I haven’t done it since. But I did it. Once. With Joel Hogan.”
There was no way the senior chief could know how much it cost her to tell him that. Her voice didn’t shake. She refused to let her eyes fill with tears. But inside she was dying.
But his expression didn’t change either. He’d blinked when she’d said the bit about the sex in the parking lot, but that was it.
Finally he smiled, then laughed very softly. Took a sip of coffee. Scratched his nose. Sighed.
And all the while his expression honestly didn’t change. He just kept on looking at her with kindness in his eyes.
“Nine years ago, you were . . . what?” he finally said. “Going to flight school? Just out of college?”
She nodded. “That’s no excuse.”
Neither was the fact that she’d stupidly assumed that having sex in the back of someone’s car would be a major building block for a future relationship. But there was no way she was going to start yammering about all the little painful details of that night—such as the way she’d cleaned herself up after and went back into the bar, only to find out from a friend that Joel Hogan was engaged to be married in two weeks’time. God, she’d gone from being on top of the world to wanting to die. Right then and there.
“Maybe not,” the senior chief said evenly, “but it’s a rational explanation for stupidity. What, were you twenty-two years old? Twenty-three?”
“Nineteen.”
He lifted an eyebrow.
“I graduated high school early,” she explained.
“When you were fifteen?”
“Sixteen. I got my college degree in three years—in an accelerated program at MIT.”
“Whoa.” He was impressed. “A genius, huh?”
Teri snorted. “Obviously not.”
He laughed softly at that. “Come on, you were young. He was probably just as flashy and good-looking then as he is now. And, oh, let me guess. You’d been drinking, right?”
She nodded and he laughed again.
“Alcohol is the one guaranteed ingredient in ninety-nine percent of the tales of woe and stupidity that I’ve heard down through the years,” he told her. “And I’ve heard a lot of them, Teri. You’re not the only one who did something really stupid nearly a decade ago. I made some pretty lousy choices myself, ten, twenty years ago. Do what I do, and give yourself a break.”
“Easy for you to say,” she said. “You didn’t have sex with Joel Hogan.”
He laughed loudly, and God, maybe he was a miracle worker like everyone said, because for the first time ever, she could laugh about it, too.
She looked at him sitting there, with the deep blue late morning sky spreading out behind him, a gorgeous backdrop stretching all the way to the horizon where it met the sea.
Maybe this was what going to confession felt like. This sense of being absolved, of being forgiven. Of finally being safe because this awful secret had been shared. It wasn’t really a secret anymore because someone else knew.
Maybe she should tell him everything. . . .
“So what are we going to do about this?” the senior chief asked. “I take it that the reason you haven’t brought Hogan up on sexual harassment charges is because the details surrounding your previous relationship—and it was a relationship, it was just a really brief one—will become public. To your career and personal detriment.”
She nodded.
He went on. “Teri, I’ve got to be honest with you. The best way to handle this might be to come clean with your boyfriend. And then have him show up at the base. Have him pick you up, give you a ride home, meet you for lunch, I don’t know. Let Hogan see you with him. Maybe then he’ll back down and . . . No?”
She was shaking her head.
“You don’t want to tell him?” he asked.
“I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Ah.” She’d surprised him again. She suspected it wasn’t easy to surprise the senior chief.
“I’m not very good at relationships,” Teri admitted. “Men tend to avoid me.” Ice princess, Joel had called her, just a few days ago. It was true. She came off as cool and aloof. It was better than scared to death, but only marginally. “I mean, they’ll talk to me and flirt if they’re in a group, but . . .” She smiled wanly. “Maybe I should look on the bright side. If the news about the sex in the parking lot gets out, maybe I’ll finally get asked out on a date.”
She liked making him laugh. She’d always thought of her sense of humor as being too dark, so she usually kept her mouth shut and her thoughts to herself. But Stan Wolchonok seemed to find her genuinely funny. And now that she no longer felt so dreadfully alone in this situation, she could see that there was an awful lot about it that was pretty hideously humorous.
However, there was still a great deal of it that was not funny at all.
“My concerns have to do with my career,” she told Stan. “I’m between civilian jobs right now, and I’m considering taking a longer term OUTCONUS assignment after this one’s up.”
“OUTCONUS, huh?” he said. The acronym stood for outside the continental U.S. “You interested in traveling? In leaving California?”
She nodded. “Absolutely. I don’t have any real ties to this area—my mother’s back east. What I really want, Senior Chief, is to fly. No BS, no hassle, but . . .” She took another deep breath. “There’s more you need to know. About one of my last civilian jobs . . . ?”