“Damn it. Sorry.” I shoved my fingers into the slim slot and managed to grab the card just as it was my turn to approach the guards.
“Welcome to the Great Place,” the soldier working the gate said.
“Really?” I couldn’t help but tease him.
Ever since the soldiers were required to recite that ridiculous motto, I gave them shit about it. I couldn’t help it. I did it in Texas and carried it on to Georgia.
“Yes, really,” he said, his tone neutral. He inspected our ID cards and the standard decal stuck to my windshield.
“Have a good night,” the soldier told us, though I knew he didn’t care about our night.
He probably thought we were together, that I was some barracks whore driving us to this guy’s small room, where we’d have sex while his roommate slept in the other bed. Who even came up with the term barracks whore? And why did I think it so freely, without considering that the soldiers were also sleeping with random strangers? I felt like shit knowing how easily the word whore slipped into my head. I made a mental note to get better at the way I think about other women.
“Uh—I don’t know where I’m going,” I reminded Kael.
“It’s a right up here,” he mumbled, as I was passing a street on the right.
“Right now?” I jerked the wheel to make the turn in time.
He nodded.
“Next light. Turn left there. There!”
“Dude.” I rolled my eyes, stopping my car for a second.
“What?” The way he asked seemed like he’d forced himself to respond. I felt like he wanted to get out of my car as soon as possible and the thought sort of pissed me off. I didn’t necessarily want to be playing taxi for a stranger who was allegedly Elodie’s husband’s bestie. I barely knew Phillip as it was, and his friend acting this way didn’t exactly improve my opinion of Elodie’s man.
“Sorry. Just go up a little further. It’s there on the right. The brown building.” He gestured in the general direction.
The buildings were nearly identical. The only things differentiating one from the other were the numbers painted on the sides. The one we were passing was either 33 or 88; the black paint was faded so I couldn’t tell.
“Yeah, they’re all the same big brown buildings here at the Great Place.”
I swear I heard the tiniest hint of a laugh, just a small puff of smoke, enough to show that he was at least mildly amused by my comment. Sure enough, when I looked over, there it was—a sliver of a smile spread across his lips.
“It’s here.” He pointed to a massive parking lot. Kael kept his finger pointed at a navy-blue truck parked in the back of the mostly empty lot. I pulled up next to it, about a car’s length away.
“Thanks . . .” He looked at me like he was searching for something.
“Karina,” I told him, and he nodded.
“Thanks, Karina.”
I tried to calm the swarm of bees in my stomach as he climbed out of my car without another word.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I don’t know what I expected Kael to drive, but this beast of a truck wasn’t it. When I sized him up—literally and figuratively—I came to the conclusion that he’d drive something practical, like a black sedan or a medium-sized white pickup truck. But it wasn’t this massive dilapidated blue thing with rust circling the wheel well and covering most of the passenger side. The truck-jeep-car thing said bronco in bold letters and had two big circle headlights. The tires were so oversized that the truck somehow made Kael look small. His truck-jeep thing was actually really cool, but it needed some work. The more I noticed about the car, the more I realized it suited him perfectly. Like the saying that dogs and owners start to look alike after a while. Or is it husbands and wives? Either way, his truck simply fit him. He had the standard Georgia plates, peaches with the corny slogan, and Clayton County printed across the bottom. I had no idea where that was.
I wondered if he actually was from Georgia or if he bought the car here. You never knew with soldiers. Cars seemed to drop from the sky above. If his hometown was really in Georgia, I wondered how he felt being here with home not far away. Or did it feel far away? The perspective depends on your situation. I would feel distant even if I was in the same county as my dad and his wife, but maybe Kael had a good relationship with his family and felt close and content and okay with that. I didn’t know this about him, but now I wanted to find out.
I kept watching Kael; I don’t think I’d ever seen someone like him. He wasn’t doing anything spectacular like men in the novels I’d read and films I’d seen, but there was something inside of him that made him sort of glow compared to other people. He was charming, too, but in an unassuming way. He knew who he was, and he gave me this almost competitive feeling, this little burn in my stomach to try to be on his level. He was Elodie’s friend—and he was going to be sleeping in my house! Was it going to be weird? It was absolutely going to be weird. I yanked my visor mirror down and checked my appearance. The light surrounding the mirror came on, but Kael didn’t notice. He was calling someone and standing at least ten feet away from where I was in my car.
Yikes.
I swiped under my eyes. The mascara on my lower lashes had left little flakes of black across the top of my cheekbone. I was pale. Abnormally so. I slapped and pinched my cheeks a little and sucked in my lips and counted to ten. It was what the girls my age were doing on Instagram and getting thousands of views doing so. It worked, but I looked way too frazzled for this evening. I should have finished styling my hair. I turned to scan my backseat, hoping to find one of my gigantic cloth scrunchies. I had at least two in my car at all times. Minimal time spent, with the illusion of effort. I watched as Kael stuck his hand under the metal sheet above his front tire and felt along the surface. He tried to call someone else and I finally found a white hair tie and pulled half of my hair up. A lot of loose pieces of my wavy hair came down. I messed with them a little, and then put gloss on my lips. I glanced at my reflection one last time, and when Kael hung up the phone, I closed the mirror.
The more I watched him, standing there in the dark, pacing around with his iPhone going back and forth from his pocket to his cheek, the more I felt uneasy about this whole situation. I thought Elodie’s excitement over his arrival might be her loneliness getting the better of her—someone familiar taking the place of the husband she missed so much. She was so lonely lately that some days she cried all night. This Kael guy was the closest person to her husband, and I was the closest friend she had, so I needed to be on guard with him, making sure he was not just spying on his buddy’s pregnant wife. Soldiers did that more often than you’d think.
I was about to Google Clayton County and his license plate number when he opened my car door and leaned down, totally dominating the space, or lack of, between us. I leaned away from him; it almost felt like I had to.
“You can go,” he told me.
I didn’t know him well enough to decipher what he was really thinking. It almost felt rude. I wanted to challenge him, to taunt him for being locked out of his car, but I was about to piss myself; I was already late and had no room to be snarky. But I was curious about this soldier.