by Katie Cross
The sun had left the horizon in a wash of magenta as we stepped onto the sand. He guided us away from the beach house toward an open stretch of sand where tiki torches burned bright around a banquet table of food. Servers scuttled around, busily carting food, wine, and what appeared to be champagne. The smell of pineapple and pork lay heavy on the air amongst piles of rice, fish, and several elegant sushi rolls.
Couples mingled throughout torch-lit sand as we approached. In the middle of them stood Grady and Helene, laughing. Grady kept his arm lovingly around her. Helene appeared to be introducing him to a family member, because she kissed an older woman on the cheek, then gestured to Grady. My eyes didn’t stray from that older couple. Who were they? How did she know them? Were they also related to me? Although I studied every person I could see, none of them were clearly Anthony Dunkin.
A weird sort of relief followed.
“There are more people than I expected,” Jayson said quietly. He kept us along the edge of the crowd, steering us toward round tables where candles danced in the gentle breeze. His arm had tensed slightly under my hand. The surf lingered not far away, a constant hum of activity in the background.
“It’s a l-lovely d-d-dinner,” I agreed as he led me to a table so far back, none others were behind us. The ring of light from the torches extended just to where we sat, but not beyond. He glanced around with a quick smile to someone that called to him. Although he seemed at ease enough, there was a current of tension in the way he held his jaw. The relentless searching of his gaze.
“H-have you s-spotted her yet?” I asked quietly as my arm slipped away from his. He didn’t seem to notice me take a step back, closer to the table where I could breathe a little better.
“Yes.”
I let my eyes wander the growing crowd to see if I could pick her out without being obvious. More people meandered down sandy paths toward the beach. The house where we were staying wasn’t far from here, buttery warm lights illuminating it in the darkening sky.
“Where?” I asked.
“Twelve o’clock. Red dress, no shoes, at the bar.”
By the time my eyes naturally wandered there, a crowd of people that had been waiting for drinks had dispersed. Two people remained. One, a stoop-backed male with dusty gray hair. The other a female with glossy legs that stretched into forever and a stunning dress that would have made a rose jealous. Black hair that danced across her shoulders in gentle waves, sculpted cheeks, and a coy smile caught my attention. I looked away before Victoria caught my gaze.
“I don’t think she’s seen me yet.”
“W-what if you j-just got this over w-with?” I asked. “Talk to her. M-maybe she’ll ignore y-you after that.”
Jayson frowned. “Maybe.” But I could tell that my suggestion was as likely as rain in this pristine night sky. Stars popped out overhead. A waiter slipped by, then stopped and held a tray in my direction.
“Wine?”
Not wanting to dull my brain, or make my thoughts less clear so my stutter grew worse, I waved it off with a warm smile. “N-no. Th-thank you.”
We lingered at the table for a few moments while Jayson seemed to pull himself back together. Then a call came from a few steps away, and Jayson looked over. A grin spread across his face seconds before a meaty male tackled him into a hug. They collapsed into the sand, laughing.
Meanwhile, a pair of eyes met mine through the flickering light of the tiki torches.
Victoria stared hard at me, her expression more curious than hostile. Still, it sent a cold feeling through my veins like an ice bath. I met her gaze, too startled to look away. Beneath layers of curiosity in that stare, I sensed something big.
She tilted her head and motioned out toward the waves, where the light stopped behind the torches and the waves hissed. A quiet invitation. I glanced around to confirm that I didn’t imagine her asking me, but no one else stood at my back. Jayson spoke with his football-player sized friend a few tables away, laughing uproariously at something the other one said.
Victoria lifted an eyebrow in question. Or was it a challenge?
I nodded.
Then followed her out into the sandy darkness.
“I’m Victoria.”
We met several yards away from the dinner party, beyond where the light of the torches reached, near the surf. Wedding guests trapped in the glowing overhead lights, tiki torches, and fast, staccatos of laughter lingered at our backs. She held out a hand and I accepted it. Her handshake was firm, quick, and she released me a second later.
“Dagny.”
The word flowed without a stutter by sheer luck. Water hissed around my feet where we stopped at the surf.
Victoria smiled. “It’s good to meet you.”
Is it? I wanted to ask, but kept the question at bay. Beneath her smile, she did seem curious. Maybe even sincere. But who was I to Jayson except a friend? The same thing that she should be, except I wasn't sure anymore. His reaction to her had been suspiciously strong. Did he still have feelings for her? My gut clenched just thinking about it.
Besides, why would my presence with Jayson prompt her to want a conversation with me? Lingering emotions, probably. She wasn’t over Jayson either? Maybe they’d rekindle whatever they had before and come back together. Wouldn’t that be the worst trip ever?
Then again, she might be jealous of competition. Although the thought of me being competition almost made me laugh.
There was no tension in Victoria’s perfectly sculpted shoulders, no annoyance in her words. Maybe she’d moved on and forgotten him. For all I knew, a new man waited on the other side of the dinner table with a plate for each of them, but I doubted it. No one beckoned another woman away from a guy like Jayson just to be friends.
She turned her face to the gentle breeze off the ocean and closed her eyes in the exact same pose that captured me an hour before.
“It’s perfect here, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, but my voice was a quiet singsong. Turning words into subtle, quiet melodies removed the stutter. It could be an awkward way to speak, requiring more attention to my words than ever, but it got me through the most important conversations without stumbling all over myself. For some reason, this conversation seemed to merit such work more than any others I could recall.
“Helene has always had wonderful taste,” Victoria said. “An island getaway wedding just . . . fits her. So does Grady.” She laughed quietly to herself. “He’s good for her. She needs him and his . . . grounding influence.”
I laughed incredulously and she turned to me with a questioning smile.
“Is Grady not grounding?” she asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe. He was a very wild teenager. That’s why I laughed.”
She tilted her head to the side, then smiled. “Yes, that makes sense.”
“To think of him as grounding is . . . a-amusing.” The stutter that slipped didn’t seem to catch her attention yet, but my throat tightened at the thought. In some ways, the singsong and hope of sounding normal felt ingenuine. Would I always have to speak this way in front of her? Was the stutter something to hide?
I shoved aside those questions.
“I suppose we all change,” she mused quietly.
While the stars popped out overhead and the water tickled my toes. I wondered if Jayson was looking for me yet. Would he be stressed? What would he think if he found me here with Victoria, of all people?
Why did she ask me to come?
Her easygoing greeting, even the calm conversation, hadn’t disarmed me at all. While I didn’t think of her as a wild woman bent on hunting down a man, I couldn’t discount that sometimes the most frightening monsters had the brightest smiles. Still, this whole trip suddenly made less sense and I didn’t know how to reorient.
Seconds after the thoughts filtered back out of my mind, Victoria let out a long breath. “You’re here with Jayson?” she asked. In her wavering voice was a hint of vulnerability that had to be at
least a little authentic.
“Yes.”
“Ah.”
The word was swept into the ocean breeze, and I let the silence lay between us because I didn’t know what to say. Only the milling sound of the growing dinner crowd filtered through, with an occasional loud laugh thrown in for emphasis.
“He’s spoken about me to you, I would imagine,” she murmured.
“A f-few things, yes.”
She glanced at me from the corner of her smoky eyes, but whether it was regarding the stutter or what I said, I wasn’t sure.
“That I was a monster, perhaps?”
The surprise in my tone was sincere. “N-no.”
She chuckled, as if amused, but the lightness had fallen out of her tone. “What has he told you?”
“He s-said you had a f-falling out and the r-relationship died before it b-began, that’s all.”
The gentle summation of their odd experience felt incomplete and filled with holes, like Swiss cheese. Neither Jayson nor Victoria were monsters, yet I didn’t want her to have a reason to make him into one. If I relayed all the details he’d told me, I had no doubt she’d use it against him somehow.
Victoria’s expression didn’t change as she absorbed what I said, her jaw highlighted by the lights behind us.
“Falling out,” she murmured. “How . . . interesting.”
I straightened. Time to end this on a good note or before it dove too deep. Besides, I was honest enough with myself to admit that I didn’t want to know if she was fishing for information. Maybe she came to decide if I was competition or not, and then she’d make her move when she had the truth.
That would be utterly unbearable.
“D-do you n-need something from me?” I asked. “I d-didn’t tell him where I was going and I don’t want him to be worried.”
“He is the kind sort, isn’t he?”
I nodded.
“An introduction was all.” She turned to me with that warm smile yet again. Facing me fully, and only an arm’s length away, she was more stunning than ever. Starlight seemed to add an aura of mystery to her dark eyes. Her expression softened a little, smudged with concern. “And . . . perhaps a gentle warning for your sake.”
“W-warning?”
“One that I wished someone had given me when Jayson and I . . . when we crossed paths. We may have only been together for a week or so but, my goodness, did it feel so much longer than that.”
All my attention focused on the effort to maintain an impartial expression. My eyebrows lifted slightly in a sign of encouragement, and she took it.
“Jayson is a wonderful person. At least, that's my assumption. I can’t say that I know him well after things didn't work out between us.”
“When you told him he wouldn't make enough money for you to be happy?”
The question wasn't meant to be a jab. At least, not a conscious one. But the darkening of her eyes told me that's exactly how she took it. Still, I couldn’t help but feel for her. I had been on the losing end of Jayson Hernandez my whole life. Wanting what one couldn’t have was the worst kind of torture, particularly when he was involved. The man could be so clueless sometimes.
Victoria laughed mirthlessly, one arm crossed across her middle to hold the other. “Yes, I imagine that is how he paraphrased what I said, although it's not at all what was intended. I would never hurt him.”
Her tone became breathless. She blinked several times and cleared her throat. When she tucked a strand of hair behind her ears, it shifted back out in the breeze, but she didn’t seem to notice. Instead, she seemed a million miles away.
“If he wants to make what we had smaller than it was,” she added quickly and with a pained expression, “then let him. I’ve endured worse; I imagine I can take that as well. We all deal with grief and loss in our own ways. But you deserve the truth, at least. I’ll sleep better at night if you’ve had the warning.”
A haunted expression crossed her face. She frowned, lips pouted, the picture of grief in her beautiful feminine state. Even my mind, so loyal to a man that barely knew I existed, began to wonder.
Did Jayson tell me the truth?
What details didn’t I have? At this point, I just needed to leave. Warning or not, I didn't need to hear it.
“Th-thank you for introducing yourself,” I said. “I hope you enjoy the wedding and this b-beautiful n-night.”
She pulled her eyebrows up. “You don't want to hear it?”
“N-no, thank you.”
She blinked several times. Her mouth opened, closed, then opened again when she said, “Very well. Have a good night. Tell Jayson I would . . . I'd love to see him.”
She trailed off, and I didn’t doubt what she said. Nor could I entirely disregard what she'd revealed. Almost a decade of reverential-like worship, and Jayson had only just realized I existed. Only an idiot wouldn’t see my adoration for him.
An idiot named Jayson Hernandez.
With the party a few steps away and Jayson surely looking for me now, I didn’t fear Victoria yet. What would she do, smack me with her shoe? But the edge of something in her eyes was unsettling, and I had a feeling I could only see a minuscule part of whatever she harbored in that quick, manipulative mind.
“G-good night.”
She opened her mouth to say something, but her gaze caught on something over my shoulder. I felt someone standing back there, but didn’t dare turn around. Victoria’s upper lip curled slightly, then she issued an almost-warm smile to whoever stood back there.
“The conquering hero returns,” she murmured.
“Back to your hole, snake,” muttered a deep voice behind me.
Victoria sent a cold glare back there, looked at me with a quick nod of farewell, then filtered back to the circle of light. I spun around to find a towering man a few steps away. He wore flip flops, a pack high on one shoulder, and an old gray t-shirt that flapped in the wind. Tousled, sandy hair gave way to bright blue eyes and a golden beard that shimmered in the low light. He stood in the shadows like a hulking god, and the slightest hint of smoke curled off him.
“Hello B-bastian,” I whispered.
“Dagny.”
He studied me for a moment and I wondered if he remembered me. He must have, because didn’t he just use my name? Of all the Merry Idiots, Bastian had always been the quietest. The thinker. It had been Bastian holed up in the closet of the library the day I was able to see the whole C-tape. He knew where the old VHS was stored and showed the movie to a few friends when I stumbled onto them. I’d intentionally kept quiet, deterred a librarian, and he’d later thanked me for not ratting them out.
But would he remember that quiet girl who volunteered in the library? Or did he just know me as the girl who made his coffee?
He motioned to the circle of lights with a nod. “Jay’s looking for you. Go ahead. I’ll keep an eye on her.”
“Y-you think sh-she’d hurt me?”
“Never turn your back on Victoria Haynes.”
With that unnerving thought, I glanced back into the light where the dinner party continued. Victoria lingered near the edge of the light, but kept her back to us. The strange thought that she hadn’t asked if Jayson and I were dating filtered through my mind. She’d clearly made an assumption—a fair one—about our relationship status.
Everything had changed now that I’d met her.
I could change with it.
Victoria’s attempt to turn me against Jayson by telling me whatever lie she had only made me want to lace my shoes on tighter. There was no one else more prepared to act madly in love with Jayson Hernandez than me because it wouldn’t be an act. Despite her calm veneer, I sensed that Victoria still had her eye on Jayson.
She wasn't about to stop her chase.
All I had to do to help him was everything I’d dreamed of doing with Jayson for the last ten years. Laugh with him. Joke with him. Be so close I could smell him all the way in my sleep. Being his girlfriend could provide some level of p
rotection against Victoria so he could enjoy the break and the time with his friends.
You against me, Victoria, I thought. He will never be yours again.
I might lose my heart in the process, but at least it would break for the man I’d always loved.
10
Jayson
There was no reason to panic, but I couldn’t help the way my chest tightened.
Where. Was. Dagny?
Every woman that walked by and wasn’t her or Victoria sent me into another little spiral. Had Victoria found her? Had she run off for some reason? I kept an easy expression on my face and a beer in hand as I skirted the edge of the party. Sand slipped through my toes. Waves crashed. People laughed. My heart sped up even as I tried to calm it down. We were on a literal island—there was nowhere for her to go that I couldn’t find.
Aside from that massive ocean.
Thoughts of Victoria so close by were not reassuring.
Regret for not immediately introducing Dagny to my friend Jameson, and then pulling her to my side to keep her anchored near, kept me on high alert. Maybe Victoria got to her. Maybe Dagny didn’t want to be here. When a warm hand touched my back, right between my shoulder blades, I whipped around.
Dagny stood there, color high on her cheeks despite the perfect temperature. She smiled, slipped closer, and slid an arm around my waist. My heart thudded in my chest as she pressed her cheek to mine and whispered, “Play along?”
With a little encouragement from her, my hand slid around her waist. Instinctively, I pulled her closer, but there wasn’t far for her to go. My thoughts only extended as far as the heat of her breath on the sensitive part of my neck, right below my earlobe.
Play along?
“V-victoria and I just m-m-met,” she said quietly, so only I could hear.