by Ember Leigh
“You don’t want to go back.”
I mean it as a question, but I have enough of a hunch to assert my dominance over my observation. She nibbles on her bottom lip, hesitating before she speaks.
“You think it would be far to walk back?”
Her secret intent blossoms inside me, in the same way a secret handshake can speak volumes. I step closer, glancing around like we’re about to do another naughty thing and I’m checking for witnesses.
But instead of kissing her, I say, “You wanna go walk around a little?”
She can’t hide the eagerness in her glittering green eyes as she nods. In a hushed voice, she says, “I’ve been dying to get out of the resort.”
“Me too. Fuck it. Let’s ditch.” I jerk my head over my shoulder, down the open road. Truth is, if this were my own trip, I would have been wandering the streets for days now. Resorts aren’t my style, though they are a fun departure. I appreciate all types of travel, all types of people—but when left to my own devices, I gravitate toward the backpackers, the hippies, the free spirits. And maybe that’s why Nova and I ultimately came together. Out of this whole damn group, she’s the only one itching to really know Aruba.
She nods determinedly, eyes stuck on the tourist vans that have clustered at the pick-up point. “I’ll let Amelia know that I plan to stay here for a little longer.”
I watch as she walks off to where Amelia and Amelia’s parents are crowded near our resort’s van, counting heads and trying to figure out who goes where. While she and Amelia chat, I head for Keko and Elliot.
“I’m gonna take a walk. A solo walk,” I clarify, before either of them can offer to join.
“Hurry back. Don’t want to miss the grub,” Elliot says, patting his stomach. The man loves to eat, and I swear he’s gained five pounds since we’ve been here.
I promise them I won’t, even though I’m not sure I can keep my word.
Truth is, there’s something much more important on my schedule today.
Wandering a remote island with a fiery redhead seems like the absolute best thing I could ever choose to do.
Chapter 17
NOVA
Once the shuttles disappear, Weston and I exchange grins as if we’re about to embark on a Ferris Bueller’s Day Off adventure. Except instead of Chicago, we’re wandering the back roads of Aruba, pausing at fruit stands, inspecting any and all patches of flowers and shrubbery that catch our eye.
The air is heady with humidity and the wafting scents of a fire nearby. Yet my skin is fresh from my unexpected dip in the ocean. Weston has offered to carry all my belongings in addition to his own backpack, which is both unnecessary and extremely sexy. Why is it sexy? Because everything he does is sexy. He could fall and scrape his knee and I’d still probably have to change my underwear afterward.
Weird, but it is what it is.
My phone vibrates just as we set out. I’d ignore it if I weren’t irrationally worried about something happening to Gram. But of course it’s Jimmy, responding to a picture of the resort I sent him that morning.
JIMMY: God, that place looks incredible. I wish I could visit.
NOVA: You should! It’s literally the most gorgeous place I’ve ever been.
JIMMY: You really think I should?
NOVA: Why not? Life is meant to be lived.
It’s a timely platitude that I also happen to believe in. But Jimmy’s version of lived involves drunken nights at the same watering hole for the rest of his life.
Weston and I chat about everything and nothing as we wander along a road we have no familiarity with, in a direction we can only guess is east. It’s a natural decision between us, and neither of us doubt it for a second. And for how natural it is, it still strikes me as outrageous. Because if this were anyone else—perhaps most of all Jimmy—I’d have to reassure them plenty of times not to freak out. Hell, I doubt even Amelia would want to do something like this—wander into the unknown without a map. We cross paths with plenty of locals, and even stop to have an interesting conversation about the necessity of trying an authentic bitterballen recipe with a man who punctuates every sentence with the sound “yanoo.”
The late afternoon sunlight beats down on us. Weston helps me reapply sunscreen approximately a hundred times in our hour-long wander through cactus-spiked paradise. Finally we come upon a little village outpost where attractive apartment buildings sit next to cactus-infused parks, and the clear blue of the sky makes everything inside me ache with something powerful and unknown.
“God,” I sigh as we scuff down the road between street vendors selling clearly not-name-brand sunglasses and other accessories. Christian Dior does not write his name in Ariel font on the front of the glasses, just so we’re clear. “I wish I could move here.”
“You could, couldn’t you?”
Weston’s simple question forces my mouth shut. It’s not as easy as doing it or not doing it. The question never even comes up. It’s simply not on the drawing board. “Are you kidding me? That’s about as likely as me moving to the moon.”
“Why?”
I fumble for a way to convey the past twenty-five years of bone-deep understanding centered around my family’s obsession with finances. Namely: we never have enough money, and there will always be more debts to pay.
“I need to have a stable job before I move anywhere. I’ve got a lot of bills.” I shrug. “It just seems a little unlikely that I’ll find something somewhere else that will pay all my bills back home and let me lead a decent life.”
“What are all these bills about?” He nudges me, a joking tone in his voice. “Gambling problem?”
I laugh, but its humorless. “Actually, yeah. Not me, my grandpa. He kind of ruined the family with it.”
Weston is quiet for a moment, so long that I start to think he didn’t hear me. Then he slings his arm over my shoulders and squeezes me against him.
“Sorry, Nova.”
“You didn’t know. And there’s nothing to be sorry about. I’ve accepted my fate.”
“You could still live someplace like here,” he says, almost like he’s trying to be helpful.
“In an alternate reality, probably,” I say with a laugh. “Trust me, I used up all my Get Out of Small Town Free cards when I went to college. I worked my ass off to attend that school and got so many scholarships that I graduated with just a couple loans. And even that didn’t put me ahead.”
“But you’re not in debt—”
“No, but my family is, and that’s what I’m part of, so I need to contribute.” I sniff, feeling a strange swell of emotion clamping my throat. I thought this was supposed to be a relaxed late afternoon walk, not a psychological nosedive.
Weston and I continue walking, admiring the sights in silence. Palm trees spring up, stuck in the sidewalks, in front of storefronts that grow progressively more colorful: teal, coral, lime green. Even though he hasn’t said anything, hasn’t even hinted at judgment, I feel compelled to defend my position.
“I live with my grandma,” I blurt, looking up at him to see if he’ll look disgusted or amused or maybe something worse. “She and I live on my parents’ property, in a little shack in the backyard.”
His brows lift, and he nods. “That’s cool.”
“No, it’s not. I’ll probably die there, Weston.”
“It doesn’t matter where you die. As long as your entire life up until that point was lived as you wanted.”
His words start a heavy cyclone through me. The meaning is so intense I can barely think about it.
“If I moved here, I’d have to bring Gram,” I say as we pass a bright red building. I jerk my thumb at it. “Hell, we could live here. She’d probably be thrilled.”
He laughs, but it only reminds me of the fact that I’ve opened up to him. A lot. Like, way more than I planned. I don’t like people knowing how brutally poor my family truly is. That we’re so poor it might take us three lifetimes to shovel ourselves out of debt, and if this were
olden times, all of us would be in debtors’ prison by now. Instead, we’re in modern times, so I have to live in my own internal debtor’s prison, where my family secretly hates me for anything I spend my money on that isn’t helping them.
“What about you? Why don’t you move to Aruba?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I could move to Aruba. But I could move to Ibiza. Or I could move to Morocco. Why choose?”
“If only I had the luxury of money, I wouldn’t choose. Or rather, I’d choose all of them.”
“So do it,” he insists. “Life is too short to spend it wishing you could do something.”
“Only if I have a job waiting for me.”
He shrugs. “You could make your own job.”
My heart sinks. This is the exact conversation I have with myself weekly as I grow more dissatisfied with my life and prospects. But it’s not that simple. If I don’t have a weekly paycheck coming in, guaranteed, then my Gram doesn’t eat. She never had life savings, and anything she’d thought she could count on, my grandpa spent gambling. My parents aren’t much better off, having inherited a metric shit ton of medical debts from my mom’s side once her parents passed. There’s no end in sight.
“I can’t just up and do that,” I say in a low voice, feeling the familiar claws of conflict.
“You can do anything you want to.”
I sigh, rolling my eyes. “Yeah, I know that. Thanks. You’re starting to sound like some out-of-touch Instagram influencer, though.”
“Is that out of touch?” He fingers the fronds of a stout palm tree as we walk past a tiny flower patch surrounded by a wrought iron fence. “Maybe I just want to be the one voice in your life telling you to go for it.”
That’s equal parts heavy and beautiful. “How do you know you’re the only one?”
“I don’t. But am I wrong?”
I choose to say nothing. We’re coming up on a gated boutique hotel with fascinating balconies and about a million ferns lining the entryway. But my chest feels like it’s nearing implosion, so I need to change the subject.
“All right. So what are you going after, Mr. Inspirational?”
“Freedom.”
I sigh. “That is such a cop-out answer.”
He laughs bitterly. “Fine. Then what’s the right answer? Tell me what you’re after.”
I struggle to think of anything that isn’t “freedom.” But dammit, he’s right. It is what I’m after. I need my slice of freedom, within the bounds of my financial restrictions. And as far as I can see, there is no mathematical equation that provides me with a solution. Living the life of my dreams can never happen if I’m duty bound to New York State.
“Fine, I want freedom too,” I grumble. “But it’s more than that. I want to be able to provide for my family and not have my soul shrunk into the shape of a senior portrait.”
“Lofty.” He nods approvingly. “I like it.”
We walk along the palm-lined boulevard a little longer, silence settling comfortably but tinged with question marks. Finally, curiosity kills my cat. “What about you? What do you even do?”
Weston hesitates, sending me a sidelong glance that makes my gut shrink. “I’m an influencer.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m serious.” He laughs, reaching up to caress the wide, flat leaves of another tree as we pass by. “A few of my posts went viral throughout my travels, and I’ve just been building it up. Now I get marketing offers and publicity and all this stuff.”
It’s really hard to compute this information. “Wow. So do you have like…a lot of followers?”
He shrugs. “Almost three hundred thousand.”
My eyes nearly pop right out of my head. He said it so casually, in the same way he might mention he planned on ordering steak for dinner. “That’s…closer to half a million than anything else.”
“I try not to think about that.”
“So have you been posting about this trip?”
“Not yet. My posts lag behind my actual travels. So I can figure out my angle and message and everything.”
I can’t tell whether I should laugh at its outrageousness or cry with envy. I’ve never met a real influencer, much less hooked up with one.
“This is how you make a living?”
He laughs softly. “One of the ways.”
“And you’ve always been doing this?”
“No, it’s…more recent.” He shrugs, raking a hand through his hair. “And kind of accidental. I needed to find something new a couple years ago. I had to pivot. This is where I ended up.”
“Hm. What did you pivot away from?”
He shrugs again, and his silence tells me I should leave the topic be. But I don’t listen to social cues with Weston anymore. If he could blatantly interrupt my masturbation session, then he deserves some unappreciated probing into his personal life.
“Come on, now,” I goad him.
“What?”
“Tell me what you pivoted from. Was it a heartbreak? A secret baby? Maybe Mafia involvement.”
He smirks, scratching at the back of his head. I’ve never seen him this nervous before. This hesitant to dive headfirst. It’s shocking, really.
“I told you about my gambling grandpa. Don’t I deserve to know about your pivot?”
A sigh leaps out of him. Finally, he says, “I got fired from my job.”
Wow. This information really does not compute. He seems like he breezes through life and excels at everything, minus yoga. “Say what?”
“Two years ago.” He shoves his hands into his pockets, his energy drawing tight.
“Did you like the job?”
He nods. “Yeah. It paid really well. Was a good career job. My first out of college. But then…” He shrugs.
“Then what? I can’t imagine them firing you for anything other than being too good looking.”
He snaps a dead leaf off a bush we pass by, crumbling it in his hand. “Let’s just say, corporate life and Weston didn’t jive too well.”
“Okay. So what does that mean?”
“Not performing the job for which he was hired.” He accentuates the words with air quotes. “Missed deadlines. Poor performance. Total fucking failure.”
Something heavy settles over him, and he spends the next few steps squinting out at some unknown point on the horizon. I don’t know how to grapple with his performance review. I can’t even fathom those assessments of him. Then he looks over at me and says, “Don’t tell Amelia. Okay?”
“Why would I tell her that?” I’ve never seen him like this—skittish, like I hold all the cards and he doesn’t trust me to put them away safely.
“You’re her best friend.”
“True. So Rhys doesn’t know?”
“I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Hey.” I grab his shoulder, making him stop and turn toward me. His face is a gorgeous mask of indifference. Something practiced and hard. I push onto my tiptoes so that our noses touch. “If it’s that important to you, I will protect this information with all my might.”
The corner of his lip twitches upward. “All your might?”
“With sword and stone, and…oh, shit. I dunno. I’m trying to make this majestic. Honorable. Am I failing?”
“You’re failing,” he confirms.
We resume walking, and I grab his hand. I bring his knuckles up to my lips, watching him closely to see if I can coax another smile out of him.
“Let’s see what your half-million followers think about it, then.”
And just as my lips brush over his knobby knuckles, I see it. The curl of the heartbreaker grin. The smile that will forever stain my heart and remind me of the epic week on Aruba where we hated each other and then fell into each other.
Weston loosens his hand from mine and slips his arm back around my shoulders. He buries his lips in my hair and murmurs, “Three hundred thousand. Don’t inflate my numbers. And I’ll trust you on this one. You better not let me down, Nover.”
&n
bsp; A giggle bursts out of me at the unexpected use of the British pronunciation of my name. Warmth spreads through me, sticky sweet and alluring. Is it so wrong to be delighted by the fact that he shared a deep dark secret with me?
He has no idea, but I’m as loyal as they come.
First, I was loyal in my hatred.
But now?
I’ll be head over heels for him until the end of my days.
Chapter 18
WESTON
We make it back to the resort just in time for dinner, thanks to some guy in a battered Jeep who offered us a ride. We hurry to the huts. There’s only five minutes until dinner, but I’m not worried.
“Go on without me,” I tell her once our teal and fuchsia homes are in view.
“Aren’t you coming?”
“Yeah, I just gotta make a phone call first,” I tell her. It’s not true. There’s nobody to call. But I need a timeout. Nova presses a fast kiss to my lips before she goes to change her clothes. I slip into my own hut, back pressed against the thatched surface of the door, listening to the muddied silence. The waves crashing in the distance. The murmur of conversation from further down the boardwalk. A distinct “Fuck” from Nova’s hut.
I grin, and when I hear her footsteps thumping down the boardwalk again, I whoosh out of my hut and snag her for one last kiss. Her sweetness and prickliness is too much to resist, even in the throes of an anxiety attack.
The distraction doesn’t last long. She races off, and I slip back into my hut. This time, I press my palms to the door and let the silence sweep over and drown me.
Because here’s the fucking truth: I don’t know what I’m doing, and that’s the secret I don’t want anyone finding out, not even Nova.
My phone vibrates in my pocket, and I fish it out, bracing myself for the worst. Nova is in financial debt, but I am in career debt. I am in lifestyle debt. I am living on borrowed time and question marks, struggling to stay afloat without knowing if I’m in water or quicksand.
It’s a new email alert. The subject line reads: “RE: YOUR APPLICATION FOR PROMO TOUR.”