by Claire Adams
She smiled. “Of course,” she nodded. “We have a lovely selection of reds and whites.”
“Nothing harder?”
I saw one perfectly plucked eyebrow rise slightly. “What would you like, ma’am?”
“Bourbon,” I said instinctively, making the choice that Tristan would have made in my position.
The airhostess smiled and nodded. “And for you, ma’am?” she asked, looking towards the older woman sitting next to me.
“Orange juice,” the woman replied. “With a splash of rum.”
“Of course,” the airhostess nodded, before moving on down the aisle.
The older woman looked at me with interest. “Bourbon, huh?”
She looked a little like my grandmother—big, cuddly, and comforting. But unlike my grandmother, this woman looked hip and fashionable. She was wearing white linen pants and a matching white blouse with a pattern of seashells along the neckline. She was wearing chunky statement pieces around her neck and ears, and her silver hair was cut short.
“Yes,” I nodded shortly.
“That’s a hard drink to have on a flight,” she continued, in a strong Southern accent.
I just smiled politely and refused to engage.
“But when I look at your face, I suppose I understand the need,” the woman continued.
I looked at her with a small frown, unable to ignore that last comment. “What do you mean?”
“You look sad, honey,” she said, with a sympathetic smile. “I assume the bourbon is to…nurse that sadness?”
“I just… I’m sad to be leaving,” I sighed.
The woman raised one eyebrow at me. “But that’s not all you’re sad about?”
I smiled and looked at her pointedly.
“I’m sorry,” she said, with a laugh. “I know I’m being nosy…my children accuse me of the same thing. It just seems like such a waste.”
“What does?” I asked curiously, knowing I was getting drawn into a conversation despite my best efforts.
The wflight attendant approached and set down our drinks. The moment she was gone again, the older lady turned back to me. “Your generation,” she said. “You’re all so young, and you have your whole lives ahead of you…and still you waste your time being sad about everything. What I wouldn’t give to be in my twenties and thirties again.”
I smiled, and then I extended my hand out to her. “I’m Molly,” I introduced.
“It’s nice to meet you, Molly,” she replied. “I’m Meryl. Now that we’ve got the pleasantries out of the way, would you mind telling me why you’re so sad?”
“I… I had this really great job,” I admitted.
“In Hawaii?” she asked.
“Yup.”
“Wow, that does sound like a great job.”
I laughed. “I haven’t told you what my job was in the first place.”
“Doesn’t matter, really,” Meryl countered. “A job in Hawaii is already ten times better than any job anywhere else.”
I smiled and nodded. “There might be some truth to that,” I agreed. “In any case, I was forced to quit yesterday, and I suppose I regret it a little.”
“Why’d you quit?” she asked.
“Uh… It’s a long story.”
Meryl smiled pointedly. “It’s a long flight back home.”
I sighed but conceded. “The job was great, and the people I was working with were wonderful. It’s just…my boss…”
“He was an asshole, was he?” Meryl assumed.
“No,” I said sadly, thinking about Tristan and our day together on his private island. “He was a pretty good boss, actually. But…”
“Oh, don’t tell me,” she cut in. “You fell in love with him?”
I laughed. “Oh, I was already extremely in love with him,” I admitted. “I first met him when I was fourteen. And I’ve been in love with him ever since. He was my brother’s best friend.”
“Ah,” Meryl nodded. “Is he married? Is that the problem?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “He’s not married. He’s just…unavailable.”
“Meaning?”
“I don’t think he’s a one-woman kind of guy,” I admitted. It was painful to say, but once it was out of my mouth, it seemed to lose the power to hurt me.
“Ah…and did you know this beforehand?”
I sipped my drink. “I did,” I nodded. “But I thought… I thought…”
“You thought you could change him,” Meryl said without skipping a beat.
“You don’t understand,” I said, feeling the need to defend my feelings. “I always felt like we had this connection, except when we met I was fourteen, and he was eighteen, so it was one-sided at the time. As I got older, I sensed something changing between us, but I still wasn’t sure if it was my imagination or not.
“But then, six years ago at this family Christmas party, we kissed. And it was amazing and perfect and everything I imagined it would be. Except, he pretended that it never happened.
“I was devastated obviously, but I had no choice but to put it behind me. That is until a couple of months ago when I came down to Hawaii to stay at the resort that Tristan had just opened.”
“And that’s when things…rekindled?”
“Eventually, he told me that he had lied about not remembering that kiss… He was just scared to get involved with me.”
“Because?”
“I suppose he was scared of himself, too,” I said. “He was scared he wouldn’t be able to be the man I wanted him to be.”
“What happened that made you quit yesterday?” Meryl asked.
“The realization that I had idealized him in my head all these years,” I said. “He was different.”
“I see,” she nodded. “Can I ask you a complicated question?”
I smiled. “We’ve gone this deep into my personal life; I don’t see why not?”
“Despite the fact that this Tristan is not the man you had fantasized about in your head all these years, do you still love him?”
It was a good question and one that I already knew the answer to. I sighed. “I don’t have to think about that answer,” I said. “I still love him… I think I will always love him. I just don’t know how to stop.”
Meryl smiled in a way that betrayed her own personal connection to my problem. She looked at me with a maternal kindness and patted my hand. “I’m sixty-six, darling,” she said. “And I’ve been married for forty-five of those years. Forty-five years, and I can sit here today and tell you truthfully and confidently that I love my husband.”
“Wow,” I breathed, thinking about the kind of commitment it takes to stay married that long. I thought about my parents, and it seemed to me that every couple that had stayed married longer than twenty years deserved some kind of special honor.
“Tate was twenty-four, and I was twenty-one when we got married. Together we built a business, a house, and we raised three children. When I tell people that they look at me like I’ve led some kind of charmed life. They see my adult children, they see my beautiful grandkids, they see my fine house and my business, and they assume it all came easy.
“Let me tell you something, darling: none of it came easy. Tate and I, we struggled to build every single thing we had. But nothing was as much a struggle as our marriage. Not even my children realized that. Angela’s my oldest. Two years ago she came to me and told me that she and her husband had decided to separate. They were unhappy, it seemed, and they wanted to go their separate ways. When I tried to advise her, do you know what she said to me?
“She told me that I couldn’t afford to advise her because I had a perfect marriage,” Meryl said. She let out a snort of laughter and shook her head. “A perfect marriage… Ha!”
“What did you say to her?”
“I told her that soon after we were married, I left her father,” Meryl told me. “I wanted to file for divorce seven months after our wedding day. I also happened to be four months pregnant with her.
”
“Why did you want to divorce him?” I asked.
Meryl laughed. “We were young. I was only twenty-one. I didn’t understand what marriage really meant. I went from my father’s home to my husband’s, and I felt as though I lost my identity twice over. We’d been raised differently, we did things differently, and I thought I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. So I went and stayed with my parents for a few weeks. And eventually, Tate came to take me back to our home.”
“And you went with him?”
“I went with him,” Meryl smiled. “Of course, youth can be impulsive, impetuous and reckless. But as you get older, the problems become harder, more serious.
“The second time I started thinking about divorce was different. I was in my forties, I had been married twenty years, and I had three teenage children. Tate and I had spent our twenties and thirties trying to build something that we could leave to our children. We had been so consumed with raising them, that somewhere along the way, we’d lost track of each other.
“Tate came home one day and made a confession. He had cheated on me with another woman…some girl in the company that was a good deal younger than me.”
“Oh God,” I said, clinging to Meryl’s story, completely absorbed in her life.
“I screamed and kicked and threw things,” she admitted. “I told him to get out. He said he wouldn’t, so I told him that I would leave. He told me I couldn’t because of the kids.”
“What did you do?” I pressed when Meryl fell silent.
“I stayed,” she replied. “For one year after that, we lived like strangers. We slept on opposite corners of the same bed, we exchanged conversation during dinner in front of the kids, and we went along with the routine of our lives… For one year it was hell. But then at the end of that year, we both realized something.”
“What?”
“We had healed a little,” Meryl told me. “We came together, we talked things out, and we decided that despite everything, we still loved one another. And we started fresh, we endured, and because we endured, we fell in love with one another all over again. We became best friends as well as lovers.”
I took a deep breath. “It takes a lot to forgive a man who cheated.”
“It does,” she nodded. “That really depends on the woman. My point though is this: love and marriage...it’s not something that just falls into your lap. If you’re lucky enough to find someone you love, you need to fight like hell to keep that love alive. Because it’s not always going to be perfect, it’s not always going to be easy—it’s work and change and sacrifice.”
I reached for my glass, but then I changed my mind and dropped my hand. “You have a point,” I said. “But that also depends on one very important factor.”
“Which is?”
“Both people need to want to work at the relationship,” I said softly. “If one person just wants to walk away…”
“Then they were never meant for you in the first place,” Meryl said pointedly.
I sighed inwardly. “They were never meant for you in the first
Chapter Thirty-Three
Tristan
The incessant knocking at my door betrayed who was behind it. Emma had never been very patient. Rolling my eyes, I went and answered it.
“Took you long enough,” she said, breezing in without an invitation.
“Hello to you, too.”
“You haven’t spent any time with me since I arrived,” she said accusingly as she spread herself over my sofa and made herself comfortable.
“You’ve been here barely two days,” I pointed out. “And I greeted you when you arrived, didn’t I?”
“What am I?” she asked. “Just another random guest at your fancy ass resort?”
“Uh no…a random guest would be paying for room and board,” I said, sitting down on the chair next to her.
Emma gave me a wink. “Aw, come on,” she said. “Those are just the perks of having a powerful big brother.”
“How’s Mom?” I asked dryly.
“Mom’s fine,” Emma shrugged. “You know.”
“I don’t know actually,” I admitted. “I haven’t spoken to her in months.”
“Really?”
“Not since her birthday.”
“Wow,” she said. “No wonder she complains about you so often.”
“She complains?”
“Of course,” Emma nodded. “She’s always talking about her successful son… I mean, she’s proud and all that, but she’s kind of bitter, too. But don’t worry, she doesn’t blame you.”
“Who does she blame then?” I asked.
“Your father,” Emma smiled. “Obviously.”
I rolled my eyes. At the time, Mom and dad’s divorce had been contentious. Of course, I had been young enough that I didn’t remember any of that. The summer after their divorce I had been enrolled in an exclusive boarding school in England and had left the troubles of my parents’ marriage behind me. After that, I had swapped off summers and holidays between them.
I had been six when Mom had remarried, a full six months after the divorce had been finalized, and I had been seven when she had given birth to Emma. I still remembered the pug-faced infant that Mom had shoved in my face like some kind of prize. I had just arrived from boarding school with plenty of stories to tell, and a pink-faced baby with the most annoying voice I had ever heard had upstaged me.
I looked at Emma in mild amusement and thought how lucky it was that she had grown out of her pug face, her excessively pink cheeks, and her freckles. She had turned from an ugly child to a gangly teenager to a woman that many men would consider beautiful. The only thing she had kept from her youth was the shrill and annoying voice. Emma had been nothing more than an irritation to me growing up, but adulthood had created an unlikely friendship between us that had evaded our younger years.
“Of course,” I nodded dryly. “Whatever she can blame on my father, she will.”
“To be fair, she blames my father for just as many things,” Emma said, with a shrug.
“Oh?” I said, with some interest. I had never particularly warmed to my stepfather, who was as overwhelmingly boring as he was arrogant. “Like what?”
“Like my rebellious nature,” Emma said, with a satisfied smile. “She claims I inherited my sharp tongue, my brash manner, and my willfulness from him.”
“Huh, I wasn’t aware he had that much character,” I said slyly.
Emma shot me a sharp look that was laced with amusement. We had developed a shorthand over the last few years that some would describe as dark humor. Despite my best efforts today, however, I was having a hard time concentrating on the conversation. It was taking a lot of energy and concentration to attempt to appear calm and unfazed.
“As much as I would like to defend my father, I’m forced to agree with you,” she shrugged. “Although what he lacks in personality he makes up for in mystery.”
“Meaning?”
“He has secrets,” she replied. “Kind of like you.”
“Excuse me?” I said, taking the bait.
“I hear you have a girlfriend,” she said, and her tone shifted slightly. “Or at least, I hear you had a girlfriend.”
“That’s none of your business,” I said immediately.
She smiled, and I knew instantly that she wasn’t just going to let this topic go. “Nothing is ever really my business,” she said. “I make it my business.”
“Yes, I remember,” I nodded. “That’s why I avoided you when we were kids.”
Emma sat up and crossed her legs. Then she fixed her dark hazel eyes on me. “You and Molly, huh?” she said. “At long last.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, come on,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You’ve always held a candle for Molly. Don’t even bother denying it.”
“What makes you think I did?” I demanded.
“I may be seven years younger than you, but that doesn’t mean I’m stupid, Tri
stan,” Emma said harshly. “Or blind, for that matter. I just noticed things.”
“You’ve seen Molly and I interact all of what…two times?”
“It was enough,” she said, with a shrug. “Remember that big party that your father hosted to open one of his many hotels?”
“Yes.”
“You invited me to that.”
“I didn’t invite you,” I reminded her. “You begged me to include you.”
“Whatever, same difference,” she said dismissively. “The point is I was there, and so was Molly and her family. I watched the two of you the whole night. At first it was only obvious to me that Molly was infatuated with you, but as the night progressed, I realized you had feelings for her, too.”
“Based on what?”
“The way you looked at her,” Emma replied. “The way your eyes lingered on her when she spoke. The way you made excuses to touch her throughout the dinner. The fact that you barely noticed the cocktail waitress who was flirting with you.”
“I noticed her,” I said defensively. “I slept with her later that night.”
“And did you think of Molly the whole time?”
“I knew letting you have a suite here would come back to bite me in the ass,” I groaned.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Do you deny it?”
I sighed heavily. “No.”
She smiled smugly at me. “I thought so…. Now, what happened?”
“Nothing,” I said, trying to brush it off. “She was here for a few months, we got involved, and now we’re not involved anymore.”
“Why?” she pressed.
When Emma got like this, she was like a dog with a bone. She wouldn’t let go until she had dug deep. “This thing with Molly was…it was just a fling.”
“Bull.”
I raised my eyebrows. “It’s true.”
“Please, you think that’ll work on me,” Emma asked. “I know you, Tristan, better than you think. You’re lying to me.”
I groaned. “Do you want anything to drink?”
“I’d like some answers,” she shot back. “And while you’re supplying them, you can grab me a drink, sure.”
“Why do you care?” I demanded. “You barely knew Molly.”