by Shey Stahl
When I get back to the hotel, Rylee is sitting outside my door, crying. I’m not sure what to make of it until her crying turns to heaving and then shaking uncontrollably.
It’s the perfect place, paradise, right? And everything’s turning into a big heaping pile of smelly shit.
I pull out my key card from my robe. It’s a miracle I remembered it in my rush to follow Jake out. “What happened to you?”
It takes her a minute to find her words, and then I wish she wouldn’t have. “Wesley slept with someone else. He’s been sleeping with her since that first night we got here!” She cries into her hands. “Some fucking island girl.”
Dropping down next to her, I wrap my arms around her. Oh, God. That dirty little frat boy. I knew he would do something like this someday. I just knew it. Imma kill him.
“He said it meant nothing.” She throws her hands up. “What a crock of shit. I hate that excuse!”
“I’m going to kill that little bastard!” I get up, intending to do so, but Rylee grabs my wrist and makes me sit down with her.
“That’s not the worst part,” she cries, giving me that same cute scrunched nose look I adore so much on her adorable face. “I, uh… went looking for you last night at that bar.”
She didn’t. No…. Please tell me she didn’t sleep with Jake. No. This can’t be happening. And I don’t even know why my mind immediately goes there, but it does. I’m already preparing myself for the fall. If she went there, she didn’t know who Jake was. He had been pissed when I left—that would be payback for him.
Part of me knows Jake isn’t vindictive, though. He wouldn’t do that.
“I left early,” I tell her, trying to swallow my words and figure out what her next words will be.
Her tear-soaked cheeks blush as she stares at me. “I didn’t think they were open, but there was this guy there cleaning up broken glass, and we got to talking. I asked him where you were, and he said he didn’t know.”
“And then what?” I can’t breathe.
“I had a drink, or ten, and then left with Nash.” Her words speed up, and then she bursts out, “And I told Wesley because I was pissed, and now I’m in the hall crying. Who acts like this? Who gets revenge by fucking someone else? What did I do?” She sobs into her hands.
Rubbing her back, I try to console her. “Rylee… hon.” Suddenly, I’m at a complete loss for words. Usually I know exactly what to say and am willingly tell others what they should do. Now I have nothing for her. Not a goddamn thing. “I’m sorry. I really am.”
Her chin shakes. “I just want to go home. I hate it here.”
Part of me understands she knows what she did was wrong. But the fact that Wesley had thrown it all away on the first night they were there was what hurts her the most.
“I don’t understand why he brought me here just to cheat on me? This has been the worst vacation of my life, and that includes the time you got us arrested in Mexico.”
She had to go there. The time she’s referring to was when we were in Cabo and a cop pulled us over for making an illegal lane change. I argued with him, and we wound up in jail. Took five days before we could get out. But whatever. I still stand by my choice, and the Mexican government is shady as shit. “Don’t remind me.”
Every day we make decisions, and they go one of two ways. If we listen to our hearts, what happens then? Good or bad, when you’re making them, they all seem good. Then, after time passes and you can see whether or not that decision was right, you’ll know exactly when and where you made your mistake. I’m the type of person who weighs heavily on playing it safe. Picking and choosing exactly when I’m going to make a decision that could potentially go badly. Island Boy, well, he was a big chance for me. Sometimes our heart and gut tell us two different things. Sometimes it’s easier to listen to your heart and ignore the warnings your gut may give you. But then, there’s this one chance, this one moment where you know that you could possibly be letting the most amazing part of your life go.
That’s about when my tears let loose, and Rylee and I are both crying.
“Oh, God, we’ve completely lost it,” Rylee says, laughing, wrapping her arms around me.
“I’m fine,” I try to reassure her, but I don’t do a very good job. I’m not fine.
“Bullshit. We’re going to drink. Get your shit.”
Rylee’s idea for tonight is drinking. I don’t want to drink anymore. At all. I want her to think of a way to make this pain go away.
Have you ever been out with friends, and you’re the sober one and everything they do is annoying you because they’re drunk and you’re not? That’s me tonight. So I have no choice but to start drinking or else I’m going to ditch my best friend. We find a bar inside the hotel and sit down at the bar, much like I did my first night here. Everything is so very different now, though.
“What’ll it be?” the man at the bar asks, winking and giving me a look.
He thinks he’s smooth. He’s not. I miss Island Boy. I miss him so much it actually makes me sick to think about, like a knife to my heart anytime his dirty smirk pops in my head.
This guy is tall, very tan, lighter hair than Jake’s. He has an Australian accent that I don’t find attractive. I bet if Jake had one, I would have enjoyed it, but his accent does nothing for me.
“Are you having a good time?” he asks me.
I turn toward him and raise my drink, but it’s my eyes that give away my sadness. “Do I look like I’m having a good time?”
“No.”
“Then I’m not having a good time.”
An hour later, I’m having a good time and we leave that bar. We go to the casino for the first time, and I nearly lose all my money. I can see why people go broke in casinos. It’s bullshit.
Wesley’s in there, spots Rylee and immediately rushes over with bloodshot eyes and nearing tears. He knows he fucked up and the best thing in his life hates him. “What can I do?”
Rylee punches him. Actually fucking punches him in the face. She got his ear, and I’m sure she was aiming for his mouth, but he turned his head. “You can go to hell!”
Rylee stares at me, holding her sore hand close to her chest, sniffling and wiping away snot with the back of her hand. “The wedding is off.” And we immediately go back to her room.
I follow her inside as she tosses Wesley’s suitcase in the hallway and slams the door, pacing the floor by the window. Her hands and body shake. “I don’t even know what to do. I can’t believe him,” she wails, her shaking taking over, marring her voice. “What a fucking asshole! What can I do?” she mocks. “As if he could actually make this right. He brought me here! He fucking brought me here!”
I’ve been where Rylee is a time or two. I know this pain, that void that fills with an uncontrollable need to right what went wrong. After so many times of this occurring, you get jaded to the situation and just say fuck it all to hell. Rylee, living in her happy bubble, hasn’t experienced this before… it’s going to take time for her to ride out this storm of emotion.
On Tuesday I spend the day with Rylee and never hear a word from Jake. Not that I expected that I would, but still, I thought maybe the determined side of him would have won out and he would have come back. But he doesn’t.
“I can’t believe Wesley,” Rylee says repeatedly, in shock. “I can’t believe this.”
I have to remind myself that to Rylee, Wesley having sex with another girl is probably a surprise to her. To me it isn’t. I saw early on he is that way.
Not Rylee, though. She saw the side he showed her. The loving and nurturing side that bought her flowers every Sunday and coffee every morning. He played that one well.
“What are you going to do? Is he leaving early?” I ask as we sit there watching the waves on the beach. I keep looking up the beach, remembering my many walks up this very path. It all seems so distant already, and it only happened the other day.
“No, he’s coming back with us and then moving out.” Rylee glan
ces at me, brushing sand off her as we walk back to the hotel. “Can I move in with you for a little while? I can’t afford that place on my own.”
“Yeah.” Then I sigh, wrapping my arm around her. “I need to find another client when we get back.”
“You should work at a place like this.” She points to the concierge desk when we’re walking through the lobby. “I tried to book snorkeling yesterday, and they sent me diving with those helmets.”
“They have swimming pigs here too.” I start laughing, about to tell her about Jake and the pigs, but then I stop. She doesn’t need to hear that right now.
“Seriously? Pigs swim?”
“That was my first reaction too. It’s the weirdest thing. They’re like little fish.”
Looking closer at the concierge desk, I kind of see her and Stevie’s point about the job. This isn’t any different from what I do back home. Maybe not as many celebrities, but there’s certainly a demand. People travel and need others to take care of things for them. The Atlantis is the premier spot in Nassau, and loads of wealthy people stay here and need the help I can offer. It’d be cool, right? Living in the Bahamas.
Rylee notices right away my brain is working.
“Fuck, you’ve gone completely sideways for him, haven’t you?”
My head hangs. “You’re telling me. It’s awful. Now I’m thinking of ways to stay here like it’d actually change something.”
We make it inside the hotel and to the elevators when I notice Amara, Jake’s ex-girlfriend, walking toward us. At first I wonder why she’s here, and then I realize she’s probably here to see Alicia.
“Hey…” She stops in front of me, a certain sadness to her eyes. “Kendall, right?”
I nod, apprehensive as to why she would be talking to me.
“Did you have fun the other night?” Amara asks, looking from me to Rylee, and then back again. “At Club Naz?”
“Yeah, it was fun.”
I think she can tell I’m not exactly into small talk with her, but she surprises me when she says, “I’m not the heartless bitch Jake probably told you I am.”
I swallow over the lump forming in my throat at the mention of his name. “He never said that.”
In fact, Jake had said very little about her, other than the fact that she cheated on him.
Amara nods, chewing on her bottom lip. “Well, I suppose you think I am now?”
She cheated on him. Of course I thought that. “I don’t know anything about you.”
Just before she walks away, her eyes glaze over, as if she had let something go she knew she shouldn’t have… much like at the bar when she saw me standing where she should have been, on his arm. “Until you’ve loved one boy your entire life, you don’t know what I was thinking, so please don’t judge me. He was drowning me. I was suffocating, and I needed out. I didn’t do it the way I should have, but I did it. I didn’t know there was anything else out there but what we had, and then when I left with another guy, I regretted it. I regret the look on his face.”
I knew that look. I knew the sharp pain in my chest, the painful reminder.
And then Amara walks away, and I’m left dumbfounded. For two reasons. I’m holding Rylee as she cries, because Amara has just given her a painful reminder of what happened to her, but I’m reminded of that same look Jake had given to me too.
I had done exactly the same thing Amara had done to him.
I hadn’t realized how much that mattered until now.
Rylee and I don’t spend much time upstairs, and then we decide to go to dinner at Carmine’s in the hotel. Immediately we order a bottle of wine, because why not? Wine makes everything better.
“You want it to be true?” she asks, bringing her second glass of wine to her lips.
“What?”
“You trying to tell yourself you don’t mean anything to him. You’re trying to convince yourself he doesn’t mean anything to you either.”
“Yes, I want it to be true.” I sigh, the weight of my ignorance building in my chest. With my elbows on the table, my hands brush over my neck, and I’m reminded, yet again, that I miss him. “I didn’t come here to fall in love with someone after just a few days,” I say, my voice shaking. “It’s not like I can actually leave here and make it work, you know?”
“But you could,” she points out, dipping her head to catch my eyes. “You can do your job anywhere you want.”
I know that. I don’t want this to be about me though. Rylee needs me at the moment, and maybe it’s by design that she wants to talk about me instead of her. I’m not sure. I set my wine down and look at her reaching for a piece of bread in the middle of the table. “Are you okay?”
A tearful smile takes over, her lips pressing into a tight smile as she twirls her fork in her pasta. “To be honest, it didn’t hit me until that chick said those things. I felt like that Amara girl. I did. I’ve only ever been with Wesley. I was a virgin when we met, and everything just sort of happened so fast. He’s been the love of my life, and I never imagined anything different.”
I can totally understand why Rylee would feel this way. It isn’t like I don’t understand how Amara felt either. But my concern is Jake in that situation. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for him having her do that.
Rylee draws in a deep breath, her eyes on the ocean to our right as we finish our meal. “I cried the entire time I was with that guy at the bar. He probably thought I was some crazy person, and he kept asking if he was hurting me.” She laughs, her hand covering her mouth. “He was so sweet and nice, and it was probably the worst experience he’d ever had.”
I know she’s talking about Nash and know enough about Surfer Boy to know that probably isn’t true.
“You’re a beautiful soul, Rylee.” I try to convey that through my sincerity, through my words and eyes. “Too beautiful for someone like Wesley.”
“I know. It just hurts. I should have left him sooner,” she admits solemnly, lowering her voice. “Deep down, I know he’s cheated on me before. You always know these kind of things.”
I’ve never wanted to take away someone’s sadness as much as I do now.
2 parts Grey Goose® L'Orange vodka
½ part Orange Curacao
½ part sour mix
½ part blood orange syrup
½ part orange juice
½ part orange blossom honey
Pour all ingredients into a mixing glass. Shake with ice to chill and strain into a chilled martini glass rimmed with sugar in the raw.
Against my better judgment, I had agreed to have dinner with Liam. He ends up taking me to the Green Parrot in downtown Nassau—you know, the part of town Jake warned me to stay away from.
I don’t know why I agreed to go with him either. Maybe it was my way of making it up to him for feeling like I’d led him on. I’m not going to have sex with him or anything. It’s just dinner and drinks and friendly conversation.
The bar he takes me to is small. We sit shoulder to shoulder with about twenty other people, and it’s a stuffy, smoke-filled establishment I don’t ever plan on returning to based on their air quality. I’m surprised no one’s complained yet.
Behind us the bar is standing room only, about another twenty people crammed in drinking and talking too loudly over the music.
And here’s where the night changes, and I realize this meeting with Liam might have been a bad idea. I remember Jake’s warning about not going to Nassau alone. I’m not alone. But I don’t think I’m in that great of company, either.
Another man, older than Liam, maybe in his late thirties, joins us at the bar and sits next to me, his thigh touching mine. He makes me uncomfortable immediately. With his narrow nose, midnight skin, and eyes so dark and mysterious, he gives me a bad vibe.
“This is Messer… Messer, this is Kendall,” Liam introduces us. I don’t bother shaking hands with him. After all, half his body is touching me. That’s introduction enough as far as I’m concerned.
/> “How do you two know each other?” I ask Liam, motioning between the two of them.
“I met Messer, what…” He pauses, looking at Messer, and then shrugs. “Five years ago. We get together anytime I come to the Bahamas.”
“Which is?” I press, feeling like I need to know a little more about them. I’m tempted to take pictures of their drivers licenses just to be safe.
“Twice a year,” Liam says, bringing his scotch to his lips and then taking a slow drink, winking at me. “Sometimes more. Just depends on how much free time I have.”
By the way, he looks like a total dipshit when he winks. Jake does it so much better.
“The lawyers I know work too much to be sneaking off on vacation that much,” I tease, sucking down my own drink. My remark isn’t meant to be rude, but I think there’s a small part of Liam that takes offense to it.
It isn’t Liam I’m worried about, though. It’s his shady fucking friend. Most of what he says I can’t understand, but it’s the way he looks at me that freaks me out. And the way Liam does nothing to stop it pisses me off.
Leaning over, he whispers something to Liam, who smiles, nodding to me with an errant smile. “I think she would.”
“Ya lie….” Messer and Liam look at me. Messer’s smile takes over, his teeth bright white against his dark skin. And then Messer says, “Tru tru.”
Whatever the hell that means. I know what Messer’s intentions are. You can see it in his eyes and the way he watches me and my body. He wants to fuck me.
Suddenly, Liam stands and reaches for his phone on the table. “My flight leaves early in the morning.” He gestures to Messer and me. “You kids have fun.”
Is he serious? He’s leaving me here with him?
“I’ll come with you.” I stand as well, looking at Liam like he’s lost his goddamn mind if he thinks I’m staying here with this guy.
Liam shakes his head. “No, you stay. I’m not going back to my place. I gotta meet someone.” And then he walks out of the bar leaving me alone with scary dude.