To her chagrin, she did know. Boy, did she ever know. There but for the grace of God, and all that. “He told you about his experience with venereal disease, so you slept with him? Seems logical.” In bizzaro land. Where she was evidently vacationing.
“It made more sense in context. Also I maybe, just possibly, a teensy bit—”
Oh my God, what now? His last girlfriend didn’t really understand him? He can’t do it with a rubber because he just can’t bear not feeling the full experience? Ugh. “Spit it out.”
“I may have been in love with him for about three years.”
Oh, was that all? “Well, duh.”
As far as she was concerned, that was all she needed to say. The whole thing had been obvious to her all along. Thank heavens it was now out in the open.
She snagged the waiter on his next pass, billed everything to their room, and within minutes she and Julie were on the beach, enjoying the Technicolor sunset. Pinks, purples, reds...too many colors to name, in tiers across the sky. It was a postcard in the making, almost too pretty to be beautiful. It called for rendering in pastels, watercolors, a young girl’s diary. Hearts and flowers. A cotton-candy sort of sunset. Amanda wanted to be world-weary and cynical, but she couldn’t keep it up. Had she been wearing socks, they would have been knocked off by the hot chromatic tango the sky was executing as she watched.
She took off her flip-flops and dug her toes into the sand, considering a stroll down to the water’s edge. If she toe-fisted there, the tide would run in around her ankles, billow the sand up, bury her deeper before it receded. She could burrow into Oahu, and pretend she never had to leave this fairy-tale place with the ferociously great sex and the magical sunsets.
Julie, however, was in a less willfully oblivious frame of mind. “You’re really gonna drop that ‘duh’ into the conversation with no follow-up?”
Yeah, I was. We’ve been friends a long time; I think an occasional “duh” is not only acceptable, but probably de rigueur for a relationship like this. And you’ve been in love with the guy since you met him. Everybody knows that. Duh. Duh, duh, duh!
Possibly frustration and liquor were making her a less-than-optimal friend at that moment. Amanda took a breath and attempted to compensate.
“I thought the ‘duh’ said it all. I really don’t see what the problem is, Jules. I was startled it happened so suddenly, but in the larger sense I’m not surprised. If anything, the real question is why this didn’t happen sooner. I never could figure out why you tried to fix me up with him. You’re perfect for each other, and you yourself admit you’ve been in love for years. Which I could’ve told you.”
Duh, duh, duh... Dude, seriously. A thousand times duh. Oh, I’m a terrible friend. But...duh.
“I have been, but I never said Alan has.”
“Of course he has. If you don’t know that, you’re about the only one who doesn’t.”
Everybody knows, Jules. This is not news! She might be a terrible friend, but she was a pragmatic one.
Julie must have picked up on Amanda’s limited patience, or maybe she was simply tired of the topic of Alan. Much as Amanda was sick of thinking about where things were or were not headed with Jeremy.
“What is wrong with us?” Julie asked. “Why can’t we have a conversation that doesn’t fail the damn Bechdel test? This is a dream vacation. We’re in a tropical wonderland full of stuff we’ve never seen before. It’s amazing. We should be amazed, dammit! Let’s talk about motherfucking turtles or something.”
“Motherfucking turtles?” Did I miss a memo? Whatever. They had made it to the tide line, and Amanda dug her toes in as though she could root herself there. The sky was amazing, the sand melted away under her feet, and she felt at one with nature and the universe. That very feeling was probably why they charged so much for vacations here. Why Jeremy had hoped to change her mind here. It was extremely transformative. Dammit.
“Oh, it’s something Alan said earlier. You’re probably going to be hearing it again.”
“Okay, then that still fails the Bechdel test.” Little as she wanted to continue the conversation, she recognized that she was pretty much stuck with it. “This stuff is what’s on our minds right now, Jules. And in my case there’s a time element here. You and Alan see each other every day. You can work it out over lunch if you want to. But the day after tomorrow, we go back to California and Jeremy goes back to Washington, and I feel like I need to know what happens after that.” Even thinking about it made her sad.
“You need a plan. An Amandaplanda.”
“I do. Big surprise.” Amanda always had a plan, which was why Julie had given her the stuffed panda in the eighth grade. It was holding a clipboard, obviously making a plan, so they’d named it the Amandaplanda, even though Julie was just as likely to whip up a checklist as her friend. “Here’s a plan. Let’s go the bar.”
“The one by the beach?”
Jeremy had mentioned he might head there, since he had his evening free.
“Any bar except that one.”
Chapter Nine
Beating Alan three times at darts had put a small amount of the spring back in Jeremy’s stride, but it didn’t last. He picked up the guy’s tab as a consolation prize, and they talked past each other for a while. Jeremy slumped over his beer, talking about Amanda and feeling sorry for himself. He knew he was mumbling, knew he was giving off an impression of surly drunkenness, but he didn’t care. It suited his mood. Because, as he told Alan in a dark moment, he didn’t believe she was coming back to him. She didn’t know what she wanted, but it didn’t sound like anything he could give her.
“It’s like she wants to negotiate things, but I do all that at work, I don’t want to come home to it. I just want things to be the way they’re supposed to be. I shouldn’t have to engage in high-level negotiations just to have a relationship with my wife, you know?”
“Sure. You want stuff to be easier than that.”
“Well. It doesn’t have to be easy, just...”
“Not adversarial?”
“Yeah.”
Alan didn’t seem that interested in the conversation, but he was a polite guy. Patient, easygoing. Willing to tolerate a certain amount of angst as long as the beer kept flowing. “So why’d you move, anyway?”
“It all seemed to make sense at the time. I don’t hate California, but I figured a new start, close to my big clients, great city. And I like rooting for underdog teams. But I didn’t mean to write it in stone.”
“Right.”
“I never believed all that crap, you know? Before I met Amanda.” Had there been such a dark time in his life? It was hard to recall a world without her in it, even if she was in another state. “Then she was there, and it was like psshhfffttthh!” Explosions. Fireworks. Angel choirs. “And I’ve been screwed ever since. Because I can’t think about anything else, but I don’t think she’s comin’ back, man.”
Oh, fuck. Fuck, I can’t believe I said that. I can’t be giving up on this. No.
“You don’t?” Even Alan sounded surprised, but now that Jeremy had said it out loud, it rang horribly true.
“I don’t.” Do I? The bartender distracted them, tapping next to Jeremy’s empty beer glass. “Yeah, one more then close me out, please. I’ll pick up his, too.”
“Thanks. I’ll get yours next time. We may be here tomorrow night, the way things are going.” Alan stared into the last half inch of beer in his own glass, looking about as enthusiastic as Jeremy felt. Poor guy, he seemed to be going through some serious shit of his own. Why would either of them want to hang out with the other, in their current state?
“God, I hope not. No offense.”
“No, this sucks. It’s so fucking happy in here I wanna hurl.”
Jeremy could sympathize. When the fresh cold beer arrived, he lowered his
head and pressed his cheek to the glass, hoping to cool some sense back into his fevered brain. “Fuck it. At least I tried, right?” The last refuge of the hopeless.
“So...you going to CES this year?”
It was the big West Coast technology conference. Jeremy would be there with bells on.
“Subject-changing time, huh? Yeah, and my booth will be the one with the crowd in front of it.”
“Oh? Big new product launch?”
Jeremy chuckled, the sound feeling somewhat foreign, given his overall gloomy mood that evening. “Nah. One of my tech writers who’ll be there is some kind of yo-yo whiz. Knows all these amazing tricks. He convinced me to do yo-yos as our promo item, with the logo on them. He’ll draw the crowd doing his thing, and people will want the yo-yos to take home to their kids, so...”
Alan looked skeptical. “Yo-yos? How did you even find that out? Did the guy have it on his résumé, or what?”
“No, it’s just something he does at the office, during breaks. And meetings, sometimes. We’re pretty informal, and a lot of the team work spaces have plenty of room for pacing around and making big gestures. Or, you know, playing with yo-yos.”
“Team work spaces? Do you have, like, swinging pod chairs or maybe a monkey on-site? I’m getting a Google/Pixar kinda vibe.”
Alan sounded sarcastic, but Jeremy suspected the snark was born of jealousy. Who wouldn’t want a Pixar vibe at work? “No pod chairs, no monkeys. But there are a lot of modular couches, and people are allowed to bring their dogs to work as long as the dogs are well behaved.”
It had been one of his best moves, though he’d had his doubts when one of his employees first suggested it. Still, he’d committed himself to a collaborative business model, one where he set the goals and let his teams decide how best to meet them. The pros and cons of the dog decision had been discussed by all the stakeholders, just like any other project or product. Potential outcomes were considered, assessment criteria for success defined, and a plan generated. He’d expressed his concerns but let the plan move forward, and to his vast surprise it had become one of the best features of the office. Some of their finest product innovations had been cooked up the same way.
“Yo-yos and dogs. I sort of want to work there now,” Alan confessed. “Don’t tell Julie. She’s still pretty pissed at you.”
“Mum’s the word,” Jeremy assured him.
“I’m kinda surprised, though. I had you pegged as a strict rules-and-regulations kind of boss.” Jeremy must have looked taken aback, because Alan glanced up and immediately started trying to unsay it. “Not in a bad way, you know. Just because of the whole thing with Amanda. You didn’t seem like you’d be very flexible about—okay, I’m gonna shut up now and drink this beer.”
“Okay.”
Okay. It was a fair assessment, if he was being honest with himself. His natural inclination was to micromanage, and he had to work hard to overcome that. He couldn’t escape it entirely, either, because ultimately the buck stopped with him. It was his name on the letterhead, his neck on the line. He was still the lead developer. And although his employees could meet their goals in their own way, it was Jeremy who set the goals to begin with.
In that sense, he suddenly realized, he was not actually a collaborator. His employees, sure. But not him. Working with a team to arrive at ends he’d already dictated wasn’t the same as working with a team to decide what the end would be in the first place. He wasn’t in the chain of command, he was the chain. And he was good at what he did.
And that, Jeremy suddenly understood, was his problem. Because Amanda didn’t need a boss or a minion, she needed a collaborator. The one thing Jeremy was not. But that was what he had to be, her equal in the hierarchy, not above or below.
He almost didn’t hear Alan’s suggestion that they call it a night, so stunned was he by the revelation that struck him next.
There is no hierarchy.
It was an epiphany, a liminal moment he would never forget, and even as it happened he knew he’d better write it down as soon as he could to make sure it still made sense in the morning. Just in case it was the beer talking.
He all but race-walked back to his room and grabbed the hotel notepad the moment he walked through the door, scribbling the cryptic message his mind had sent him.
It felt late, and he was surprised to check the time and find it was only ten o’clock. Amanda would be back from her dinner with Julie soon, he supposed. He had a little time to think things over, make sure he really understood the implications of the no-hierarchy thing. That lasted about two minutes—two minutes of staring at a notepad with there is no hierarchy scrawled on it—before he decided what he really should do to pass the time was watch a movie.
For some reason he was thinking of The Matrix, so he spent some time looking for a streaming version. Finding nothing, he conducted a brief flirtation with the notion of piracy but ended up—as he always did—simply purchasing a download from a legitimate vendor. Not because of nobility, particularly, but because of paranoia about getting caught. Or so he told himself, at least.
Neo, Morpheus. Blue pill, red pill. Hot leather-wearing chick. It all sort of melted into a blur. He didn’t recall nodding off, but he woke with a start to the raunchy beat of Rage Against the Machine under his ear. Peeling his face off the iPad, he watched as Neo soared off over the digital rooftops. Every programmer’s best dream and worst nightmare.
It was almost midnight, and still no sign of Amanda. He checked his phone. No texts or missed calls, either. Had she come by and seen him through the window, gone away again so as not to wake him?
He wanted to text her, but...almost midnight. Suddenly he couldn’t stay on the bed another second, couldn’t risk staring at that phone screen until the digits ticked over to a new day with no word from her. Since he couldn’t leave, either—maybe she was just having a great time with Julie, maybe she was on her way to his room right now, tipsy and amorous—he decided the only other option was to take a shower. Or, as he would later refer to it, “That Fateful Shower.”
Chapter Ten
He wasn’t there.
It honestly hadn’t occurred to her that he might not be. That he wouldn’t answer the text she’d sent a minute or so before she arrived, that she wouldn’t see him, or at least his silhouette against the blinds, as she trudged down the path to his cottage.
Amanda had steeled herself for this, fortified her courage with alcohol, even made sure that her favorite red-and-white polka-dot sundress still looked reasonably ironed before making the trip over from her and Julie’s room. Looking good always helped her feel better. More confident. She’d made a plan, prepared for difficulty. But she had no contingency plan for what to do if the dreaded moment never happened. The butterflies in her stomach slowly morphed into bats as she stared into Jeremy’s empty room. Then into eagles. Then one giant pterodactyl.
Where was he, anyway? Still out drinking somewhere with Alan? She didn’t think they had enough in common to make small talk for that long. Had he found a different kind of drinking partner? Or, worse yet, a different kind of partner altogether to spend the night with? Probably not. But he could have. And after she talked to him, that would be somewhere in his future. Somewhere in hers, too.
And then she started crying. She wasn’t even sure why. It was ugly-crying, too, the kind that nobody else should ever see. She sat down heavily on one of the big patio chairs, pulling her knees up under her skirt and resting her head on them as she tried to will the sobs to stop.
She was done. She was just...done. And it had happened almost without her noticing, she now realized. Sometime during the conversation with Julie, the semi-serious talk of daddy issues, the true extent of which Julie was happily unaware. Amanda was aware, and the importance of all that ancient crap obviously hadn’t dwindled despite her determination not to let it affect her
. She’d kept it to herself, but that hadn’t killed any of it.
And she resented that. She’d spent years putting her history with her dad behind her. Why did it get to play any part in determining who she ended up with? Because it just did. Because that was how people worked. Just like people married their parents. She’d tried to pick somebody like her mom. Self-directed, motivated, independent and confident. Instead, she’d ended up with Jeremy. He was gainfully employed and, as far as she knew, he’d never gambled. But the one-sided decisions, the win/lose mindset, the way he thought one grand gesture could wipe out any multitude of minor transgressions...those were just like Dad. And she couldn’t live with that.
She’d expected to feel even more anguish at deciding it was really, truly over. Instead, she felt only a great wash of calm finality, a soothing buzz of acceptance that eased her tears a notch. Enough for her to notice the chill in the air, the smell of a tiki torch.
Something rustled in the bushes, making her lift her head on sudden high alert. A stalker? A large predator? Did Hawaii even have predators?
Then whatever it was started whistling a hula song, and Alan sauntered through the foliage, doing a terrible job of trying to act nonchalant. His fake double take when he “noticed” her was truly a disgrace to actors everywhere. Lucky for him he wasn’t trying to be one of them.
“Alan, seriously. What the hell?”
“I was gonna go see if I could tell whether Jules was back in your room yet. Then I heard you, so I came over here. Are you okay? Wait, did Jeremy... Do I need to beat him up or something?”
The image of Alan attempting to beat up the new improved Jeremy was almost enough to make her smile. It was sweet of him, though. She tipped her head up and sniffled, trying not to let anything ghastly escape her nose. “I haven’t even seen Jeremy tonight. You were his date. You tell me if he needs beating up. I came over here because he didn’t answer his phone, but he isn’t here, either.”
Sex on the Beach (Cosmo Red-Hot Reads from Harlequin) Page 7