by Lila Monroe
“And the water is solar heated,” Brooke says brightly. “Plus they have this special water recycling system so it’s all as eco-friendly as possible.”
“Yes,” Maggie says dryly. “Trevor is in heaven.” Brooke’s husband-to-be is known first for his mad bass skills and second for being the crunchiest eco-geek this side of San Francisco.
I grab one of the hand towels and barely restrain an indecent sigh at the softness. Still, a glance in the mirror tells me it’s going to take at least a shower to fix the catastrophe that is currently my hair.
“Was it awful, getting stuck on the road?” Brooke says. “I mean, with the storm and all …” She grimaces.
I don’t want her to worry any more than she clearly already has. “Ah, it was hardly any time before Will showed up.”
Brooke spins toward Maggie. “You sent Will to get her?”
Maggie raises her hands. “I was asking around, and he overheard and volunteered. I figured Trevor’s friends were safe. If he’s a serial killer or something, you really should have told me.”
“It’s nothing like that,” I say, wishing Brooke hadn’t brought it up. “We just had an … awkward situation in college.”
“It was more than that,” Brooke says.
“Okay,” Maggie says, waggling a finger at me. “I think you’d better spill, and there are a lot of comfy chairs around here I can torture you with if necessary.”
I can’t help smiling at the Monty Python reference. “I misjudged him,” I say. “I trusted him when I shouldn’t have.”
“They started out at each other’s throats,” Brooke informs Maggie. “Every day Ruby would call me to vent about how he’d been showing off for the prof or correcting her in class—so, of course, I knew it was love.”
I roll my eyes. “He did get on my nerves. He even finagled his way into getting a spot with everyone’s dream advisor at the same time I did, when the guy normally only took on one undergrad a year. But we ended up managing a project for him, and it turned out we actually got along when we were working together. We started hanging out more as friends, and then my mom had a cancer scare back home—he cut me a ton of slack, held my hand when I was freaking out …”
“That’s so sweet,” Maggie says, without her usual sarcasm.
“Well, yeah. I thought so. He was still seeing other girls here and there, but nothing serious, and I guess I got rosy-eyed imagining he’d get serious with me.” I bite my lip.
“But he turned you down?”
“Worse,” Brooke says dramatically. “She wrote him a letter confessing all her feelings.”
I cringe, just remembering. “I got drunk, and worked up the courage to go over to his frat house when he was out and stuck it under his door.”
“So far, so good,” Maggie says.
“Yeah, well, the next day I came by the house for the study session-slash-hangout we’d already planned. And …” I stop.
Damn it. The memory still hurts, with an echo of the nervous pinching in my stomach when I walked over, my head spinning with the possibilities. I hadn’t heard anything from him, so maybe he was going to pretend it had never happened, but maybe he wanted to wait to talk in person. To let me down easy, or to tell me he felt the same way? Hope fluttered in my chest.
That’s when I saw all the guys clustered around the bulletin board in the common room, jostling each other and snickering. I can still hear Will’s voice, reading with wry amusement the words I’d written so sincerely the night before.
“ ‘Sometimes a person comes along who makes you think all the clichés and fairy tales could be real.’ ” He chuckled and nudged whoever was standing next to him in the throng. “Can you believe that?”
My heart had started thudding hard enough to shake me, and my cheeks flared searing hot. For a second I couldn’t convince my legs to move. I knew I should march on over there and give him a piece of my mind, take him to task for treating my emotional so cruelly. So I did what every courageous, independent woman would do.
I turned on my heels and ran.
Reliving that moment, I swallow hard. Brooke touches my arm. “Ruby?”
I make myself shrug. “He pinned it to the bulletin board in the common room for everyone to gawk at. All the guys in the frat were laughing at it. Will was standing there laughing about it with them.”
Maggie sucks in her breath. “Yeah,” says Brooke. “Exactly.”
“I gave him my heart and he took a dump on it, basically,” I say. “He couldn’t have cared about me even a bit. I was an idiot to think he did.”
“You weren’t an idiot,” Brooke says firmly. “He put on a good show. I’m so sorry you’re going to have to put up with him here. I really didn’t know Trevor’s Will was your Will.”
“How exactly did that happen?” I ask, grateful to change the subject from my past humiliations. “He wasn’t at Trevor’s birthday party last year, or your engagement party, or, like, a gazillion other things everyone else showed up for. I never ran into him once before now.”
“The story I heard is that they were on the rowing team together at USC,” Brooke says. “You know how guys are. They’ll barely talk in five years and still see each other as BFFs.”
That explains it. I straighten my spine. “Well, I’m not going to let him get to me. I learned my lesson. I’ll steer clear of him, and we’ll both be happy.”
After a shower—not the rainfall kind—and a wardrobe change into my favorite teal halter dress—it sets off my eyes and makes my figure look nearly hourglass; magic!—I venture out of my room to explore.
Beyond the lobby desks, the main floor opens up to an outer deck where teak recliners circle a sparkling infinity pool. Palapas spot the golden sand of the beach beyond. The layout of the resort allows the jungle to sprout up here and there around the deck, and a natural breeze flows through the whole place. An environmentally friendly substitute for air conditioning, I guess. I can’t say it isn’t pleasant.
Really, there’s nothing unpleasant I can say about Will’s resort, as much as I might enjoy getting a mental dig in. It’s one of the most un-unpleasant places I’ve ever had the satisfaction of inhabiting, down to the modern-yet-classic styling of the columns and doorframes.
But then, Will has always been good at appearances, hasn’t he?
Speak of the devil. The man himself ambles into view on the deck, side-by-side with a woman I haven’t seen before. Her ebony hair is pulled back in a chignon, and a sleek indigo sheath dress cloths her tall, svelte frame. She doesn’t look more than a year or two older than me, but she’s exactly the sort of woman who always makes me feel like even at 28 I’m just a frivolous girl.
I watch their stroll, safely hidden from view by a massive fern. It doesn’t help that she’s absolutely gorgeous. No wonder Will can’t seem to take his eyes off of her. And why wouldn’t she be into him? Successful, handsome, charm to spare—he’s even more the playboy than he was in college.
The thought pinches at my chest. Is that jealousy? Oh, no. He can flirt with whomever he wants—it’s no business of mine.
And yet I’m still standing there when Will gives the woman a brief wave and turns to head straight toward me.
Ack! The last thing I need is him thinking I’m lurking around to spy on his canoodling. I scoot backward and spin around to hustle off—and find myself face-to-face with a speeding luggage cart.
I yelp. The porter gasps and yanks the cart to the side. Several of the smaller bags tumble off the stack of suitcases onto the floor.
Nice one, Walters. “I’m so sorry!” I babble as I grab a few of the runaway bags. I’m just setting the last of them back on the cart when someone taps my shoulder. My heart sinks.
“You know, if your things were ruined in the rain, there are alternatives to hijacking other people’s luggage, Ruby,” Will says with a teasing arch of his eyebrows.
I glower at him. “I’m just giving your employee a hand.”
The porter, clear
ly a generous spirit, hurries off without mentioning I caused the problem in the first place.
“So what do you think of the place?” Will asks, reminding me of how much I don’t want to tell him the answer to that question. But I’m not going to lie.
“It’s nice enough, I suppose,” I say nonchalantly, “if you’re into comfort and splendor and that sort of thing.”
Will’s smile twitches as if he’s trying not to laugh. I’m not sure if that’s a victory for me or a fail. “As hard to impress as always, I see,” he says. “Let me guess: You’d be happier spending your vacation adventuring off on some uncharted planet?”
I don’t go around broadcasting my sci-fi geekery to everyone I meet, but I’ve never been ashamed of it either. If you ask me, the world will be a much better place if the Star Trek vision of the future ever comes to be. All races and nations living in harmony, on a grand quest to bring the same kind of peace and compassion all across the galaxy? What’s not to like?
And that’s not even getting into how fantastic it’d be to have the technology to conjure any food you wanted out of thin air or zip across the planet in an instant.
But right now Will’s comment makes my cheeks burn. Star Trek was always our thing, the shared geek bonding that brought us together. I had written him off as another shallow frat douche when I noticed the logo sticker on the back of one of his notebooks. We wound up talking for hours in the campus pub that night, going over our favorite episodes, and which characters we were most like. (He was obviously a Riker, the full-of-himself ladies man gunning for the captain’s chair, and Will insisted I was a Janeway, breaking new ground and breaking balls as the first female captain in the franchise.)
The last thing I want to remember right now is how well I thought we’d clicked. As if it was a sign or something sappy like that. Sometimes, a TV show is just a TV show. I mean, Charles Manson might have been a fan, too! If there ever was a person who could have used a time machine … One quick hop into the future and younger me would have been so much wiser.
No chance of that at the moment, so I keep my cool with a careless wave of my hand. “Interplanetary adventuring could have some appeal. I’ve never been much of a beach bunny.”
“No,” Will agrees. For a second the look he gives me is almost speculative, unguarded enough that I’ve started to relax when he adds, “When you do take off on your interplanetary journeying, make sure you have the right company. You wouldn’t want to end up with a flat and no one to rescue you on the other side of the galaxy.”
He gives me a wink, and my hands clench even as the rest of my body flushes hotter. I suspect some very unwise words might have come out of my mouth, but just then the elevator dings, and half of Brooke’s extended family floods into the lobby.
“Ruby!” Maggie calls with a wave. “Time to kick off wedding week with a fancy dinner.”
“Count me in,” I say, turning my back on Will. I’d feel happier heading over to join the crowd if I didn’t know he was coming right behind me.
Chapter Four
As we stream into the restaurant reserved for the first night’s dinner, Will steps up to play host. He ushers people here and there between the tables set up in groups of eight, all warm but efficient congeniality. Obviously that side of him hasn’t changed. With the meetings we had to set up under Professor Maldew, he was strategic all the way down to the seating. “Working with you is like doing business with Sun Tzu,” I joked more than once. He was the planner and I was more of a … winging-it-er.
It was a good pairing while it lasted.
Tonight’s plan has the married couple sitting with the wedding party, so I’m at one end with Maggie across from me and her younger sister Lulu—who, true to form, is wearing a dress that covers less skin than some bikinis I’ve owned, but whatever, we were all twenty-two once—beside me, the happy couple in the middle, and Will at the exact opposite end, where there’s no chance of him even attempting to talk to me. Excellent. Filling out the table is groomsman Colin from Trevor’s cycling group, and best man Brad, who hits three other Bs of his type: buff, blond, and buzz cut.
Will makes a remark I can tell is sly from the curve of his lips, and Brad cracks up. A prickle runs down my spine. The two of them were frat brothers and at least casual buddies back in college. But I’ve crossed paths with Brad at a few of Trevor and Brooke’s dos, and he’s never shown any indication he remembers my humiliation back then. I don’t think the guy has the guile to pretend he’s forgotten. He’s kind of a meathead, more interested in building muscle than brain, but I’ve never seen him be cruel.
It’s not a big crowd overall because of the travel involved. I glance over at the other tables: Brooke and Trevor’s parents, grandparents, assorted extended family, a couple of Brooke’s college friends, a woman she works with at the art gallery, additional cycling buddies, and one of the guys Trevor often has gigs with when he’s working as a session musician.
“You’re kidding me!” Brad says. My eyes jerk back to my own table.
“I wouldn’t lie about a thing like that.” Will grins broadly. He looks … different, in a weird way it takes me a moment to place. He’s relaxed, like he hasn’t been any of the times he’s been talking with me since our collision at the airport. Like he used to be.
No. I will not accept another stupid pang in my chest. However he acted when we were friends was a fraud. I know that.
Okay, okay, maybe it’s reasonable to be sad over losing the guy I thought I knew but really didn’t. But only briefly, please.
Will glances down the table at that second, of course, and our gazes catch. Yikes. I grab my wine glass and turn to Maggie. “So, how’s business going in the cupcake world?”
“Sweet!” she says, and smirks at her pun. “Really, it’s been good. I can’t believe the bakery opens in just one month.”
“That’s awesome.” Maggie is a master-baker—if you like your cupcakes boozy and shaped like penises. Who doesn’t? She’s been operating out of food trucks and tiny windows around Brooklyn for years, and is finally opening her own bakery. “Let me know when the big day is, and I’ll have my clients tweet about it.”
She grins. “Thanks. I can’t believe it. It’s been my dream for so long, and it’s actually happening now.”
“You’re going to rock it,” I reassure her.
Brooke and Trevor stand up, and the chatter around the room drops off. Trevor runs a hand through his dark floppy hair, looking as if he feels a little awkward in the formal shirt and slacks, but he glances at Brooke before he addresses the crowd, and then he’s only beaming. He and I don’t have a ton in common, but I give him full points for his adoration of my bestie.
“The food will be coming soon, don’t worry,” he says. “First off, we wanted to thank everyone for coming all the way out here to celebrate our impending marriage.”
“The trip is kind of a reflection of how the two of us ended up getting together,” Brooke says. “Although I’ll be the first to admit that when I tagged along with Ruby to her alumnae party, I had no idea I was going to meet the man of my dreams.”
“Of course, I’ve always been grateful that Brooke moved to me rather than the other way around, because I hear the surfing isn’t so great up in Philly,” Trevor puts in, to several chuckles from his audience. “I’ve got to give extra thanks to her family for being willing to let her go. I know how much you must have missed her, because she’s been a gift to me every day I’ve lived with her.”
Brooke’s cheeks turn pink, and I feel myself going misty.
“Save some of this for the wedding!” someone hollers out, and Trevor laughs.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got lots more.”
“Anyway, we hope you get a great vacation out of this too,” Brooke says. “Try all the facilities, have fun—that’s what we want to see.”
“Toast!” her aunt yells. We all raise our glasses. As I clink mine with everyone’s in reach, a stream of waiters appears with p
latters of appetizers.
The shrimp canapé all but melts in my mouth. I close my eyes for a second to savor. Then Lulu is knocking me with her knob of an elbow.
“So did you know when you set them up that Trevor was going to be The One?” she asks, her head cocked, bird-like. Other than their coloring, she and Maggie couldn’t look more different. Lulu is thin as a rake and she’s always got her hair pulled up in configurations it gives me a headache to contemplate.
Everyone looks at me to hear the answer. I laugh. “Not exactly. I was more relieved she had someone to talk to, while I was busy networking for clients.” I tip my wine glass to her.
“And then I spilled red wine on my favorite dress, and Trevor knew just how to rinse it out,” Brooke smiled. “I knew then he was a keeper.”
“Wait,” Brad says. “Was I at the party? How come I don’t remember any of this?”
“I’m pretty sure you were still sleeping off a bender from the night before,” Trevor says with a laugh. “One of those all-night parties with the gym crowd.”
“Oooh,” Lulu says in a coo that makes me cringe inside. She prods Brad’s bicep. “If drinking all night leaves you looking like this, forget moderation.”
Brad looks somehow oblivious to her flirting. “I’ve cut back since then,” he says, his voice in physical trainer mode. “Your body should be a temple.”
The main course arrives: a creamy salmon risotto. While I am dying and going to heaven over that, Lulu flutters her eyelashes again, but in a different direction this time.
“How about you?” she says, and I realize she’s aiming her “charms” at Will. “Were you around for the historic party?”
“I’m afraid I missed it,” Will says smoothly.
“There’s a 50/50 chance Will wasn’t even in the country,” Trevor says. “Lots of important places to be, right?” He nudges his friend.