Chapter THIRTY
(Charlotte)
After our moment of honesty, it was so easy to be with Matt. I almost found myself forgetting that we weren’t in the real world. We got up, we ate breakfast, we made flirty little double entendres while we lazed around in the sun. We went to one of the pools with a swim up bar and I tried a drink that was way too strong. We ate lunch at the enormous buffet—although, I probably wouldn’t have put a buffet in a sex resort. At least, sex wasn’t allowed in the dining establishments. Still, I couldn’t help but think of where everybody’s hands had been as they picked up ladles and tongs.
The sun was going down when Matthew suggested we use the massive soaking tub on the bedroom balcony.
“I think when it’s this size, it’s an aboveground pool,” I said, dipping my toes into the cool water. It was way too hot out for anything warmer than “tepid.”
“I think you’d find something to complain about if I took you to Buckingham Palace,” he quipped.
“Jokes on you, I can complain about Buckingham Palace without having to go there.” I held up one dripping hand and started listing things off. “First, waste of taxpayer money. Second, it’s ugly. It looks like the world’s most boring wedding cake. Just this big gray box sitting there—”
He held up his hands. “I surrender.”
“Have you ever been there?” I wondered if all rich people knew each other.
“I was there for a wedding reception,” he confirmed.
“Charles and Di?” I guessed.
He made an outraged noise, followed by a splash of water directed at me that was so big, I was surprised it didn’t empty the tub. While I sputtered and laughed, he informed me, “I wasn’t even born yet! How dare you!”
“I don’t know when they got married,” I said in my defense, blinking water from my eyelashes. “Gosh, so touchy.”
“My fortieth birthday is tomorrow,” he reminded me. “I am in no mood.”
“Please, like turning forty ever stopped a man from doing anything. Meanwhile, I’m one birthday away from never having a chance with Leonardo DiCaprio.” It was deeply unfair. Not the DiCaprio thing. The entire concept of aging as a woman, versus aging as a man.
He looked a little uncomfortable. I’d crossed a line that I hadn’t been aware of. So, I waited with a questioning expression until he admitted, “I’m weird about my age because my dad died young. Like…young, young.”
“Forty?” Wouldn’t that be a weird and awful coincidence?
“No, no.” He paused. “Forty-one.”
“Jesus.” I’d heard often enough that I was too young to understand how short life is, blah, blah, blah, but I wasn’t so consumed with my allegedly careless youth that I didn’t know that was a young age to go.
I didn’t ask how it happened—I would have guessed car accident, at that age—but he told me, anyway. “He had cancer.”
“He was sick for a long time, then?” Why did my brain think that would somehow make it easier to lose a parent?
“He was, but he wasn’t doing anything about it. He waited until he was in too much pain,” Matt said grimly. “One day, he went to the doctor and then he never came home. Two weeks between his diagnosis and his death.”
“I’m so sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“To be clear here, I don’t look at my father’s death as the worst thing that could have happened to me.” He winced. “That makes me sound awful.”
“No, it…” I wasn’t sure whether or not I should say the rest of my thought. To hell with it. “It makes him sound awful.”
“He was. He was a shitty, worthless person.” Matt shifted his gaze off at nothing in particular. His jaw was tight. “He loved my mom. It devastated her when he died, but still… Who spends four months in agonizing pain and doesn’t mention it or do anything about it until it’s that late?”
“People who can’t afford to go to the doctor?”
“And my father could. He could have afforded an entire round-the-clock team of doctors. But he felt it would interfere with work.” Matt shook his head with a bitter smile. “He chased dollar signs straight into his grave.”
My brain stacked up all sorts of responses. I could have told him that his father was probably in denial, afraid to face his own mortality. That maybe the man probably had known he was dying and worked himself to death faster out of a fear that it wouldn’t be enough to see his family through after he was gone. But all of that was stuff Matt would have probably thought of, or heard, before.
“Is that why you have this place?” I asked, nudging my toes against his under the water. “You recognize the value of relaxation?”
He laughed. “No, I have this place because I’m a pervert who inherited a hospitality empire.”
“So...your dad…” My brow furrowed as I pieced things together. “Your dad worked himself to death running a business that’s all about making other people relax?”
“That is an accurate summation, yes.” Matt nudged my toes back. “And that’s why I try not to work too hard. I know I get described as this lazy playboy, but I do get the things done that need to be done. But I don’t work nonstop, like a lot of billionaires my age.”
“There aren’t ‘a lot’ of billionaires your age,” I said wryly. “There are too many billionaires, but definitely not ‘a lot’ of them.”
“Put away the guillotine, Robespierre. I’m just saying, I look at some of these guys who didn’t inherit an already thriving empire and I see how they’re awake twenty hours a day, constantly looking over their shoulders because they think if they slip up once, everything is gone. I’m not willing to be like that. I don’t need to grow my family’s wealth. They’re already wealthy. Even if we lost every single Ashe-branded property, we would still be wealthy for generations. Why die at forty-one to make my nonexistent kids richer?”
“Fair enough.” And far less despicable, when couched in those terms. “No kids, then?”
He shook his head. “Nope. Don’t plan on any either.”
“So, the Ashe dynasty ends with you?”
“No, my sister has kids.” He gave me a smile that was far less haunted than before. “The legacy is safe. I’ll hand my shares off to them.”
“If I had a glass, I would toast to that.” Maybe we should have brought something to drink. It might have prevented us from falling into such a dark subject.
“What about you?” he asked. “What deep thinking have you done that has shaped your feelings about your inevitable death?”
My jaw dropped. “Uh…I…”
“I’m fucking with you.” He grinned. “I would rather know…the top five things that make you happy.”
“Um…like sex stuff?” That’s what we were there for. Even if I had overdone it.
He shook his head. “No. In general.”
“Okay…” It would have been easy to throw out generic answers like getting surprise flowers or seeing a baby smile. But if I couldn’t be honest with Matt, who could I be honest with? “In no particular order…” I realized that they were all a little bit mean. “Wait, you’re not going to judge me, right?”
He narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “I can’t promise that. I don’t know what you’re going to say.”
“I’m going to be honest. And you’re going to kick me out of this tub.” I took a deep breath. “I love to watch people try to do cool skateboard tricks and then totally eat it.”
A laugh exploded from him.
“I told you, I’m terrible!”
“No, you’re not!” His shoulders shook with the force of his laughter. “That was one of my favorite pastimes in college.”
“No, it wasn’t.” I felt a little silly, but somewhat vindicated, if he was telling the truth.
He nodded vigorously. “There was a park I loved to go to because there were so many people, well, not on skateboards, but inline skating. I would sit at the bottom of this hill and watch people come down it face-first. It wasn’t funny if it was a kid. I would have felt bad laughing about that. But these guys who took it seriously? Yes, I loved it. I loved watching them fall down.”
I watched him wipe tears of laughter from his eyes, and I couldn’t help but laugh too.
“Okay, okay, what about this one. Equally horrible,” I said, and cleared my throat. “When somebody spoiled has their wedding ruined. Bonus points if it’s because someone else proposed during the wedding.”
“You didn’t seem to think ruined weddings were so funny before,” he reminded me, and it was a little scolding.
I lifted my chin. “Joke’s on you. I loved that Scott didn’t marry Lauren. But I didn’t like the way that particular wedding got ruined. You almost died.”
“Yes, I remember.” He slid his scarred leg against my thigh. “That’s two.”
“TikToks of people criticizing recipe videos.” I’d been missing those in my time on the island. “Almost-new lip balm.”
He raised an eyebrow, on the edge of being disgusted. “Almost new? Secondhand?”
“No.” I laughed. “No, when you get a new tube of lip balm, there’s this thin ridge around the edge. I like it better when that edge has worn down because you don’t get way too much from it crumbling.”
“These are very specific. I was imagining ‘kittens’ or ‘warm socks.’”
“Those things are nice,” I agreed. “But is anything as nice as smoking a joint on the beach?”
“Is that your fifth thing?” he asked.
I nodded.
“I’m pretty sure I can make you happy.” He stood, water sluicing down every ridge of muscle on his torso. I wanted to claw my nails into his ribs. I wanted to sink my teeth into his pecs.
“Come on,” he said, either not noticing or outright ignoring my lustful appreciation. “Let’s go smoke on the beach.”
****
Most of the resort guests were at the castle. Apparently, there was a BDSM exhibition in the theater that night. People performing on stage and everything. The rest of the place was fairly deserted. We saw a giggling foursome sneaking into one of the canvas-curtained bungalows near the sand’s edge, and Matt nodded to them with a slanted smile.
“You love owning this place,” I observed.
He took a deep, contented breath. “I do.”
“You like making people happy.”
“I do,” he repeated.
“Sexually happy?”
He considered. “All kinds of happy. My life has been… I don’t want to say easy. Life isn’t easy on anyone. But I haven’t been deprived of anything, in a material sense. I haven’t known what it’s like to go without food, to worry about whether or not I’ll have a place to live. And I recognized very early how unfair that is.”
“A lot of people in your position would have rationalized that away,” I said.
He’d tucked a joint behind his ear for the walk down. With his dark curls a little grown out, he looked like a cool kid in an eighties movie. “I know they do. I’ve heard all about it. My dad was a big believer in the concept of ‘deserving’ wealth. If you had it, you deserved it. If you didn’t have it, you were lazy. Shortsighted. Poor.”
It wasn’t a funny truth, but the way he pronounced poor as if he had a permanently thrust-forward chin made me laugh.
The sugar-fine sand squished through my toes, and I closed my eyes, savoring the feeling. Everyone thought people who lived in California had a beach at their doorstep, but I rarely made it out to the ocean. It was at least a three-hour drive. The sound of the gently rolling surf and the pleasant ache in my calves as they adjusted to the resistance of the sand distracted me so much that I didn’t realize I’d walked ahead of Matt.
“Charlotte?”
I turned and spotted him standing at the edge of the sidewalk, cane in hand.
“You wouldn’t mind?” he asked sheepishly, indicating his arm.
I hurried back. “Oh my gosh, yes. You can lean on me.”
He looped his arm through mine. “Hopefully, I won’t need to. But balancing gets trickier—”
“As the night wears on,” I finished for him. “I noticed.”
The corner of his mouth twitched, like he didn’t want to smile. “You notice a lot, huh?”
“No, I’m obtuse when it comes to most things. But I try to be considerate. Sorry I abandoned you.”
“I won’t have this forever,” he said, like an apology.
“So what if you do?” I shrugged. “You’re not going to be able to stay here forever either. That doesn’t mean it’s bad that you need it right now.”
We made our way to the line where the sand got damp and dropped down, safely away from the waves. He took out the joint and lit it, taking a few quick puffs before passing it to me.
I inhaled and held it, staring out at the rapidly dimming blue dusk over the sea. “This is beautiful.”
“You’re telling me.”
I turned to him. He was looking at me, not the view.
I passed the joint back and tucked my hair behind my ears. “Shut up.”
“It’s my birthday. Let me be cheesy,” he argued.
I held up a finger. “It’s your birthday on Friday.”
“It’s my birthday week,” he insisted stubbornly. “If girls get to do that, so do guys. It’s equality.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s ridiculous.”
“It suits my purposes,” he said tightly, then exhaled.
I thought for a moment while I took another hit. “Okay. Top five things that make you happy.”
He tilted his head. “This place is one of them. Not just the sex part. I like sex, obviously. But it’s the atmosphere of escape that makes it a draw for me.”
“That’s one.” If he’d kept track for me, it was only fair that I kept track for him.
“Seeing other people be happy. Making other people happy.”
“You already mentioned that,” I reminded him. “On the way down. I don’t think it should count, now.”
“I’m not constantly reiterating that to sound like some kind of saint, to be clear.”
“It actually makes your acts of giving less saintly,” I pointed out, wriggling my toes deeper into the sand. “Because you’re doing them for self-gratification.”
“Does that make your blow jobs less saintly?” he teased me.
I took the joint back and tossed my hair haughtily. “Excuse me? I was on my knees.”
“And I was the one praising God.” He thought for a minute. “Was that two?”
“No. Stuff you told me within the last half hour doesn’t count. You’re still at one.” I took another deep inhale. I didn’t know where he got his stuff from, but it was better and probably far more expensive than anything I could get.
“Dogs.” He said it wistfully. “I love dogs. I wish I could get one, but it wouldn’t be fair.”
“Because you work all the time?” I looked around us at the deserted beach, the expanse of water beyond it, the utter lack of desk anywhere.
He got the point. “I do work a lot, but I also travel. That’s going to be a part of my job forever, since travel is my business. I can either get an animal and haul it all over with me—which isn’t fair to other people who have to be around my dog and might not want to be—or leave it at home while I’m off running around.”
“I think you should get a dog,” I said, fully ignoring all his reasons not to.
“Really?”
I nodded. “I like dogs. I can’t afford one and anyway, my dad isn’t going to let an animal shit in his pristine lawn.”
“That’s the other part,” Matt said with a grimace. “The poop.”
“So, you buy some ridiculously genetically engineered breed that doesn’t poop.” I leaned against him and handed him the joint.
He took another hit. “Weed. That’s three. I fricking love weed.”
“Duh.”
“And a good concert,” he went on. “That’s four. I love going to a good concert. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be a band I’m into. I’ve seen artists I love live and they’ve sucked, and artists I never listen to who were incredible. Like The Black Crowes.”
I didn’t know who that was, but I nodded.
“I saw them in…2010, maybe? I only knew one of their songs from the radio, but holy shit, they put on a good show.” He shook his head as if lost in the joy of that memory.
I didn’t point out that I had been in middle school at the time.
“Okay, that’s four,” I said, holding up four fingers. “One more, and you’re off the hook. Although, I have to say, I’m disappointed that you’re way less horrible than I am.”
“You’re not horrible. You’re hilarious,” he corrected me. “And that’s my number five.”
“People being horrible in a funny way is your number five? Or only when I do it?” I joked.
He fell very serious. Too serious. And he reached up to cup my cheek.
My heart stuttered in my chest. His thumb brushed across my bottom lip.
Then, he turned away. “I’ll let you interpret it whichever way makes you happy.”