Chapter 3
Ryan
S hane was irritable when I got back from the beach and found him in the room, doing something at his laptop with a hard look around the edges of his expression. He smiled at me when I stepped into the room, but his heart clearly wasn’t in it.
“Hey, sweetheart,” he said, before he turned back to his computer. “Had fun at the beach?”
“You should have come. It was amazing.”
“I’ll go tomorrow. Just had this to wrap up…”
I laughed, kicking off my sandals and rummaging through my bag for pajamas. “And you were the one telling me off for working on vacation?”
“I talked a big game. For pride comes before the fall,” he laughed, but once again not quite with it. I paused, looking at him carefully.
“Everything okay?” I said, and he nodded, closing the laptop and turning to me with a strained smile.
“Yeah, all good. Taking a shower?”
“Mm-hm. Hope your surprise task doesn’t give you too much trouble.”
He opened the laptop again, going back to it as if I wasn’t there, and I wondered if he really didn’t care about seeing me in a swimsuit. I didn’t want him to care so much that he tried to start something—wasn’t in the mood tonight and still awkwardly kind of hoped that against all odds nothing would happen on this trip—but maybe some small, petulant part of me felt spurned that he didn’t even look.
Of course, he was probably just used to me. Nothing to do with me, and it didn’t mean I was unattractive.
I took a long shower, not just for the warmth and the luxurious feel of the waterfall showerhead but also to help work out the knotted tangle of thoughts drifting in my head—and to make sure I wasn’t about to track sand into the bed—and I was working conditioner through my hair when I heard noise from the front door, Shane opening it and a quiet conversation with whoever it was. Couldn’t make anything out, and I thought nothing of it—figured it was a family member—before the door shut and Shane knocked on the bathroom door.
“Hey, babe?” he said. “Did you do something to get in trouble with the hotel staff?”
“The hotel staff?” I turned off the water, cold in a sudden flush as it left me standing dripping in the shower stall. “What happened?”
“This girl from the front desk came asking to see you. Said her name was Allison?”
“Oh, Allison…” I stepped out of the shower, bundling up my hair in a towel, patting it dry. “I asked her to take care of a discreet favor to keep my grandmother from haranguing the poor concierge. Probably something came up with it. I’ll be out to see her in a second.”
“ A discreet favor to keep her quiet? Jesus, Ryan, old woman being picky with the hotel staff doesn’t warrant mafia tactics.”
“I wasn’t ordering a hit on her,” I laughed, drying myself off and pulling on my pajamas. “More like a bribe. Maybe it’s still mafia tactics.”
“Guess I knew what I was getting into with your family.”
“Indeed. Don’t make a fuss or you’re next, darling.” I washed my face and stepped out of the bathroom, walking around him to grab day clothes from my bag before I stepped into the bathroom again to get changed.
I found Allison right after I stepped outside, changed out of her concierge uniform and into a t-shirt and frayed jean shorts. She was a short girl with a curvy figure, dark blonde hair that just brushed the tops of her shoulders, and honestly, if I hadn’t been looking specifically for her, I probably wouldn’t have recognized her out of the sleek, pressed look of the concierge uniform.
“Hey there,” I said, stepping down from the suite door and onto the boardwalk that ran in front of the rooms. The night air was brisk but still warm around us, and I could hear the lively activity bustling from the direction of the pool and the café, but tucked into this corner under the shade of palm trees and behind thick bushes, it was just the two of us. “Did everything go all right with the shipment to Grandma’s suite?”
She smiled politely at me. I recognized that smile—universal sign language for bad news that I don’t want to have to be the one to break. “Sorry to do this late at night, but could I ask you to come talk about something?”
“Uh, sure.” I glanced around. “Did something happen?”
“My friend is better able to explain. She’s at the bar.”
“Sure… let me just tell my partner.”
Allison put her hands up. “I already explained to him.”
This was weird. Uncomfortable to say the least. A staff member out of uniform trying to direct me away somewhere while making sure I didn’t tell my partner anything about it? I took a half step back. “Well… just to let him know how to contact me if he needs anything,” I said, and I swiped my card to open the door before Allison could say anything. I pushed inside, slipping the door shut quietly behind me, and Shane looked up from his laptop, sitting by where the back door was open a crack to let the ocean breeze rustle his short, dark hair.
“Everything okay with your mafia contact?” he said, and I shrugged.
“She wants me to go talk to her friend at the bar…”
Shane frowned, studying me before he stood up. “Don’t go anywhere with her,” he said, and I did a double take.
“What—I don’t think it’s a kidnapping plot, Shane.”
“Look, you can’t be too careful. Places like this—it’s an expensive resort in a poorer area. The people working here will be a lot less well-off than the guests.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Oh my god, Shane, just because someone’s working-class doesn’t make them a criminal.”
“I’m not saying that, I’m saying they’re perfect recruiting grounds for traffickers to pay locals fortunes to prey on rich guests. I’m not even saying she is, just that it’s better safe than sorry. Either I go with you or you don’t go at all. We should probably make a point of that anyway… it’s safer for you to move around with me than going around by yourself.”
I folded my arms. “It’s a vacation resort, for crying out loud, Shane. We’d have heard about it if there were kidnapping plots against guests here. You know it’s overwhelmingly poor and disenfranchised people who get trafficked, right? Not young, well-off white women snatched out from under their family’s nose?”
“Even so, it’s just good sense,” he said, gesturing to the door. “Let’s go tell her together that you’re not going anywhere without me.”
What was even happening right now? Shane was normally so… hands-off. Content to just mind his own business and let me mind mine, and he trusted me to handle things myself. Suddenly it was all him being the weird one right now, and I had to wonder if maybe—well, if she wanted me specifically to see me away from my partner, and Shane was reacting like this to the prospect, maybe she had a good reason for it.
I hugged myself. “Okay, let’s not do that,” I said. “We’re going to make her think you’re controlling me in some creepy way if you do that. I’ll go tell her myself.”
He pursed his lips, but he sighed. “Have it your way, Ryan,” he said, and I stepped out of the door, pulling it shut lightly behind me. Allison gave me an anxious look, and I took a deep breath before I spoke.
“Let’s go see your friend,” I said, and she nodded quickly.
“Sorry about all this,” she said, and she turned and led me in the direction of the bar.
“No hints what this is about?” I said, and she shrugged.
“It’s best if Brooklyn tells you.”
No chance it was something weird after all—the pool was packed too full of people right now for any funny business, groups lingering at the edges with drinks in hand, talking and laughing, squeezing in around where the bar was alive with activity. Allison took me around to where a woman I recognized from the bar earlier sat in a shaded corner, holding a tall drink in both hands.
She was a gorgeous woman, dark hair in a messy bob that gave her a wildly playful kind of look, tall and lean, with sharp features and light gray eyes, a sculpted brow, and the kind of picture-perfect sharp, dramatic lines to her lips that made her look like she should have had them stark red for a vampire movie poster. Together with the loose black tank top showing her half-sleeve tattoos on one arm and a full sleeve on the other, it was no wonder she was easy to remember from earlier. She glanced up at the two of us as we approached, sitting up taller in her seat, and she gestured me to the seat next to her. “Hey,” she said, her voice a low, almost masculine sort of warm buzz. “Ryan Bell, right?”
“That’s right. You’re Allison’s friend Brooklyn?”
“Brooklyn Sterling. Make fun of me for the name if you like, I know it’s a lot. Wanted to say thanks before anything else for making Allison’s day a little brighter earlier. Do you want a drink? On me.”
“I’m good, thanks. And just happy to help… I forgot to fill out that survey.” I leaned over the bar, relaxing a little. “So, what did you want to see me about?”
She tented her hands on the bar top, pursing her lips. “Look, I want you to know this isn’t an easy topic, and however you react is fine. I’m a career bartender. I’ve seen every kind of reaction to everything. If you want to throw something at me, that’s fine. A man staying in suite 36 flirted with me and tried to take me back to his room for sex. Allison had mentioned earlier someone staying in suite 36 with a boyfriend, so I backed out when I saw the room number—I thought you should know.”
I stared at her, blankly, for a second, just going through it and repeating the words in my own head, and I think it reflected badly on me and my mental state, the health of my relationship, that my first reaction was to laugh. I kept the laugh on the inside, still just staring, before I finally formed the words, “Shane? You mean—what?” I shook my head. “You’re telling me Shane tried to cheat on me with you.”
“If Shane is probably just under six feet tall, dark hair with stubble, and wearing a dark sport coat over a cream-colored shirt today, then yes.”
My head was fuzzy. I was furious at myself for the wrong reasons—for not being able to be angry, for not having any reaction. I just stared at her, hazy, feeling like none of this was real, like Brooklyn and Allison would laugh together and tell me how it was all a joke, maybe a camera crew would come out of the bushes, or maybe I’d just wake up.
Of course he’d been trying to cheat on me. That was why he’d been so resolute that I shouldn’t go see this friend at the bar. Why he’d told me to nap, to stay in the suite, to go to dinner with my siblings without him, to go enjoy the beach after and he’d stay for some surprise work tasks. He’d tried to cheat on me.
Finally, I found some kind of reaction, but it wasn’t right—landed on something like exasperation, like I’d been here with a friend who misbehaved and caused a scene, and all I could think was can you please just behave. Like I wanted to scold him.
Brooklyn was a professional. Sat in the painful silence I gave her, still giving me that sympathetic look without being patronizing or condescending. I swallowed hard, weirdly self-aware, and I nodded, pushing out the only thing I could think of to say. “Okay.”
She paused. “I didn’t tell him I was backing out because I realized. I didn’t want him to escalate anything against either me or you.”
“Okay. Sure.” I turned back to the bar, staring ahead blankly at a group of middle-aged women laughing loudly together not far ahead, colorful cocktails on the bar while kids that seemed to be theirs played in the pool close by. Two bartenders both fully locked in on the work, one sticking calmly and resolutely to the work, one with a high-energy bounce in her step and a little flair to how she worked. Every detail of the scene was suddenly interesting, worth noticing. Don’t know why. Maybe I couldn’t focus on what was inside my head and I had to focus on what was outside it.
Brooklyn had told me it was okay however I reacted. She probably hadn’t anticipated this—me just sitting there staring blankly at the bartenders. I was supposed to be angry, right? Supposed to be angry or sad or both. Supposed to cry and scream.
“Stella’s going to be insufferable,” I said tartly. I didn’t even know why I said it out loud. Brooklyn was still a professional, because she nodded like it was a normal thing to say.
“How so?”
“She told me I needed to get him to propose already or he’d start… doing things that men do. Cheating, I guess.”
Brooklyn let out a slow, careful breath. “You may not want to hear this right now, and I can’t say for sure, but from the way he went about it and how he rearranged the suite like a professional to make it look like it was just him, I don’t think it’s his first time.”
“Right. Of course it’s not.” Because that made perfect sense. I mean, we didn’t even get a full day in at this place before he tried to fuck the bartender in our bed. Of course he was a consummate professional. We’d had a weekend trip to Valencia just a few months ago where he’d stayed back at the hotel because he was jet-lagged and needed a nap and I went out with friends for dinner. Jet lag my ass. He’d probably slept with the woman from that other couple at the resort we’d been talking to—he’d gotten along too well with her. She was pretty. Prettier than I was, probably—Brooklyn was too. Guess he had good taste in women to cheat on me with, at least. Maybe it couldn’t be helped he’d try to sleep with Brooklyn. A hot bartender or the plain girl who was too busy working to ever have sex anyway?
“If there’s anything I can do for you, I will,” Brooklyn said. “If you don’t believe me, that’s fine too.”
“No, you’re definitely right. Makes perfect sense.” I laughed. “Okay. Sure. I guess he’s been cheating on me for a while.”
“Do you want that drink after all?”
“A whiskey on the rocks, yeah, actually, that’d be great.”
Brooklyn flagged down a bartender, and I had a drink set down in front of me in no time. I sipped it gingerly. Cheap whiskey. Whatever. I wasn’t in the mood to properly appreciate fine whiskey right now. It would do.
“I’m probably supposed to be having a reaction,” I said.
“You are,” she said, with just the right balance of sympathetic without being annoying about it or reminding me that things were shit. “Disbelief and shutting down is completely normal in the wake of shocking news.”
“Okay. Yeah, actually, that makes sense. I’m sort of a journalist… I interview people in crises all the time. It’s pretty normal. A lot of them are so blasé. Hurricane victims standing in the rubble of their own homes, and they just shrug and say, rained a lot. Guess it just rained a lot.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s okay.”
“I’m a boring partner. You’re absolutely dripping sex appeal. It’s normal.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry. That sounds gross. And it sounds like I’m blaming you.”
“Being cheated on is never about you and always about them, Ryan.”
I laughed, an incredulous sound that I didn’t even mean to make—just pulled itself up out of me. “Bartenders, the font of wisdom. So true.”
“It’s true. Firstly, nothing about you suggests that you’re boring. Even on a shallow level, you’re very pretty. But more importantly, the fact that you’re his partner should be reason enough that he’s interested in you.”
“Oh, now you’re not content with just him, you’re trying to flirt with me too.” I didn’t know why I said that. I had no control over what I was saying right now. Brooklyn smiled politely.
“I wouldn’t hit on a woman who just found out her boyfriend is cheating on her. There’s a time and place for everything.”
“My family is going to kill me,” I laughed, cupping my drink in both hands. Passe—I was just heating up the whiskey. Somehow I didn’t care. “They love Shane more than they love me.”
“If they’re halfway decent family, they’ll understand that him cheating on you should be pretty disqualifying for whatever good things they think about him, and they should stand by you.”
“Well, how about that. I guess they aren’t halfway decent.” I took a long sip of whiskey. My hands were shaking… huh. I hadn’t even noticed until I saw them holding up the glass and the ice ball in the center was rattling against the sides. “Oscar will be there for me. He’s too awkward to say anything directly, but he’ll be there for me. Make awkward jokes to show his support. Stella will come around eventually, I bet… once she’s done telling me I should have done more to lock him down.”
“There’s nothing you can do to make a cheater not cheat.”
“I could be prettier, more interesting.”
“The only thing interesting about cheating, to a cheater, is that it’s not the partner. It’s not about you.”
I knocked back the rest of the whiskey in one shot and set it down, putting a hand to my forehead, sighing, hard, sinking against the bar. “Jesus Christ. What do I do now? Is there a crash course you can enroll me in? How to confront your boyfriend when he tried to fuck the hot bartender? ” I shook my head, scowling at myself. “Christ, I’m sorry, listen to me just… I’m being gross about you. You’re being really good about this. Tracked me down to break the news. You’re good at it, too. Not your first time getting cheated with, huh?”
That was also a bitter and gross thing to say. But Brooklyn just smiled sadly. “It’s not, no.”
“Sure. I can see it.”
She didn’t respond to the… was it a provocation or hitting on her? I didn’t want to believe I was saying something like yeah I can see why someone would want to fuck you , and it probably came out more like a provocation, but I guess I was saying that. If I clarified I’m not insulting you I’m saying you’re like sex on legs then it would make things worse. Words were muddy and didn’t make sense right now.
“You can take your time to figure out how to confront him over this,” she said. “But it’s important to address it and have the confrontation, or you never will. I want to help however I can… it’s really the least I can do.”
“What do I even say? Hey, so, apparently you tried to sleep with the woman at the bar, and I don’t appreciate that? I mean… I’m supposed to break up with him now, right?”
She winced. “There’s no supposed to anything—only you can say what’s the right thing to do right now—but I will say that trying to fix a cheater is a trap no one ever gets out of.”
“ You’ve been cheating on me and I want out. Just that? Do I just say that?”
“That’s probably what I would say in your situation. With more expletives, but I think that’s just my style.”
“I wish I had your style. I want to be angry right now. I just feel… blurry.” I put my head in my hands. “Christ, where am I going to sleep tonight? My family’s going to side with him if I try to make a thing out of this, but I’m not sleeping next to him tonight.”
I saw something twitch on her expression, frustration at… I think at the mention of my family. Maybe she just loved a happy supportive family. I don’t know. “They should take your side. But if you need to, you could spend the night at either my place or Allison’s, she’d probably be more than happy to offer.”
I squeezed my glass tight in my hands, a hazy feeling in my head that I tried to push through by just focusing in hard enough. “I’m not about to… make you put me up like a refugee. I’m a big girl, you know.”
She shook her head. “If it comes to that, it’s not on you, it’s on him for pushing you out. I mean it. I’ll give you my number and Allison’s too and you can text either one of us if you need to.”
This girl could have just fucked him anyway and strolled on to live her life with nobody any the wiser. Instead, here she was offering me a place to stay if things went badly with him.
Guess I didn’t have an excuse.
“Thanks, Brooklyn,” I said, my voice raspy. “I’ll… I’ll go have a talk. And I guess we’ll see how it goes.”
She gave me a soft, sympathetic look. Why it was that that made me want to cry, I didn’t know, but whatever. Nothing was supposed to make sense right now. “Stay safe, okay? Allison or I could go with you, if you don’t feel safe.”
“No, I… I’m going to do this properly. There’s some things I need to get off my chest, anyway… things I have to say to him.” I didn’t even know where the words were coming from, just felt them falling out of me, and—I knew they were true, but that didn’t mean I was remotely ready for this. Could you ever be ready for this?
I guess we’d find out.