5. Fox
FOX
“ I ’m okay. Just lost.”
The sound of Ashley’s voice dragged me back to consciousness.
I edged the brim of my hat up to see her accepting a tissue from a woman holding a toddler. The boy was staring at me without any self-consciousness, the way little nippers did before they were taught it was rude. As if I had something to teach him about human behavior, which I most definitely did not. Very poor example here, kid. Look away.
For some reason, Ashley had driven us into a family neighborhood. Shrubs bloomed in pinks and yellows, palm trees rustled overhead and a dog barked in the distance.
She blew her nose and tried to laugh off her tears. “I’m having a bit of a day.”
The woman eyed me with suspicion.
“What’s going on?” I brought my seat upright. I hadn’t slept long, maybe an hour, but it was enough to make a difference. My head was splitting, but some of that was caffeine withdrawal. I hadn’t dared accept anything on the plane, but now my stomach whispered that grease and salt would be greeted politely.
“I took the wrong direction out of Honolulu. Then I saw signs that said I was heading to the marine base so I got off the highway.” Ashley’s eyes were red and her chin crinkled. “Now I’m lost.”
Hell yes, she was. My heart stumbled as I looked into her forsaken gaze. I tried to find words, but the ones I needed to say would have to wait a little longer.
“I would love a coffee.” I appealed to the stranger. “Is there anywhere nearby?”
She directed us to a grocery store with a take-away counter a few blocks away.
“Thanks. We’ll use the GPS to find our way from there,” I said, fishing for my phone.
Ashley smiled weakly at the woman and continued up the road.
“I knew there was a way to get back to the resort on this side of the island. I thought all I had to do was keep the water on my right and I’d get there eventually. It was a dumb idea.”
“It’s okay. I like the scenic route.” I was dreading telling Shane’s parents that things had gone off-book. Getting lost on the way to doing that suited me really well.
Ashley parked and came into the store with me, veering down an aisle while I made for the deli counter where I ordered a breakfast panini. I didn’t even know what time it was, but a few minutes later, I was washing down extra-strength Tylenol with a syrupy orange electrolyte replacement, waiting on my sandwich and a gallon of red-eye coffee, when Ashley appeared beside me.
She held a basket with a bottle of premixed marguerites.
I grimaced in rejection.
“I’m entitled,” she said sullenly.
She was, but, “at least get real tequila. That premixed stuff is a recipe for flushing your sunglasses.”
Her mouth twitched. “Voice of experience?”
“This morning. At the airport. The good ones that the sales rep gave me.”
“The cute one? Too bad. That’s really gross.”
“Tell me about it.”
She sighed and picked up the bottle to return it.
“Wait.” I took my bagged sandwich from the clerk. “You want a bacon and egg sandwich?”
She stared with longing at mine. The corners of her mouth wobbled. “I won’t fit into my wedding dress if I eat that.”
Ah, shit . I closed my eyes.
“I haven’t eaten anything but salad for three months . No alcohol, no bread. No cream in my coffee. It’s disgusting without cream, by the way. Your mouth is a dead zone. And why did I bother? My boobs have disappeared and I still have an ass like a delivery truck. Now I’m not even going to wear the dress that maxed out my credit card?”
“Extra bacon, extra cheese,” I said to the clerk so he wouldn’t see Ashley blinking her damp lashes. “And a mocha frap with whip cream and caramel. If you have chocolate shavings?—?”
“Fox, don’t. What if?—”
“Ashley.” I grabbed her hand and gave it a squeeze. “If you tell me one more time that you’re afraid to eat because it makes your ass look fat, I’m going to send you for shock therapy. Your ass delivers.” I met her gaze and something like vertigo hit me, as if I’d rolled over a speedbump unprepared, rattling my brain.
Her eyes went wide and her hand flexed in mine, but she didn’t pull away.
An impression of having overstepped hung in the air between us. This had only happened a couple of times before because I didn’t let it happen, but I was suddenly thinking about the way she turned a regular day into Valentine’s Day by putting on a pair of yoga pants. I nearly swallowed my tongue trying to find my voice.
“We’re going to eat a sandwich, get our heads on straight, then talk,” I said, releasing her hand and mentally pushing away those very wrong thoughts. She was my friend . Not...
No. Just no.
“No offense, Fox, but I don’t want to talk to you.” She hugged herself. “I want to talk to Shane . I keep thinking I could fix this if he would pick up, but I’m so mad, I would probably make things worse. I don’t understand what happened ?”
I drew a breath that burned. Words crowded into my mouth, some that wouldn’t entirely make sense, but I didn’t want to get into it here where men with short haircuts and stiff bearing would witness a White woman reaming a Black man a new one.
“C’mon.” I headed toward the cash. On the way, I threw some potato chips and a few pieces of fruit into my basket, grabbed the first pair of sunglasses I saw that had a polarized sticker, and started on my tongue-scorching, crude-oil coffee while I paid.
Life-force seeped back into my bloodstream one cell at a time, bringing with it profound humility. I took the keys and ate as I drove. Five minutes up the coast, I saw a sign for a state park and pulled in.
Ashley lowered her frothy coffee and glared at the van across the parking lot. It had a wedding bell logo on it. “Seriously?”
I polished the last bite of my sandwich and went to the trunk to dig through my duffle—which was when I realized I had grabbed Shane’s bag from the taxi.
Fucking brilliant.
I found a pair of board shorts and jerked my head to steer Ashley to the mostly empty beach where I stripped to my boxer briefs.
“Fox!”
I had no pride left. No fucks to give. I walked straight into the water.
A reef protected the bay so the water was a glassy, shallow aquamarine. Almost too warm. When I was waist-deep, I threw myself forward in a shallow dive, swimming as far as I could without taking a breath, letting the worst of my travel grime and hangover rinse away.
When I felt marginally less disgraceful, I slogged back to the beach.
Ashley was waiting with the straw of her coffee tucked into one corner of her mouth.
“Sins all gone?” she asked.
“Where do you think the garbage island came from?” I jerked my chin toward the ocean, then slicked the water from the tight curls I kept trimmed to a quarter inch so my hair actually had a chance at drying between dips. “Turn.”
“Why— Oh!” She squeaked as I dragged my wet briefs off my hips and wrung them out. “Get us arrested for public nudity, then,” she said to the three palm trees up on the lawn. “This day couldn’t possibly get worse.”
“You’d think,” I muttered, pulling on Shane’s boardies. “Got any sunscreen?”
She pivoted and gave me an are-you-kidding-me eye roll before she dug through her bag. I often teased her about her shoulder bag because it was like one of those bottomless, cartoon-magic bags that had whatever was needed in the moment. Lip balm, wet wipes, an elastic band. One time, I locked myself out of the shop and she’d handed me a key, asking, “Does this one work?”
Ever since then, I would say something like, I cracked my board, Ash. Got a spare in your bag?
Have a look , she would say as she offered it. I think it’s under the parachute .
As she handed me the sunscreen, she said, “I have a lady razor in here if you want to clean up that bikini line?”
“I said no peeking.”
She snickered and it made me feel unreasonably good to make her smile.
I didn’t smile back, though. Emotion hit me so hard, I had to take a step to keep my balance. I blamed the hangover and the rush of blood sugar after twelve hours of fasting, but my throat tightened with a weird emotion. My conscience was slamming up against my genuine affection for her and it was leaving a mark.
I smeared the cream all over my arms and chest, admitting, “I took Shane for lunch the day before we were supposed to fly out. I wanted to know if he’d talked to you about signing the pre-nup I had drawn up.”
Her plastic cup landed on the sand and the top popped off. Coffee and the last of the whipped cream spattered the tops of my feet. She blinked at me, her big brown eyes wounded and brimming with stunned betrayal.
Guess not.
My heart grew heavier yet shriveled at the same time.
“It’s not about not trusting you,” I said.
“’course not.”
“Please see it from my point of view. Shane and I are partners. Everything I have is in the business and the house. I’m entitled to protect my half.”
She folded her arms and turned to stare out at the water. “What did Shane say?”
“That he hadn’t sent it to you yet.” I finished my legs and used my wet boxers to wipe the coffee off my feet before I smoothed sunscreen over the tops of them.
“So you, what? Got him drunk to make him sign?”
“No.” I straightened, insulted, and decided to find a shirt rather than ask her to do my back. “We read through the draft, made a few notes, then dropped it at the lawyer’s office. The receptionist promised to email the final copy to him so you two could e-sign it before the wedding. Then we went back to the pub.”
We should have gone back to work. Gone surfing. Gone home to pack. Anywhere but the pub.
Getting that document finalized had felt momentous for both of us, though. The marriage was real. Everything would change. We’d both known it.
“Shane and I did a couple of shots. He texted the guys to join us. It turned into a crawl before we took the party back to the house and kept it going on the beach. Shane and I didn’t talk about the prenup again until we were in the taxi.” I dropped the sunscreen on my pile of clothes and rubbed the residue from my palms into my face and the back of my neck. I was avoiding her eyes. “You’re my friend, Ashley. This isn’t anything against you.”
She was looking at me like I’d tricked her into betting all her money on a horse that had to be shot.
“Shane cares about you. He does. But in the taxi, he said he kept thinking that I was right to ask him sign something, but that you two shouldn’t need a prenup. Not if you plan to stay married? I said, ‘Do you?’”
She folded protective arms across her middle.
I had felt exactly this full of dread at the potent silence in the back of the car. My gut filled with a fresh bag of cement.
“What did he say?” she prompted shakily.
“Nothing,” I said flatly. “I asked him if he was having second thoughts. He said he was.”
A tiny noise, the kind of whimper small creatures made when they were trapped and suffering and only wanted to die, squeaked in her throat.
It rang like a piledriver in my ears. I swallowed, thinking I might have rushed the gun on eating. I made myself say the rest and hoped only words came out of my mouth.
“I asked him if he loved you. Like, the way his parents love each other. Get through anything love. He said his mum and dad had been after him to propose to you. You were going home and they thought you were good for him, that it was time he grew up. He thought so, too.”
“He doesn’t love me?” The break in her voice cracked something in my ears.
I took a breath, but it didn’t seem to have any air in it, only thick, hot humidity. My lungs burned.
“Shane said that signing the prenup was like admitting he expected to divorce you. I asked him if he did expect that and he said he couldn’t see being with you forever.”
Her gasp went into my chest like a blade, but I didn’t falter. I finished her off.
“I said if he was going into your marriage thinking it wouldn’t last, then he shouldn’t marry you at all.”
“ You said that.” Her eyes were bleak.
“I did.” And as sorry as I was for hurting her, I didn’t say I was sorry. I still believed I had done right by both of them.
I’d had a front row seat on their relationship. They were a pair of puppies who frolicked and nipped and growled, always in play mode with each other. When things got real or difficult, they retreated from each other. Shane appealed to Ashley because she had had to grow up too young and Shane was very much a Peter Pan free-spirit. He was fun. That’s why everyone loved him. Shane liked Ash because she enabled him to stay exactly as he was. She washed the dishes and picked up his socks, fetched groceries and reminded him to visit the dentist.
Her mouth began to tremble.
I held out a hand, an offer to hug. It was a plea not to be hated. “We got to the airport and he said he couldn’t get on the plane.”
“He was drunk .”
“He was.” We’d both been swaying and slurring our words, but a moment of acute sobriety had cut through the fog. Shane had hugged me and said ‘Thanks, mate.’
“You could have made him come and tell me himself.” Her voice rang with a deep well of hurt. Injury done to her by Shane and by me.
“He didn’t want to face his parents.” Or her. Evasion of difficult conversations was an art for Shane. That’s why I’d had to pick my moment to press him on the prenup. Shane had side-stepped several times and had only faced it when we ran out of time.
Maybe I was as guilty as everyone else of enabling Shane to skirt responsibility, though. I knew his avoidance of something didn’t mean he wasn’t brooding privately. Looking back, I could see the way he’d tensed up every time I mentioned asking Ashley to sign. I would bet my share in T&B that Shane had known deep down, from the moment he’d put Ashley on the plane with a ring on her finger, that he hadn’t really wanted to marry her.
Standing outside the airport in Sydney yesterday, we’d both known that if he came to Hawaii, he would buckle to Ashley and his parents and the pressure of the moment. He would marry her and they’d be stuck in a marriage that was doomed.
That wasn’t fair to either of them.
My drunk logic had concluded that, as the best man, I was duty-bound to back him up, but this was so shitty. It sucked so hard to face her.
“Ashley, you know what I came from,” I said gently. “I wasn’t going to stand there and watch a train wreck happen.”
“You don’t know that’s what would have happened. You didn’t even give me a chance. You didn’t give us a chance!”
Her sudden outburst lashed at me and maybe she was right, but, “Did you love him , Ash? Hell and high water kind of love?”
She jerked back. “Don’t you question my motives. You just screwed my entire life. You could have had this talk with Shane three months ago, before I put my life in a box and sent it to Australia. Do I love him? I quit my job and sold my car to buy plane tickets for my family to be here for my wedding day. What do you think?”
“I think you’re angry,” I said in a level voice, trying to keep this from escalating, but I was sharply aware she hadn’t said, Yes. I love Shane . “You want to blame someone and I’m fine being that person.” I gathered our things, including the plastic cup still dripping whipped cream and iced coffee. It was caked with sand. “But would you rather be in a new country, living in his house and sleeping in his bed, maybe carrying his kid when you found out he hadn’t really wanted to marry you?”
She paled. “No. But what am I supposed to do now? Go back to Canada? To nothing ?”
It wasn’t ‘nothing.’ She had family. I knew it was a complicated one. Wasn’t everyone’s? But they loved her.
I didn’t say that, though. I walked to the trash bin and threw away the cup.
My conscience contorted into a knot, squeezing and hurting every inch of me as I turned back and said what had cut through my inebriation in the back of the cab.
“I love Shane like a brother, Ash. But he gave up and walked away before you even got married. What does that tell you about your chances?”
She blinked at me with weepy bewilderment.
“He wasn’t going to stick. Not for the long haul.” Not in the way she deserved.
“He never loved me? That’s what you’re saying? My whole relationship with him was a lie and I’m the idiot who didn’t see it?”
“Don’t.” I felt scraped hollow inside, seeing how hurt she was, but they’d really only had three months together, then three months apart. Did she really believe that was enough to base a lifetime commitment on?
“Shane thinks prettier than reality. You know that.” It was what made him such an excellent salesman and was a big reason why Togs and Boards was so successful. Everyone took the gulp of Kool-Aid Shane handed them and climbed aboard the train bound for pots of gold. Even me. “If he led you on, it wasn’t malicious. He always believes things will work out and lots of times they do.” Other times, I scrambled behind him to make sure whatever Shane had blindly promised didn’t bankrupt us.
“But you thought we’d wind up divorced. And that I would come after your company. So you blew up my marriage before we had a chance to fail.”
I didn’t see it that way, but, “Yeah, I guess I did.”
“Well, fuck you, Fox.”
She needed a punching bag. I accepted that. It still hurt like hell.
“I left my coffee in the car. I’ll wait for you there.” At least I’d had the sense to keep the key fob. I didn’t fancy walking the length of the island in this heat.