Chapter 14 #2
“Sorry,” I said. “I was practicing my small talk at the bar with Richard and Rachel’s daughters. It may please you to know that, while Erik is jealous of you, the teen girl contingent around here is jealous of me. They think you’re a hottie.”
“Darn right,” he grumbled.
I climbed up next to him on the bed, sneaking a peek as I went.
His face was haggard, with bags under his eyes, his hair in disarray, his body language cranky and petulant, and yet still, somehow, he was hot.
Those girls were right to be jealous, I thought, though only of the pretend me, not the real me.
Ricky sipped his Coke, then said, “So, we ever gonna talk about your new friend? My rescuer, slash possible mob bag lady, slash murder accomplice?”
“Be nice to her,” I said. “She helped us both in your hour of need.”
“It hurt so bad,” he whined.
“I know,” I said, dropping my head onto his shoulder.
“So,” he asked my hair, “who was she?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, popping back up. “She’s Denise. She’s Lis’s wife.”
“You were right,” he yawned. “Did they bump everybody off?”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “I don’t think so, but I tried to look at it like I thought you would, too, and that side of me still thinks there’s a chance.”
“You tried to think like me?”
I smiled at him. “I didn’t even have to try that hard. It was as if you were already there in my head. You have a tendency to be very suspicious, you know that?”
“That doesn’t sound like me,” he grumped. He looked around the room, his eye landing on our packed bags on the sofa. “Weren’t we supposed to leave here today? What happened there?”
“I arranged with Mary Alice to stay tonight and tomorrow, since you can’t drive. And I pushed back our reservations at the other place.”
“Okay, that’s good,” he said blandly, taking another sip of his Coke.
“I know it’s not the one we wanted, but it’s kind of like we got that act of God to keep us here.” I grinned, trying to lighten his spirits with a joke.
“That’s not very funny,” he said, yawning again. “This really hurts. And I’m so tired.”
“Do you want to take a nap?”
He nodded, and I climbed off the bed to help him maneuver back down into a prone position. I pulled a blanket out of the closet and spread it out over him.
“How’s that?” I said. “An acceptable level of pretend boyfriending?”
“Oliver,” he mumbled sleepily, “enough with the pretend stuff. We’re not doing that anymore.” He clutched the blanket up around his neck and tried to turn onto his side, facing away from me.
I stood over him for a long moment, stunned.
Trying to gather myself, I looked around the room, wondering where to go, wondering when everything had gotten so blurry, realizing that the blurriness was the tears gathering in my eyes.
I walked stiffly, unthinkingly to the couch and sat down, looking blearily down at our bags next to me.
Where had this come from? I had failed, obviously. I had been so thrown by Ricky’s sudden reappearance in my life and I had never recovered my footing. I’d been teetering on the edge of total meltdown for days, unable to remind Ricky of any reason why he might ever have possibly liked me.
He, meanwhile, had been trying everything, I realized.
He’d tried the fake boyfriend gambit to put me at ease, but it had put me in my head instead.
He’d tried to teach me to drive to give me a way to help him, but when the moment came when he really needed that help, I couldn’t do it.
He’d tried giving me Prosecco to lower my inhibitions, and I’d lowered them too far.
Ricky had never been unkind to me before, but apparently he’d finally given up.
Whatever fun we’d had together in Washington had been lightning in a bottle that we couldn’t recapture.
I tried to think of what to do about the rest of the trip.
Try to be professional, get through it. Maybe start looking for a new job when I got home, so I wouldn’t always have to be reminded of how humiliated and hurt I felt right now.
I looked around the room again, trying to gather myself.
Ricky’s back was rising and falling, his breathing heavy.
If he had so completely given up on me as to be able to cut me loose so cruelly and then fall asleep without a hitch, so be it.
I’d be professional the rest of the week, starting now.
Only—maybe not in the same room as him. I dug my laptop out of my duffel and headed for the door.
I trudged my laptop down the bluff to the beach without thinking much about where I was going.
I sat down on a sun-bleached log, opening my computer in my lap and staring numbly at the blank screen.
It was windy down here, and as the wind buffeted my face, a stinging in my eyes informed me that tears were forming again.
I shut the computer and set it down next to me.
Who was I kidding? In my best moments this week, I’d struggled to focus on my job even a little bit.
Surely trying to be professional in my lowest moment was a fool’s errand.
I leaned forward and rested my elbows on my knees, propping my chin up in my hands and letting the wind fly through my hair and beat at my face.
I had been a bit heartbroken since my last trip with Ricky, but that had snuck up on me slowly as I’d realized I didn’t know how to maintain our long-distance friendship.
Now I felt my heart breaking in a whole new way as Ricky had abruptly ended whatever confused hope I’d managed to scare up from our reunion, and this one was a much sharper, more acute pain.
I hunched over, folding my arms as I dropped them to my knees, and dug my fingernails into the skin on my arms to try to feel anything other than the pain of knowing that my resolve to show Ricky that I cared for him hadn’t been strong enough to defeat my ability to self-sabotage by being too anxious, too easily overwhelmed, too … me.
A pair of bare feet with cheetah-print toenails padded through the sand in my peripheral vision, stopping in front of me.
“Hey, Oliver,” Tawny said in a flat voice.
My eyes traveled upward, past her short black shorts, the pair of red patent leather peep-toe heels hanging in her hand, and her surprisingly loose-fitting, tasteful linen peasant blouse, meeting a face that looked only fractionally happier than I felt.
“Still having a bad day today, huh,” she said, dropping down onto the log next to me.
I shrugged, wiping the back of one of my hands across my eyes. “I’m sorry about yesterday. I didn’t mean to yell at you. I was upset about something else.”
She shrugged in return, the heels in her hand, now hanging between her legs, clicking against each other as they rose and fell. “It’s okay. I’m having a bad day, too,” she said. A finger swiping underneath one of the lenses of her sunglasses told me that she’d been crying, too.
We sat together in silence for a while, the wind whipping around us, Tawny hunched in a similar posture to mine.
Eventually, she dropped the shoes down into the sand, stretched out her legs, and leaned back on the log.
“Well, this is depressing,” she said. “Should we get it off our chests? What’s going on with you? Trouble with Jeff?”
“Ricky,” I corrected her, not wanting to answer otherwise.
“Oh, yeah. Anyway, you guys’ll work it out,” she said, pushing back some hair that had blown into her face. “I can tell he really loves you.”
I thought I had been miserable before. I tried to hide my face in my hands, but I couldn’t hide the heave of my shoulders as I started full-on weeping. How badly I wished I could believe Tawny more than I believed myself, but the hurt of Ricky’s words was too fresh and too deep to overlook.
I felt Tawny put one arm around my shoulders and the other on my arm, and heard her worried voice near my ear. “God, is it that bad? What happened? Did you mess up? You musta messed up pretty bad.”
She released me and took up another hunched position, her arms wrapped around her legs, as I struggled to compose myself and wipe my face again.
She blew out a sigh. “I’ve been there, too.
I’ve messed up a lot, and now—well, let’s just say, the way I’ve messed up now, at least you’ll never have to worry about doing what I’ve done. ”
I looked curiously at her through puffy eyes. She pushed her sunglasses up onto her head, using both hands to wipe her eyes, smearing her mascara slightly. “You won’t judge me, right? You’ve messed up, I’ve messed up. You won’t judge me. I gotta tell somebody.”
She took a deep breath, looking away, then turning back to me. “I’d be a good mom, wouldn’t I?”
I was too much of a mess to come up with anything more convincing than a weak nod.
“I wanted it so bad,” she continued, her voice quavering a little.
“A baby. I knew if I had a baby, it would all be okay. I kinda thought it would just happen, you know? Wiley and I, we used to party a lot and have a lot of fun and we were really into each other, right? I mean, we were doing it all the time. So finally, one day, I ask Wiley why he thinks we haven’t had a baby yet.
And he gets all serious and acts like he’s better than me, and is like”—she deepened her voice to do a Wiley impression—“‘I’ve been making sure that doesn’t happen, because you shouldn’t have a baby unless you get clean. ’”
She seemed to want validation. “That’s hypocritical, if he was using, too,” I said, my voice still a little wobbly. “But if you wanted to be parents, you should probably both have been clean.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said in a small voice. “He always thinks he’s so in charge, so I guess he thought he could stop anytime he wanted to, but I was so weak and stupid that I couldn’t. But I did stop. I even finally quit smoking. Do you know how hard that is?”
“You should be proud of yourself,” I said. “I’ve heard it’s really hard.”
“It is,” she said, the pride in her voice rising triumphant over the wind.
“I don’t even use the gum no more, or vaping, or anything.
I haven’t been this much of a goody two-shoes since I was nine.
So then I go back to Wiley, and I’m like, what about it?
And he’s all, ‘Tawny, you’re so dumb, I can’t get you pregnant ’cause of the cancer. ’ You better believe I was mad.”
“He had been lying to you?”
“Yeah, can you believe it? That manipulative son of a—” Tawny cut herself off with a yelp, raising her hands in an unsuccessful attempt at a catch as a gust of wind blew the sunglasses off the top of her head.
We both jumped up, scrambling over the log, looking at the patch of thick, untamed brush that we had been sitting in front of.
“My Dolces!” Tawny cried. “Can you see them anywhere? Wiley’ll definitely kill me now if I lose them.”
We were both stepping gingerly through the growth, pulling branches apart and pawing through leaves. I stopped, struck by Tawny’s last words. “What do you mean, ‘definitely kill you now’? Were you worried he would kill you before?”
“That’s what I was telling you,” Tawny said, lowering her face into a bush. “He’s been acting so weird the last couple of days, I think he found out what I did. I’m really scared of what he’s gonna do.”
We were getting further and deeper into the brush than I thought the sunglasses were likely to have gone, but Tawny’s frantic searching had me convinced that this was truly important to her.
I headed toward an odd indentation in the ground cover, as though there had been a small sinkhole, wondering if there was water here and the glasses had rolled down toward it.
But there was no water, and no sunglasses, either.
The impression had been formed by something flattening the bushes in this spot; something that looked like a big piece of garbage, which struck me as odd for this wild, inaccessible, unpolluted beach. I leaned in for a look.
“Eek! I found them,” Tawny screamed behind me.
I turned to see her arm joyfully waving the designer shades aloft.
I was still curious, though. I turned back, taking another step closer to the foreign object that had crushed the brush.
It was, I judged as I approached, about five feet long, thick and oblong and sort of imperfectly cylindrical.
It looked heavy. How had it gotten here?
I looked up the bluff. Far above, the balconies of the inn jutted out from the stone facing.
I crouched down next to the object, laying a trembling hand on its rough surface.
“Oliver, what are you doing over there? Did you find something?”
“Yes,” I called back. “I did! I found it! The rug!”