Chapter Five
Kayla’s sandals slapped hard against the cheap, vinyl floor as she stomped toward the luggage carousel. The trip was far too short for her to get any satisfaction out of stomping around. She stopped beside Mack and crossed her arms over her chest, letting her annoyance out in a huff of breath.
“What’s with this tiny airport? Only one luggage carousel?” Kayla said.
Mack kept her eyes on the belt, endlessly circling without bringing any bags out. “Lots of places only have one carousel. You must’ve been to tiny airports during your playing days, right?”
Kayla huffed again. “Maybe.”
Mack finally looked down at her, scrunching her eyebrows together. “What’s got your panties in a twist?”
Kayla twisted her face deeper into a scowl to make sure none of Mack’s shining optimism could penetrate. “Ew. I hate that word.”
“What word would you rather I use? You don’t wear boxer briefs or boy shorts.”
“How do you know what underwear I wear?” Dammit. Mack was breaking through her defenses too easily.
“Because we shared a room for two years in high school, and you suck at laundry and tidying up. I spent half my time picking up after you. Including your panties.” Mack hit the last word with extra emphasis.
Kayla poked her in the ribs, but couldn’t keep the grin off her face. “Yeah, well, I’ve upgraded to thongs, which my soon-to-be-wife should know.”
Mack’s grin was positively wicked. “Interesting. Okay, what’s got your thong in a twist?”
The fun of teasing melted like her deodorant in the tropical heat.
“The stupid passport official wouldn’t tell me if Skye has arrived yet.
I got the same run around from Delta. What’s the point of paying a ridiculously high transfer fee and bullying the resort into giving me the dates Skye booked if I don’t get the same consideration from the airline or the passport people? ”
Mack turned a stern gaze on her. “You bullied the resort people?”
“Heck yeah. Pulled out all the stops, and they caved. How else do you think I found out when Skye was coming here?”
“You cried, didn’t you?”
“I do have some dignity.” Kayla rolled her eyes at Mack’s raised eyebrows. “I begged. Much more ladylike.”
Mack’s bark of laughter was like sunshine on her face.
How could she stay grumpy when Mack was looking more relaxed than Kayla had seen her in years?
At least her secondary plan was working, even if she was hitting a roadblock with the primary objective.
“Well, do me a favor and don’t get yourself arrested for trying to bribe a government official.
God knows what the prisons are like on this island. ”
As Mack teased her, Kayla pulled out her phone and switched it off airplane mode. The moment she did, a dozen notifications came in, one right after another. Kayla cringed. “I think we have a bigger problem than that.”
Right on cue, Mack’s phone rang. The first suitcase appeared through the rubber curtain at the end of the luggage carousel, and a collective sigh of relief burst from their fellow travelers. Mack took one step forward, then stopped dead, looking at her phone screen.
“Why’s Mom calling me?” Mack asked.
Despite her trepidation, Kayla couldn’t help being charmed.
Mack had always called Kayla’s mom just Mom.
When Kayla and Mack first became friends, they were in their early teens.
The first time meeting her, Mack had tried to call her Mrs. Lamb, but her mom wasn’t having it.
She said it made her feel old. Mack had resisted the familiarity at first, but things weren’t always great at home for her.
Soon, Kayla’s mom was more of a mother to her—more of a safe space and confidant—than her own mother, so she relented.
A couple of years later, Mack had come out to her parents, and they had responded by kicking her out of the house in the middle of the night.
Kayla, who had known the big talk was happening, wasn’t surprised to see Mack crying on their doorstep that night.
She was a little surprised by the blackening eye that had been her father’s parting gift.
Kayla’s mom had been a rock star that night, getting Mack settled in, feeding her, and being the loving parent she needed when her own had been such a disappointment.
She’d continued to be that hero for the next two years while Mack lived with them and finished high school.
She had been there for both of Mack’s college graduations, all her birthdays, and every Christmas.
If folks didn’t know better, they just assumed both Mack and Kayla were her biological daughters.
“About that,” Kayla said. “I might’ve sent her a text message on the way to the airport this morning.”
“A text about what?” Mack still held the ringing phone out like an offering.
“This trip. I told her all about it.”
“You did what?”
Mack’s shout made a twenty-something blonde in barely-there shorts and a big floppy hat jump. Mack was too apoplectic to apologize, so Kayla lied, “I told our cat she’s adopted.”
The woman gave Kayla a puzzled look, which only made her giggle harder.
She grabbed Mack by the arm and dragged her to a more secluded corner away from the carousel.
By the time they got there, Mack’s phone had stopped ringing and Kayla’s had started.
She didn’t bother checking the screen, she knew who it was and they didn’t have a lot of time.
Mack asked, “Did you tell her the truth or the lie?”
“Um…”
“LaLa!”
“Okay, okay. Don’t shout at me.” She tapped the toe of her sandal against the much larger toe of Mack’s boat shoes. “I told her the lie.”
“Why would you do that? Why would you tell your mother we’re getting married?”
Kayla stamped her foot, but the pouting act hadn’t worked on Mack since the first Obama administration. “She knows Skye. She would have told her and blown the whole thing up. You know how she is.”
Mack gently banged the side of her head against the wall beside her. “Yeah. She has this weird thing about not lying and manipulating people.”
“I’m not manipulating Skye. I’m just…introducing data to help influence her decision.”
“And telling her you’re going to marry me.”
“Yeah.”
“Which is a lie,” Mack said.
“Okay, look, if you’re going to nitpick everything I say, we aren’t going to get anywhere, and we don’t have a lot of time.”
As if her mother had been listening in, Mack’s phone rang again. She held up the screen, unnecessarily proving it was Mom again. “Time’s up. God, why did you tell her anything?”
“I had to! She’s my emergency contact. What if we had died in a plane crash?”
“That option sounds pretty good right now.” Mack sighed and banged her head a couple more times. “Might as well get it over with.”
Kayla’s stomach plummeted, and she held out her hand to the inevitable. Mack, however, was nothing if not gallant. She slid her thumb across the screen and held the phone to her ear. “Hi, Mom.”
The thin, tinny voice coming from Mack’s phone was so loud that Kayla could hear it like she was in the same room. “Don’t you ‘Hi Mom’ me, McKensie Elizabeth Bristol. How could you not tell me you’re in love with my daughter? And where have you been?”
“Sorry, Mom. It was a long flight.” Mack turned and walked a few steps, picking up her usual habit of pacing while on the phone, and taking the muffled sounds of Mom’s voice too far away for Kayla to hear.
“Yeah, I wanted to tell you face-to-face, but you know how LaLa gets so excited about things.”
Annoyance prickled across Kayla’s skin. Mack and Mom had a habit of ganging up on her.
They thought they were so funny and insightful, and Kayla was their favorite target.
Most of the time, it was cute, but when they did that thing of talking about her like she wasn’t in the room, it rankled.
Of course, she couldn’t ignore the fact that the only reason Mack was in trouble with Mom was because of her.
Mack was doing her a favor above and beyond anything she could ask anyone else.
Heck, it was above and beyond anything she should have asked Mack.
Kayla owed her one—maybe one thousand, honestly—and now she was deflecting Mom’s righteous indignation.
Maybe a hurried three a.m. text message to say she was flying off to St. Lucia to marry her best friend hadn’t been the best idea.
Just as guilt was threatening to engulf her, the main airport doors opened, letting in a gust of fresh air laced with the humidity of the Caribbean and the scent of some exotic flower.
Allowing the sounds around her to penetrate, she heard the chattering of a dozen different accents and half as many languages.
Standing by the baggage carousel were a pair of local men, their skin dark and rich as expensive wood, their eyes alight with laughter, bright blue polo shirts and pressed khaki shorts fluttering gently in the breeze of the passing luggage.
One laughed and slapped the other on the shoulder.
The second said something in a lilting, melodic language that almost sounded like French but held a distinctly Caribbean cadence.
Behind their heads was a massive poster for a local beer with the golden hue that promised light, crisp refreshment.
Everything around her was alive and exotic.
In all the excitement, somehow Kayla had forgotten that she was in St. Lucia.
That she had a new stamp in her passport.
That soon she would have sand in between her toes from a beach she had never visited before.
She would swim in the ocean and drink cocktails in a cabana.
She was on vacation with her best friend and, God did she need it after everything the last year had brought.
And after Mack’s secretary’s revelation it was clear Mack needed this as much as she did.
Maybe that was what she could offer. Sure, it came with planning a fake wedding on that very beach under that sun and with those cocktails, but that was just one little wrinkle in the beach towel of joy this week could be if they let it.
“Okay. She’s pissed, but she isn’t disowning either of us,” Mack said as she rejoined Kayla.
Impulsively, she threw her arms around Mack’s neck and held on tight. “That’s great. Thanks for talking to her.”
“I should’ve talked to her earlier, apparently. You didn’t tell me Skye never asked Mom for her blessing.”
Kayla asked, “Do people even do that anymore?”
The crinkle was back between Mack’s eyebrows. “Of course. It kills me that I didn’t do that.”
“We aren’t really getting married, Mack.”
“Yeah, I know, but still.” A slight blush appeared on Mack’s cheeks, and it was so adorable that Kayla couldn’t help reaching up and cupping her face. “Have I ruined your masc street cred?”
“No.” Mack shrugged. “I mean, maybe. It’s the respectful thing to do, and now Mom has had two people propose to you without asking for her blessing first. I think it hurt her feelings.”
“Well, that’s sweet, but she’ll get over it when I come home married to Skye.”
Mack’s eyebrow rose in a clear show of skepticism. “You think she’ll be fine with you going to St. Lucia engaged to one woman and coming home married to a different one?”
“Probably not, but she loves Skye. Plus, she’s always wanted me to settle down.”
Mack started back toward the luggage carousel in search of their bags. “Remember how she tried to get us to date in high school?”
Kayla hooked her arm through Mack’s, who adjusted her gait to match Kayla’s shorter stride. “She just wanted to get you a girlfriend, and I was the only other lesbian in our school at the time. Plus, it would be easier to chaperone dates if we were going on the same ones.”
“She would have made us sleep in separate rooms, though, so then there would have been no one to clean your room.”
Kayla leaned her head on Mack’s shoulder, remembering how they used to stay up all night talking.
Some nights, when Kayla had been away for long periods playing with various soccer teams or attending National Team camps, they wouldn’t sleep at all.
Mom would scold them as they yawned into their Corn Pops the next morning, but she hadn’t hidden her smile nearly as well as she thought she had.
Kayla was away so much that she had trouble making and keeping friends.
Mack didn’t have any family of her own. A few sleepless nights were well-worth the strong bonds they both held on to.
Kayla said, “I don’t know. I bet she’d be thrilled if I really did come home from this trip married to you.”
Mack laughed. “She gave up on us as a couple a long time ago. Trust me.”
There was a note of sadness in Mack’s laughter, and Kayla knew exactly why.
Romance had never been on the table for them.
They’d been so instrumental in each other’s lives for so long, sometimes it really did feel like they were family.
Of course, they’d talked about dating back when they were teenagers—mainly because Mom had made so many obvious hints that they had to put it out there.
But Kayla had never been Mack’s type and Kayla had only ever seen Mack as a friend, no matter how much she examined the possibilities.
They had even tried dancing together like a couple at a Winter Formal once, but it had been so awkward they’d just laughed through the whole thing.
It had always been obvious to her that they weren’t a match, so it was odd that both Skye and Mom had so readily accepted the idea of them being engaged. They were the two people apart from Mack who knew her best. How could they not know that romance with Mack wasn’t even a possibility?
Mack clunked Kayla’s purple roller bag down in front of her. “God, what did you pack? Rocks? How much can two bikinis and a vibrator weigh?”
Kayla slapped her arm. “I need a lot of outfits. I have to look my best for The Plan of Seduction to succeed.”
“The Plan of Seduction? Are you really calling it that?”
“It’s a working title.” Kayla indicated Mack’s smaller but still sizable suitcase. “You need all that room for your two swimsuits and vibrator?”
“Don’t forget the straw fedora.”
“I notice you didn’t deny bringing a vibrator.”
Mack winked. “Neither did you. It is our honeymoon after all.”
Kayla laughed, the tropical atmosphere seeping into her pores. Right now, it was easy to forget that this week would be a constant struggle to win back the woman she loved. The teasing banter with Mack was simply too much fun to allow her to worry.
“Come on, lets see if we can find some of those local beers while we wait for the resort shuttle.”