Chapter Thirteen
Kayla leaned heavily on her elbow, the sun like a warm blanket on her back, while her lower half was pleasantly chilled by the pool lapping at her stomach.
The surface of the bar was poured concrete, worn smooth by hundreds of former guests leaning on it just like Kayla was today.
Somehow, that thought soothed her. She was a tipsy speck in the vast cosmos that was resort life.
More important than Kayla’s relaxation, and the cause of her extreme contentment at the moment, was Mack’s relaxation.
Mack spent so much of her life as a coiled spring, holding everyone else together and constantly at work.
She tracked easily from boardrooms to client meetings to workouts.
Her body carried a constant low-level tension.
Kayla was pretty sure that she treated sleep most nights as a task to accomplish as efficiently as possible rather than a chance to rest her body and mind.
But that Mack and this Mack were as far apart as could be.
Her shoulders rode low, and her smile was easy and wide.
Her eyes sparkled with a joy for life that the corporate world tried to dim.
She looked like the best friend Kayla remembered from her youth, and it warmed her more effectively than the tropical sun to see that girl within this woman.
It was enough that right here, right now, spreadsheets and seduction plans could be forgotten, and they could just have fun.
Mack raised her plastic cup in salute. “Excellent margarita, my friend. Thank you.”
Their bartender, an older Black man with kind eyes and skin chiseled like aged wood, accepted her praise with a warm smile before moving on to the next guest. Mack leaned back against the concrete bar and let her legs float in the water in front of her.
She took a sip, then leaned her head back so far that her straw fedora nearly tumbled onto the bar.
Apparently, Mack could feel eyes on her, because she opened one eye a fraction and squinted Kayla’s way. “What?”
Kayla waved a finger up and down, indicating Mack’s body slightly adrift in the lazily moving water. “This looks good on you.”
“Huh?”
“You look happy.”
Even as the words left Kayla’s mouth, they sent a pulse of bittersweetness through her veins.
Seeing Mack happy made her happy. It was the one thing in her life that had always been guaranteed to lift her spirits.
The bitterness came from the rarity of that sight these days.
Was Mack happy less often, or was she just not around to see it much?
Mack’s voice was soft, and she looked directly into Kayla’s eyes. “I am happy.”
The intensity of their stare blurred the rest of the world out for a moment. Kayla looked down at her empty cup to center herself. Stupid tequila always made her wistful and weepy. But Mack would laugh at her for being so emotional over her happy best friend, so she played it off.
Instead, Kayla set down her cup, letting the slight current from someone cannonballing into the far end of the pool float her toward her best friend. “Let’s keep it that way. Today is all about Mack. What do you want to do with it? I’ll go anywhere you say.”
Lifting Mack’s cup out of her hand, Kayla used it to indicate their surroundings before taking a sip. Mack gave her a disgruntled look and gently lifted her drink back out of Kayla’s hand. “Today is all about me, huh? What about the Plan of Seduction?”
Kayla cringed internally, but made sure it didn’t show on her face. “Skye is nowhere to be seen, and you haven’t been this chill since senior year when you threw your back out and the doctor gave you that muscle relaxer. I’ll take advantage of the favorable wind for now.”
“I would argue, but I think you’re right. There is something about St. Lucia that makes me lazy enough to lounge by the pool.”
She gave Kayla a wink and stood up from her stool, stretching in the sun like a contented cat. It warmed Kayla’s heart to see. At least one of her missions for the week was going perfectly.
The bartender came back and grabbed Kayla’s empty cup.
She confirmed with a nod that she’d like another of his excellent margaritas.
While he got busy mixing it, she noticed that something had caught Mack’s eye.
There seemed to be a lot of activity happening on the nearby pool deck.
It was the columned area under the roof where tables were normally set for breakfast, but the staff was clearing the tables and chairs away.
Mack asked, “Hey, Marcus, what’s going on over there?”
The bartender looked up from juicing limes to the spot she indicated. His voice was a rich baritone with an unmistakable lilt of the islands when he replied. “Dance lessons. Haven’t you looked at the activities schedule?”
Mack plopped back down on her stool and looked at the laminated card he indicated. “There are activities?”
“Of course, my friend. Every afternoon, there are dance lessons on the pool deck. You and your lady friend can learn salsa, tango, waltz. Learn something nice for your first dance, yeah?”
Mack turned back to Kayla, her face shining with child-like excitement. “Sounds like fun. Want to go?”
Kayla was a terrible dancer. Like danger to herself and others bad, but Mack looked so excited. How could she possibly resist? “Let’s do it.”
Almost as soon as the words came out of Kayla’s mouth, Mack’s shoulders slumped. “No. We can’t.”
“What? Why not?”
“We shouldn’t go. We should look for Skye and work on the plan. That’s why we’re here after all.”
Kayla’s stomach churned with nerves that she wasn’t making progress, but she knew she needed to be patient.
She tended to rush in to things. That was why they were here, in fact.
She blurted out her lie about getting married before giving herself time to think, and now Mack was having to lie to help her.
She could be patient and work on her other mission for an afternoon.
Kayla said, “No way. We’re taking a break today. I’m making sure my best friend has a good time on her honeymoon.”
Her wink made Mack chuckle, but she shook her head. “The important thing is getting Skye back. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m just being selfish.”
“You are the least selfish person I have ever met, so you can just forget that idea for starters.” A glimmer of a smile lit Mack’s eyes, so Kayla pushed on. “Getting Skye back is important, but there’s one thing that’s even more important.”
“What’s that?”
Kayla pushed to her feet and grabbed Mack’s hand. As she led her toward the pool steps, she said, “You, dummy.”
It should’ve been that easy, but Mack was just as stubborn as she was. She pulled back against Kayla’s insistent tugging. “LaLa, wait. Do you even know how to dance?”
“Not at all. That’s why I need lessons. Now come on, let’s go.”
Considering how easy it was to drag Mack along after that, it was obvious she had really wanted to do this all along.
They took a moment to dry themselves and throw on some clothes before hustling onto the newly cleared dance floor.
They were a few minutes late and missed the introductions from the two resort employees leading the lesson.
At least a dozen couples were nodding along to their instructions and smiling in that goofy way couples did when they were in the honeymoon phase of a relationship.
Mack nudged her arm and pointed across the room to where the older couple they’d met on the shuttle bus stood hand-in-hand. Linda gave them a smile that was far less warm than the one on the bus. It held a note of the same confusion she’d shown at dinner the previous night.
Kayla went on tip-toes to whisper into Mack’s ear. “I think this is a good opportunity to practice looking like a couple again.”
Mack nodded and put on a serious expression that was too severe to be genuine. “Should be easy. You’re such a bad dancer, you’ll probably fall into my arms within a few minutes. I’ll try to look excited about it.”
Kayla slapped her arm, but they both dissolved into giggles.
“Did everyone hear that?” The male instructor called out over the crowd.
On instinct, Kayla straightened her back and looked straight ahead. How many times had she and Mack been caught talking in class rather than listening to the lesson back in their high school days? Could a resort dance instructor put them in detention?
Mack cleared her throat and studiously avoided the stares of the other guests. “Yep. We’ve got it.”
Fortunately, he didn’t ask them to repeat what he had said, like Mr. Ali, their chemistry teacher always did.
Instead, he clapped his hands in an authoritative way, and all the couples scrambled to claim a clear spot of dance floor.
Humility won out over pride, and Kayla cleared an extra-large area for them.
Mack wasn’t wrong about the likelihood of her falling.
She just hoped it was into Mack’s arms and not onto the floor or, worse yet, into the pool behind them.
Music started to play through the speakers mounted on the columns all around them. The male dance instructor called out in his teacher voice again. “We won’t face our partners yet. Let’s learn the steps first. And one, two, three, very good.”
Kayla scrambled to keep up, but he wasn’t doing a lot of explaining, just holding his arms out like there was an invisible partner and shuffling his feet in a bewildering pattern.
The woman next to him wasn’t much help, either.
She held both an invisible partner and the edge of a flowing scarlet skirt high enough to show off ridiculously thin heels.
Just the sight of them made Kayla’s ankles ache.