Chapter Twelve
Twelve
With Tyler beside her, the pounding jungle did not seem to close in around her as it had only an hour before.
They walked past the other guest bungalows, which Lulu noted were all tiled rather than thatched.
Lulu padded along the boardwalk bordered by an ancient banyan tree and her eyes widened when Tyler shone his flashlight on his cabin.
A glass-walled container home graced the landscape, complete with a screened porch raised off the jungle floor by stilts.
Through the picture window, the cottage glowed with warm lamplight.
As Tyler had promised, a king-size bed and a poufy sofa adorned the space.
It was like a bizarro world version of her thatched hut: all the wild appeal of being ensconced in nature but with luxury, comfort, and aesthetics.
“This strikes me as flagrantly unfair.”
“I did warn you.”
They stepped inside. An overhead fan whirred, but the air was so humid that even the fan did little to create a breeze.
Lulu flounced onto the couch before he could argue, but still he did, and they engaged in a brief but clichéd back-and-forth over who would take the couch, with Tyler insisting and Lulu threatening to sleep on the floor if he did not sleep in his bed.
In the end, Lulu lay on the couch beneath the bed sheet and Tyler sprawled on the naked bed. The glass walls trapped the jungle humidity inside the room, and with sweat beading on her forehead, she threw off the sheet and sat up, rigid on the sofa.
Seeing her, Tyler sat, too. “Do you feel that? The air is just so dense. Like it’s gonna rain. Or pour.”
“Alejandro said not for a couple of days,” Lulu countered. “But it sure is hot.”
“Yeah. Lava hot.”
“Surface-of-the-sun hot,” she said.
“Too fuckin’ hot.” He tipped his chin toward the screened porch. “I guess that’s why they put that there.”
So that was the point of the low platform built above the porch floor. To house the king mattress.
She met his eyes. In silent agreement, they tugged the mattress out to the porch, where the temperature measured at cooling lava instead of liquid magma. Tyler flopped onto the mattress and patted the spot beside him.
Now this was not a good idea. Every fiber of her being could predict what would happen to her self-restraint if she lay down beside a cut and hunky Tyler Demming, whose manly scent of pickleball prowess and jungle vines was just the right mix of aphrodisiac to drive a sexually deprived single mom to open the gates and let the cavalry in. And yet…
Heart pounding, she settled herself at the far edge of the bed.
She lay on one shoulder, knees curled, her face searching his in the dim light.
Neither of them moved, and Lulu held her breath.
Something had shifted between them, and she sensed the approach of a palpable change.
A moment of truth. And when his lips parted, she knew whatever he was about to say would stoke the flame or douse it.
“Lu?” he asked softly at last. “Do you ever wonder…” he trailed off and she waited, watching him wrestle with his thoughts. “Do you ever wonder what it would be like if our fingers were our toes, and our toes were our fingers?”
Lulu blinked. “What?!” she asked, her features pinching with incredulity.
“I’m sorry,” he amended instantly. “I say stupid things when I’m nervous.”
Nervous? Maybe he thought he was going to have to rebuff her.
Like she would try to come on to him! Ha!
As. If. She wouldn’t even consider touching the curve of his sculpted shoulder.
Or look into those eyes that flashed in the soft lamplight like two sexy mirrored disco balls. And don’t even look…there. Stop it.
Dammit. With effort, she snuffed out the smoldering coal in the back of her brain that kept sparking to life.
Married. Married. Married, her brain repeated.
He may have zero moral compass, but she was going to fight to hold on to true north if she had to scooch all the way over to the drooping edge of the mattress until she slid off the platform and onto the ground.
A long time passed without a word. The porch, a private haven of civilization within the wild jungle, was a fully screened box, and in the darkness the dim silhouettes of the sheltering treetops were visible overhead.
It gave Lulu the sensation that they were floating on a lonely raft in the sea, the space between them as impassable as the ocean itself.
The high-pitched whine of the jungle, his attentive concern for her well-being, and her tumble in the raft that had made a grilled panini of their bodies, all conspired together to mix a conflicting whirlpool of emotion.
In the silence, which was not really silence but a thrumming, pulsing, wild insistence, her mind ricocheted to her youth.
She wondered then, if Tyler, too, sensed the parallel world humming at the edges of this one. The what-if world. The if-only universe.
Lulu was eighteen again, her back flush against the cool pavement.
Nothing overhead but the moon, nothing ahead but the surety of a winning future.
Tyler’s handsome face, so close to hers as he pressed his promise into her breastbone.
They’d fitted into each other then, as easily as the last two puzzle pieces, lips and limbs tangling without a thought for the cares that would come.
So often, when that moment flitted into her mind, she pushed it aside. And now, lying there so close that if she moved her toe, she might run it up the length of his calf, she remembered it. Viscerally and in the present tense.
His voice brought her back. His words were so low and careful that she nearly missed them. But she had heard it. Still, she said, “What?”
“I’ve missed you, Lu.”
His voice threaded through her. “I’ve thought about you. A lot,” he said, and boosted himself up on his elbow. Even in the dark, his eyes sparkled.
This guy. Now he tells her this?
“Tyler…” She couldn’t keep the ache out of her voice.
“What?”
He was very good at playing innocent. But this had to stop here.
She could lay in this bed, and maybe if those damn cicadas would shut the hell up, and if she could stop thinking about the smokin’ hottie lying not one foot away, she might sleep for a minute.
But she would not play this game any longer. Not for one more instant.
She looked up at the screened ceiling. “We shouldn’t even be having this conversation.”
“Why not?”
Oh, please. She was dead tired of sidestepping the obvious. It was time for someone to walk in the shit and stink things up. “Well, for one thing, what would Sapphire think?”
Turning her head, she waited. Her left brow took the slow elevator up her forehead while she pinned him with her skepticism. Oh, this was going to be good. She could stay up all night to watch him squirm, trapped in a net of his own making.
His face went slack, like he’d taken a slap he never saw coming. She ground her foot into what she’d already stepped in.
“You’re a public figure, Tyler. Did you think I hadn’t heard you got married?”
He was shaking his head, making a shocked little sound in the back of his throat. “Lu.” He sounded genuinely injured. “Do you think I would be hitting on you like this if I were married?”
If he were married? And he was hitting on her? She didn’t know which piece of information to focus on.
Tyler sat up and wrapped his arms around his knees. “God, Lu. Is that what you thought? No wonder you’ve been so…so…”
She sat up like a shot, twisting her torso to face him. “So what?” she asked, indignant.
“So nothing,” he backpedaled. “You’re just…you,” he said, gesturing at the length of her body. She narrowed her eyes.
“Sapphire…isn’t my wife. Not any longer. I’m not married to her anymore. We just…” Shaking his head at the mattress he said, “She wanted me to keep it out of the media.”
Pinching her lip between her teeth, Lulu swallowed. She wasn’t buying it.
He went on. “She was worried the attention would blow up and overshadow her career. Some people elope to get married in secret. We did the opposite. We had a very public wedding, and a very private divorce. Two and a half years ago.”
He wasn’t married? Wait. Was he playing her?
“I get how it looks. But we couldn’t announce it.” His eyes reached for hers through the darkness. “She worried that the divorce publicity would be a shitshow, so we kept it on the DL.”
The shift in Tyler’s voice threaded through the humid nighttime air. “Believe me when I tell ya, it’s not the best way to go through heartbreak…alone.” His words wavered, and uncertainty flickered over his features. “Only my parents know what really happened.”
It was that flash of vulnerability that set her belief in motion. He was telling the truth, and her own heart squeezed with empathy. How tough it must have been to go through a divorce and show the world a smiling face.
“Can I…” To her outsider’s eye, Sapphire and Tyler had looked like the search results for Most Loving Couple in the Snugglyverse. “Can I ask what happened?”
“Honestly.” Tyler let out a long breath of air.
“Keeping this all inside has been…Let’s just say it hasn’t been easy.
She…” He hesitated, deciding what to reveal.
“You could say Sapphire and I were on separate pages. I guess she and I forgot to have those important conversations you’re supposed to have before you go and get married.
” Lulu raised a questioning brow. “You know. Remember how we used to talk about how we would be different parents than our own parents?”
Nodding, her brain flew back to those nights in the basement of her childhood home, dreaming together about how they would encourage their kids to be whatever they wanted—at whatever stage they wanted—tennis pro instead of college? If that’s what your heart desires…