Chapter 14 #2
Tears welled in her eyes, and she wasn’t sure how to stop them. Three years they’d been waiting to be shed. When she couldn’t trust herself not to let them fall, she turned her back to Waylon and tried to get a fucking grip.
“You had a few for me, too. ‘Entitled.’ ‘Arrogant,’ ” he said, close enough now for her to feel his presence at her back. Her pulse ratcheted faster as his fingers found the dress’s zipper at the nape of her neck. “I’ve revisited that night in my head so many times I’ve lost count.”
Not a single muscle in her body moved—not even her heart. She was definitely going to need a defibrillator. Just when she thought she glimpsed the pearly gates, the zipper’s descent stalled below her shoulder blades, and Waylon’s hands fell away.
Fletcher worked hard to commit important details to memory—Dyer’s pill regimen, when to schedule deep cleans of the international properties, how to fix the fax machine on the sixtieth floor when it started death-rattling—but she didn’t have to work hard to remember that night.
It had been stamped on her prefrontal cortex, forcing her to recall it every time she spotted that unreturnable green dress at the back of her closet.
Not once did she imagine it haunted him the same way.
“I hated doing those events,” he said. “Everyone’s stressed, the expectations are so high, and nobody actually gives a shit about the charity.
It’s all for show. And I…Well, I’d been avoiding my dad, knowing I was going to get another mind-numbing lecture about what it means to be a Cartwright and how I was tarnishing the company name because I didn’t want to take the CMO job he offered me.
And then, this redheaded woman walked in. ”
Fletcher’s jaw fastened itself shut, afraid to hear the tremble in her voice if she spoke.
“I could have punched whoever made her cry,” he said.
“You didn’t even know me then.” And the unspoken: You didn’t know how much we’d hate each other.
“I didn’t. I was certain we’d never met.
This was not the kind of woman easily forgotten.
Once the tears stopped, you had this megawatt smile.
Defiant and determined. I knew right then that you were too good for my dad and his precious company.
Too eager to prove yourself. Cartwright Media would destroy you. ”
“You were wrong about me. I have what it takes to make it in this industry, and—this job was everything I’d ever wanted.
You almost ruined it.” Fletcher twisted to face him.
A scalding cauldron of emotion churned in her stomach.
Vulnerability, self-pity, outright rage.
He’d seen her, understood her, and still tried to define her choices without her consent.
Waylon’s face sank lower until it was in line with hers, lashes long and thick.
This close, she could see his heartbeat in the veins of his neck, right below the sharp edge of the jaw softened by stubble.
He cleared his throat and said, “And for that, I’m sorry.
But you were wrong about me, too. You said I’d always be a Cartwright, but that night, my dad had Melv write up a no-contact agreement.
As far as my dad was concerned, I wasn’t a Cartwright anymore.
Not until the diagnosis. It took dying for him to invite me back to Lydell.
Back into his life at all. So, maybe we’re even. ”
She didn’t want to believe him, and she didn’t want to be even.
She wanted to stay mad at him for the rest of her life and then some, her skeletal middle finger flipped in the general direction of his coffin.
But some traitorous part of her heart decalcified, the hard shell chipping off.
A prickly feeling gathered in the cave of her chest.
For a moment, his apology hung unanswered in the air. She almost accepted it, but the rumble of an elephant stampede in the distance reminded them exactly where they were. And why.
Waylon said, “I think this is the part where you get undressed and pretend I’m not here.”
He also decided now was a good time to take his shirt off. Objectively, it was easier to ignore his presence when she wasn’t face-to-face with that. Sunlight dripped off the planes of his chest—way too tan for a New York November—and the sight of it puddled in Fletcher’s core.
“You, um.” Fletcher swallowed. “You also have to pretend that I’m not here. Equal opportunity and all that.”
Something flared in Waylon’s eyes. Like he could tell the way her heart rate kicked up and liked being responsible for it.
“As you wish.”
And then he proceeded to drop his pants to his ankles with no regard for her presence at all.
Fletcher should have, probably, maybe, turned away sooner than she did.
But for a long second, she just stared at the gray elastic of Waylon’s boxer briefs, the way they hugged his thighs, the length of him at the center.
What was she doing? That was Waylon she was eyeballing.
One nice comment wasn’t enough to forgive him for the psychological damage he’d unknowingly inflicted for the last 1,155 days.
She turned then and fought the urge to forcibly shake out her limbs.
Reaching behind her, she found her zipper carefully positioned within reach. Right where he’d left it for her.
The river was cool against her skin as she waded up to her shoulders, and if she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine she wasn’t ten feet from her dead boss’s naked son.
She floated, letting her skin wrinkle and the daylight drain.
Today had been eight million years long, and she was glad to see its end.
A groan of relief parted her lips. Fletcher couldn’t help it.
Behind her, in a plane of existence Fletcher was refusing to validate with her cognitive awareness, Waylon chuckled.
Fletcher didn’t respond, but she did sink lower, blowing bubbles out of her nose.
“I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen you relax,” he said, his voice distant.
Fletcher snorted. “What happened to ignoring each other? You aren’t supposed to be seeing me at all.”
“I could sense it in your aura.”
“Didn’t take you as a big aura guy.”
A clipped laugh. “Joplin’s responsible for that one.”
Fletcher’s stomach lurched with envy at her colleague’s name, thinking about how they clung to each other in the pool, the nicknames, the way his name sounded in her mouth—
Bitter guilt clogged Fletcher’s system. Joplin was dead. She couldn’t be jealous of a dead woman. Regardless of whether or not that dead woman had a romantic history with Waylon.
Shaking off the thought, Fletcher waded toward the banks and scavenged around her backpack for something—anything—to use as a towel. Cocktail napkins from the wine cellar it was.
To his credit, Waylon kept the toned expanse of his back to her the whole time she clipped her bra and shimmied into the spare set of clothes she’d packed—a cream-and-black tweed skirt, a chambray shirt, and a slightly-more-practical-than-heels pair of slingback flats.
She offered him the same decency when Waylon buttoned a short-sleeved linen shirt, forcibly paying as little attention as possible to the way the water sluiced through the curves of his biceps, followed the veins of his forearms.
Tragically, noticing Waylon was growing increasingly harder to avoid.
Beneath the umbrella canopy of an acacia tree, their glampsite came together quickly: twin temperature-regulating sleeping bags; silk pillowcases for memory foam pillows that sprung out of capsules; and a solar lantern with USB charging ports.
Fletcher plugged her phone in as she sank into the fleece folds of her sleeping bag, snug despite the evening wind picking up with the first clouds on the ink-dark horizon.
Still no service. She fired off a string of messages to Ford anyway, just out of routine.
Although they normally discussed the slope of Ariana Grande’s ponytail or which vegetable best embodied them as a person, tonight’s messages read:
THIS IS A SHIT SHOW
THE SHITTIEST OF SHOWS
I want to go home
If I squint really hard at the horizon, I’m pretty sure I see you taking body shots off a guy with a handlebar mustache in Seychelles. Hope you’re having more fun than me.
BUT NOT TOO MUCH FUN
He would never read them. They’d sit, unsent on her phone with that annoying red exclamation point error forever. But she could pretend.
“I don’t think those texts are ever reaching that boyfriend of yours,” Waylon said as he knelt on his sleeping bag.
“I think Ford’s out of my league.” That earned an amused huff. “But no, um. Kent and I broke up.”
Broke up didn’t accurately reflect the way things ended. She was single—he was in denial. And, if she was honest, he had been for a good long while. Their relationship had been dead in the water for ages—months, years? She’d just been too scared to admit it.
For the last three weeks, she’d been pointedly ignoring his calls. If she hadn’t been so dead set on proving to everyone she belonged on this trip, it would have been too easy to fall back into their old patterns. The same routine of trying to please everyone except herself.
“I thought it was serious,” Waylon said.
“It was for him.” There was an itch at the base of her throat she couldn’t stop scratching. Sourness cut through her chest. “Actually, we got in a fight because he tried to tell me not to come on this trip.”
Waylon considered this. “Who among us hasn’t tried to talk our girlfriends out of crashing an international company retreat turned cage fight?”
Fletcher hummed. “I didn’t think you were the girlfriend type.”
The moment snagged and unraveled. Finally, he said, “Not lately, I’m not.”
“Not since Eliza?”
Waylon’s guard bolted into place in an instant. Fletcher watched it happen, the suave, charismatic character he played so easily being shuttered inside hurricane windows. Something cold, distant took form instead.
Normally, she’d relish the chance to dig under his skin, festering there like a splinter. Under the first dust of stars, it didn’t have the same effect.
“Kent wanted me to be his wife,” she blurted.
“We were high school sweethearts, and I guess he always thought moving to New York was a phase I needed to, I don’t know, get out of my system.
All he ever wanted was to get married in a little white chapel and drag me back to the same life I had growing up.
A farm, a couple of well-oiled crop-dusting planes and combines, four kids, a hundred acres, and a tire swing. ”
She didn’t know why she said it, except maybe it was easier to talk about Kent than the events of the last twenty-four hours. And if she and Waylon were going to keep up this tentative truce, being on speaking terms helped.
Waylon laughed, bright and alive once more. “Let me guess, that didn’t fit in your five-year plan?”
“Ten-year, actually.” She sucked down a couple steadying breaths to keep her stomach from rioting again.
There was nothing wrong with little white chapels.
But Fletcher had always been more of a destination elopement with a hot air balloon send-off girl herself.
Kent never understood that. “Maybe I should’ve listened. ”
A sharp inhale. “To his marriage proposal?”
“To his insistence that this job is a soul-sucking whirlpool of depravity that will lead to nothing and no one.”
Waylon’s eyebrows did that infuriating thing. A breath whooshed out of him that said, Well, was he wrong?
After that, silence. She couldn’t bear to look at Waylon, knowing he was looking back at her. Unsure of what he’d find.
Somewhere in the cloying darkness, an owl screeched, and the noise had Fletcher burrowing deeper into her sleeping bag.
“We should take turns keeping watch,” Waylon said. A yawn tugged at the corners of his lips, but he didn’t address it. “I’ll go first.”
“Oh my god. Do my ears deceive me? Does Waylon Cartwright have a plan?” Fletcher said, eyelids heavy.
The stars above them spun like snow globe glitter or a December night’s first flurries. As sleep sunk its claws into her, Fletcher couldn’t quite name the stir of warmth in her chest, but she knew that sleeping next to Waylon Cartwright was the safest she’d felt in years.