Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Sam
I wake up alone, sunlight pouring in through the curtains.
With a big sigh, I roll out of bed and find my pants.
It’s time to face the light of day.
At Naomi’s house.
Where I stayed after I told myself I wouldn’t.
Fuck.
I follow the smell of coffee into the kitchen and find Naomi there, still in the same little pink shorts and tank top, pulling out a cast iron pan and placing it on her half-size gas stove.
She turns when I walk in and smiles at me.
So much for facing reality. I’m going to live inside this fantasy for as long as I can.
She walks over and kisses me, pulling back to look up into my eyes as I hold her close.
“Good morning.”
“Morning, princess.”
“I made coffee, and I was just going to fry up some bacon.”
She tries to turn and walk back to the counter, but I hold her tight. Her face turns back to mine, a surprised smile lighting up her features as I lean in for another long kiss.
And just like that, I’m transported to another life. One where this is my home, my woman, my family. My morning routine.
Everything I’ve ever wanted.
If only this wasn’t so complicated.
If only choosing this life wouldn’t mean giving up the one I’ve worked so hard for.
I end the kiss and release her. “That sounds great. I’d love a cup of coffee.”
She stands, watching me, for a long moment before walking over to the cupboard and pulling out a purple mug scattered with gold stars in a constellation I recognize but couldn’t name. “How’d you sleep?”
“Amazing. That bed of yours is incredible. I wonder if I could fly one of them home with me.”
She’s not looking at me as she sets the cup down and I wonder if my perfect morning fantasy is going to be overtaken by awkwardness. It’s the last thing I want, but I’m not sure how to prevent it. This situation is a bit awkward.
“Cream? Sugar?”
“Cream,” I say and accept the carton of half-and-half from her with a smile.
“So, when's your flight?”
I glance up at the black and white cat clock on the kitchen wall. My flight is currently boarding. I would have needed to be in Houston to get through security and customs hours ago.
“A few hours,” I lie.
She looks back from the stove, wide eyed. “Do you need to leave? You’ve still got to go to your hotel, pack, and get to Houston.”
There's something in her voice that I can’t ignore. It’s desire, but not the same kind as last night.
She doesn’t want me to leave.
Maybe as much as I don’t want to.
“I have some time. I can stay for breakfast.”
She relaxes, and I do the same, some kind of unspoken compromise having been reached.
We have this chunk of time together.
And then it’s over.
My mind drifts to worrying about when I’ll ever be able to get another flight to Faraday after missing mine, but I force it back to the present moment.
“Do you have to work today or anything?” I ask.
It's an obvious attempt at forcing small talk, but when Naomi turns around, she’s smiling.
She’ll allow it.
“I work from home on my social media channels. I go out all the time and do stuff so I have content, but I don’t exactly have a schedule.”
“What do you mean by social media channels? I mean,” I say quickly when she narrows her eyes at me, “I understand social media, like Instagram and TikTok, but what does it mean to have that be your job? Where does the income come from?”
“I get paid when I can get people to buy things from other people. So my job is to have enough people follow and trust me that when I go somewhere or recommend something, they also go there or buy that thing. It’s a balance of creating eye-catching content, being a relatable, trustable person, and selling things.”
“Influencer,” I say, finally feeling like I have a tiny grasp on the meaning of the word.
Naomi smiles down at me as she scoops the bacon from the pan. “Exactly. People will buy what I suggest they buy, but only if they want to be me. So I have to present my life in a way that looks pretty perfect but also authentic and vulnerable enough that they can relate to me as a real person.” The eggs hit the pan with a sizzle.
“That sounds like my own personal version of hell.”
She laughs. “Which part?”
I think about it for a long moment. “I guess the part where you put everything you do and think online. I’m more of a work at work and home at home kind of guy. I don’t like it much when the two cross over.”
A perfectly cooked and styled plate of bacon and eggs, complete with an orange slice and a buttered English muffin appears before me on cheerful red pottery with a ridged rim.
“Thank you,” I say in amazement. “I don’t usually get such royal treatment in the morning. Or ever, I guess.”
Naomi sits in the chair across from me at the small square table and leans forward on her elbows. “No one’s cooking for you down on Faraday?”
I shake my head, holding my hand to my mouth while I finish chewing the first delicious bite. “Not unless you count the cooks at Reef.”
“That’s the new restaurant you guys opened in the basement, right?”
I cock my head side to side. “It’s more of a ground level space than a basement. It’s on the pool level and has a big door that opens to the patio. It’s really cool, actually. The guests have been leaving the best reviews. Raft is great and all, but Reef is really what we needed for our guests and their families to get their day-to-day meal needs met.”
She’s quiet and I glance up to find her grinning at me.
“What?” I can’t help but smile back.
“Nothing. You’re just adorable when you talk about that place. It’s like your baby. ”
She’s far from wrong. “It does sometimes feel like a dependent that I’m responsible for keeping alive.”
Naomi laughs. “That’s not all a baby is, you know.”
I take another bite and wait curiously for her to go on.
“Your baby is what you love most in the world. What you’re most proud of. What you can’t stop thinking about and want to succeed and flourish so badly that you would pour your own blood, sweat, and tears into helping in any way you can.”
I chew quietly and try to identify the double meaning she’s clearly trying to communicate.
I come up empty handed. My usually keen intuition is failing me when it comes to this woman. Or maybe I just can’t hear it over the buzzing in my ears that amps up every time she gets within a few feet of me.
“Well, when you put it that way. It’s definitely my baby.”
“But you work with your friends. Isn’t that crossing your work/home boundary?”
Just the word boundary sends me straight back to last night when I was centimeters from plunging myself into her forbidden pussy.
I feel myself flush and look down at my breakfast. “It’s not quite like that. The guys and I don’t exactly work together. Dom and I do, but the other two…” I trail off with my foot in my mouth.
“The other two just fly in and out when they feel like it?” She rushes in to save me.
I smile up at her gratefully. “Something like that.”
It’s so much more than that, but I don’t know how to put the relationship with my three best friends and business partners into simple words that won’t make me sound like a complete fool.
How they feel more like family than friends.
How we’ve managed to set aside our complicated work arrangements as co-owners of the resort anytime we’re not in meetings or doing resort related work and just be pals.
How much it means to me that they trust me to helm the ship that is The White Sands Resort on a day-to-day basis, rarely questioning my judgment or decisions. At least not as often as they question each other.
A decade ago, when I first came to the guys with the idea to buy a run-down island resort, they balked. It took me the entirety of a five-day guy’s trip to get them on board.
Dom fell first, as I knew he would, the allure of his very own restaurant being something he couldn’t pass up.
I’m still not entirely sure why the other two eventually signed on. Whether it was just to make me and Dom happy, or if they truly saw something there for themselves. Either way, just ten short months later, we were rolling up to the mostly abandoned property with stars in our eyes.
And not much else.
The funny thing about taking a leap of faith is that you just never know how far down the universe has placed the net.
If it wasn’t for the bottomless pockets of my three besties, as well as a group of local contractors and other tradespeople who saw some potential in our project—or just took pity on us—we would have been just another cautionary tale for other young, inexperienced, budding entrepreneurs with more money than sense.
“And you live off-property?”
Naomi’s question pulls me back into the present moment. “Yeah. I bought a house the first year we were there. It was a bit of a fixer upper.” Understatement of the century. “But I’ve put in a lot of work and it’s starting to come around.”
Naomi tosses me a smirk. “Starting to come around after ten years of work?”
I shrug, chewing and swallowing before I answer. “I work at the resort a lot, so I only have my weekends to do house stuff. It was only recently that I started really getting those, and there have been some setbacks. Storm damage and whatnot.”
“Oh, I heard about that storm last year. Your house flooded?”
“The inside stayed dry, but the winds took out one of my outbuildings and the yard took on some water.”
“The tropics are a crazy place to live.”
I nod, but then shake my head side to side as I consider. “I don’t know. We have the weather and the obvious limitations like transport and importing most things we want, but I don’t think it’s any crazier than living somewhere like here. Every time I visit the mainland these days, I feel more and more like I’m going to get hit by a car or have a seizure from all the flashing lights.”
She laughs and I absorb the sound, warmth filling my body.
What I wouldn’t give to make this woman laugh for the rest of my life.
Nope. Not thinking that.
I set my fork down a bit too hard and the bang echoes through the quiet kitchen. I grimace. “I should probably get going.”
“Oh, right.”
We both sit for a long, slightly awkward moment, looking at our plates.
Naomi recovers first, standing and clearing the table. “Um, I guess most of your stuff is still in my bedroom.”
I glance down at my bare chest in amazement. How did I manage to come out to breakfast without a shirt on?
“Yeah. I’ll just go grab my shirt.” I stand and she doesn’t turn, facing away from me as she rinses the plates. After a moment, I leave the kitchen and retrace my steps back to her room.
The sight of her mussed up bed should not be sending all the blood in my body south, but it is.
How am I ever going to recover from last night?
I snatch up my tee and make a beeline for the safety of the living room where Naomi is waiting, looking as uncertain as I am about the next step.
It’s comforting that she isn’t just sending me off with a smile, as if I was just another one-night stand. She’s visibly unsure of herself, biting her lip and shifting from foot to foot with her hands clasped.
I shouldn’t do it, but I walk right over and pull her into an embrace. She relaxes in my arms. I shift slightly so she won’t feel my dick hardening.
“I…I had a good time last night,” she says finally, head still tucked between my shoulder and ear.
“I did too.” What else can I say? I can hardly tell her how much she rocked my world. How I’m leaving here a different person than when I walked in. All the things I want to say are on the tip of my tongue, but I bite them back.
There's just no way.
“I wish things could be different,” she says, giving voice to my thoughts.
I respond by putting my entire foot in my mouth. “You’re telling me. I just spent the last hour pretending this was my life.”
My words fall heavily into the air around us, settling like dust in the silence that follows them.
I hold my breath waiting for her to decide I was making a stupid, completely inappropriate joke and laugh, but she doesn’t.
Finally, after what feels like an eternity, she pulls away and takes a step back. My arms don't let go right away, but finally drop when she’s far enough away.
“Let me get you an Uber.”
I give her my hotel name, and she works her phone magic.
And now it’s really, truly time to leave.
“You can come over anytime you're in the city,” she offers as I pull open the door to her apartment.
“Thanks. I’ll do that.” We both know I won’t.
There’s an awkward pause, both of us waiting for me to reiterate the invitation for her to come down to The Sands, but I can’t make myself do it. Back then, at the taco place, things were so simple.
I’m not sure what they are now, but simple isn’t exactly the word I’d choose.
“I’ll see you around, okay?” I say as I walk out into the hall.
Naomi stays in her apartment, leaning just inside the doorframe. She nods.
“Have a good flight.”
And then I walk away.