10. Stephanie
— ? —
Stephanie
“So. How’s day one coming?”
Harry dropped into the lounge chair beside me with a glass of iced tea in each hand, condensation running down over her knuckles. She passed one across and I took it and held on.
“Kind of weird.” I nudged my sunglasses up my nose and sank deeper into the cushions. “But overall okay.”
We were back at the pool, hours on from the morning I’d already tried to drown.
I’d fled to my cabin after my swim, slept the hard dreamless sleep of the emotionally wrecked until noon, then made myself admit that hiding wasn’t going to make three days pass any faster.
So here I was in my bikini for the second time in a day, trying to tan through the low hum of a party that refused to end.
The complex was going full tilt. A knot of guests batted a volleyball around the shallow end, shrieking every time it hit the water.
Others draped themselves along the tiki bar, sunburned and happy.
Tris and Lando held court in the middle distance with cocktails and matching linen, playing the elegant hosts they’d been born to be.
The whole place smelled of grilled corn and sunscreen, and someone had a playlist going that leaned heavy on the summers of my early twenties, back when Kevin and I were new and I still thought love was the easy part.
I’d danced to half these songs at our wedding.
I turned the volume down in my head and reached for my drink instead.
And out on the lawn past the deep end, a soccer game had broken out.
Hugo was in it. So was Kevin.
Opposite teams, thank God.
“How do you feel?” Harry asked. She tugged her own sunglasses down her nose and looked at me over the rims, the way she did when she wanted a real answer. “Seeing him again?”
I sighed.
How did I feel. That was the question, the one I’d been dodging all morning and all night and, if I was honest, for most of three years.
“Sadness,” I whispered.
The word snagged on the way out. I hadn’t planned to say it. It just fell.
“It’s been three years.” I kept my eyes locked on the sky, grateful for the dark lenses hiding whatever my face was doing behind them.
“But the wound. I think I just put a band-aid on it and never really healed it. I thought distance had healed everything, but seeing him again brought up feelings I thought I no longer had.”
My voice cracked on the last of it. God. I wasn’t going to cry at a pool party. I was absolutely not going to cry at a pool party surrounded by his entire extended family and a floating volleyball.
Harry’s hand found mine on the armrest and squeezed, warm and sure.
“Yeah.” Her voice went soft. “I know how hard it can get.”
She did. She’d split from her boyfriend a few months back, five years gone in one afternoon when she found out he’d been sleeping with her own paralegal. We’d cried our way through that call together, both of us asking the ceiling why love had to cost this much.
Nobody warned you about marrying into a family and then leaving the man.
You didn’t get to keep the man, but the family stayed yours, or you stayed theirs, and the lines got hopelessly tangled.
Harry had been my bridesmaid and then, when it all fell apart, my divorce lawyer, and somewhere across both she’d become the person I called first. She’d never once made me choose between her and her brother.
She’d just quietly stood in the doorway of both our lives and refused to shut either.
I took a long pull of the iced tea. It was too sweet, the way Tris made it, sugar cooked right into the pot, and it loosened a small tight knot behind my sternum anyway.
“We should distract ourselves,” Harry said, and just like that she sat up, the grief shrugged off, her whole body switching over from comfort to scheme. She clapped her hands. “Not me, of course. These are my family. But you?”
She swept the pool deck with an appraising eye, cataloging.
“We could totally get you one of my cousins.”
“HARRY!” I shrieked, half a laugh breaking through it. “Oh my god, wouldn’t that be weird?”
She shrugged, supremely unbothered. “All families are a bit messy.”
“I’m not hooking up with Kevin’s cousin at his mother’s birthday party.”
“Who said anything about hooking up? I’m talking about a nice distraction. Some flirting. Maybe a dance or two later.” Her grin turned wicked. “Looks like Jordan already has his eye on you.”
I followed her gaze to a chair a few yards down the deck. A man was watching me. Blond, tall, aggressively ordinary in a polo and khaki shorts. When I caught him at it, he smiled instead of looking away.
Jordan. I half-remembered meeting him last night, before the torch and the grass and the small inferno I’d started.
One of the dozens of Coleman cousins I’d been paraded past over the years of being married in.
They were a big, loud family, the kind that filled a whole restaurant for a birthday and remembered every name, and I’d loved that about them once, back when I thought I was joining it for good.
Now they were his again, on loan to me for a weekend, and every friendly face carried a little sting of what I’d given back when I handed over the ring.
“Hey, Jordan!” Harry called before I could clap a hand over her mouth. “Come say hi!”
I smacked her arm. “What are you doing?”
“Being a good friend. You’re welcome.”
Jordan was already up and ambling over, his smile spreading wider with every step. I pushed up onto my elbows and then sat all the way up, painfully aware I was in a bikini and now on the hook for small talk with a man who may or may not have watched me set the lawn on fire.
“Stephanie, right?” He sat down on the foot of my chair without being asked, which set my teeth a little on edge. “We met briefly yesterday. Before the, uh, torch incident.”
“That’s me. The arsonist.”
He laughed. “It was actually pretty impressive. I’ve never seen grass catch that fast.”
“It’s a gift.”
Harry made a great show of checking a phone that hadn’t buzzed. “Oh, would you look at that. I’ve got to go help Mom with the centerpieces. You two have fun!”
She was gone before I could grab her wrist, and then it was just me and Jordan and his relentlessly friendly face.
“So,” he said, leaning back on his palms. “I hear you used to be married to Kevin.”
Great. This was going great.
“Used to be, yes.”
“Must be awkward. Him showing up like this.”
“It’s fine. We’re adults.”
“Right. Sure.” He edged closer along the cushion. “I always thought you were cute, you know. Even back when you were married. Obviously I never said anything because, you know, my cousin. But I always noticed you at family events.”
I stared at him.
Okay, that was kind of odd.
“That’s, um. Thank you?”
“You’re welcome.” He grinned, and it was clear he had no idea he’d just admitted to clocking me while I wore his relative’s ring. “So, are you seeing anyone?”
I opened my mouth to answer. To gently, politely, and with total finality tell Jordan that I had zero interest in whatever this was warming up to be.
“WATCH OUT!”
The shout came off the soccer field. I looked up in time to see a white ball screaming through the air at a speed no casual game should produce.
It caught Jordan square in the back of the head with a sound I could only call violent, a wet, hollow thock.
Jordan dropped.
“Oh my god!” I scrambled onto my knees as he crumpled sideways onto the cushion, groaning, both hands clamped over his skull. “Jordan? Are you okay?”
“What the fuck,” he managed.
I looked up and tracked the ball back along its flight path to the point it had come from.
Kevin stood at the edge of the field. Every single person at the party had gone quiet and turned to look at him.
He shrugged.
“Oops?” he said. “It slipped.”
Bullshit. Complete and total bullshit. Kevin had knocked a soccer ball around in college, intramural, until medicine crowded it out.
He wasn’t a natural, never had been, but he had enough control to know exactly where a ball was going.
That ball hadn’t slipped. A man like that didn’t slip a ball forty yards into the back of one specific head.
He’d done it on purpose.
“What the hell, Kevin?”
He jogged over, not carrying a scrap of remorse, and lifted a hand toward one of the other cousins. “Come on. Take Jordan to the small ER station at the complex. There’s a nurse on duty.”
Two men got Jordan up between them. He swayed, eyes not quite focusing, looking concussed, and my stomach twisted with guilt on his behalf. He was weird and too forward, but he hadn’t earned a soccer ball to the brain for it.
“You’re literally a doctor,” I said, pointing after Jordan’s shuffling exit. “YOU can treat him.”
Kevin smiled at me.
It knocked the air clean out of my lungs.
That crooked half-smile, the one that used to melt me down to nothing, the one I’d spent three years trying to file under things I no longer felt.
I knew that smile from the inside. I’d woken up to it.
I’d fought with it, been undone by it in a hundred kitchens and hallways and one white tent by the water where we’d promised each other a forever that had lasted seven years before it starved.
“I’m off duty, Steph. Took the weekend off.” His eyes stayed on mine, steady and warm. “You’re my only exception.”
He winked.
My heart stuttered. Actually stuttered, skipping a full beat before it lunged to catch back up.
Fuck him. Fuck him and his smile and his wink and his whole stupid perfect face.
He didn’t get to flirt with me. He didn’t get to bean his own cousin off the skull for sitting too close and then look at me like that. We were divorced. DIVORCED. He had no claim on me, no right to be jealous or protective or whatever brand of caveman this was.
“I’ll come with you,” I said, standing and falling in behind the group headed for the medical station.
Kevin scowled. “Why?”
“Because I’m a nice person, KEVIN.” I gave his scowl right back to him, matched and raised. “And I want to make sure you didn’t give him a concussion.”
His eyes dipped down my bikini for a second before they jerked back up. “You want me to give you your dress?”
“No.” I squared my shoulders and refused, on principle, to feel one ounce of self-conscious. “I don’t want my dress. I’m okay like this. You got a problem with it?”
His jaw went tight. His eyes flared with want, and under it a hot band of frustration, both of them at once.
Good.
I stood a little straighter, made sure the black triangles of my bikini were fully on display, made sure he got a long, uninterrupted look at exactly what he’d thrown away.
He ground his teeth and dropped behind the group, following us toward the medical station, and his mouth opened, probably to say a dumb thing about my state of undress.
“Leave my sister alone, asshole.”
Hugo appeared at my shoulder, already dragging his t-shirt off over his head. He tugged it down over mine before I could get a hand up to stop him.
“Just wear that,” he said.
I stared at him. At the shirt now tenting off my shoulders, still warm from his back and smelling of grass and sweat. At my brother’s scowl and my ex-husband’s barely-leashed frustration, the two of them flanking me like bookends of male opinion.
Were these men insane?
I stopped walking and turned to face both of them.
“What’s this?”
“My shirt.” Hugo gestured at the offending garment. “You can cover yourself while you walk around.”
I laughed, one sharp disbelieving bark of it.
“Oh no.” I grabbed the hem and stripped it off over my head in one smooth pull. “No, thank you.”
I held the shirt back out to Hugo and looked from one of them to the other. My brother, trying to shield me. My ex-husband, trying to stake me. Both of them deciding my own body was a problem that needed managing.
“I said I’m okay like this.” Every word came out cold and flat and final. “And you two will respect that, or Jordan won’t be the only one going to the ER right now. Do you hear me?”
“Yes ma’am,” Kevin said, instantly.
I kind of liked how fast he folded.
Don’t think that, Steph. Don’t you dare think that.
Hugo took longer, jaw working, but he nodded in the end. “Fine. Whatever.”
“Good.” I turned and walked toward the medical station with my chin up and my bikini in full view of the entire Coleman clan.
The grass was warm and dry now under my feet, the burned soles complaining with every step, and I kept my spine straight and my pace even and let none of it show.
Confidence was a costume I’d gotten good at wearing over the last three years.
Stand tall, chin level, and nobody had to know the floor was gone underneath you.
I’d worn it the day I signed the papers across Harry’s kitchen table, and it had held then.
It could hold across one lawn now. Behind me the party had gone back to its noise, volleyball splashes and somebody’s Bluetooth speaker, the ordinary sound of people who weren’t holding themselves together with spite and posture.
I put a little swing in my hips. Just in case Kevin was watching.
Which he absolutely was. I could feel his stare landing between my shoulder blades, a heat that raised the fine hair on my arms and pulled my skin tight.
Good, I thought again. Let him look. Let him see exactly what he lost.
I didn’t feel half as bulletproof as I was playing it. My heart was slamming and my hands had a fine tremor I kept tucked against my thighs, and some cowardly part of me wanted to bolt for my cabin and lock the door until Sunday.
But I’d be damned before I let him see how much he still moved me.
I made it three steps toward the station before Kevin’s voice came again, low and just for me, close enough that I felt it on the back of my neck, and what he said stopped me cold in the grass.