Chapter 16 Lauren
SIXTEEN
Lauren
The week after Damien and Kate’s wedding is the real magic, I discover.
It’s mostly due to the Hastings family, a band of hilarious chaos muppets who love to laugh, drink, swim, and live in the moment.
As I observe them all throughout the week, I’m both charmed and a little overwhelmed — in a good way — at how much energy they all have.
I also come to understand Max a little more through his family. He’s so obviously the caretaker, the organizer, the oldest son who is trying to keep everyone safe and happy. It’s adorable, really. And a little familiar, too, almost like looking at a mirror of myself.
From the minute I open my eyes Sunday morning, I’m swept up in what feels like a whirlwind, laid-back party train.
The dress code is whatever you slept in, the schedule is whatever Remy suggests at noon, and the Hastings family treats the entire resort like their personal summer camp because, technically, it is, at least while they’re renovating.
A pattern among us emerges quickly: coffee on someone's balcony, a loose plan that dissolves within an hour, and all of us — me, Max, Kate, Damien, Tate, Remy, and whoever Natalia brings when she shows up — ending up somewhere unexpected by sunset. It’s either the picnic area at Paradise Springs, the pool deck at the resort, or one of the bars in town.
I'm on the walking cast now, which the doctor had approved at my follow up appointment and which Natalia had celebrated with margaritas.
No surgery needed — the fracture is healing cleanly on its own.
Six to eight weeks total, she said, and then I'd be back to normal.
She'd also said I could transition to the walking cast, which felt like a promotion.
I do, privately, miss the scooter a little. Still, I can manage the resort grounds slowly and with dignity. I cannot manage the uneven limestone path to the springs, which is a tragedy I've decided not to dwell on. Maybe when I get steadier and stronger.
The pool is a reasonable consolation and everyone loves it there, so that’s where we park ourselves on most afternoons.
“You're not supposed to get the cast wet,” Max calls out from his lounge chair, where he’s hunkered with a laptop.
“I'm fully aware.” I'm sitting on the pool steps with my foot elevated on the edge, the rest of me blissfully submerged to the waist. “I'm not getting it wet. I'm getting everything else wet.”
“That's a fine distinction.”
“I'm a fine person.”
“You are extremely fine.” Max looks at me, smirks, and raises an eyebrow. I laugh in response. Meanwhile, Remy cannonballs in from the far end. The spray catches my cast. I level a look at him as he surfaces.
“Sorry, Lauren. Didn't see you there.”
“You had a running start, Remy.”
“To be fair,” Max says, closing the laptop, “I saw you there too.”
Remy points at him. “Betrayed by my own brother.”
“I'm not your brother right now. I'm a witness.” Max sets the laptop on the table and pulls off his shirt, and I openly ogle him. Goodness, he is gorgeous, a fact that I think about way too often in the deep corners of my mind. “Move over. I'm getting in.”
“Finally,” I say. “I was starting to think you were married to your laptop.”
“I'm in a complicated relationship with it.” He lowers himself into the water next to me.
He's been working for twenty minutes and keeps glancing at his screen with the expression of someone who made a promise to himself and is finding it difficult to keep.
He has a meeting early next week — something with a buyer's representative on the mainland — that he's been mentioning often.
I've noticed the way his jaw tightens when it comes up.
“Put the laptop away,” I say.
“I'm nearly done.”
“You said that twenty minutes ago.”
“I could splash you,” I say, grinning at him.
He closes the laptop.
Damien surfaces next to Remy, shaking water from his hair, and Kate materializes on the pool deck in her swimsuit with a cooler.
She has a handful of days left with her new husband before his California obligation begins.
Her mom has given her the week off from the tiki bar, and it occurs to me that Kate and Damien should be on their honeymoon, but instead they’re here.
With all of us.
Watching them together, I feel something I've been feeling all week — this complicated mix of warmth and longing. Kate looks like a person who has been poured into the exact right container. I wonder what that feels like from the inside and debate whether I should ask her.
Remy floats into view. He grins and flicks water at me. I retaliate with a well-aimed splash. Within thirty seconds the entire pool is at war.
The Cauldron is on the main street of Cypress Grove, wedged between a crystal shop and a place that sells what appears to be exclusively flamingo-themed merchandise.
The sign above the door is an actual iron cauldron with a flame painted inside it, and on Tuesday nights a local band called the Swamp Rats plays blues and zydeco until the town's noise ordinance kicks in at midnight.
“I already adore this place,” I declare before we're even through the door.
It's low-ceilinged and warm, with exposed brick and mismatched stools and a bar that runs the length of the room.
The band is already playing, the accordion joyful and slightly chaotic, and the small dance floor is packed with people ranging from college-aged to elderly, all of them moving with the abandon of people who have been coming here long enough not to care how they look.
Natalia finds us a corner table. I lean my scooter against the wall — the walking cast is better for even surfaces but The Cauldron's floor is scuffed wood with a slight slope, and I've learned my limits — and Remy immediately disappears toward the bar.
He returns with a tray of drinks nobody ordered, and yet everyone cheers. They're house-made cocktails called the Swamp Witch, green and slightly alarming.
“What’s a Swamp Witch?” I ask.
“It tastes like a margarita,” Max chimes in, his hand on the small of my back.
“Then why not call it a margarita?”
“I like this woman’s logic,” Max says to everyone.
“The name is part of the experience.” Remy shrugs and downs a neon green shot.
The band shifts into something slow. Damien stands without a word and holds out his hand to Kate. She takes it without hesitating and they move to the edge of the dance floor, and I watch my best friend press her cheek against her husband's chest and close her eyes.
Three months, I think. She can do three months. But it's not going to be easy.
The accordion swells. Someone at the back of the room whoops.
The Cauldron smells like spilled beer and old wood and something faintly herbal I can't quite identify — something that reminds me, distantly, of Kate's tea blend, of the springs at night. The floor hums with the band and with something older underneath it.
I lean toward Natalia during a break between songs. “What is that smell? The herbal base note underneath everything else.”
She doesn't even pause. “Probably Wren’s concoction. She makes the cleaning products for half the businesses downtown. Her family's been making them for decades.” She tilts her head. “Her grandmother was in my grandmother’s coven. Most of the women here are in covens.”
“Most of them?” I look around the room — the bar, the regulars, the couples on the dance floor.
“Cypress Grove has more practicing herbalists per capita than anywhere in Florida,” Natalia says, with the casual pride of someone who grew up thinking this was perfectly normal. “You’ve heard it’s the Psychic Capitol of the World, right?”
“I had, but thought it was a tourist slogan.”
“Nope. We’re the real deal.” She pauses. “Don’t move. I’m going to get us some lemon water.”
Once she leaves, I glance back at the table and see that Max is watching me.
When we lock eyes, he raises his glass and grins. I blow him a kiss. He pretends to catch it, and presses his hand to his heart.
I don't know what's happening to me in this town.
But I think I'd like to find out.