Chapter 50
Trystan and I sit across from each other in the little coffee shop we went to after Cait’s first appointment. I can’t stomach grilled cheese and whipped cream today. I’m not hungry for food.
“Bri, honey, if women were my thing, I’d hold on to you as tight as I dare because I never want to let you go.
You are special, so damn special, and he’s an idiot for missing that.
The damn fool let both of us go. We know he’s got some fucked up DNA, but he might’ve been dropped on his head in the hospital too.
I mean, it’s not outside the realm of possibility.
” He smirks while blotting his lips with a napkin.
I was surprised to hear that Trystan had quit Mercer Media too.
He was almost part of the furniture there, and that may have been part of a wider issue. “Do you still love him?”
He sighs. “I do. I always will. Same goes for you.”
“I miss him, Trys. I miss him so damn much it hurts. He warned me not to fall in love. I thought it was because he didn’t want some obsessive woman by his side. But I was wrong…” My voice falters.
His brow quirks. “How so?”
“He warned me not to fall in love because he knew how fucking impossible it would be to live without him.”
“Yeah. He’s correct. It’s hard to fill an aching void when the sand just runs through your fingers. No matter how much you scoop up, those grains just fall away.”
“That’s it. That’s it. You’re exactly right!”
“Oh, Bri. I think it’s time.”
“Time for what?” I ask, confused.
“You and I are going on vacation. Time to scoop some sand. And I won’t take no for an answer.”
Trystan leans against a blue Jeep with the roof off the vehicle, and the top clinging to his lean frame, a gift from God himself. Every line and dip of his abdomen, every furl and bulge where the fabric kisses his biceps in supplication. He taps his Armani watch. “You are late, Bubble.”
“Sorry, Trys, the plane took off late and didn’t make up time. I’m worth the wait, though.”
“Absolutely you are,” he says to my hair, now full of ick and flyaways from the flight and airports. “I’m so happy to see you, Bub.”
“Not half as happy as I am to see you, Mr. Hynd.”
He removes his sunglasses and tucks them into the neck of his shirt in that effortlessly sexy way that makes saliva pool while you check for your feminist card.
Trystan is a good-looking man. Trystan does sexy things, and Trystan and I are closer now than we’ve ever been.
The bond of working for a complex, broken individual wearing a mask of perfection was a challenging and rewarding one.
If we learned anything from the baggage of Mason’s identity discovery or the way Michael and Mitchel brushed him away like a crumb off a suit, it’s that labels are dangerous; masks are dangerous.
If you have to wear a mask and project an altered reality, that’s not life, that’s a fictional prison.
In the months AM, Trystan came out to people he once feared would destroy his career and reputation.
His own father, and Mason’s. The thought of crossing paths with Hynd senior when we were in Houston made sweat break out and his spine stiffen.
He was terrified of his father. Then he came out to Magnus Mercer, hooked up to machines in a hospital bed.
“If that old cunt has another heart attack at my news, then he’s got help at hand, hey. ”
It wasn’t a heart attack; he had suffered a series of minor strokes, no doubt exacerbated by watching his empire being picked apart and dismantled brick by brick, crumb by crumb.
As empathetic people, Trys and I did not have Magnus Mercer in our prayers.
If that was a character flaw, then it was one we both wore unapologetically.
The suffering both fathers had presided over was abhorrent, not to mention illegal.
Trystan accessed his trust using a Manhattan lawyer who Frazer Klein’s family had worked with when Kenya was abducted.
“What do you want to do first? Bags to the hotel, or drive along the beach?” He slings my bags into the back of the Jeep with ease.
I’ve never packed heavily and now don’t even travel with my sketch materials.
I prefer to take a series of photographs and work from that back in my living room, curled up on cushions or with a glass of three-dollar wine.
One million dollars earns insane interest in my bank account, and I drink three-dollar wine that smacks of vinegar and poor decisions.
“All of it, Trystan. I want to do it all. I want to hear about everything you’ve been doing since I’ve seen you last. I want to hear about everyone you’ve been doing, and if any of them are on this island, I’d love to meet him.
And most of all, I’m just content to spend time with my favorite guy and scoop sand. ”
The rear door shuts with a thunk, and he’s at the passenger door in an instant. “My lady,” he jests, and I just know he’s rolling those eyes behind the glasses he put back on because holy shit it’s bright out here. “Sure thing, lovely, we can do it all.”
I reach for the seatbelt as he plants a kiss on the hairline above my temple. I pray it doesn’t smell like avgas and airplane food. “Christ, I’ve missed you.”
Trystan spends the next four days showing me around the island paradise.
He slips away for an hour some days when I’m lounging by the water or enjoying a massage.
From the quaint hotels back deck, we can access the white sand beach directly through a maze of coconut palms and tropical plants I can look at and not think about Malice.
Because she will not leap out from behind the foliage and snip off any lesser leaves with her secateurs and overpriced gloves.
Because she’s in a treatment facility for addiction, or was the only time I inquired about her whereabouts.
I see Nic every other week for lunch or coffee dates.
She is only in contact with Marin and Mason, who she let slip had quit the corporate world not long after he’d quit the toxic branches of the family.
He had also quit New York, but she left it at that when my lips pursed and I could feel the prickle of tears threaten.
She knows I left her brother’s employ, but not why.
By her panicked reaction and hasty apology, I realized I was making her uncomfortable.
His name is now off-limits, banished from our conversation as easily as I walked out on him, or the way he left New York.
We discuss any upcoming children’s books I’m illustrating, her gorgeous family, and Ava’s ballet lessons now that she can get all that wispy hair up into a classic bun.
I live for the photos of a smiling little girl in a leotard and tights, teeth missing and hopeful eyes staring back through the lens.
We discuss first positions and first curse words from a son who likes to send his father prematurely gray and his mother into fits of giggles behind her hand.
My phone buzzes with a text message, and Trystan frowns, grabbing for it when I extract it from my jean shorts. “Vacation, Bubble! No phones, no stress. Give me one reason I don’t drop it in the pool right now?”
“Because I’d drop you in after it.”
Trystan knows most of my small circle. He knew Pen through Covet bookings and met Eden one night when we ran into him, literally dashing into his lawyer’s office.
His heartwarming smile with eye creases and enlarged pupils made Ed a little weak at the knees.
That, or the three tequilas she’d had at the bar we’d just left.
Introductions were swift and messy on a street blooming with the after-work drinks crowd and commuters desperate to be anywhere other than trapped on the sidewalk.
“It’s Ed, Pen, or is that Nic? Maybe it’s Liam. Has Geoffrey proposed yet?”
“If you move your damn paw, I can tell you who it is.” There is no name, only a cat emoji and a butterfly.
“It’s Caity!” She had a follow-up visit with her retinal specialist, and while the inflammation and leaky vessels are still present, it’s graded low level, meaning she can avoid Prednisolone for the time being.
That’s the best news we can hope for. “Give her my love,” he says, his enormous arms interlinked over my shoulders as I type.
“Of course.”
“Where is the restaurant again?”
My neck cranes from the gentle rhythmic waves rolling into the forested area on the other side of the single-lane road.
Save for a marina ahead of us, there is not much around.
The road has hugged the shoreline for the better part of ten minutes, so a hamlet of twinkling lights and alfresco revelry would await us around the next bend.
Nope. This side of the island holds the airport where I flew in days ago, and a smaller helipad closer to the marina.
“It’s not a restaurant. It’s a sunset cruise.” Trystan pushes his sunglasses further up the bridge of his crooked nose and grins. “How romantic, right?”
“You are such a dick sometimes.”
“Only because you love it. We both love dick, right?”
I swear he’s my fifth brother, the one no one told me about, who was raised rich in some swapped at birth scandal.
Too soon? Given the way Mason was conceived and raised without an ounce of love, I feel terrible for even thinking it.
He pulls the Jeep into an empty bay of the sand-strewn parking lot.
Unlatching his seatbelt, he’s around to the other side to open my door, an unnecessary move that he continues to ignore.
As I climb down from the passenger seat, he keeps his arm on the roof of the Jeep and his gaze across the water, almost reverently.
The last time I was at a marina, well, the last time I was on a yacht, I fell more in love with a man I could never have.