Once she’d emptied her stomach and washed her face, Katie unlocked the door. It wasn’t like she could wait him out; he’d made it clear he wasn’t going anywhere.
He rushed to pull her into his arms when she opened the door, and she didn’t know whether she wanted to cling to him or push him away.
As more time had passed and she’d recovered from the shock and hurt of what had happened, she’d started to move into being outraged.
“Your mother is a lunatic,” she said into Ben’s shirt as he embraced her.
“Yes, I know,” he said, pulling back to look at her. “Are you okay? Dumb question, I’m sure, but God, I was so scared I wouldn’t be able to find you. You left your phone and your purse. I’ve got them here.”
She grabbed them from him, and the relief she felt was so overwhelming she started to cry. She hadn't realized until that moment how scared she was about being stranded on the island with no way to call anyone to tell them where she was.
“Are you okay?” Ben tucked her hair back behind her ear and then wet a paper towel and dabbed at something on her shirt.
She didn’t want to think about what it might be.
“Are you like in shock or something? Kate? Look at me. Talk to me, please.”
“I want to go home.”
“All right. Let me call a taxi to take us back to the ship.”
“No. I’m not going back to the ship. I want to go home. To Maya’s.”
Ben looked stunned, and then even more concerned than he had before. His brow creased as he nodded. “Okay. I’ll make the arrangements for us to fly out of here, but I’ll need to go back to the ship to get our things and to let officials there know that we won’t be continuing.”
“I wanna go by myself.”
Now, he looked like he was going to be the one breaking down.
“Kate, please. Please don’t do this. Please don’t shut me out. Please don’t let her take you from me.”
"What did you do?"
"What do you mean?"
Katie crossed her arms as she looked at him, trying to gauge whether he was the one she could trust. "What did you do to your mother to make her hate you so much?"
Ben flinched and sank back to lean against the wall. “Nice that you assume I did something.”
“It’s because I have no idea what happened. What else am I supposed to think? Your sister says that your mother doesn't want you to be happy. She wants you to be punished. Punished for what? Your mother says you're an addict who picks up women in bars and brings them home to embarrass her. Is that true?”
He swallowed as he looked down at his hands, and when he looked up at her, she was shocked to see his eyes filled with tears, his face contorted with pain.
No matter what doubts and fears she had, some part of her had fallen in love with the Ben she knew. And to see him hurting hurt her.
She went to him, wrapping her arms around his neck as he enveloped her in the tightest embrace she’d ever felt.
“Please don’t go without me,” he whispered against her hair. “I’ll answer whatever you ask. I have no secrets from you, and I’ll tell you no lies. All I ask if that you give me a chance to explain. And then, if you still want to walk away, I’ll respect your wishes and wish you well.”
Pulling away from his embrace, she reached up to run her fingers through her hair. “And if I don’t give you a chance to explain, you aren’t going to respect my wishes?”
A faint smile pulled at the corner of his lips. “No, I’ll respect them either way.”
“Can we talk somewhere other than this bathroom?”
“We can go wherever you’d like. But if we don’t make it back to the ship before they set sail, all our belongings sail with it, and we’ll likely pay a fine since this is a US port.”
Katie scrunched up her lips as she considered her options. She’d already determined she didn’t want to be stranded on St. Thomas. And the likelihood of finding a flight out tonight was slim to none.
Like it or not, her best bet was to go back to the ship for the night, and then catch a flight out of St. Maarten in the morning.
“All right. I’ll go with you, and I’ll listen to what you have to say. But I’m still going home tomorrow.”
“Fine, but I’m not staying onboard without you. Will you let me take me you home? Your sister is probably going to kill me as it is, but at least let me bring you back to her in one piece like I promised.”
Katie and Ben were both silent in the taxi ride back to the ship. She learned when she came through security that Ben had pretty much alerted the entire world to the fact that she was missing without her ID, wallet, or phone, so everyone at the checkpoint seemed relieved to see her safe.
The farther they got from what had happened, the more surreal it seemed.
Had Ben’s mother really gotten in her face and accused her of being a trollop, of all things? Katie wasn’t even sure she knew what a trollop was.
Ben could not have been more attentive on the way back to the ship and to their room. He seemed to constantly waver back and forth between wanting to hold her and wanting to give her space. And though she didn’t say so, she was feeling much the same.
“I’m sorry, Kate,” he said once they were back inside their room. “I never should’ve left you alone with her. I never dreamed she’d pounce like that, though. Laura said she thinks it’s desperation…that Mother knows she’s losing control. And my sister said to tell you she’s aware she owes you an apology. She was distrau—”
“She needs to make her own apology, not pass it along through you.”
“You’re right, of course, and she did offer to apologize in person. Just so you know, I told Laura it was my idea to distract Brady. That you were just doing what I suggested, and that I would have done the same thing. She understands why you did what you did.”
When Katie didn’t respond, he continued.
“I should have protected you. I should have been better prepared. Hell, I should have never exposed you to them in the first place.”
Katie smiled as her eyes welled up with tears.
“But then we never would have met.”
“Something I’m sure you regret now, but I won’t ever regret meeting you, Kate. No matter how this all turns out—and for the record, I hope it’s together——I will always be grateful to have had the experience I had with you. The time may have been short, but I cherished every minute of it.”
She couldn’t think about that yet. It hurt too much to consider.
“I’d like to take a shower and wash the public restroom stench off me.”
“Okay, sure, of course.” He clasped his hands together and twisted them like he was nervous. “I’ll go take a walk, and you can text me when you’re done. You’re not planning to bolt from the room as soon as I leave, are you?”
“You don’t have to leave the room, Ben,” she said with a half-formed grin. “We showered together this morning. I think I’ll be fine with you being in the next room now.”
When Katie came out of the bathroom in her pajamas after the shower, she was surprised to see that Ben had ordered room service.
“I didn’t know if you might be hungry,” he said, “but I figured you probably weren’t going to be up for going to dinner.” At the expression on her face, he rushed to clarify. “Not with my family. You don’t ever have to see them again, even if by some miracle, we do stay together. I got nachos, since I know you like those, but no olives. And a pizza. Oh, and some chicken noodle soup in case you’re still queasy. I know you were sick at the service station.”
“I was sick because a crazy woman verbally assaulted me, and the guy I was falling for evidently has quite the colorful backstory he didn’t see fit to share.” She grabbed a pack of crackers and climbed onto the bed to sit cross-legged with her back against the headboard.
“I wasn’t trying to hide anything from you. If you’d asked, I would have told you. We haven’t really gotten around to the life history stage of our relationship yet.”
"That's because we skipped ahead to be Cruise Ben and Cruise Katie. I told you all that stuff at the beginning is there for a reason.”
The room grew silent except for the sound of Katie chewing a cracker.
“So,” she said after swallowing the cracker and chasing it down with water, "are you gonna tell me or not?”
“I’ve already said I’ll tell you everything, and I would have the other night before all this even happened. What do you want to know?”
“Are you an addict?”
“No. I went through a time in college where my recreational drug and alcohol use was out of control. But I quit cold turkey after a particularly devastating event in my life at the age of nineteen, which I’m certain you’ll be hearing more about tonight. I haven't touched any drug or alcohol since then. Next question.”
“Do you pick up women in bars and take them home to embarrass your mother?”
“No. Have I ever taken home a woman I’ve met in a bar? Yes, of course, but to my home, not my mother’s. I don’t take anyone to meet my family. I told you that.”
“You told me you don't take anyone you care about, because you don't want to see them treated unkindly. Which I have a whole new understanding of now.”
“You are the first person I've introduced to my family since… Allison. Not that I’ve been in a serious relationship since then, but…”
“So why would your mother say that?”
“Because she’s unhinged, and she hates me. There was one situation where I brought home someone I shouldn’t have, and she’s never forgotten it. But it didn’t happen again.”
Katie leaned forward, worried about what the next answer might bring. “Why does your mother hate you?”
“I think it started at birth when she realized motherhood was time-consuming and life-altering, and it wasn’t going to be temporary.”
“Seriously…what happened when you were nineteen?”
He stood and began to pace the room.
“I was a hellion as a teen, starting in high school. I put my parents through the wringer, and things only got worse in college. The summer I was nineteen, I started hanging out with an older woman, Gretchen. She was thirty at the time, and we had absolutely nothing in common except that we both liked getting high. Gretchen was a small-time dealer, which is how we met, and she threw killer parties. People of all ages and walks of life went to those parties.
“So, call it stupidity, or youth, or me being rebellious and hating my parents at the time, but I brought Gretchen home for dinner on a night when my parents were hosting a swanky dinner party—that’s the one-time situation I was referencing. Gretchen was stoned out of her gourd and dressed like a hooker, and my mother was mortified and madder than I’d ever seen her. They kicked me out of the house that night, and for some reason, I thought it was a great idea to go stay with Gretchen.”
He went to stand at the balcony door with his arm braced against the glass, and his forehead resting on his forearm.
“One night at one of Gretchen's parties, there was a girl named Henley. She was my age and beautiful. Real nice girl. I still to this day have no idea how she ended up at Gretchen’s. She wasn’t a regular. I would have remembered her, and afterward, no one seemed to know who brought her. I talked to her for a while early in the night. Like I said, she was beautiful, and I was nineteen. Gretchen and I were on the rocks. Let's be honest, I never really had romantic feelings for her. It was more of a…relationship of convenience, and staying with her day in and day out had made it less desirable.” He lifted his head and looked back over his shoulder at Katie. “And let me stop to say, I’m not proud of who I was then or of the decisions I made. If I could go back and change them…”
He stopped for a moment, and when Katie realized he’d gotten choked up, she crawled to the foot of the bed to be closer to him.
“So, anyway.” He cleared his throat and shook it off. “I’d been living with Gretchen for a few weeks, and I’d started looking for a way out, and she knew it. When she saw me talking to Henley that night, she went ballistic. Just blew up, yelling and screaming at me. She was jealous of Henley, and she knew I had one foot out the door already. So, we had this blow-up at the party in front of everybody, so folks knew Gretchen thought I was interested in Henley. I'd like to point out that nothing happened between me and Henley prior to that argument. I never saw her during that argument, nor did I see her at any point after it, not that I know of, anyway. You’ll understand later why that's significant. Being upset with Gretchen and my general life situation, I got pretty messed up that night. The last memory I have was stumbling into the room I shared with Gretchen and crashing face down on the bed.”
He paused, and Katie sensed that he was struggling with the memories he had to recall. She reached for his hand, and he jumped when she touched him, like he's gone somewhere else in his mind and was startled to see her there.
She gave a slight tug, and he sat on the edge of the bed, and then she sat next to him with his hand in hers.
Turning his head to her, he took in a deep breath, and her heart hurt to see the haunted look in his eyes.
“The next memory I have is of waking up in the backseat of my car. I was groggy and nauseous, and I had no memory at all how I’d gotten there or why I was in my backseat. It was a Camaro, and you may have noticed, I’m a tall guy. I don't fit in the backseat of a Camaro. But somehow, I was scrunched up in a ball laying back there. Henley was in the driver’s seat. The car was running. We were parked on the side of the road, perfectly within the white lines of the paved shoulder. She was slumped against the driver’s window, and I thought she must have passed out, so I sat up and called her name, and then I put my hand on her shoulder to shake her.”
He drew in a jagged breath and let it out with a shudder as Katie tightened her grip on his hand. “She wasn’t asleep, and she didn’t wake up again.”