I WAKE THE NEXT MORNING FEELING THE ACHE AT MY TEMPLES BEFORE I open my eyes. I roll over and immediately regret it. The movement makes my head feel like it’s being flattened in a juice press. In addition to the physical torment, there is a lightness in my belly I can’t quite place yet, something akin to a cocktail of embarrassment and regret, though it’s too soon to understand it. The last time I woke up with that intuitive remorse in my belly was the morning after the dart-throwing incident in college.
Desperate for water, I force myself out of bed. Once upright, I look down at my pitiful self. I’m still adorned in the floral wrap dress from last night, but the tie has come undone and it’s now more of a robe, exposing my black bra and Spanx.
I quickly tie the dress and walk out of the bedroom toward the kitchenette in search of water, the five or so steps feeling like an eternity. I’m certain my body is at least twenty-five percent drained of its liquid and I’m sputtering forward like a car whose gas tank is quickly approaching empty.
“Hey.”
I scream. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Sorry, I was just lying here.” Charlie pushes the throw blanket covering his legs to the side and sits up on the couch, the pullout already tucked away.
“Sorry,” I say as I catch my breath. “I forgot you were here for a minute. Don’t you ever sleep? What are you, a vampire or something?”
“Why, did you bring a stake in your Mary Poppins bag that you plan on driving through my heart?”
I shake my head. “It’s too early for your intended wit.” I raise my fingertips to my throbbing temple. “What happened last night?”
“You don’t remember?” he asks, lips pursed in clear amusement.
“I remember dinner. Punch, lots of rum punch. I remember . . . dancing? After that, it’s all a blur.” I rub my forehead with my thumb and index finger. “Tell me everything.”
He smiles wickedly, his mouth taking on the shape of a half circle.
“First, you may want to fix your dress. It’s a little distracting.” I look down to find the front of my dress tucked into the waistline of my Spanx.
I tug it loose and give him a stern look. “Speak!”
“Okay! Well, for starters, you’re surprisingly skilled at getting strangers to dance with you. You danced with our waiter. You danced with the older couple at the table beside us. And with this dude on vacation with his parents. Actually, you told his mom he’s a SILF.”
“A SILF?” I say, rubbing my eye with my palm.
“Apparently it means a Son I’d Like to—”
“Oh dear god.”
“Or at least that’s what you told his mom. But don’t worry, he’s eighteen. He made sure to tell you that.” He’s grinning again.
My skin begins to tingle as if trying to rise away in embarrassment of its association to me. “What were you doing during this time? Not helping, clearly.”
“Watching. You were quite entertaining.” He crosses his arms and observes me with too much pleasure.
“Thanks for the support.”
He stands and I take in his yet-again-shirtless torso and black jersey shorts. “Oh, believe me, I tried. But you’re incredibly strong. You called me Zane, told me you didn’t need a man rescuing you and that you could take care of yourself. And you kept insisting we fill the bathtubs with water in case of emergency? Your urgency to fill the bathtubs is what finally got you to head back to the room. But not before you threw up in a bush. Then you fell into another bush. It was not a good night for you and bushes.”
“That would explain the little leaves in the bed,” I mutter, grabbing a glass from the cabinet and filling it to the brim at the sink.
“All I could think about was you landing on one of those Amazonian bugs.” He wiggles in disgust. “And why water in the bathtubs?”
“A water reserve should the supply be cut off. First thing you should do in an emergency, ensure you have water.”
That amused look again.
I glance down, then at the wall. Anywhere but at him. “I don’t know what happened to me last night.”
“I think we’ve established that punch happened. Lots of rum punch.”
It’s not like me to lose control like this. But the stress of designing the perfect game for Catapult, the run-in with Zane and his now-fiancée, this situation with Charlie—apparently they all led me to an unfortunate amount of rum punch.
My mind strains, trying to focus on the last thing I remember from the night before. The two of us, staring at each other across the table, our faces inches apart. A warmth in my belly. “Please tell me we didn’t do anything,” I say.
“No, we didn’t. You weren’t exactly in the right state of mind.”
Is he insinuating that if I had been in the right state of mind, perhaps we would have?
Would I have?
Charlie stretches, pushing his arms up and out over his head. I’ve never actually seen this guy work out, so now I’m wondering how his firm shape is possible. I find myself annoyed, wanting to yell at him to put on a damn shirt.
He begins folding the blanket on the couch and I chug a second glass of water before heading back to the bedroom and closing the door. After a cheeseburger and fries from room service to grant my hangover the grease it craves, I end up sleeping off the aftereffects of my ill-advised night for most of the day. I awake in the late afternoon feeling better physically, but at a low point mentally. We’ve been here for almost forty-eight hours and I have made no progress toward building a game concept for Catapult that will convince them to hire me. And I’m in paradise and have barely left the suite.
The sun is setting when I exit the bedroom to once again find Charlie sitting on the terrace. Though tonight’s sky doesn’t rival the blanket of orange we saw from the plane, it has taken on a magnificent arrangement of colors, pink leading the symphony.
“She lives,” he says, closing my romance novel and placing it in his lap.
“Barely. No more rum punch for me.” I fight back a grin at his vintage TLC T-shirt that reads DON’T GO CHASING WATERFALLS, complete with T-Boz’s, Left Eye’s, and Chilli’s faces.
“No mimosas or rum punch. I wonder if there’ll be any safe alcohol left by the time we leave here.”
I take the seat beside him. “No kamikaze shots for me either,” I say. “Since we’re listing banned alcohol. I went to Rocky Point in Mexico for spring break my junior year of college and passed out in the bathroom after too many of those. But not before dancing on the bar with the tip jar between my knees.” There’s a wave of nausea I have to swallow back down.
“Drunken dancing seems to be a theme with you,” he muses. “I would have liked to have seen that. Before the pass-out, I mean.” He lifts one eyebrow so quickly it’s likely unintentional. “It’s cheap tequila for me. Also college. Grad night. I woke up in my underwear on a park bench. To this day, I have no idea what happened to my clothes.”
“Well, you do seem to have a lack of enthusiasm for shirts, so my guess is you derobed voluntarily.”
He responds with a contemplative look, as if he hadn’t previously considered this version of events.
We settle into a comfortable silence and I let the fresh air do its healing.
“You know, your game is really special,” he says after we both track a cormorant gliding across our sightline.
“You mean the cheese-throwing thing? That was silly. I have to do more. I need something huge that’s gonna leave no question in their minds that Catapult has to have me.” I stare at the sky, now overtaken by an impossible spray of purple and yellow, and I can feel him looking at me. “What?” I ask.
“Nothing. It’s just cool that you’re so passionate. You’ve figured out what you want to be when you grow up.” He lies back and stares up at the sky. “I certainly didn’t think I’d be turning thirty and my claim to fame would be as the guy who sells fake abs in a muscle spray commercial.”
“It’s a tough business, right?”
He shrugs. “Yeah, it is. You don’t realize how lucky you are though. To know what you want to do and be talented enough to actually do it and be balls to the wall about pursuing it. The stars don’t align like that for most people.”
“I guess you’re right,” I say, wishing his validation didn’t make me warm.
“Tell me more about how you got into acting,” I say, wanting to know all the parts he’s played, down to the costumes and lines.
“I was in drama all through middle school and high school. Since we moved around a lot, I liked becoming someone else. Someone better. More interesting than who I actually was. Life’s a little easier if you get to be someone else.”
I have a hard time picturing an awkward, teenage Charlie. The laid-back, easygoing cool seems to encircle him like an aura. But it’s the second time he’s referenced it.
“I haven’t always been so go-with-the-flow,” he says. “It used to give me a ton of anxiety each time we set up in a new place. Joining the drama club helped.”
A feeling of empathy presses on me. I would have never pictured Charlie as a loner. “I dunno, I think you’re pretty . . . okay,” I tell him.
“What a compliment.”
I turn to face him. “Maybe you could be a voice actor, voice the characters in my games.”
“Now, that sounds like a promising future.” He raises his water glass in a cheers-ing motion.
“Say, ‘The zombies are coming! To the arsenal!’”
He clears his throat, steadies his gaze to show me he’s serious. His eyes narrow and he tilts his chin to the ground. “The zombies are coming! To the arsenal!” he proclaims in a deep, guttural bellow.
I laugh. “No, that was bad. So bad.”
“What? I thought it was great.”
I laugh again and he smiles in observance before we return to staring at the sky, the color becoming more and more magnificent, now a smear of mostly purple.
“For what it’s worth, I didn’t always know game design was what I wanted to do. I mean, I always thought about it, but not necessarily as a career. I’ve definitely fumbled my way around a bit. Less than a year ago, I was working at an engineering firm doing photography as a side hustle.”
He shifts to face me. “Really?”
I nod. “I figured it could be a useful skill for game design.”
“Why’d you stop?” He props his head in his hand, elbow against the headrest of the lounge chair.
“It was fun when it was a hobby. I loved it. I still do, when it’s on my own time. When I get to be creative.” I silently scold myself for failing to bring my camera on this trip. “But once it turned into a business, all the fun got sucked out of it. Especially when I shot weddings.”
“What? But you’re such a romantic.” He picks up The Burning Locke from his lap and wags it at me. I notice the bent page corner to hold his spot and flinch internally at his tarnishing of the crisp page.
“There’s a lot of pressure shooting weddings. I once had a bride shove the proofs at me, yelling ‘Look at these! Look at my face!’”
“What was wrong with them?” he asks.
“Nothing. It was just her face.”
He grins and it shoves his dimple deep into his cheekbone.
“There’s also the abomination that is missing a key moment at a wedding. The groom’s first look. The first kiss. The first bite of cake. The father-daughter dance. One time I was so engrossed by the flower girl bouncing up and down to ‘Gold Digger’ that I missed a bridal party entrance completely. I felt so awful about it. That bride raged and threw a Big Gulp at my head when I dropped off the proofs.”
“What was in the Big Gulp?”
“Sprite.”
He shrugs. “Could have been worse. Cherry Coke, for example.”
“Anyway, that was my last wedding.”
“So that’s why you’ve put this off until now. You’ve spent your time pursuing other things to avoid the one thing you really wanted to do.” He says it as more of a statement than a question, as if he has just marked a fact about me on a checklist.
I open my mouth to counter, but no words come out. Is that what I was doing?
“So is Zane the guy who broke your heart?” he says after some time.
“What?”
“You called me Zane last night. When you were insistent on your drunken independence. So I’m assuming it’s him.”
“Why do you insist someone must’ve broken my heart?”
“I told you why. It’s in your eyes.” He stares at me, brief and intense, before turning back to the water. “Same as mine, remember?”
I shed a breath, shake my head slightly. “He’s nobody.”
“Whatever you say.”
I don’t know why I can’t seem to share this part of me. The part that is so similar to him and what he is going through with Brooke. Perhaps it’s because I’m terrified of the weakness he’ll see in me as a result. But then again, maybe sharing my past with him could help him move on and realize he deserves to be with someone who sees how great he is. Someone he doesn’t have to deceive to be with. I want that for him.
“Charlie, I—” I stop as he stares into my eyes. He clenches his jaw and it feels like a dare. A dare to spill all. A dare to be vulnerable with him. A dare to stop thinking and act.
I have a brief flash of a different version of last night—one where we did end up in bed together. Where his touch made me forget Zane and Brooke exist.
His phone beeps on the table beside him, but his attention remains focused on me.
“You should get that,” I tell him, that little ding returning me to reality.
He holds firm for a long beat, then, when he sees the moment, my contemplation of going there with him, is gone, he hangs his head and reaches for his phone.
I watch as he reads, eyebrows narrowing closer together with each millisecond that passes. I’m about to ask if everything is okay, but he launches to his feet before I can. “What the fuck?”
“What is it?”
“What the fuck,” he repeats, still staring at the screen.
“Are you okay?” There’s that feeling again. The lightness in my belly of proactive regret.
Finally, he looks at me, brows still pressed together so tightly they’re practically touching. “Did you . . .” He shakes his head as if he can’t comprehend what he’s about to ask. “Did you message Brooke last night?”
I stand to face him. “What?”
“Did you message Brooke last night?” He enunciates each word.
“No, of course not. Why would I . . . do . . . that.” It all comes rushing back as my words limp their way out. Stumbling across the resort back to our suite, phone in hand, typing. Charlie several yards behind yelling “hang on” as he trotted to keep up. I was typing. Then I fell in the bush, but apparently not before hitting send.
He sees my face change as I remember, and his does too, the wide round of his eyes telling a story of fiery disbelief.
“I didn’t mean to. I mean, I was drunk. It was an accident.”
“Where’s your phone?” he asks quietly. He follows me to the bedroom where we find it lying on the bed. I enter the passcode. He taps his foot against the tile floor as I strain to remember just how bad this is.
I find the message. It’s bad.
“I’m so sorry,” I say.
“Lemme see,” he says, holding out his hand. I place my phone in his palm and close my eyes, mortified by what he’s about to see. I open them, in time to watch his eyes grow wide as he reads. “To Brooke with the big chest. That’s how you addressed it?” He’s looking through me with a scowl.
“I think I was thinking it was, like, Becky with the good hair?” I say, trying to help us both understand my choices. I press my lips together, waiting for him to keep reading, because it gets worse.
So much worse.
“Charlie and I are having a great time on this trip, having all the sexxx.” He stops reading long enough to scowl at me again. “I just wanted you to know, he’s happlier than hiss ever been. With me. And I let him do butt stuff.”
I cringe as Charlie throws my phone onto the bed.
“Dammit, Satan Sloane,” I mumble under my breath.
“What?”
“Nothing. Look, I’m so sorry, I don’t know why I did that. I think I thought I was helping . . . What did she say to you?”
“Oh, yes, let me share that with you.” He holds his phone up and begins reading in a disdainful tone. “Hi Charlie, not exactly sure what to make of the message your new girlfriend sent me last night. Glad you’re happy but perhaps you could ask her to focus on your relationship and leave me out of it?”
I cower, a storm in my stomach as flashes of lightness streak across my insides.
“I’m so sorry,” I say again.
He doesn’t respond and instead stalks out of the room, leaving me standing there in my own self-loathing.