Sex on the Beach (Cosmo Red-Hot Reads from Harlequin) (6 page)

“I never said I was the authority on us. Or you.”

“Didn’t you? Last year, which came first? Proposing to me, or looking at commercial real estate in Seattle?”

He squirmed, uncomfortable with both her line of questioning and the rubber still hanging, sad and floppy, off the end of his softening penis. “The real estate. I’d been thinking about it for a long time. Looking off and on for months. I’d always wanted to move to Seattle.”

“Right. But you hadn’t really acted on it yet, so you didn’t think about telling me. Not until it was a done deal.”

“What would’ve been the point? There wasn’t anything to tell yet.”

She grimaced, nodding as if he’d just made her point for her.
What point
,
though?
“And you proposed, I accepted, we planned the wedding, looked at bigger apartments...and then two months before the big day you tell me about the deposit you just paid on a lease for office space in Seattle. You were so excited, like moving was going to be this big new thing. Like it would finally make things
great.
I admit part of my shock was that I’d thought things were already pretty great, so I was taken aback that you apparently hadn’t felt that way.”

“But I
did
feel that way,” he protested. She shushed him.

“The bigger part was that you’d done this big, life-altering thing without even—hell, not only did you not consult me. You didn’t even
tell
me. You didn’t see the point. Just made the plan without me, and then took this immovable position and defended it when I said, quite understandably, I think, that I was happy in San Jose and would prefer not to move.”

He wanted to get it. He could tell there was more to it than this, some fundamental emotional thing he wasn’t grasping. But he could also tell Amanda’s patience for attempting to explain it was running out. This could be the last try, and he was blowing it. “I don’t get it. I just said I’d look for space in San Jose. I could move back. If you need me to...hell, I don’t know. If I have to, I’ll move my whole company back there. Is that what you need me to say? Is that enough? I would do that for you, Amanda, and I don’t know what more I can do to prove to you how much you mean to me.”

He could hear the desperation and frustration in his own voice, an echo of the whiny teenager he’d once been.
But your best friend is going to the prom with my best friend.
It’s only logical for us all to drive together.
Why should it matter whether I wear a tux or not?
You can still wear whatever you want.
What is it you want
,
anyway?
He hadn’t gotten laid until college, and frankly he didn’t blame any of those girls one bit. If he’d been going out with him back in those days, he wouldn’t have slept with him, either. But he thought he’d changed, grown.

Apparently not as much as he needed to. And damn, he really couldn’t move his company on a whim. All the key staff he’d spent months wooing, all the corporate structure he’d worked so hard to build. Moving would be a major proposition. He would do it if he had to, he realized that now. Amanda was that important. But it would be painful, and more so for his employees than for him. He didn’t want it to come to that.

She put a hand on his cheek. Fond, but not passionate. As if she hurt for him, as much as for herself. “If you really thought that was going to fix everything, why didn’t you just offer to do it a year ago? Or show up on my doorstep and tell me? Or mention it when we first saw each other here? I think you knew, deep down, that it wasn’t going to fly. The location of the office isn’t the problem, Jeremy. Even the issue of moving is not the problem. I thought it was, a year ago, but since then I’ve realized that it’s not.”

“Then what is?”
Tell me.
Tell me so I can understand.
I’ll do anything to fix it if I can only figure out how
.
Please don’t go
. But words had only gotten him into trouble this afternoon. He held most of them back, afraid to do more damage inadvertently.

“Look. Moving back to San Jose, what does that solve in your mind?”

Trick question
. “Well...the part where I moved to another state before, and we broke up?”

“Right. So you make a moving plan without me once, then try to fix it by...”

“Um. Making...a moving plan. Without you. Again. Offering to, at least. But it would be undoing the first one. Making it right.”

She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. So that’s one disagreement solved. Took a year and uprooting several employees to do it, but okay. I assume you would work that out with them. It would
suck
for them, but okay. Here’s the thing. What happens the
next
time we have a disagreement?”

He shrugged. For a moment he thought he’d started to catch on, that the problem was he’d made decisions unilaterally. But now he was baffled again. “We figure out whose solution makes the best sense, and do that, I guess?”

“That. That right there.” She slid off the bed, standing with her hands on her hips as though they’d reached a conclusion.

“What right where?”

“To you, this is a binary. Either your solution is the correct, sensible one, or mine is. One or the other.” She held her hands out, weighing invisible options. “What about secret option C?”

Where would the scale pan for
that
go?
Oh God
,
there are a plethora of options.
No
,
no
,
you have to take her nudity out of the equation
,
dumbass
. “There are only two of us. Aren’t there? That’s A and B.”

“There are two of us,” she agreed, shaking her head in resigned contradiction. “But there is always a secret option C, Jeremy. If there isn’t, it’s not a relationship. At least not one I can be in.”

Chapter Eight

Sex on the Beach during a beautiful sunset made everything better. Amanda figured that out after her second one. Mai tais seemed to be having a similar effect on Julie, who was on her third drink and clearly tipsy.

“I don’t get it,” her friend said, slurring only a small amount. “One—he groveled. Two—still in love with you. Three—awesome reunion sex.”

Amanda nodded, willing to stretch the description to cover the recent incident. “Unbelievably awesome.”

“Three—he—”

It might be about time to cut Julie off. “Four.”

“Four—he flew all the way to Hawaii to do this groveling.”

“He did do that.” It was sort of groveling, at least. Not very debasing, but there had been apologies and pleading. “I’m not so sure it’s a point in his favor though. Don’t you think it’s maybe a little
too
much? I mean, he comes here and it makes a big impression, sure. But it’s a one-shot deal. I have no idea if he’s actually willing to change his plans in the long run. Or the way he
makes
plans, which is the more important thing.”

“He cared enough to take a risk, at least. Financially, obviously, but it was an emotional risk, too.”

“Yeah, as a big one-time gesture.” She realized that was the point she’d been trying to make to Jeremy earlier, and failing. “But what happens the next time we have a big decision to make? Or even a small decision, the day-to-day stuff? That’s the part that matters. I don’t want to marry somebody if I feel like it’s a power struggle every time we try to figure out what restaurant to eat at. That’s not a relationship, it’s a series of concessions. One person always taking away from the other person, instead of building something together.” Why hadn’t the words come this easily before?

“You guys always eat at Tito’s...”

Oh
,
sure
,
go throwing facts into the mix.
Wow
,
pasta sounds amazing right about now
,
how can I still be hungry?
“Yes, but it’s the principle of the thing. And I don’t think he’d eat there now, he’s turned anticarb.” The potatoes had been the catalyst for some confession about just how appallingly health-conscious Jeremy had gotten. The why of it all still escaped her. He’d never been a fitness junkie before.

Julie sipped her drink but leveled a surprisingly sober look at her. “Is it possible that this—the way you’re worrying about it—is it possible that it isn’t really about Jeremy? I don’t mean I disagree with you, just—”

Amanda knew only too well what she meant. “You think I’m projecting because of daddy issues.”

“Okay, yeah. That.”

That
. She wasn’t really sure how much Julie knew about her parents’ divorce, the animosity there. No real reason she should know much; a lot of people’s parents were divorced. Of course, Jules had been around when the shit went down, but she had been a happy, clueless eight-year-old. Amanda had counted on that happy cluelessness, the sense it gave her that there were still good families in the world, still happy homes where kids didn’t have to deal with the fallout of their parents’ crap. So she had never told, and Julie had never asked. But some things you just figured out from context.

She wasn’t going to get into it now, though. It was more of a late-night non-vacation conversation, that one. She threw Julie a bone but kept the meat to herself. “I know Jeremy isn’t like my dad. Our situation is completely different than my parents’. But the parallels...I admit, it’s a trigger for me. There are all these—these extra emotions going on, clouding things up. I have no idea how I actually feel about him by himself, without all the added junk.” And she didn’t mention just how
much
added junk was involved, or how relevant the parallels truly were.

Julie seemed satisfied with that. “Also sex hormones.”

“Yes, they do bring the stupid, don’t they? Crap. What am I gonna do, Jules? Seeing him again, it’s like I grew back an arm I didn’t realize I was missing. It feels so natural I can’t believe I went without it for a year.” Okay, maybe she didn’t need another drink to reach full-disclosure mode. “But then I think maybe it’s because I’m lonely and it’s so nice to be part of a couple again. I don’t want to make a mistake.”

It echoed in her mind—
I
don’t want to make a mistake...a
mistake...a
mistake
—and she nearly missed the importance of Julie’s response.

“God, I know. That’s so similar to where I am with Alan right now.”

Huh?
Wait...what?

“Alan? What do you—No way! Wait, seriously? Why didn’t you tell me you were—?” Her brain grasped for the usual baseline assumption that Julie and Alan were destined to end up together, but for once it was simply failing to compute. “Oh my God, I was hanging all over him yesterday, I had no idea.”

“We weren’t, then. This is recent.”

“That was last night. How much more recent can you get?”

“Um, later last night. We danced, and I started talking to some guy, but he turned out to be a total sleazebag, and then he kissed me. Alan, not the sleazebag. Then he told me about the time he got crabs in college from wearing his roommate’s jeans. Which is a sucky way to get crabs.”

Oh
,
for God’s sake.
Seriously?
What idiot college boy with an STD doesn’t try to palm off that lame story on a girl?
Why didn’t he just tell her he caught it from a toilet seat?
And wow
,
good thing I didn’t end up sleeping with him
,
after all...I
guess.
“And you believed that?”

“Well, yeah. Actually, yeah, I did. I do. It was a good story. And after that...you know.”

To her chagrin, she did know. Boy, did she ever know. There but for the grace of God, and all that. “He told you about his experience with venereal disease, so you slept with him? Seems logical.” In bizzaro land. Where she was evidently vacationing.

“It made more sense in context. Also I maybe, just possibly, a teensy bit—”

Oh my God
,
what now?
His last girlfriend didn’t really understand him?
He can’t do it with a rubber because he just can’t bear not feeling the full experience?
Ugh.
“Spit it out.”

“I may have been in love with him for about three years.”

Oh
,
was that all?
“Well, duh.”

As far as she was concerned, that was all she needed to say. The whole thing had been obvious to her all along. Thank heavens it was now out in the open.

She snagged the waiter on his next pass, billed everything to their room, and within minutes she and Julie were on the beach, enjoying the Technicolor sunset. Pinks, purples, reds...too many colors to name, in tiers across the sky. It was a postcard in the making, almost too pretty to be beautiful. It called for rendering in pastels, watercolors, a young girl’s diary. Hearts and flowers. A cotton-candy sort of sunset. Amanda wanted to be world-weary and cynical, but she couldn’t keep it up. Had she been wearing socks, they would have been knocked off by the hot chromatic tango the sky was executing as she watched.

She took off her flip-flops and dug her toes into the sand, considering a stroll down to the water’s edge. If she toe-fisted there, the tide would run in around her ankles, billow the sand up, bury her deeper before it receded. She could burrow into Oahu, and pretend she never had to leave this fairy-tale place with the ferociously great sex and the magical sunsets.

Julie, however, was in a less willfully oblivious frame of mind. “You’re really gonna drop that ‘duh’ into the conversation with no follow-up?”

Yeah
,
I
was.
We’ve been friends a long time;
I
think an occasional
“
duh
”
is not only acceptable
,
but probably de rigueur for a relationship like this.
And you’ve been in love with the guy since you met him.
Everybody knows that.
Duh.
Duh
,
duh
,
duh!

Possibly frustration and liquor were making her a less-than-optimal friend at that moment. Amanda took a breath and attempted to compensate.

“I thought the ‘duh’ said it all. I really don’t see what the problem is, Jules. I was startled it happened so suddenly, but in the larger sense I’m not surprised. If anything, the real question is why this didn’t happen sooner. I never could figure out why you tried to fix me up with him. You’re perfect for each other, and you yourself admit you’ve been in love for years. Which I could’ve told you.”

Duh
,
duh
,
duh...
Dude
,
seriously.
A
thousand times duh.
Oh
,
I’m a terrible friend.
But...duh.

“I have been, but I never said Alan has.”

“Of course he has. If you don’t know that, you’re about the only one who doesn’t.”

Everybody knows
,
Jules.
This is not news!
She might be a terrible friend, but she was a pragmatic one.

Julie must have picked up on Amanda’s limited patience, or maybe she was simply tired of the topic of Alan. Much as Amanda was sick of thinking about where things were or were not headed with Jeremy.

“What is wrong with us?” Julie asked. “Why can’t we have a conversation that doesn’t fail the damn Bechdel test? This is a dream vacation. We’re in a tropical wonderland full of stuff we’ve never seen before. It’s amazing. We should be amazed, dammit! Let’s talk about motherfucking turtles or something.”

“Motherfucking turtles?”
Did I miss a memo?
Whatever. They had made it to the tide line, and Amanda dug her toes in as though she could root herself there. The sky was amazing, the sand melted away under her feet, and she felt at one with nature and the universe. That very feeling was probably why they charged so much for vacations here. Why Jeremy had hoped to change her mind here. It was extremely transformative.
Dammit
.

“Oh, it’s something Alan said earlier. You’re probably going to be hearing it again.”

“Okay, then that still fails the Bechdel test.” Little as she wanted to continue the conversation, she recognized that she was pretty much stuck with it. “This stuff is what’s on our minds right now, Jules. And in my case there’s a time element here. You and Alan see each other every day. You can work it out over lunch if you want to. But the day after tomorrow, we go back to California and Jeremy goes back to Washington, and I feel like I need to know what happens after that.” Even thinking about it made her sad.

“You need a plan. An Amandaplanda.”

“I do. Big surprise.” Amanda
always
had a plan, which was why Julie had given her the stuffed panda in the eighth grade. It was holding a clipboard, obviously making a plan, so they’d named it the Amandaplanda, even though Julie was just as likely to whip up a checklist as her friend. “Here’s a plan. Let’s go the bar.”

“The one by the beach?”

Jeremy had mentioned he might head there, since he had his evening free.

“Any bar
except
that one.”