Page 21 of Stuck in Paradise with You

I ignore him because evidently, they weren’t as separated as I thought. ‘She said it would only end one way.’

I pick up my coffee, ready to end this conversation, and when I taste it, I realize he remembers how I like it – just a splash of milk and one sweetener.

‘What way was that? With you blocking me and ignoring me for seven years?’

I did block him. Not that I knew he knew that. As for ignoring him – that would have required him trying to contact me, rather than moving states without even saying goodbye.

‘No,’ I tell him. ‘With me getting hurt.’

Literally as soon as the words leave my mouth, I regret them. I feel rather than see his gaze trained on me and I daren’t look up from my coffee. I daren’t because with the wordhurt, memories of those exact feelings have crashed over me like a wave and I don’t want him to see.

I don’t ever want him to know how much of a mess he left me in. How he has ruined me for all relationships since because I’ve never, not once, felt the kind of highs I felt when I was with him.

He rises from his seat, hands in pockets, and goes to the windows, looking out across the resort and to the vastness of the ocean.

9

LUKE

‘Carrie, I think we need to make a pact. No personal talk, just business.’

I’m at my limit.Damn Eric and his freaking gastroenteritis. What I wouldn’t give now for his offensively bellowing laugh and the way his lips make a wet clacking sound when he eats any kind of liquid food, especially breakfast cereal in milk.

I’m staring out of the window as I speak, wondering how in the world this woman is back in my life, us locked in a room together, trapped in a space so heavy with ill-will, it feels like a weight around my shoulders, bringing me down.

This is supposed to be the place I come to get happy. It’s always been the place I can get away from life in New York, where I’m around the best friend who has seen me through the highs of winning college hockey games and the lows of deaths, break-ups, career slumps and taxes.

I guess Carrie ticks a few of those low boxes.

She told her mom?I can’t remedy that with her cutting me out of her life the way she did. Telling your mom about your guy is serious. But she ghosted me, as if I was just someone she picked up on a dating app, went out with once, then tossed aside.

We might have been together for weeks but we knew each other for much longer. She might have been hurt by the way things ended and I get that, I was too, but I couldn’t have stowed away my feelings as easily as she did. That’s how I know definitively that she was never invested the way I was. It was one sided and it fucking killed me. It’sbeenkilling me for seven years.

There. I admit it. Are you happy, universe? BecauseI’mhappy. At least I was just fine before yesterday.

‘No personal talk, just business,’ she says.

I turn from the window to see her chest rise and her shoulders roll back on her next breath.

It looks as if the tax advisor on the cusp of partnership has just showed up.

Excellent. Safe ground.No past, no bikinis, no… nothing.

‘There’ve been recent changes to the tax laws in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda,’ Carrie says, sipping her coffee and shuffling papers around the desk, as if we didn’t just have as much of a heart-to-heart as we are likely to haveeverfrom this day and forward.

Dismissive. She knows that game so well.

She turns in her seat until she’s glaring at me. When I don’t move, still trying to get any kind of a read on her but failing, she holds out her hands –Are we doing this?

I clear my throat.Game face.‘Changes we care about?’

She nods, twisting back in her seat to face the desk and her preparation. ‘Absolutely. It’s given me some ideas for how we could restructure the entire web of Hettich companies.’

‘Let’s hear it.’

‘Could you come sit down, please? You’re making me— You’re straining my neck.’ She speaks without looking at me, so I know I’m not straining her neck, but maybe I am making her nervous. Maybe the junior tutoring the senior is new anduncomfortable for her. Or maybe her dealing with the CFO of the Hettich group is a big deal. Or maybe… maybe she’s as disoriented by this whole unexpected experience as I am.

‘Fine,’ I say, shrugging. I don’t want to sit. I have a weird energy that’s making my legs twitchy. But I sit opposite her, trying to appear casual, while my hands are pressed to my thighs, stopping my legs from bouncing under the table.

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