Page 81 of A Quick Stop in Paradise

I laughed. Reversal was the one and only tool of every other cheater, liar, and abuser out there. He probably thought he was safe with this in public. He hadn’t realized how little I gave a fuck anymore. “You’re hoping that by bringing this up in front of my family, I won’t say anything,” I said. “That you can try to reverse it to make it sound like I’m the one with a salacious secret to hide, and I won’t be able to set the record straight because I’m not out to my family. Is that it?”

Shane blanched, eyes flicking wildly to my family and back to me. “I don’t know what you’re going on about now—”

“You were hoping that I’d be ashamed of my sexuality and threaten to out me to get me to do what you want,” I said. At this point, even the other tables in the café were looking. Somehow, I didn’t care. Shane threw his hands up.

“What the hell are you talking about? I wasn’t doing anything like—”

“Yes, I’ve been together with a woman while I’ve been here,” I said, raising my voice a fraction. “So if that’s not thelittle secret on the side,what is it? Do you want to share? Please, feel free to say anything at all. Don’t count on me to stop you.”

Shane went red, huffing hard, rolling his eyes theatrically, but I knew the panic it meant when he clenched and relaxed his hands like he was doing. “I don’t know what she’s going on about,” he said, looking back at my family. “She—”

“Or do I need to get into the details?” I said lightly. “You tried to cheat on me with a woman here and she turned you down to be with me instead. Or is that too humiliating to actually own up to?”

“I don’t care what you do,” Shane started, but Aunt Helena cut in, looking like she was witnessing a murder.

“Can wenot do this here?” she hissed, and Grandma was apparently in agreement, because she stood up suddenly.

“I think David and I had best be off to our room,” she said, her voice thin. Grandpa stood up slowly with her, giving me a look somewhere between judgmental and horrified, but it was Mom who cut in with the eminently practical,

“For crying out loud, we’re already doing this here. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Sit back down, you two.”

“This is ridiculous,” Shane blustered. “Nobody here could care any less who you’re seeing, but when you abandon me and your family for some…”

I raised my eyebrows. “For some what? A woman? Or, even worse, a service worker?”

“Ryan—” Mom said, raising her voice. “Who is this you’re talking about?”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said, pushing back from the table and standing up. “I’ve heard nobody here could care any less about it. I’m bisexual, though, by the way. Hopefully that doesn’t disappoint you all as much as me being a journalist. I’m changing my booking to go back separately. Let me know when you’re ready to fix things between us, if you ever want to.”

“Ryan!” Aunt Helena stood up as I pushed past her and towards the entrance, the whole table exploding into chatter. Mom stood with me, taking a step towards me as I walked past her spot at the table.

“Ryan, sweetheart—you don’t need to fly back separately, let’s just—”

“You have my number. Send a message.” I waved off her hand, marching away from them and back to the entrance, pushing out into the hot, beating sun and getting a good fifty feet around the corner before I stomped, hard, one shoe on the pavement, with a loud curse spat into the bushes, collapsing against the wall, a hand against my forehead with a heavy sigh.

I shouldn’t have stopped there, though. Left an opening for Shane to come around the corner, chasing me down with that red-faced humiliation and anger that I’d learned to recognize as a toxic cocktail in his expression that meant I needed to give him space no matter what. What a shitty relationship, where I was charting things like that.

“Ryan, are you fucking kidding me?” he spat, and I shot him a weary look.

“You were threatening to out me to get me to behave.”

“You’re putting words in my mouth, and I don’t fucking appreciate it. I wouldn’t—”

“I know what I just heard, Shane,” I said, voice low and steady. “Yell at me and pick fights with me all you like, but trying to leverage my sexuality is fucking low. You should be ashamed of yourself. Even when I learned you’d been cheating on me for at least a year, I still thought you were better than that. I thought maybe we could work through this and be cordial, but I don’t think I can ever look you in the eye again.”

Somehow, out of everything, that actually got through to him, and he wavered there between a million different things in his eyes. I sighed, turning away.

“I don’t want to see you ever again.”

“You’re going to regret pissing off your entire family over some random woman.”

I laughed, stopping in my tracks but not looking back at him. “You know?” I said lightly. “I don’t think I will.”

For all my worrying, the path back to Brooklyn was shorter than I’d expected—too short, even, because it didn’t give me time to put on a brave face, and when I found her in the far corner of the pool courtyard, she stood up with her expression protective the instant she saw me.

“Hey,” I said, and she stepped around the edge of the pool to meet me.

“Let’s get back to my place and you can rest,” she said, pulling me into an embrace, pressing my face into her shoulder. I laughed thickly.

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