Page 19 of How to Say I Do
But every so often, that impenetrable curtain shielding his soul would crack, and I’d catch something in his profile. I saw how his fingernails dug furrows into his palms. His high-held chin trembled sometimes. Right now, he was scraped raw and uncertain, big pieces of himself tumbled around and out of order, and the sensitive places he wasn’t used to exposing were out in the sunlight. Vulnerability traded places with his pride like a seesaw.
Noël was so vibrantly alive that being next to him was like being battered by the sea. The presence of him, the churn of all his moving parts, the rush of recognizing his tender places rising to the surface as I got a peek past his armor—
He made me think of roses opening after winter, buds tentatively unfurling and testing the light before embracing a bloom. He made me feel sixteen again, heady and breathless and losing myself in daydreams and fantasies. I wasgone. Ass over head, my boots well in the air, hungry for more of Noël. I wanted everything: the man who’d eaten both our burgers and poured his broken heart out to a strange cowboy, and the man who’d snuck a bottle of vodka onto a plane and chugged a homemade screwdriver while smirking at me like we were partners in crime. The man who melted into my side when he couldn’t go one step further, and who had trusted me to bring him the rest of the way. The man who looked at me with eyes brighter than all the stars over Texas combined, and who had held on to me and said he was sorry I’d lost my father with a softness that moved deep down into my most fragile, hidden places.
Something inside me was opening to Noël. Something like old hopes and sixteen-year-old dreams, and like watching the sun set behind those first ten acres with my father.
Dad, what would you think of Noël?
But I had to be realistic. I was gay. Noël was not. I liked men. Noël hadn’t given me any indication that he was anything other than exactly who he appeared to be—a heterosexual, broken-hearted and lonely man in need of a friend.
So even though I was tumbling, and even though I wanted, and even though Noël spun me in every wild direction, I knew this wasn’t going to be a romance.
I was okay with that. I was. I was a big boy, and I could have saidadiosat any time yesterday. There was no need to hike to the lagoon with him, or take him to dinner after, or even to answer his probing questions with anything other than the emotional two-step I’d danced for years. I didn’t need to tell him all those truths about my life. I could have made my excuses and said a polite goodnight and taken myself off to bed, and this would have been over and done with. I certainly didn’t need to walk him back to his villa. Or ask him what we’d be doing tomorrow, all the while holding my breath and crossing my fingers and toes that he’d want to keep honeymooning with me.
But I had, and I did, and…
It was enough, I thought, to fall in love, even though he wouldn’t fall, too. It was enough to go a little crazy inside myself, and to feel like the world had lit on fire, and for these few days, to pretend that anything was possible.
When we met at Noël’s for breakfast, he seemed even more sleep-deprived than he’d been the morning before. I asked if he was all right, but he waved off my concern. “Just a late night,” he said, averting his eyes as he downed his coffee.
A late night could mean anything. I’d stayed up watching the moon rise and fall over the ocean from my balcony as I gave myself a talking-to, working through my tangled emotions and laying out the reality of the situation.Head over heels, fine. But keep it to yourself, Wyatt.
Maybe Noël met up with that redhead after all. It wouldn’t be terrible for him to have had a sweet night with someone gentle and loving.
He surprised me a few minutes later when he pulled out a hat and plopped it on his head. “Got a hat.” It was one of the touristy kinds sold in the gift shop, curled up outrageously on the sides, attempting a mashed-up Nashville and Indiana Jones look. It was hardly a cowboy’s hat, but it did look real good on Noël.Toogood.
“A straw one.” I flicked the brim and grinned.
“What’s wrong with a straw hat? Doesn’t it cover my neck?”
“It does, sure, but a real cowboy hat is made of felt.” I rubbed my fingers around the brim of mine. Noël rolled his eyes. “Don’t you worry, I’ll get you a good one someday.”
What tickled me far more than Noël’s dedication to combating the risks of sun burn and melanoma was the thought that he’d been up and about early that morning and he’d gone all the way to the gift shop to buy that hat. That meant he had thought, at least a tiny bit, about me. Maybe he was on the way back from the redhead’s room, or maybe he was buying something else, like toothpaste or a comb or condoms, but at some point, I’d been on his mind. I’d take that. I’d take that all day long.
After breakfast, we strolled down the beach to the resort’s marina, where a luxury cigarette boat waited to whisk us away. We boarded, and the crew poured us each a glass of champagne. As we sipped, the captain started up the engine and guided the boat toward the horizon.
Noël and I settled in for the hour-long crossing, letting the roar of the engine and the sea spray fall across our faces. We cruised across the waves for an hour before the captain steered us into calmer waters lapping at the shoreline of our secluded cay. The cay's sand was bright white, like the beach had been bleached out by the ocean’s salt water.
We slipped over the side of the boat into bath-warm water. Our feet sank into the powdery seafloor as we waded through the surf toward the beach. Schools of rainbow fish swarmed back and forth around our ankles, and sting rays flapped their fins near the sandy bottom while sharks circled leisurely just beyond our reach.The air had a heady, salty taste. I turned to Noël. He was grinning from ear to ear. My heart went haywire.
The private cay was as advertised—magical beyond belief, like it had been cut straight out of a magazine and pasted into reality. Sea and sky melded into a turquoise dreamscape, and pearl-white sand finer than ground diamonds rose out of the waves. Kayaks, paddle boards, and snorkels waited for us, sheltered beneath a cluster of palm trees. There was also a cooler of water, beer, and boozy frozen tropical squeezes tucked into the shade.
We ignored the booze and grabbed the paddles.
We spent all morning kayaking around the cay. There were a hundred little inlets, rocky curlicues where the waves would collect into white foam. Underwater currents had carved caverns out of the volcanic rock, and we watched schools of rainbow-hued fish and baby sharks glide in and out of shadows. Noël was fascinated by a group of baby turtles he found, and he spent ten minutes leaning over the edge of his kayak to watch them swim. I held on to the other end so he wouldn’t flip himself.
He shot me a wondrous smile, almost like he was asking,Are you seeing this, too?
I surely was.
For lunch, we regrouped on the beach. Someone had delivered a picnic basket and laid out a blanket beneath the palm trees, and we dined on fresh ceviche and tapas, and then popped open an ice-cold bottle of Cristal. I taught Noël how to set down his straw hat—crown down, and never on your bed or where you went to sleep—and he took the whole lesson very seriously, never mind his mischievous eyes.
We ate and drank and lounged, our ankles crossed in the sand and our faces shaded by the palm fronds. We sipped on bubbles while the sea breeze ruffled over the beach, and I thought,This is a dang fine honeymoon.
The ocean kept calling to us. It seemed like the sky had fallen into the sea. How many days in your life are you able to lie beside such perfect waters? We couldn’t miss a second of it, and we headed back down the beach and plopped ourselves in the surf, bringing the champagne bottle with us as the waves rolled up and down around our legs.
He took a swig and dug the Cristal bottle into the wet sand. Sea foam and surf spray clung to our thighs. “I finished my letter to Jenna. That’s what I was doing last night.”
