Page 20 of How to Say I Do
“Youfinished?” I remembered what he’d said: when he was done, when he signed off from his letters or his emails, he was over it, he was ready to shake the whole thing off. That probably meant he could brush off a bad day or an annoying celebrity, not put an eighteen-month-long relationship and getting dumped at his wedding in his rearview mirror. But the spirit was there, at least. He wanted to move on.
“I did. I said goodbye to her and everything. Signed it, too. I thought I’d be writing all week, but…” He shrugged. “It feels done.”
“What did you say?”
“I told her I knew that we were a mess. We started something that seemed to work, but we never stopped to consider whether it really did. Everything moved so fast. We met, we dated, and then suddenly she was a star and we were planning a wedding. But we didn’t have any idea what our life looked like in six months, or even a year from now.”
He tipped back, laying his arms over his head on the sand as he stretched out beneath the sun. A wave rose and wrapped around his waist. I watched salt bubbles pop at hips and stuffed back my jealousy at inanimate water particles. Instead of wishing I were sea foam, I followed him, laying on my side with my head in my palm.
“I said I wished we didn’t get all the way to our wedding before we—or she—realized we weren’t working. Or that I didn’t have to come here to figure out she wasn’t the one for me. I also wish she would have dumped mebeforefinding someone else.” He held his breath as he gnawed on his lip. “Was anything we had real? Or was it all…”
Waves rolled in and out.
“And Ireallywish it didn’t hurt as much as it does, because when I look back on everything, I don’t understand how what was such a fuckingmesscan hurt me this deeply.”
“Of course it’s going to hurt. She was a part of your life in a big way, and you were a part of hers. That matters.”
“It was just eighteen months, eighteen kinda-shitty months—”
“I don’t think ‘just’ matters much when you’re trying to weigh up how another person impacts you. My dad was ‘just’ in my life for seventeen years, but—”
Noël rolled onto his side and faced me. “That’s not the same thing at all. He was your father.”
“I loved him. And you loved her. That’s enough to change you.”
He frowned. “I don’t want her to have changed me. I want to forget her.”
“Change isn’t a bad thing. Look where you are. Look what you’ve figured out.”
Noël mirrored me, propping his head in his palm with his elbow dug into the sand. “Are you one of those who believe something good comes out of all bad things? That there’s a life lesson everywhere we look?”
“Nah. Sometimes things just really,reallysuck.”
Noël’s haughty patina fell away. His breath caught, and he stared at me as I stared at him. Waves broke around our thighs. Curls of seawater zipped up between us. There he was, my hidden Noël, the jewel gleaming at the center of his bruise. He seemed so suddenly vulnerable, unprepared to feel this viciously on our little beach.
I couldn’t help it. I laced our fingers together as another wave slipped up our thighs.
Our Cristal was nearly buried in the wet sand thanks to the rise and fall of the surf. It kept getting tugged to one side and dragged toward the ocean. It took one more breaker, one more rush of water coasting over us both, and the bottle gave up the fight. Champagne ran down our chests.
We both yanked away, hissing at the icy nitrogen bubbles circling our belly buttons. “Cold, cold!” Noël cried. He flopped to his back as I alligator-rolled, smothering my stomach in the sun-baked sand with a laugh.
“Oh, sure, laugh!” Noël pulled a face. “I bet you’re impervious to cold. You can’t feel it through all that muscle, can you?”
Noël commenting on my muscles, or noticing my body in any way, sent a different set of waves humming through me. “Texans don’t feel cold. We bred that out years ago on the open range.”
He rolled his eyes and flicked sand at me. I flicked sand back, and in no time at all, we were wrestling. It wasn’t exactly a fair fight since I had about sixty pounds on him, but I let him pin me in the surf after a romp and a healthy amount of thigh-on-thigh leg scrabbling.
Noël looked so triumphant straddling me, pinning my wrists over my head with the shape of him outlined by the sky. It was the kind of moment from MTV music videos and Hollywood romances, where the hero and heroine are locked in a setup for a perfect first kiss. I could picture it, my big hands crawling up Noël’s back and pulling him in. I’d rise to meet him halfway. I’d want to taste his kiss so badly that I wouldn’t want to wait. He’d whisper my name, and he’d thinkI’ve never, and,But I want this, and he’d say,Kiss me, Wyatt, and I would.
Instead of kissing him, I upended Noël. He tumbled off my lap with an undignified squawk, but before he could recover, I hauled him fireman-style over my shoulder and took off into the ocean, him dangling over my shoulder. When I hit the waves, I threw him as far as I could. As he soared, I heard him laugh, and I saw his gorgeous face twist into a boyish grin before he splashed into the serene blue of the surf.
We swam together for hours, racing each other to and from far-flung sandbars before circling the cay, snorkeling over the same path we’d trod with our kayaks. Noël found the baby turtles again and swam near them, very delicately, while I bobbed outside the cove and gamely told him I’d watch for sharks.
Halfway around the cay, we found a volcanic promontory and climbed to the top of it—all six feet—and then flung ourselves off the tallest point of the whole island. We judged each other’s cannonballs and heckled each other’s splashes, pushing each other to ever-more extravagant leaps and lunges.
All too soon, our boat back to the mainland appeared in the distance, and we trudged to the beach to wait for our ride.
Waves made whirlpools around our knees. Noël hadn’t stopped smiling since he’d popped out of the ocean after I’d dunked him. He seemed lighter than air, like he’d float away into the trade winds if I didn’t keep both eyes on him. He was wearing his straw hat, and his board shorts hung low on his slender frame. I wanted to pull him against me and bury my face in the pink stretch of taut skin above his collarbone.
