Page 2 of Lair

A cool shadow crosses my face and I open my eyes—Cailee stands above me, hands on hips, her perfect brow wrinkled in annoyance. “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?”

“Sorry,” I mumble, dipping my scrub brush into the sudsy water bucket. “What were you saying?”

It’s June. We’re in the Port of Miami, on a little wooden cruiser that’s all gleaming mahogany and pinstriped topsides. There are rows of these classic-looking, Venetian-style boats bobbing at the docks, and we have to clean all of them today. Daywork, they call it. What we aspiring yachties do for income while we hope to get a position aboard a boat.

“I said,” Cailee intones, “what do you think about Greg?”

I glance over at Greg on the next boat over, one of the many bland-looking hotties who’s in the crew house with us in Fort Lauderdale. He catches my eye and grins, and I look away.

“Mm-mm,” I grunt noncommittally.

Cailee pinches off the hose she’s using to wash down the deck. “Aurora Strand. I helped you escape your abusive ex by bringing you with me into the glamorous world of yachting. The least you can do is help me get laid.”

I sigh and give her a look. Point taken.

“Okay. How about Jordan?”

To my surprise, Cailee blushes. “Well...”

I gape. “Cailee. Don’t tell me you already...”

Cailee shrugs, one of those helpless little gestures she’s perfected.

“Oh my God,” I laugh. “Was it... back at the crew house?”

The crew house. Basically an off-the-grid condo for yachties. And I do mean off-the-grid. The owner blacked out the windows and demands we enter from the back so we don’t draw the attention of the hotel chains, who hate crew houses for avoiding hotel tax laws.

Also, they’re a notorious place for hookups.

“No,” Cailee blushes again. “We kinda...” And she points through the window of the wheelhouse to the hidden interior of the boat.

My jaw drops. “Cailee Summers, you little slut. You did it while you were dayworking?”

Another helpless shrug. You know you still love me...

“But...” I splutter. “How...?”

Cailee gets a mischievous little grin on her face and plants one foot on the foredeck of the neighboring boat a few feet over, so she’s straddling both. “I tried this little move...” And she bends forward as if to hose down the boat’s hull, showing off perfectly toned legs and ass cheeks poking out of tiny cut-off shorts. A blinking advertisement that screams “FUCK THIS.”

Greg freezes, mop poised and eyes huge.

Cailee flips her wavy blonde hair and looks over her shoulder at me, brow arched.

We both burst out laughing. It feels good. Needed. Because for a second there I was beginning to think about my ex again.

This is why I love Cailee: She’s impervious. Her trust—in flings, in romance—is total. She pursues a guy wholeheartedly, miseries be damned, and always survives without a scratch. In the throes of it she’s unabashed, full of cringing mushiness, of almost willful destruction, appalling to watch. But when it is clear it’s not working—the door shuts. No wavering for her, no drawn-out, humiliating uncertainties. She is brisk and uproarious, pragmatic and breathlessly objective about it all, unapologetic about the spectacle she’s made of herself.

In other words, she couldn’t be more different from myself.

Me, who stuck with the same guy since I was sixteen. Who had thought this farmer’s son with the stocky frame and sensitive reddish skin was my soulmate. I had thought, in the beginning, that he was perfect. I had never felt so seen, so cared for. I put him on a pedestal. Yes, I quickly saw—even if he did not—that he was a delicate man, and considered it part of my duty as his partner to accommodate that insecurity. Little did I know how slippery a slope that would prove to be. Why not put off going to college in the city for a few years to support his dream of running a farm? Why not put up with his touchiness about being contradicted, his tendency to shift blame onto me if his flaws were exposed, if his ego happened to be as sensitive as his skin? Why burden him with my thoughts and feelings if he was so busy? Why not hide from my friends how I felt like a hostage at the farmhouse when he was drunk, and what he’d sometimes do to me? No one wanted to hear about that.

It was the price of loving him, I told myself. This was how he needed to be loved.

Cailee disagreed.

And so, after spending a year wearing me down and planning our escape, she had dragged me here. To the Sunshine State.

Free at last, at the suddenly ancient-sounding age of twenty-four, and feeling like I don’t know the first thing about myself.

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