But the degree of hurt that they both suffered to get to satisfied rather than ecstatic with their lives?
No way. I’m flat-out uninterested in relationships.
Even Emma, who was my favorite example of someone who could love another person through all of their flaws, ultimately couldn’t have that one-in-a-million love story.
So wanting to leave my phone number with this man?
Thinking that if we were home, we’d spend more than one night together?
Wanting him to meet my dog?
I am not in my right emotions. Or my normal intellect.
This room smells like sex and more sex, except it actually smells like guilt and regrets.
“I’m only coming back if you promise that your fascination stays in this room,” I tell him.
“You know you have me at your complete mercy to promise you anything you want right now?”
My entire body lights up like the lake back home on Valentine’s Day when we illuminate it for a midnight couples skate.
He did naughty, naughty, delicious, please, yes, again things to me in the name of being completely at my mercy all night long.
Not that I haven’t also been completely at his mercy.
“I’m going to get ice,” I tell him.
“Start the bath on your way out the door, and I’ll join you there.”
“You should talk to someone about your taste in women.”
He chuckles. “I like you. And I don’t like people easily, so you must be worth it.”
“Do I need to not come back? I’m serious. This stays in this room.”
“You tipped my bartender two hundred dollars on a thirty-dollar bill and didn’t think I noticed. You covertly took pictures of a couple getting engaged on the beach when they didn’t think anyone was watching and made their night even better for giving them that souvenir. And you rescued a stuffed octopus from a mongoose for a kid that some people would say was too old to have a stuffed octopus and still too young to have been up that late. I recognize special when I see special.”
I need to go. Get back to the resort where Emma’s wedding was supposed to happen yesterday. See if she’ll talk to me and let me do something to help make this better. Check in with Laney, my other best friend, whose heart is also currently broken because I didn’t tell her what I should’ve about Emma’s brother, whom she is so crushing on, soon enough.
I want to find my mom and have her hug me and promise me that she still loves me.
I know she will. I know she does.
I probably need to find her and tell her I’m okay more than I need to hear that she still loves me, because I don’t want her to worry.
And then I want to fly home to my dog. And I need to make sure my grandpa is okay. He couldn’t make it to the wedding after coming down with a pretty bad cold, but I know someone back home will have filled him in on the entire disaster.
After that, I want to go live in a cabin in the woods where I’ll hunt and fish for food, completely forget every morsel of gossip I’ve ever acquired, and never, ever, ever hurt anyone I love ever again.
“I’m not special,” I force out. “I’m a disaster.”
“Whatever it is, we can fix it, Duchess,” Duke says.
He sounds so much like Laney—whose last words to me last night before I tucked her very, very drunk ass into bed were we can’t fix any of this, Sabrina—and yes, I mean I tucked her in at like eight in the evening, and yes, I left someone I trust to watch her while I went back out—that tears actually threaten my eyeballs once more.
And I don’t cry.
I don’t freaking cry.
“Ice first,” I force out. “The world’s problems later. Be right back.”
“Counting the minutes, Duchess.”
I grab the ice bucket off the tea stand, limp out of the room in only one boot and no panties, and then I do one more thing that makes me feel like the world’s worst human being.
I take the stairs, drop the ice bucket at the front desk, and ghost the nicest man I’ve met in years.
4
Nine days later…
Sabrina
There’s a black Mercedes sedan parked in my normal spot behind my family’s mountain café when I pull up at an ungodly early hour for my second Monday at work after Emma’s wedding disaster.
Do you know what this means?
This means that the happy, reality-denying bubble I’ve been choosing to live in since I came home from Hawaii is about to pop.
No matter how much everything looks the same—the piles of late January snow around the parking lot, Mr. Durbin’s beat-up old VW van parked next to the dumpster, the string of fairy lights glowing in the morning darkness on the balcony of the apartment over the art gallery next door to Bean & Nugget—nothing is the same.