Stuck in Paradise with You

Chapter 7

7

LUKE

It’s Tuesday morning: a working day. I’m starting the day with a beach workout, putting off the million and one things awaiting me in my inbox and calendar, the most glaring of them all being going through the tax implications of Hettich’s entire network of businesses with Carrie.

Carrie, who co-parents a pug. Odd way to phrase the fact that she’s living with someone and she loves them enough to share a dog with them. She doesn’t wear a wedding ring, but a dog suggests a long-term relationship, right?

Not that I give a damn one way or the other. I’m just… curious, I guess. She’s someone I used to know. Someone I had a relationship with. Isn’t everyone intrigued to a greater or lesser extent by what their exes are up to?

Though I think about my ex-wife, Anya, and I genuinely couldn’t give two hoots as to what she’s doing in life anymore.

In any event, the Carrie who showed up to dinner last night might have worn the same perfume I used to love. It’s not the perfume alone; it’s the way it smells on her, the way it penetrates my mind and my skin, gets into my arteries and wraps itself around my hemoglobin, assaulting all of my organs with each inhalation. And she may have the same striking eyes and unrivalled smile?—

As my bare feet tread through the hard sand at the shoreline, where the tide is heading out from the island, I have a vivid memory of the way she used to smile when we were in bed together. In the minutes, sometimes hours, we’d lie together after we’d made love, I used to crave her even more than in the heat of the moments before. She’d lie on my chest, gazing up at me with an expression that was so warm, it used to make me dizzy. Like I was weightless and spinning through the stars in space, where the fact we were colleagues and I was her superior didn’t matter.

There was only ever one person in control when it was just the two of us, and it wasn’t me.

I stop running; I’ve been running up and down the same five hundred yards of beach for nearly an hour. The sun has fully risen in that time.

We used to talk about places like this, taking trips together, Carrie and I. But our relationship never got that far. It was doomed from day one. Though Anya and I were separated, my marital status was still officially wed, and on the same day Anya told me by text message that she was pregnant, Carrie and I were spotted by a colleague, kissing outside my apartment before heading off in different directions to walk to the office separately.

It’s ironic that I’m finally in paradise with her, by turquoise water, salt air filling my lungs and glorious sunshine beating down on me. The same paradise we used to talk about as my fingertips ran lazy trails up and down her naked spine, hers drawing circles on my chest, yet she’s not the same woman at all.

The woman who sat opposite me at the dinner table last night was catty and snide. Cold and cutting. Even the smiles she gave were fake; I know because I know the way she looks when she’s genuinely happy. The way her eyes crease at the edges as if she’s aged prematurely.

That’s what she was seven years ago. She was light and peace. She worked like a Trojan but she left the stress at the office. Her playfulness was infectious and light years from the months – or longer – of fractious darkness I’d left behind with Anya.

I suppose that’s why it was so easy to fall for Carrie. And fall I did. Hard, fast, deeply. For a young woman I used to know.

But the woman I’m going to spend most of today with… I don’t recognize her at all.

Hot and sweaty from my run, I take out my headphones, pull my shirt over my head and set them, together with my phone, down on the sand. I head into the ocean and plunge beneath the surface, feeling the dense saltwater wash over my skin, washing away the irritation that stopped me from sleeping well last night and the ill temper I woke with at 5a.m.

Four days.

I can survive anything for four days. I’ve climbed Kilimanjaro, trekked the Amazon. I’ve completed an Ironman, for Christ’s sake. This won’t be the hardest test of my endurance.

On Friday, we’ll fly away from this island and maybe it will be another seven years before I see her again.

Bring back boring, safe, middle-aged Eric, who has never brought out the worst, most juvenile behavior in me.

Sitting on the sandy bottom of the sea, I exhale the final bubbles of air from my lungs. Nor has Eric, or anyone, ever brought out the best the way Carrie did.

I surface with a gasp and flick excess water from my hair as I rub the sea off my face.

When I open my eyes, my cleansing comes to an abrupt end. Carrie the Witch is descending the white steps that are cut into the rock face at the far side of the beach. She’s wearing a sunhat and a summer cover-up, but I recognize her gait, how she holds herself, and the long red hair that flows across her shoulders and bounces with her steps. Long red hair that I’ve wrapped around my hand and tugged away to expose her neck to my mouth as our bodies have driven each other wild.

And damn my body right now for betraying me. For wanting that back, if only for one time. For the way it’s making my shorts feel too tight as I watch her set down a bag next to a pair of sun loungers, which is overhung by a thatched beach umbrella.

Maybe if she lies back and closes her eyes, I can sneak out of the ocean, up to the back of the beach and behind her to the steps without being noticed. Avoiding any question as to whether I should make conversation that neither of us wants.

But now she’s unbuttoning her long white shirt in a way that makes something inside me twinge, low down in my torso – she used to wear my white shirts . God, I loved how she looked in my white shirts. The way they’d smell like her when I redressed in them. Her intoxication stayed with me longer than the buzz from any alcohol could.

I look away, at something, anything, the mundane rocks and the water gently lapping at their bases. I think of… paragliding, surfing, yachting, my grandmother, Hettich. Yet still, I’m pulled to her like aluminum to a magnet as the shirt slips from her shoulders, down her arms, leaving her in a bikini.

It feels wrong to see what she doesn’t want me to. Though I’ve seen her completely naked, that was always invited. She wanted me to see her then.

Currently, she doesn’t even know I’m here, that I’m too engrossed to look away.

And this isn’t the Carrie of years ago.

Though even at this distance, her body that was invitingly shapely in all the right places still is. Perhaps more so. Maybe her hips are wider, her shoulders broader, her butt?—

Jesus!

She turns and I hear her yelp when she spots me, right before I crash myself under the water, about as surreptitious as the Chrysler Building at night.