Stuck in Paradise with You

Chapter 9

9

LUKE

‘Carrie, I think we need to make a pact. No personal talk, just business.’

I’m at my limit. Damn Eric and his freaking gastroenteritis . What I wouldn’t give now for his offensively bellowing laugh and the way his lips make a wet clacking sound when he eats any kind of liquid food, especially breakfast cereal in milk.

I’m staring out of the window as I speak, wondering how in the world this woman is back in my life, us locked in a room together, trapped in a space so heavy with ill-will, it feels like a weight around my shoulders, bringing me down.

This is supposed to be the place I come to get happy. It’s always been the place I can get away from life in New York, where I’m around the best friend who has seen me through the highs of winning college hockey games and the lows of deaths, break-ups, career slumps and taxes.

I guess Carrie ticks a few of those low boxes.

She told her mom? I can’t remedy that with her cutting me out of her life the way she did. Telling your mom about your guy is serious. But she ghosted me, as if I was just someone she picked up on a dating app, went out with once, then tossed aside.

We might have been together for weeks but we knew each other for much longer. She might have been hurt by the way things ended and I get that, I was too, but I couldn’t have stowed away my feelings as easily as she did. That’s how I know definitively that she was never invested the way I was. It was one sided and it fucking killed me. It’s been killing me for seven years.

There. I admit it. Are you happy, universe? Because I’m happy . At least I was just fine before yesterday.

‘No personal talk, just business,’ she says.

I turn from the window to see her chest rise and her shoulders roll back on her next breath.

It looks as if the tax advisor on the cusp of partnership has just showed up.

Excellent. Safe ground. No past, no bikinis, no… nothing.

‘There’ve been recent changes to the tax laws in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda,’ Carrie says, sipping her coffee and shuffling papers around the desk, as if we didn’t just have as much of a heart-to-heart as we are likely to have ever from this day and forward.

Dismissive. She knows that game so well.

She turns in her seat until she’s glaring at me. When I don’t move, still trying to get any kind of a read on her but failing, she holds out her hands – Are we doing this?

I clear my throat. Game face. ‘Changes we care about?’

She nods, twisting back in her seat to face the desk and her preparation. ‘Absolutely. It’s given me some ideas for how we could restructure the entire web of Hettich companies.’

‘Let’s hear it.’

‘Could you come sit down, please? You’re making me— You’re straining my neck.’ She speaks without looking at me, so I know I’m not straining her neck, but maybe I am making her nervous. Maybe the junior tutoring the senior is new and uncomfortable for her. Or maybe her dealing with the CFO of the Hettich group is a big deal. Or maybe… maybe she’s as disoriented by this whole unexpected experience as I am.

‘Fine,’ I say, shrugging. I don’t want to sit. I have a weird energy that’s making my legs twitchy. But I sit opposite her, trying to appear casual, while my hands are pressed to my thighs, stopping my legs from bouncing under the table.

For two hours, we – with mostly Carrie doing the talking – get lost in a hypothetical new-look Hettich empire. I test her and challenge her, asking questions at every feasible juncture and, damn her, she knows every answer, across all our jurisdictions. Or, at least, she’s confident enough to make me believe she does.

At one point, I even start lapping the table, hands in pockets, umming and ahhing, neither confirming nor denying that I agree with her assessment, trying to throw her off. Yes, it’s childish, but it doesn’t work anyway.

I can tell from the way she side-eyes me as I wander the room that I’m irritating her, yet it doesn’t mess with her mojo.

She’s on fire. She’s fucking brilliant at her job.

And it’s as bittersweet as a candied lemon. On the one hand, I’m proud of her. My junior, whom I taught and supported, flourishing as a senior advisor. On the other hand, I’m annoyed that she’s great. The woman who burned me. The woman for whom I killed my chances of partnership without thanks or even acknowledgment.

‘I have another question,’ I tell her. ‘Some of our directors want to relocate and have a preference not to be flying back and forth to the Caribbean for board meetings. Does this new legislation have anything to say about that?’

She nods, sipping from the second coffee I’ve made her. Then she pulls up the relevant legislation on her laptop screen and points to it, right as my latest turn of the room brings me behind her chair. ‘See this provision…’

I lean across her to read the words for myself, my hands braced either side of her on the tabletop. I haven’t meant it to feel intimate, yet, as I read from her screen, the scent of her perfume mixed with something that’s distinctly Carrie works its way into my bloodstream and travels straight to my hippocampus, and I’m thrust back to the first night we kissed.

We were in our office. New York City’s skyline was dazzling through the window against the outside darkness, undisturbed by the dim lights inside. It had been a long day and night, pulling the kind of hours that are unsustainable, for a significant client of mine.

Carrie asked me to review something she was drafting. I stepped from behind my desk and leaned across hers, just as I have done now. And just as she’s doing now, her nearness, her scent, it infiltrated me, diverted my mind from what I was supposed to be doing.

As I looked to her, she glanced up to me, our faces inches apart, as they are now. Then we edged closer. First her, I think. Then me. A subconscious call and response. A reflexive move by my body that had thought about it for months. Until I was staring down at her soft pink lips, watching them slowly part, hearing her next shallow breath. Then I was kissing her. Slowly, tentatively. Nervously. Knowing it was wrong, unethical, but unwilling or unable to stop it.

Now, we’re locked in a gaze, my heart hammering, making me feel like I’ve drunk ten coffees for breakfast, and I wonder if she’s sharing the same memory as I am. Whether I’m having anything close to the effect on her that she’s having on me.

Wondering whether she’ll creep closer, if she’ll make the next move, and if she does, whether I’ll stop it.

This is bad. This is dangerous. I’m being knocked senseless by her again, except this time, I already know how it ends.

‘So, you’re telling me I can’t have all my directors sitting in the USA and claim the company is Cayman tax resident?’ I croak, unsure whether my sentence is even coherent.

It’s enough to break her hold over me, though. Her expression shifts from whatever it was, or what I imagined it was, to something cooler, safer.

‘Not unless you want the next time you see me again to be seven years from your incarceration for tax evasion.’

I think she’s deadly serious, until one side of her lips flutters, almost a spasm, then she smirks and I can’t help but laugh. She follows my lead, until we’re howling. Her holding her waist in her seat and me doubled over. There’s no doubt that at some point, it becomes more about venting steam from a pressure cooker than the joke being funny.

Because whilst my imprisonment might be hilarious to her, to me, it’s a lot less amusing.

‘Ah, sorry to interrupt.’

Carrie’s cheeks burn red at the sight of Alisha in the open doorway.

Our moment of liberation from the past is brought to an abrupt halt by Alisha’s words, and it feels like we’ve been caught in the act… again.

We haven’t, of course; we’re just two people who can’t stand each other, laughing about memories that haunt us, or something to that effect. I sober instantly but the burst of adrenaline I just got brought with it a reminder of excitement, salacious nights and stolen moments. Like an addict who’s tasted their most haunting vice for the first time in a long time.

‘You’re not interrupting at all,’ Carrie says, pushing out her chair and standing, almost to attention. ‘I was actually thinking about stretching my legs for a few minutes, so I’ll leave you guys to it.’

Just like that, she’s gone, swept off on the Caribbean breeze. I watch the way her body moves, remembering it so well.

Quit it, Luke. Just goddamn stop with the flashbacks, the memories, the terrorizing yourself.

‘Was I interrupting?’ Alisha asks, stepping further into the room. She’s dressed as if she’s just come up from the beach – a sheer kimono over a bathing suit.

I shake my head. ‘Not at all. She made a joke. Believe it or not.’ I rub my freshly shaved chin. Carrie used to be funny. Hilarious, actually, but I’ve seen no sign of that humor in the last couple of days. Until that one wise crack. Smart ass.

‘Mmmhmm.’ Alisha folds her arms across her chest. ‘Well, I just came on Noah’s behalf to ask if you’ll play soccer with him once your meeting is done. He wanted to come up here himself but I didn’t think you’d thank me for allowing it, so this is the compromise. I only came in myself because it didn’t look like much business was being done.’ She raises one eyebrow.

‘You’ve misread the room, trust me. Carrie and I are in a strictly business relationship these days.’

‘Riiiiiiight. You know she thinks you and I are together, don’t you?’

Yes. And I have no intention of correcting her. ‘I haven’t noticed.’

‘Yes, you have. It was plain as day at dinner last night.’ She wags a brightly painted fingernail at me. ‘Let me tell you, Chalmers, I won’t be used as a ragdoll in whatever game of emotional intelligence this is.’

We’re facing each other from opposite sides of the table. ‘I can’t help if Carrie jumps to conclusions,’ I say. Then for my own benefit, I mutter, ‘She’s always been the same.’

Alisha plants her hands on her hips, looking as fierce as only she can. ‘You need to tell her the truth.’

‘Why do I?’

‘Because you’re not five years old and this isn’t the school playground. If you don’t correct her, I will.’

I reach for a tissue from a box on the desk and wave it in the air. I know Alisha well enough to know she doesn’t bullshit, so I surrender. ‘Can you give me today? Let me get through this meeting. I’ll tell her tomorrow.’ Because I fully intend to tell Joe I’m leaving the island tonight .

Alisha’s bristles seem to soften. ‘Why do you want her to think we’re together? Are you trying to make her jealous? Are you trying to win her back?’

‘Jealous? Back? Hell, no. You couldn’t be further from the truth. In any event, she’s seeing someone, shares a life and a dog with someone.’

She’s moved on.

I’m pacing my side of the table, wound like a mechanical toy ready for release. When I find the words I’m searching for, I stop and once again face Alisha.

‘Look, it’s just safer this way. It’s an insurmountable barrier, me being in a relationship, her being in a relationship. We’ve talked about it before; neither one of us would ever cheat.’

‘If you hate each other, why do you need barriers between you?’ Alisha asks a fair question.

‘It’s something that means we don’t even have to get into what happened between us. You’re a safe space.’

She comes to perch on the edge of the table. ‘What exactly did happen between the two of you?’

I don’t think I’m going to tell her, not the detail. But I find myself moving to the window, staring out to where I see Carrie wandering the terrace and talking into her phone, and words start tumbling out of me. How it all started between late nights and office flirting. The hotel rooms and the six weeks we dated in secret, having a crash course in getting to know each other because it was always just the two of us, hiding away in one of our apartments, eating, drinking, talking, making love, bathing together, dancing together, falling asleep in each other’s arms.

‘Then I got a message from Anya one day – a text message, would you believe? – and it said, “I’m pregnant”, with an ultrasound picture. That was it.’

‘I never knew that,’ Alisha says.

I don’t turn to look at her because I don’t think I want to see her expression, whether she’s appalled that I was seeing someone so soon after Anya and I ended, whether she pities me because I fell for a girl like I’d never even fallen for the woman I married, then she was taken away by something that completely blindsided me.

‘It threw me, completely. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do and I couldn’t process all my mixed emotions, let alone share them with Carrie. It was a mess I needed to get my head around.’ I shake my head, dragging a hand through my hair. ‘But I had no time because that same day, someone from work saw Carrie and me together and snitched to the partners. So I was called into an office and told either Carrie would be moved into a department she didn’t want to be in, or I would have to leave the firm.’

I finally shift to see Alisha and find her attention fixed on me. ‘That’s…’

‘I was on the cusp of partnership, so they wanted me to stay and Carrie would have ended up managed out, but I felt responsible for the mess. I was older, her mentor, I should have known better. I did know better but I just couldn’t— Anyway, Anya had moved back to Chicago, to be near her parents, or so I thought, and I assumed she’d want to try to make a go of things for the sake of the baby.’ I shake my head. ‘It was an awful idea but I was all over the place and trying to do the right thing.’

‘So what did you do?’

I shrug. ‘I quit work and told them to keep Carrie but not tell her that I left so she could stay. I didn’t want her to feel guilty or try anything stupid like quitting so they’d take me back.’

Only now, relaying it, I wonder if maybe I should have let them tell her because at least then she’d have known that I did it for her. Then again, it wouldn’t have mattered. She was over us. Ready to pretend like we never happened.

I don’t realize I’ve balled my hands into fists until my knuckles are hurting under the pressure. ‘I went to Chicago, to do what I thought was decent. I tried to stay in touch with Carrie and explain everything but she ghosted me. Ignored every attempt I made because, I guess she’d just never bought in to us.’ Not the way I had.

I grip the back of my neck, rubbing against the building pressure I feel. The heaviness of the time, the memory, the pain.

‘Then fast-forward six months to a paternity test and, what do you know? The baby wasn’t mine.’ I shift along the wall of windows to continue watching Carrie on the terrace, probably speaking to her significant other. ‘We could have got back together but she made sure there’d never be a chance for us.’

I had no wife, no family, no job, no home and worst of all, no Carrie.

‘You hurt her,’ Alisha says emphatically.

I narrow my eyes on her. ‘I messed up trying to do what I thought was right. But she shut us down completely.’

‘I wasn’t there, Luke, so I won’t tell you what happened, but have you tried to sit in her point of view for a while?’

‘She cut me out of her life, Alisha,’ I snap unintendedly.

She reaches for a tissue and waves it as I did, in peace. I feel bad but I can’t help how much of a trigger Carrie is for me.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Alisha says, heading out. ‘See you on the beach?’

I nod, too wound up for words.

By the door, she pauses to tell me, ‘For the record, no woman refers to a man she loves as a co-doggy parent. I’m sure there’s one less thing standing between you and Carrie than you think.’