Stuck in Paradise with You

Chapter 10

10

CARRIE

The ocean is calm, a stark contrast to the way I’m feeling.

What just happened between Luke and me? That look … it was like… Never mind what it was like. What it wasn’t was a thing .

Which doesn’t at all explain why I’m feeling way hotter than the sticky Charithonia heat, which is a cool eighty-six degrees and about 99.9 per cent humidity. I fan myself, tugging the material of my blouse at the chest.

It isn’t working, so I take out my phone and call Callum.

No answer. Damn it.

I glance back across my shoulder to the meeting pod, making sure neither Luke nor his girlfriend have eyes on me. They don’t, so I allow myself the indulgence of letting my hair down and tugging on the roots like a masseuse does during an Indian head massage, hoping it will yank some straight thinking into me.

Because the thing is, it’s like everything I used to feel for Luke was there, in that one look, right there, for a heartbeat.

Like the way I felt relieved that he was giving training to a group of new associates the first time I met him, so I had an excuse for not being able to tear my focus from him. There was something about his voice that was smooth and confident, yet gravelly and manly all at once.

In the months that followed, when we were working in the same office, I’d pretend to be working on my own computer screen as I listened in to his calls with clients, not absorbing the substance of his words but just the way he conducted himself.

And later still, a year after we met, when I’d lie back on the sofa in his apartment, my legs across his thighs, his fingers gently, nonchalantly, massaging my ankles as he asked about my day, about my dreams and aspirations, about my upbringing. Just the two of us, hiding away from real life. I’d have divulged anything he wanted to know, the kind of top-priority state secrets people kill for, if I’d known any, because all I really wanted was for his words to wrap around me, for the light rough of his skin to move around my jaw, down my neck.

So now, standing on this terrace in paradise, like Eve who once ate the forbidden fruit, I’m scared. No, terrified, waiting for karma to bite again. I can’t be here, physically, metaphorically. I can’t be sent back to where he left me seven years ago. In pieces.

Bracing myself on the balcony of the terrace, I try a deep inhalation and exhalation. And again. And again.

When it doesn’t work, I try to call the only other person who knows about Luke and me. Who knew about Luke and me when we were actually together.

I call my mom.

‘Carrie! Where are you, what are you doing, and why?’

That’s how Mom always answers the phone to me. It’s not an interrogation, as much as a habit, lovingly meant.

‘Well… I’m standing outside of a meeting room, having stepped out for air from my client, Luke Chalmers.’

‘Okaaaaay.’ She’s distracted, doing something in the background, shuffling things or picking them up. It sounds like her cell is wedged between her ear and her shoulder. ‘Should I know who Luke Chalm— Luke? Luke Luke?’

‘You remember him then?’

‘Remember him? He broke my daughter’s heart and ran off into the wind to let someone else put it back together again. Of course I remember him.’

I glance back to the meeting room, where I can see Luke is sitting on the tabletop, talking to Alisha, who is standing close by, listening intently. I wonder what they’re talking about. I wonder how it looked when she walked in and we were laughing together.

I don’t know that we were laughing together more than generally finding an outlet for some real pent-up pasts.

‘Don’t sugarcoat it, Mom, will you?’ I ask, unable to stop watching the scene of domesticity in front of me. Hating the fact that I’m jealous of it.

Mom whispers something in the background. I think she might be in a coffee shop and ordering.

‘Is now a bad time?’ I ask.

‘No, and don’t you dare drop a bombshell and disappear like you usually do. There’s a reason you called me, Carrie, and generally we know the answers to our questions before we ask them.’

‘Please don’t Psychology major me, Mom.’ Mom is a part-time lecturer at NYU.

‘I’m not Psychology-ing anything. But I am going to get a coffee to go and we are going to talk this out.’

I sigh but I think I’m relieved. Mom can generally stop me from spiraling and that’s precisely what I need right now.

She moves through a hive of louder chatter, then it’s quieter again and she asks, ‘Why are you working with him again?’

‘Urgh. Circumstances. He’s the chief financial officer of one of the firm’s clients and the client relationship partner is sick. Given I’m a big yes girl at the moment, I agreed to step in and didn’t realize I’d be working with Luke until it was too late.’

‘Excuse me, is anyone sitting here?’ Mom exits stage left. ‘Lovely, thank you. I’m Lily, nice to meet you.’

‘Mom?’

‘I’m here, honey.’ And re-enters stage right. ‘I have a seat next to a nice gentleman on a park bench and I’m all yours for the next… nineteen minutes until my next lecture.’

‘Well, it shouldn’t take that long. I’ve told you what’s going on,’ I say, rubbing my fingers over the shiny terrace rail. ‘I don’t even know why I called, really. I’m just— It’s just that— Garghhhhh.’

‘It’s obviously a good thing that this is a one-off. You just need to power through, honey. Be your conscientious, professional self for the meeting, get the job done, don’t engage with him in any matter that isn’t business chatter and you walk away with your head held high. That man deserves nothing more.’

I nod, I think reassuring myself because Mom certainly can’t see or hear it. ‘You’re right. I can do this.’

‘For sure you can, honey. You’re stronger than you think. You’ve got this.’

‘Enough with the affirmations, Mom.’

‘Sorry, darling. Habit.’

I sigh, not really meaning to but defaulting to being a daughter, Mom’s little girl, anyone I need to be and want to be because I can be myself. ‘He isn’t married anymore. Not to the woman he was, anyway,’ I tell her. ‘He doesn’t have any kids, either. Not that either thing matters. And he is seeing someone; he has a girlfriend.’

‘Carrie.’ Mom’s tone is warning. ‘You shouldn’t care one way or the other. You need to let nasty sleeping mongrels lie.’

I might laugh if I didn’t feel so flat. ‘I don’t care.’

He has a girlfriend and even if he didn’t, I could never forget and certainly couldn’t forgive what he did to me.

Yes, I ghosted him, I moved home, I changed as much about myself as I could. The only thing I kept was my job and that was the beginning of a battle of having to prove myself indefinitely. But it was all because of him running , using me and leaving me.

He went back to his wife and moved state. He never stuck around so we could get through the backlash of being outed at work together. A text message, that was all I got. A text message to tell me his wife was pregnant and he was going back to her.

Couldn’t we have legitimized our relationship if there had been longevity in it?

That’s the point, isn’t it? We could have stuck it out, fought to have something. If I’d been asked back then, maybe I would have quit my job if it meant we could be together.

But he didn’t give me a choice. He didn’t give us a chance. He was so quick and desperate to go back to his wife.

‘It’s just…’ I say. ‘He loved her enough to go back and she was having his child. So why no wife now? Why no child?’

Now Mom sighs. ‘I don’t know, Carrie. Maybe he left them both. Is that the kind of man you want to be with?’

She means a man like my dad. Though ironically, he did stick around until I went to college. He stayed for too long and I was brought up around arguments and slamming doors for the whole of my teenage years. These days, Mom pretty much resents that men exist as a species.

‘But he seems so good with kids.’

With Noah and Toby, even Char and Sanza. I truly thought he was a father.

I also thought I was internalizing that nugget, but Mom responds as if I said it aloud.

‘Honey, has it occurred to you that maybe there never was a child? That he had his fun with you and wanted the excuse to go back to his wife or just end things with you?’

‘Ah… I… It hadn’t, no. Not until you just said it.’

Make up a baby? He wouldn’t have. Couldn’t have.

Could he? He was always so honest. ‘I’ll tell you anything you want to know, Carrie; all you have to do is ask,’ he once said to me as we lay propped on pillows, facing each other in bed. I remember wanting to ask him, Do you still love her, your wife? But the words never left my mouth.

If I had a time machine, would I go back and ask the question? Would I want to know the answer? Or would I want those six weeks we spent together to be as they were: blissfully ignorant of what was on the horizon?

‘You can’t trust a man like that and I should know.’ She’s referring to Dad, again – her own Achilles’ heel. Dad strayed in the later years they were married and though only small amounts of detail have been drip-fed through heart-to-hearts and generally when Mom needs to find a bad example of a man, I know that he met someone else – at work, as it happens – and after months of adultery, Mom considers that the catalyst for the end of their marriage.

Me? I think it was cowardly and wrong, but I’d witnessed everything else that had led up to that point over the years preceding, coming like a heavy-laden freight train, agonizingly slowly down the tracks. Still, Dad’s affair shocked me because that part I hadn’t seen coming. That part, I would never have guessed from the man I loved so much.

‘I know. I know, Mom. I do. I don’t think Luke would have had a lie as big as a fake pregnancy in him, but he certainly pulled the wool over my eyes, so… maybe.’

Maybe all the romantic nights, the pillow talks, the stolen touches, the hip grazes and shoulder skims in meeting rooms and communal office spaces, all the glances that held heat and promise, were part of a big, ugly hoax.

I wish I had my shades with me because my eyes are stinging as I search the expanse of Caribbean Sea to find some strength. I can’t be back here, in this dark place.

‘Let’s talk about this in person,’ Mom says, as if she’s a voice inside my head. ‘I’m coming into the city tomorrow. Can we do lunch?’

‘Erm, actually, no because I’m not in New York, I’m in the Caribbean, on Joe Hettich’s private island.’

‘Joe Hettich! The Joe Hettich?’

Remarkably, I chuckle at her reaction.

‘The very same. Luke is his CFO.’

‘Would it be terribly unprofessional to get a signed copy of his biography for— Wait, honey, do you know there’s a superstorm coming to the Caribbean? Haven’t you been watching the news?’ Her pitch rises to the extent that I have to flick the volume down on the side of my phone.

‘I do know but I’ve been assured it won’t hit the island. Apparently, this is a regular spoof in hurricane season out here.’ As I’m talking, I see Joe – no longer clad in bright sweat bands but now wrapped in an equally offensive sarong, hairy pecs everywhere – bounding up the steps toward the main house. ‘Mom, I’ve got to go. You’ve been a huge help. I’m very clear on what I need to do. Thank you and I love you.’

‘Joe!’ I call before I’ve even hung up the phone. I wave to grab his attention, as if my shout into the serenity of paradise wasn’t startling enough. ‘Do you have a second?’

‘Ahoy, matey!’ Joe calls in a pirate voice. He slows his run and takes a few steps in my direction, though still far enough away from where I’m standing on the terrace that I need to speak loudly.

‘Things are going really well with, ah, Luke.’ His name feels like dirt in my mouth after my call with my mom. More so even than it has for the last two days, if that’s possible.

‘Glad to ’ear it, matey.’ Gosh, this man is a lot. ‘It’ll make for more fun tomorrow. The seas will be calm and we’ll set sail at two bells forenoon.’

What the actual fuck?

‘Pardon?’

‘I think it means 9a.m. but me pirate speak is rusty. Nothing a drop of rum in me tum won’t fix. Arghhhh.’

‘Right, ha.’ I genuinely try to laugh, to be civil, but this guy is so nuts, I don’t know if I manage. ‘Actually, about tomorrow. Or tonight, even?—’

‘Whoops, I’ll be late for the masseuse. Let’s pick this up later.’ He starts galloping, galloping away toward the main house. Do pirates… gallop ?

‘Joe, it’s just that I’d really like to…’ He’s out of sight. ‘Leave this goddamn island,’ I mutter to myself.