Stuck in Paradise with You

Chapter 21

21

LUKE

Seven Years Ago

There’s a note on my desk when I come back from my late-morning meeting – as she usually does, Carrie has covered it with a notepad and left a blank pink Post-it note on top to let me know it’s there:

MEET ME AT OUR HOTEL. ROOM 252 – 12p.m.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! x

We’d both been in and out of meetings, passing like ships in the night, all morning. Now she’s MIA and something tells me I’m going to thoroughly, meticulously, scrupulously enjoy the birthday gift she’s planned for me at noon.

I am literally tingling with anticipation.

Carrie and I have been seeing each other for six weeks. We haven’t been together in a hotel for three. We spend our time together in my apartment. Locked inside the safety of my four walls, we talk – really talk – we eat, we drink, we laugh – truly laugh – we binge Netflix and we chill – the best, most glorious, head-spinningly hot kind of chilling.

The last time we used our hotel, we’d both been to the same business networking event. I’d had half an ear on conversations with colleagues and associates but the rest of me had been glued to Carrie. Watching her work the room, infiltrate conversations, garner laughs and smiles with her easy manner. I was so desperate to be the person she was entertaining, the man to receive her smiles, I couldn’t stand the thought of us leaving the event separately, having to work our way back to my apartment on our own.

It was close but too far away. I needed to be with her sooner. It didn’t have to be sex; it just had to be us. So I sent her a message, told her I’d be waiting in our hotel, watched as she read the message and felt my heartrate soar when she glanced up from her phone and found me from beneath hooded eyes.

I pick up her note from my desk and slip it into the pocket of my suit pants and, already breathing heavily, walk as surreptitiously as I can while bursting to run from my office and to Carrie in the hotel.

As I’m midway along the main corridor, flanked by offices either side of me, my phone chimes with a message. Keeping my face as straight as I can, knowing where I’m headed, I look at the message, expecting to see words, maybe even a picture, from Carrie.

But what I receive stops me in my tracks…

Happy birthday, Luke.

The words are accompanied by a picture but neither the words nor the image come from Carrie. Both the birthday wishes and the accompanying image of a baby scan come from my estranged wife.

It feels like my entire body falls from the tenth floor of the office block to the ground.

Anya’s pregnant?

We haven’t slept together in… There was one time. A last goodbye, the day she moved out of our home for good, to go back to Chicago to where her parents live. It was three months ago.

Three months.

‘Everything okay, Luke? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’ One of the secretaries – not mine – presses a hand to my shoulder as she walks by. She doesn’t wait for my answer.

I don’t think I could answer. I’m numb. Mindless. Stupefied.

Someone else passes me, our arms colliding as I turn back in the direction of my office, then back toward the exit and Carrie.

God, Carrie. What is she going to think? She’s in a hotel room waiting for me and ? —

‘Luke, we need a word.’ I look up to Christopher Oakes, partner and head of the entire tax division for the firm. Through the window into his office, I see two other partners and the HR director inside.

To say this doesn’t look good is an understatement.

I follow Matt inside.

‘Take a seat, Luke.’

I do because I don’t have a choice and because my entire world is spinning double time. I’m dizzy, and taking a seat is better than falling on my face.

None of the others say hello and I already know what’s happening. My mushed-up brain is still capable of processing the enormity of the situation, so I’m not surprised when Matt takes a seat behind his desk and tells me, ‘We’ve heard a rumor that you’ve been having an inappropriate relationship with your associate.’ He looks as disappointed in me as he does critical. ‘Is it true?’

I don’t make it to Carrie in our hotel.

I tell myself I’m doing it to save her career.

I think maybe I also can’t bear the thought of telling her that Anya is having my baby, that I’ve quit the firm, that I have catastrophically fucked everything up. That I can’t see any other option than for she and I to be… done.

Present Day

The door to Carrie’s pod is open and she’s inside, packing her luggage on top of the bed.

I tap a knuckle on the door. She isn’t startled. In fact, the smooth way she turns to look at me across her shoulder tells me she expected me to come.

She turns back to her luggage, needlessly rearranging things she’s already packed to avoid looking at me.

‘How’s the leg?’ she asks.

‘My leg?’ What is she talking ab— ‘Oh. It’s fine. Some blistering. I might have overreacted in the moment.’

‘I’m sorry. The jellyfish was an unintended consequence.’

‘I’m not here to get into the jellyfish incident,’ I say, though I do have plenty to say about it.

She inhales so deeply, even by the door, I hear it.

I take a tentative step forward.

She eventually turns to face me and rises to full height, folding her arms across her like a shield. ‘Why are you here?’

‘I have to know before you leave…’ I hear uncertainty in my voice – as much as I feel. ‘Why did you ghost me? Why did you cut me out of your life completely?’

Her eyes rise to meet mine. For a second, I think she won’t answer.

‘I need to know,’ I tell her, almost pleading.

Eventually, she speaks. ‘You broke my heart, Luke, and I couldn’t stand the thought of watching your relationship with your family through social media.’ She tugs her lip between her teeth and shakes her head, killing our connection. She raises her hands from her sides, as if to ask, What do you want from me? Then she says, ‘I did it to protect myself. You went back to someone you told me you didn’t love. What did that say about your feelings for me?’

The first thing that hits me is the way her body seems to deflate with her words, as if holding them inside had been holding her up and now, she’s… making me question myself, making me second guess the narrative I thought I knew.

‘But you left us with no chance of ever coming back or, I don’t know, being friends, even. I still— I still wanted you in my life, I just hadn’t figured out how to make that happen. By the time I did?—’

She scoffs. ‘Was I supposed to sit around and wait, Luke? Wait for what? For you to want to be my buddy ? To come to dinner with you and your family?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I should or could have done differently.’ I drag my hands over my face. This isn’t what I was expecting. I have zero clue what I was expecting.

I don’t get the chance to pull all the pieces together, though, because Joe seems to appear from nowhere, and he’s standing by my side in the doorway of the pod, clearing his throat to announce his arrival.

I wonder how long he’s been listening, and clearly Carrie does too. She’s suddenly straighter, taller, mindful her client is in the vicinity, but her cheeks pinken, like she’s ashamed to have let her professional armor slip.

‘Sorry to interrupt,’ Joe says.

‘Not at all,’ Carrie says jumpily.

I know I can’t go back to our conversation. I asked my question, at long last. The question that’s haunted me is out in the wild and it has an answer.

Joe’s come to collect her and take her out of my life, again. Maybe for another seven years. Maybe forever this time.

It’s a good thing, I think.

Yet I can’t shake the sense that when I process her words, I’m going to be left with a void somewhere deep inside me. I hope it will only be a bareness where a long-pondered question is now answered.

I fear it’s not.

‘I’m just about packed,’ I hear Carrie say as I slip away into the night, feeling like there are a million things I should stay and say to her if this is the last time I’m going to see her, but not knowing what they are, or not able to find the words.

So, I leave without saying goodbye.