Stuck in Paradise with You

Chapter 34

34

LUKE

No, no, fucking no.

It’s the bellowing wind outside, wildly chiming the dangling ornament I forgot to bring inside last night that wakes me, but before I even open my eyes, it’s the lack of Carrie that has me thumping the bed in frustration.

She’s run, again. Gone without a trace.

The worst part is, I should have expected it. I should have known better. Desire got the better of me and here I am, again, with a fucking vortex under my ribcage where my heart should be.

Why did I go there? Why let her in? For this body-crushing feeling all over again?

I roll onto my back and let my forearms fall across my eyes, willing whatever sensation is trying to be present there to just do one.

‘Idiot,’ I chastise myself, roughly dragging my hands up and down my face like it might rub some sense into me. Unfortunately, it’s not going to do that retrospectively.

Who am I kidding? Even if I turned back the clock ten hours, I would be powerless to stop what happened last night.

Damn it, even now, lying here alone, devastated, I don’t know if I would want to.

Last night was… Christ, it was intense, hot, sexy. Incredible. But not just because there’s an unexplainable and unbeatable magnetism between Carrie and me that no one in the world could deny. Not because she’s the most stunningly attractive woman to have ever consumed every single one of my senses.

It’s because being with her, over her, on her, inside her, is a feeling like nothing else I’ve experienced in my life. She can blow my world apart, make me feel ecstasy, and make it feel like we’re one person, as if she’s the other half of me. I felt more alive last night than I’ve ever felt.

I shake my head, reminding myself that I am in this pod, in this bed, solo. As I do, I notice the first light of the day is trying to peek through the thick dark clouds, through the slatted blinds covering my window.

I need to get up and move. To spend the entire day with the woman who shatters me like a mirror, for fun.

Or maybe, I just lie here, wait out the storm and take my chances in this pod, because that would be easier than enduring a day with Carrie, asking myself over and over, why did she even come to me last night? I’d walked away. It took more willpower than I knew I had but I walked away from her pod.

Then she was here. In mine. Standing in the doorway to my shower, begging me to make love to her under the setting sun.

Goddammit , it had felt like that. I’d felt the rush of being with the woman I love.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

I drop my arms across my face again. I love her .

And I really fucking hate her too.

Reluctantly, I come to sit on the edge of the bed, feeling tired and deflated. I’ve hit rock bottom once before and this feeling isn’t it, but it sure as hell feels reminiscent.

Regardless, I have three friends who are as close to me as family and who would probably want to slap me around the head if they knew I walked right into the mess they all helped pick me up from seven years ago, again. I’ve got four energetic but pretty amazing god kids who need me today. Uncle Luke needs to take his head out of his ass and turn up to play and distract.

I dig out a pair of shorts, a t-shirt and a sweater from my drawers and shove some staple bits into my duffle bag to take with me. Not because I think my things are at risk in the pod – this place is solid as a rock – but because I don’t know how long the storm will take to pass and if I’ll be communal sleeping tonight.

One thing’s for sure: if the kids want to nap today, I’ll be a willing cuddler.

Yawning, I sling my bag over my shoulder and head outside.

The hurricane isn’t due to hit for hours but the wind is already ferocious, the white foam capping the sea is plentiful, and I’m fighting against the drag to get to the pathway.

Where is Carrie? Is she already there? Is she in her pod?

There’s no way I’m letting her walk alone in this.

I make a detour. There are no lights on in her pod, the slats have been drawn across the windows and when I try her door, it’s locked.

‘Carrie, are you in there?’ I call, receiving no reply. Though even if she was inside, I probably wouldn’t be able to hear her response for the howling in my ears.

Relieved to be able to put off seeing her a little longer, I turn back in the direction of Hettich House. The main door is closed but not locked. I let myself in, my ears feeling the relief of filtering out some of the anger of the weather. Seeing no sign of anyone still on the first floor, I head down to the basement.

When I say basement, this is like no ordinary basement, no rickety wooden door leading down an unsafe staircase into a dark pit with a concrete floor and things that remind you of the most tense scenes in a horror movie. The Hettich basement is as big as my loft apartment in Tribeca.

Leaving my luggage in the main lounge, I make my way through the security door that’s been left open, though I know Dave won’t be far away, despite the fact a kidnap risk seems slim to non-existent in the current climate. I hear the lyrics to ‘I Just Can’t Wait To Be King’ coming through a sound system that’s barely registrable over the sound of Noah and Toby belting out the song.

Oh boy . I guess this is close to normal wake-up time for the sprogs.

I’m going to need a strong coffee.

Sure enough, Dave is hovering at the bottom of the staircase and holds out his fist to me in welcome. ‘You good, man?’ he asks.

‘Yeah, all good. You?’

‘Ready for whatever the day brings.’ Dave is ex-SAS. I’m close to certain nothing fazes this hunk of man.

Scanning the room and the many faces scattered around the enormous open-plan living space, before anyone else has noticed my arrival and before Noah has had a chance to dive on me, I ask, ‘Am I last to get here?’

‘Pretty much,’ Dave says, checking his watch. ‘Just waiting for Carrie, then I’ll close everything up.’

‘She isn’t here?’ Shit. Where is she?

‘We thought she’d be with you,’ Alisha says, noting my arrival and calling over from the large wood dining table, where she’s sitting with Jenny, Ella and Monique, taking advantage of a lull in the sing-shouting session. She’s grinning, her expression alive with mischief, teasing me.

Normally, I’d give as good as I get, but right now, I’m not finding anything funny, especially the fact that Carrie isn’t here.

‘Why would she be with me?’ My tone is too clipped, unintentionally so.

Alisha doesn’t catch my tone, or does and doesn’t care, because she looks to the ceiling and says, ‘Oh I don’t know, maybe because neither of you turned up to dinner last night and you’re the last two people to?—’

Something in the way I respond to her now, though, makes her pause. That, or Ella has kicked her sister under the table. The almost last thing I need this morning is for people to be gossiping and throwing around jovial innuendos. The very last thing I need is to not know where Carrie is when there’s a storm raging outside.

‘Morning!’ Carrie’s voice comes from behind me, too close behind me. I’m grateful she’s here but I’m frozen to the spot. Ridiculously, I wasn’t ready for her. I’m not ready for her.

And the overriding emotion I’m left with is fury. Not even because Alisha is looking at me like I told you so but because I woke up this morning, after an earth-shatteringly incredible night with Carrie, alone. Gutted.

She did it to me all over again.

She left.

Now she’s singing good morning to everyone as if nothing happened.

I really wasn’t ready for this. Not for the rage making my fingers tremble, or the unmistakable stabbing in my chest.

Thankfully, Carrie’s lively arrival has notified Noah of mine. He and Toby – dressed in their Cars franchise pajamas – call me over to where they’re set up on a karaoke machine and, by the looks of things, draining the life from their dad, Roy and Henry, who are sitting around them on a huge U-shaped sofa.

After the way he’s behaved the last two days, I’m not surprised when Henry seems to be the only person in the room either not able to connect the dots or not caring what picture they draw. He stands from the sofa and it’s clear that Carrie is in his sights, but Joe places a hand on his arm and mutters something to Henry that makes him retake his seat. Yeah, back off, hotshot. I’m making a big enough mess of this without turning what’s going on between Carrie and me into a love triangle.

Remarkably, Char and Sanza are both lying fast asleep in portable cribs. The dogs, Jessie and Woody, are lying on the rug next to them, ever the protectors. Roy’s sister, Lola, is feeding her newborn in a nursing chair that looks like it might have been brought down here especially. Ella literally gets everything right when it comes to kids.

In another area, sitting along two sofas and starting a game of dominoes on the table between them, are Dionne, Glen, Thom, Troy and Kevin.

‘Give me a beat to grab a coffee, boys, then you can subject me to whatever Disney performance you want,’ I tell the kids.

I notice adult eyes are watching something behind my back, then Joe’s flick to me, questions written there that I’m not ready to answer. So I act like I don’t see it and move to the coffee machine in the kitchen area. There are two filter pots freshly brewed on two separate machines. There’s also a large fancy coffee maker – beans, milk foamer and all – but if I touch that thing, I’ll break it, so I pour myself a steaming mug of black coffee and take it over to the guys on the sofa.

Only when I sit near Joe, facing toward the dining table and the staircase I walked down, do I finally look at Carrie and see that, though she’s tried to cover up with make-up, her eyes are red and puffy, not just from tiredness but from tears.

She’s been crying.

‘Well, that must have been some night,’ Joe says for my ears only. ‘Because you both look like sh — Like you didn’t catch a wink of sleep.’

She walked out of my bed, yet she’s the one who gets to cry about it? Where’s the justice in that?

Nevertheless, it tugs on the heart I’m desperate to turn to iron. How much easier this day would be if I just didn’t feel. Unfortunately, I’m not the guy who’s going to make love to a woman and not ask if she’s okay the next day when her eyes are showing me she’s not.

Jessie and Woody have that sixth sense dogs have because as I push up from the sofa, the dogs get up from near the sleeping girls and head over to Carrie, who strokes them and hugs their heads against hers.

How? How can a woman as warm as Carrie be a total and utter… ice queen?

Instead of causing a scene and going to her directly – probably to be embarrassingly brushed off with some callous remark – I go where I know she’ll head next: the kitchen for coffee. Not before I give Henry a look that says, If this storm doesn’t kill you, I might.

Though I still get the sense there are prying eyes in the room, general chit chat resumes. Kevin, the other security guy alongside Dave and Thom, must have locked us in now, as he comes into the basement and starts chatting in work mode with Dave. The group is complete and ready for the storm. Little do they know, I’m waiting for my own thunder to arrive in the kitchen.

I set about filling the machine with ground coffee for a double shot, a drop of foaming milk and a sweetener for Carrie’s drink. Less because I want to make her a drink, or do anything particularly kind for her, than because I need a diversion, something to do with my hands. The uncertainty I felt as soon as I woke alone is back, and seeing her coming my way in my peripheral vision only makes it worse.

In the time it takes me to find some backbone and look at her, she’s already grabbed herself a mug. ‘This is for you,’ I tell her.

She doesn’t look at me as she says, ‘I don’t need you to make my coffee and I don’t need you for anything else, for that matter.’ She speaks quietly, in hushed but wrathful tones.

She’s got a nerve. ‘That’s not what you were saying last night.’

‘Last night was a blip. A complete lapse in judgment.’ She reaches to take the milk jug from me. When her fingers meet mine, she finally looks at me. ‘Trust me, it won’t happen again.’

‘You’ve got that right,’ I snap back, speaking close to her ear. ‘You’ve ghosted me for the last time, Carrie Briggs.’

I don’t know why I call her by her full name. I guess because my mom used to use my full name when I was in the doghouse as a kid. And Carrie is 100 percent in the doghouse with me.

Yet what has me seething even more than the woman herself is the way my pulse rate just surged with her sharp intake of breath, the way something jumped inside me when her pupils widened at my use of her full name. The way my fingers tingled under her touch.

Because, if I’m honest, I’d have taken the pain of today to have last night with her. I think. Maybe.

‘ I ghosted you ?’ she bites, pointing at herself then me as she snarls. ‘Do you think whispering a few sweet nothings against my earlobe last night undoes the last seven years and what you did to me?’

I thought I was riled. This woman is furious. Her face looks like that of a Scotsman who’s been lying on the equator without sunscreen for a decade.

‘You want to know why I snuck out this morning, Luke? Because last night was a stupid, idiotic mistake.’

I don’t like the insinuation in her words and somehow, we wind up squared to each other, chest to chest. ‘You came to me!’

‘I know. It’s on me and I’m sorry.’ Her next breath presses her chest against mine and though my mind is screaming at her, my hands are itching to take hold of her, placate her and smooth this over. I don’t want her to be sorry. I wasn’t. At least, not last night.

I don’t want to fight with you. Those are the words spinning around in my head but I know they are, doubtless, not the right words to speak.

‘I shouldn’t have come to your pod but the rest of it is on us . We messed up, again. Foolishly thought that sex is enough when we both know it isn’t. Last night was…’ She blows out like she’s blowing a raspberry and I want to tell her, Yeah, I’m with you, it was beyond words. But she adds, ‘It didn’t answer any questions, it wasn’t an explanation for what you did to me.’

‘That’s what you want? An explanation?’

‘That’s what I’ve wanted all this time, Luke.’ She looks around the room, as if she’s just remembered we’re not alone, that we’re in a storm bunker with a ton of other people and two dogs. ‘Look,’ she says, calmer. ‘What’s done is done. We need to get through today, then go our separate ways.’

No. I don’t even think about why I want to say that word but it seems to fit. Yet something stops me from saying it aloud. Something heavy. A weight I can’t describe.

Instead, hurt and frustration have me shaking my head and as I drag a hand through my dark hair, I say, ‘Fine. I just wanted to make sure you’re okay, for some reason, and I have my answer. You’re great. You’ve moved on.’ I start moving back to the kids and Joe. ‘Enjoy your coffee, Carrie.’

‘I will,’ she says huffily.

‘Great. Maybe you’ll be functioning like a normal human being once you’re caffeinated,’ I say, turning back to her and raising my arms from my sides.

She scowls, rolling her jaw. ‘If, by that, you mean someone like you, I’d rather not, thanks.’

I scoff. ‘Fine, so don’t drink the coffee.’

‘Maybe I won’t.’

‘Fine.’

‘Fine.’

God, the woman drives me crazy. Is there anyone in the world as stubborn as she is?

I slump down on the sofa next to Joe, who is wide-eyed and sort of looks like a GIF asking, What the fuck?

‘I take it everything’s fine?’ he says, amusement toying with the creases around his mouth.

I feel the muscles around my own face twitch for entirely different reasons as I bite down on my gums to prevent me dignifying his question with a response.

Joe nods. ‘Looks like this is going to be a really long day. I might as well go ahead and fess up to a thing or two…’