Acapulco Nights

by K. J. Gillenwater

  Maybe he was thinking about divorce as well. Maybe he had someone else in his life, too. “I think that would be a good idea.”

  “Do you have any plans for lunch?”

  I should have told him I did have plans—Janice and George were waiting for me in the cafe. Instead, I heard myself answer as if from a distance, “No, I don’t have any plans.”

  I needed to talk to him as soon as possible about the divorce, so calling James would have to wait. In a way, having lunch with Joaquin meant I was doing something for James and me, so any guilt quickly dissipated.

  “Come, querida, we need to talk.” He grasped me by the elbow, took the key card from my hand, and unlocked the door to our suite.

  He guided me to the couch and sat me down. I shivered in the cool blast of air-conditioning.

  He took a seat across from me in the wingback chair. “Why don’t you change, and then we can go to lunch.” His voice tumbled over my body in a husky whisper.

  Even though my mind whirled with thoughts of divorce and James, something buried deep within me came to life and drew me toward Joaquin. He had every right to be angry with me last night—he was my husband and I left him behind. He must have seen the change in me, the softening of my gaze or maybe the looseness of my limbs. The sophisticated woman I had become receded into the shadows, and the young girl of twelve years ago surfaced eagerly.

  “All right,” I said.

  Everything about him was so masculine—his broad shoulders, his lean torso, his well-trimmed goatee. Suddenly, I wanted to take a shower, clean off the brine of the ocean and maybe cool myself down a little. I felt very exposed sitting in my bikini on the couch.

  “I’ll hop in the shower and be out in a jiffy. Why don’t you make yourself a drink?” I nodded at the stocked mini-fridge.

  “Okay,” Joaquin answered. He watched me cross the room with an odd intensity.

  I broke my gaze with him and ducked into the bedroom to undress. Alone in the bedroom, I held my breath, waiting. When I heard the clink of ice on glass, I exhaled in relief.

  What was I so scared of? He sat in the other room having a drink, and I would be in and out of the shower and dressed in a matter of moments. Then, we could find George and Janice and join them for lunch. There was nothing wrong in what we were doing. I didn’t need to feel ashamed or nervous. Two old friends having a conversation, having lunch.

  But if it was innocent, why did it feel so wrong?

  *

  I came out of the bathroom, a thick terry robe wrapped snugly around me.

  I jumped at the sight of Joaquin staring at me from the bedroom doorway, his gaze burning. What was he doing in here?

  “So, how long has it been? Ten years?” he asked.

  “Twelve,” I answered, nervous, unsure. “I—I’ll be dressed in a minute.” I reached for the door to show him I wanted some privacy.

  Joaquin stopped me from shutting it. “I want some answers from you,” he said, his gravelly voice on the brink of anger. “You are my wife. And I should have what is mine.”

  His gaze flickered over me, and then rested on my mouth. I knew what he wanted. My stomach fluttered, making it hard for me to speak. I should be outraged, I should shove him out the door, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I froze to the spot, caught between wanting to flee and wanting to fall into his arms.

  I knew, somehow, that something like this would happen the minute we stepped into the hotel room.

  He removed his jacket, laying it across the bottom of the bed. “Why did you leave me, Suzie?” He asked me, loosening his tie. A flicker of hurt darkened his face for a moment. “Where did you go? I didn’t know how to find you.”

  I had no answer for him. Standing there in my bathrobe, I could think of nothing but how handsome he looked and how much pain I’d caused him. We were husband and wife, and I’d vanished into thin air. I wanted to wipe away the fine lines that worry left on his face. Those were indelible marks I had caused.

  He growled, “You are my wife.”

  I backed away from him and into the night table, this spark of anger scaring me. When he saw me start, he reached for me.

  I cried out in surprise. Struggling against the iron grip that held my wrist, the knot on my robe loosened.

  He pulled me close.

  Though I was afraid, his nearness aroused me. A flush raced through me, prickling but warm. He bent his mouth down to mine and kissed me hard. The familiar taste of his mouth on mine made the years melt away. A spiral of heat grew inside me, and I kissed him back, nibbling on his lips, thrusting my tongue greedily into his mouth. The coals of a fire, almost gone dead, roared back to life. The kiss intensified, like a red-hot brand on cool skin.

  A gnawing empty space inside me grew, needing to be filled, needing the touch of skin. I pulled my lips away from his and started unbuttoning his dress shirt, revealing a tan, hard chest. He quivered at the touch of my hand on the planed expanse of skin.

  Joaquin pulled me in closer, my face hidden in his shoulder. “You are mine, querida. Didn’t you know I wouldn’t forget you?” he asked in a whisper.

  He kissed my hair, the back of my ear, my throat. I was nineteen again and in love. Reaching up, I touched his face, and he muttered something in Spanish, nudging me toward the bed. He slid his hands up my neck to cradle my face. Hazel eyes scanned mine for a long second, perhaps to find something in them.

  He leaned in, kissing me again, his sensual mouth tasting mine. My body was ripe, my limbs tingled in pleasure. I gave in to the ecstasy of the moment.

  He pushed me down on the bed and tugged the robe from my body. The heavy material slipped from my shoulders, uncovering my most delicate parts. Girlishly, I tried to pull the edges back together. Joaquin brushed my hands away, drinking in my naked skin, my breasts warm and rosy, my stomach bare and trembling.

  “You are so beautiful,” he whispered against me, kissing each inch of skin he revealed.

  Instead of feeling exposed, I bloomed under the heat of his gaze and the touch of his mouth. I was Venus arising from the sea, adored by all who saw me.

  Arching my back, I reached again for him, thinking only of quenching the desire burning in me. All the years between us passed in an instant, and I remembered everything about him—the feel of his lips on mine, the coarse hair on his arms brushing across my body, the hardness of his well-sculpted chest against my softness. Familiar, yet unfamiliar. Time had changed us both, but yet we were the same.

  His hand slipped between us and skimmed my naked hip, a touch as light as sunlight on water.

  A clanging in my head snapped me back into the real world—this wasn’t right. As much as the instinctual part of me wanted this coupling, the thinking part of me did not. I reached down to push his hand away, and at that very moment the phone rang.

  The harsh buzz of the phone jolted us both. Joaquin’s hand slid up to my waist, and his eyes, dark with desire, bored into mine. Our breathing ragged, we both sat unmoving, staring at one another.

  When the phone jangled again, I rolled away from Joaquin and off the bed, quickly securing the bathrobe around me. I jerked the receiver off the phone and answered, “Hello?” My voice sounded taut and breathless.

  “Suze, is that you?”

  James.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I looked over my shoulder at Joaquin on the bed, resting on his elbows, his shirt loose and his belt unbuckled. Holding the phone to my ear, my mind was a blank. I felt sick to my stomach at what had happened, how far I let things go. What was wrong with me?

  The question echoed in my head as I cleared my throat, hoping my voice sounded like good old Suzie. “Hey, honey! I was about to call you,” I said, more weakly than I wanted. Without giving Joaquin another glance, I grabbed the whole phone and dragged it into the bathroom, shutting the door behind me.

  “I got your message yesterday, but didn’t want to call too late,” he said. “Aren’t you in a different time zone down there?”

&nbs
p; James.

  His voice, clear and steady, filled my ears, and it transported me back home to our little three-bedroom ranch right outside the city. We bought it together three years ago, right after I cancelled our first wedding date. I pushed him to buy the house to prove I honestly wanted to marry him. It was something permanent I could look at every day and think: here is our house with our garage and our half-dead lawn.

  Now, I wished more than anything I’d never left that little green-and-white house in the cul-de-sac.

  “I think we’re one hour behind here, but I’m not exactly sure.” I tried not to think about what waited behind that bathroom door—my shame, my guilt, my deceit. I told him with a lightness I didn’t feel, “We went kayaking today. Can you believe it? Me, kayaking?”

  How could I sound so normal? Talk about everyday things, as if nothing was wrong? James would know. He would sense my deceit. He knew me better than anyone.

  “Kayaking?” James laughed. “That Janice, she always talks you into doing something crazy, doesn’t she?”

  “You know Janice. Never a dull moment with her.” I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, the slightest rash stood on my cheek where Joaquin’s face brushed against mine when we kissed. I put my hand up against the reflective glass so I couldn’t see myself. “Oh, hey, I think she might have met someone.”

  “A guy?”

  “Of course a guy.” I turned away from the mirror and sat on the edge of the tub.

  “Hey, you never know when she might start pitching for the other team.”

  “James!”

  He laughed, “Oh, you know I’m kidding, Suze. That’s great she met someone. That doesn’t leave you as the odd man out, does it?”

  “No, she just met the guy today. His name is George, and he owns some kind of river rafting outfit in West Virginia.”

  “West Virginia? Are you sure he isn’t engaged to his sister?” James guffawed at his poor joke.

  Men and their sophomoric humor. “All right, all right. Enough teasing, hon. He’s a good guy, and he really seems to like her.”

  “Good enough for me. As long as you don’t run into any river-rafting studs, too.”

  My thoughts flashed to the half-naked man behind the bathroom door. A nervous laugh burst out of my mouth. “Oh, James, stop it. Hey, honey, I’ve been thinking about something ever since I got on the plane.”

  “You have?”

  “Yes, when I get home, we are definitely going to pick a date for the wedding. And I’m sticking to it this time.”

  “That sounds like a plan.” The happiness in his voice was unmistakable. “Maybe going to Mexico had been the right thing after all.”

  I thought back to a night several weeks before I left on this trip. The night my plans came together.

  *

  “Come on, Suzie!” Janice insisted over the phone. “You have to go with me to Acapulco. My Spanish is lousy, and it wouldn’t be any fun for me to go alone. Plus, I’ll pay for everything—all you have to do is say yes.”

  I had kept up my Spanish-speaking skills since college, that was true. Living in San Antonio I had plenty of opportunities to use it. But I didn’t think James would be happy with me gallivanting around in a foreign country with an old college girlfriend. I was an engaged woman, after all. Plus, there were all those bad memories from Mexico—a marriage and a man I had been trying to forget.

  “I can’t. I’m sorry, Janice, but I’ve got so much going on at work. There’s a new software product I have to document by the end of next month and some edits I’ve been doing for one of the other writers—”

  “We’re only going to be gone ten days, Suze,” she begged. “I think your boss can manage without you for a week.”

  “And James would miss me,” I countered, my resolve starting to break down. “He can’t do laundry worth a darn. I know he’d be calling me all the time.”

  “So what if he calls?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think about it. Let me know by Friday, okay?”

  “All right.” Janice had the tenacity of a badger sometimes.

  My plan had been to avoid her altogether. If I didn’t call her back by Friday, maybe it would be too late to book the flight or maybe it would be too expensive.

  But Janice had other plans for me.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t let you go?” James asked me a few days later when I walked in the door after a late day at the office.

  “Go? Go where?” My mind grew cluttered with the last minute details of a project at work.

  “To Mexico? With Janice?” He handed me a plate of food—James was an excellent cook—and gently pushed me into a chair at the table in our kitchen.

  Darn that Janice! “Oh.” I lifted a fork filled with spinach lasagna to my mouth. I had a short reprieve from answering as I chewed the savory bite.

  James hovered over me, waiting as I finished chewing and taking a long drink of milk. When I set my glass down he prompted, “Well?”

  “I really didn’t want to go, to tell you the truth. I tried to let her down easy.” I quickly scooped up another forkful of lasagna.

  “Why wouldn’t you want to go? Half the time I’ll be in Dallas.” He studied me, then, seeing my blank look, prompted, “The convention?”

  “I forgot.”

  “You forgot? I circled the dates in red on your calendar in your office, and you forgot?”

  “What do you want me to say, James?” I sighed, setting my fork on the edge of my plate. “That I would love to go? That I certainly don’t mind leaving my fiancé to go hang out with my single friend in Acapulco? In a bikini? With lots of unattached men around?”

  “I think you should go.”

  “Really,” I said, incensed.

  “For our sake, I think you should go.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Suzie, how long have we been engaged?”

  I hesitated, I hoped it wasn’t the same conversation we had so many times before. “Four years.”

  “And how many wedding dates have we chosen?”

  Yes, he headed into familiar territory. My heart sank. “Three.”

  “Three, Suzie. Three.” He paced the kitchen as I watched from my chair at the table, my food now cold in front of me.

  “So? What’s so terrible about that?” I stood up to take my dish to the sink. My appetite had suddenly disappeared.

  “I’m not getting any younger, Suzie. I want us to get married, you know that.” He stopped his pacing and came to stand next to me by the sink.

  We fell into our usual routine. I rinsed, he put the dishes in the dishwasher. We were quite a team.

  “I know.” I was ashamed of myself and ashamed of what I was doing to him. How much longer would he put up with me? What would be the last straw for him? I hated to think about it. I loved him, I really did, and I couldn’t imagine not being with him. But some things couldn’t be fixed so easily. If only I could get up the courage to tell him why I couldn’t get married.

  “I think you need to take this trip. I think we both need some time apart to think.” James shut the door of the dishwasher with a click, then dried his hands on a towel hanging from the stove.

  “We do?”

  “Yes.” He covered the remaining lasagna with tin foil. “I told Janice you were going. You’re flying in to Acapulco and meeting her there.”

  “What?”

  James placed the dish of lasagna in the refrigerator, closed the door, and headed toward the stairs, “She’s buying your plane ticket tomorrow. You should probably call her so you two can make some plans.”

  He left me standing in the kitchen alone, my mind whirling. Was this an ultimatum? I wished I could be honest with him about why I’d put off our wedding so many times. If he knew the truth, he would’ve been easier on me.

  The truth.

  That’s when the idea came to me. Why not confront my past and get that divorce. This trip could be my chance to fix things witho
ut hurting James. He wouldn’t have to know. He would never have to know.

  *

  I wanted to keep talking. Keep that bathroom door shut as long as I could. Maybe if I stayed in here long enough, Joaquin would disappear, and I could pretend nothing ever happened. At that moment I’d gotten so far off course from my original plan, I couldn’t see how I would be able to fix it.

  While James told me about the cool little gadgets and computer programs he was fiddling with in Dallas, one part of my brain thought about what to do.

  First, I would have to explain to Joaquin I had a fiancé and that episode on the bed had all been a mistake. Lust had taken over, memories of a past long over. Nothing more. Then, I needed to tell him I wanted a divorce. Maybe finding out I had a fiancé would put him off, make him angry enough to drop the intense looks, the heated touches.

  From now on, no more meeting him alone. Clearly, that had been a bad idea. Next time I talked to him, I would pick a more public place—a restaurant, the hotel lobby, the beach.

  “I miss you, honey,” I blurted out. It was true. I did miss him. I missed his predictable, solid self next to me. When we were together I was safe, loved, appreciated. James would never do anything surprising or erratic. After four years together, I could read him like a book. Each little expression—a raised eyebrow, a cocked half-smile with his one dimple showing—became a window into his mind only I could open.

  “I miss you, too,” James answered back.

  I paused. I could hear only a bit of static on the line. I wanted to tell him more about this trip, but the words wouldn’t come.

  “Hey, look, Suze, when you get back, I think we need to have a long talk.”

  “A long talk? About what?”

  “Us. You and me.”

  “You and me?”

  Joaquin knocked on the door. “Suzie, are you coming out of there?”

  Oh, God.

  “What was that noise?” James asked.

  “That? Oh, that was just Janice. She wants to know when I’ll be off the phone.” Panic rose in my throat. I tried to take a deep breath and calm myself. “We were about to go to lunch before you called.”

  “Suzie?” Joaquin called out.