“Kim, that’s enough,” Kevin said, keeping his voice level.
He could see Blake’s shoulders growing tense, and he was getting that look about his jaw that he got before he blew his gasket. Blake didn’t lose his temper often, but when he did, things got real ugly, real fast.
“Can we just call a truce for the rest of the week?” Nicki suggested. “We only have a couple days more on the island, and there’s no point making it unpleasant by bickering all the time. Kim, Tanya, are you guys into scuba today, or not?”
“Sunbathing and reading is all I’ve got on my agenda,” Tanya said, standing, and grabbing her sunglasses. “Kim? You coming?”
After a moment’s hesitation, Kim got up as well and followed her sister in a huff out of the dining area.
“We’re getting too old for this shit,” Blake mumbled as he joined Kevin and Nicki at the table. “These enforced family reunions are fuckin’ brutal, man. Never liked those two bitches when we were kids, and still don’t like ‘em now.”
“Blake, don’t call them …” Nicki chided. “Bitches. That’s not …”
“Not what? Nice? Are either of them nice, Nicki? I don’t give a shit if we’re related.”
Nicki exhaled deeply. “Anyway … so this trip back to Miami. What’s that about?”
“You never mind what it’s about. I don’t recall you telling me you were getting busy with your security guy. So maybe I’m entitled to a little privacy as well.”
Kevin sighed. “You still in your feelings about that? I told you, Nicki only told me since we’ve been here.”
“Yeah, but at least she told you.”
“Blake, I would have said something, but you already have plenty on your plate, don’t you think? I mean, what with Lia here, and everything, your situation was already …”
“I’m a little sick of being a ‘situation’ to tell you the truth,” he said. He took a bite of his toast and looked from Kevin to Nicki and back again. “I think I’m ready to straighten my shit out.”
Kevin froze and looked at his brother, then at Nicki. “What d’you mean?”
“I’m thinking about telling the old man. Just coming out with it. No pun intended. Hell, I bet the old bastard already knows. And Ma … you know how she is. I’d bet my right nut she’s been known.”
“N…now?” Nicki stuttered. “You want to tell him now? While we’re all here on the island?”
Blake shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. At least then there’s no immediate escape. For either of us. We’d have to have it out.”
“But with Kim and Tanya here?” Nicki asked. “And Justin and Felicity. And Uncle …”
“Nicki, they’re all going to know. Sooner, or later,” Blake said. He shook his head. “Maybe sooner’s better.”
“But why now?” Kevin asked. “Don’t you want to think about it some more, or …”
“Why are you two tryin’ to talk me out of it?” Blake demanded. “You think it’s better this way? Me not being able to …”
“Blake!” Nicki said. She went around to his side of the table and sat directly next to him, putting a hand over his. “Of course not! We want you to do what feels right for you. But we don’t want you to do it in a way that’s rash, or poorly thought-out. What if Daddy …?”
“Yells? Shouts? Disinherits me?” Blake shook his head. “You just don’t know. None of that is as bad as where I’m at right now.”
Kevin watched as Nicki’s eyes filled. She rested her chin on Blake’s shoulder, and he leaned his head against hers.
“Okay, so … what can we do to help?” she asked quietly.
“I don’t know yet,” Blake said. “I’m going back home for a minute. Think it over a little bit. And maybe when I come back …” He shrugged.
Kevin said nothing. His own heart was beating hard, as though he was the one who was contemplating exposing his deepest, most closely-held secret. He hoped Blake knew what he was doing, because though he was sometimes a colossal pain-in-the-ass, he didn’t want his brother hurt.
“Anyway, lemme get out of here before y’all scare me out of it,” Blake said, standing abruptly. He rubbed the top of Nicki’s curly head briefly and offered Kevin some pound. “Take care of my girl while I’m gone today,” he said. “Make sure she has some fun.”
When he had walked away toward the dock and was out of earshot, Nicki looked at Kevin, shaking her head. “That was so strange, the way he said that, right? His girl? Like he meant it.”
Kevin grinned and nodded, thinking about Lia and that way she had, of just crawling right over, under or through a person’s defenses, no matter how determined they were to build them up.
“I think he did. He meant it.”
“I can’t!” Lia said for the second time. Treading water next to Kevin, she had shoved the mask aside and struggled to get the oxygen tank off her back.
“Let’s get you back on the boat before you take that off.”
Making a huffing noise, Lia swam back over to the boat, grasping the hand of their driver for the day, Winston, accepting his help as he pulled her up and out of the water. Kevin swam after her. Nicki was still down below with Justin, both of them enjoying the sights of the coral and fish beneath, tranquil, and unaware of the tantrum unfolding above.
“How about snorkeling instead?” Kevin asked as he climbed out.
Lia was shrugging her gear off her shoulders, peeling off her wetsuit and seemed not to have heard him.
“Lia. Snorkeling?”
“No,” she said, her back to him, and her voice barely audible.
She was wearing a turquoise swimsuit this time, a one-piece that Kevin remembered her having picked on the shopping spree with Nicki the day before they came to the island. It was a shapeless piece of fabric on a hanger then, but on her it was beyond hot, cut high at the thighs, low in the front and back and under the arms. Completely unsuitable for scuba. But yeah, hot as hell.
“Hey,” Kevin addressed Winston. “You mind going down, check on my sister and cousin?”
“Yeah man. Sure.”
Without missing a beat, Winston took a clean dive off the edge of the boat, cutting cleanly through the water.
“You see that?” Kevin asked, incredulously. “Dude can swim like a fish. Always makes me mad-jealous. He’ll probably go down twenty feet and not even lose a stroke.”
Still Lia said nothing, except now she was pulling on her denim shorts.
“Hey,” he said, going over to her. He touched her shoulder and turned her to face him. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” she said. But she sounded testy.
“Lia, it’s obviously not nothing. What’s up?”
“I just … hate it when I can’t do something.”
He thought for a moment, recalling her near-panic once the mask was over her face, her wide eyes behind the glass, and then her reluctance to go any deeper than about six feet once they were submerged.
“Are you upset because … the scuba …?” Kevin laughed, and grabbed both her shoulders, pulling her against him. “Lia. C’mon!”
“Don’t laugh at me!” she said.
“Okay, sorry.” Kevin tried to arrange his features into some semblance of seriousness and looked down into her large, limpid eyes. She was freakin’ adorable. “It’s okay. It’s kind of hard to get used to. Being so far down, surrounded by water … it’s intimidating.”
“Were you? Intimidated the first time you did it?”
“My first dive, I almost hyperventilated. My instructor had to grab my leg to keep me from surfacing too fast and getting an embolism.”
“You’re making that up.” Lia said.
Kevin laughed again. “Yeah, I am. I saw that in a movie. I fell in love with it my first time. And now I do it every chance I get. And you might not love it now, but I’m going to help you love it. Just as much as I do.”
Lia smirked. “I doubt that.”
“You doubt me?” Kevin leaned in, and touched her fo
rehead with his, then pressed his lips to hers, licking the saltwater from the seam, and then kissing her deeper when she parted them for him.
Lia shook her head when he pulled back. “No,” she whispered. “I don’t doubt you. Just the appeal of scuba-diving.”
“You want to go back?”
Lia shook her head, her lips a slight pout.
“You want to swim some more? Snorkel and then maybe in a little bit try scuba again?”
She shrugged.
Kevin grinned and pulled her against his wet chest. Lia wrapped her arms about his waist.
“Wow,” he said, speaking against the damp skin of her temple. “Who would’ve thought you were such a big crybaby?”
Lia shook against his chest as she laughed.
“Hey! What happened to you guys?” Nicki had surfaced with Winston, and was treading water next to the boat while Winston climbed out, not even breathless from his free-dive.
“Lia needed a minute. We’re hangin’ out up here. Probably snorkel for a little while.”
“Okay. See you in a bit.” Nicki put her mask on once again and headed back down.
~16~
Kingfisher Key, FL, Thursday 9:41 a.m.
“They’ll be coming up soon,” Kevin said, glancing at his dive watch. “It’s been more than forty minutes for them both. You sure you don’t want to jump back in and give it another shot?”
Lia shook her head. “Don’t think so.”
“Okay.”
He didn’t push, which she appreciated. Scuba was one of those pastimes that everyone probably thought they would love, and Lia was no different. She thought she would love it, but now knew from her very brief experience that it wasn’t something she’d likely want to do again. The ocean seemed even more vast when viewed from within it. Underwater, looking about twenty feet or so ahead, Lia saw nothing but a murky horizon from which fish, large and small, might suddenly appear. She imagined that sharks twice her size with teeth bared, might come swimming toward her. Runaway thoughts like that made it impossible for her to enjoy the dive. That, and the sensation of being in a place where she wasn’t a native inhabitant, where only the hubris of human technology permitted her to be.
“I don’t like flying either,” she said. “It’s the lack of control, I think.”
She saw a spark of interest ignite in Kevin’s eyes and he cocked his head to one side, waiting for her to go on. He was sitting opposite her on deck, both of them with legs outstretched. The boat swayed gently, and the sun overhead heated their skin. Kevin had shed his diving suit, and was now once again in baggy swim trunks, and shirtless. He was browner, and more golden than he had been when they first arrived on the island. Occasionally, he reached out and placed a hand on her calf, grasped her ankle, or idly stroked her skin.
All morning, in Justin and Nicki’s presence, they had been strangely shy and hesitant with each other. The only other time Kevin had touched her at all before now was when he was hugging her, comforting her because she’d been frightened by the dive. The previous evening’s intimacies had unleashed something between them; something that was much harder to control if they made any contact whatsoever, so they silently agreed to keep the touching at a minimum.
And something else had changed—Kevin was no longer as funny, as teasing, nor as glib, as he had been. And neither was she. The night they shared had suddenly made things serious.
During those few hours the night before, they’d had awkward sex while they learned each other’s ticklish, or preferred, or taboo spots; they’d had sensual sex, touching, and tasting, aided by that bottle of wine. And then finally, when they were a little weary, but reluctant to part, they had serious sex. It was the kind that people who had been together for a long time had, moving by instinct, unembarrassed by the sounds they made, and staring into each other’s eyes.
After that last bout, before they fell asleep, Lia told Kevin about Cal. About meeting a beautiful boy with green eyes who was soulful and artistic, and who sold her on a dream of moving out West where it was warm almost all the time. ‘We’ll make love, make art and then one day, make babies,’ he’d told her.
‘And that was all it took for me to be hooked,’ Lia had explained. ‘Because he fed this dumb fantasy vision I had of myself as some kind of bohemian artist who would live life on her own terms.’
She described to Kevin how Stephanie had begged her not to go, and told her she was making a mistake. And she explained how within one short month of moving she realized her best friend had been right, but still tried to stick it out. Cal wasn’t artistic, he was lazy. He didn’t want to get a regular job, or work hard at anything. And somewhere along the line, he had learned that the guise of creating art permitted him liberties that other people didn’t have—he could sleep late, dress poorly, and be a half-assed participant in life. Just so long as he had the mask of a “creative.”
‘His paintings,’ Lia confessed to Kevin something she had never shared with anyone, not even Stephanie, ‘were awful. And for a long time, I convinced myself it was just that I wasn’t cool enough to understand them.’
‘And so, you left?’
“Not because he was a fake-artist,” Lia admitted. ‘But because he was cheating on me. Wasted almost two years of my life.’
‘Relationships are never a waste,’ Kevin told her. ‘As long as you learned something.’
Lia lay there, her head on his chest, thinking about her crappy little apartment, her under-employed status, and her rapidly dwindling faith in her own art. And she felt a little better. She had learned a lot from being with Cal; and had made mistakes she was certain never to make again. So maybe she could let herself off the hook now, and stop berating herself for the time she spent with him.
“You didn’t seem scared of flying when we came down here,” Kevin pointed out.
“Well, it’s not like it’s abject terror or anything. But I’m never comfortable in an airplane. And when we flew down, I was too starstruck to care that we might plummet thirty-seven thousand feet to our deaths.”
“Starstruck?” Kevin looked amused. “By who? Blake?”
Lia nodded. “Seems stupid now, considering I know now what a goofball he is. But yeah.”
“He can be an unmitigated fool,” Kevin agreed.
“But he’s also pretty amazing at times.”
“He likes you, too.”
Lia looked down at her lap, feeling a stab of shame.
Two days ago, when they were sitting at that bar Kevin said something that her mind kept returning to. ‘What’s happening on the island,’ he said, ‘that’s a game. But what’s happening with you on me? That’s real.’ And it felt that way to her as well, but it couldn’t be completely real until and unless she came clean and told him one key fact about herself that she’d kept concealed since they met. She wasn’t a model, and had stolen the listing just so she could get the exorbitant fee. Some might even interpret what she did as theft of the fee itself. After all, that was money that belonged to the agency, not her. Blake and Nicki didn’t know either, but with Kevin, because of all they had shared, it felt worse to know that she had one extra layer of pretense beneath the one he had paid for.
“Kevin,” she began, carefully, slowly. “I want to tell …”
“Damn that was good!”
They both sprang up in unison, and looked over the edge of the boat. Justin was bobbing in the water, his goggles pulled up to the top of his head. His eyes were bright, his pupils dilated.
“I swear, every time I do down, I get high,” he said, swimming toward the edge of the boat.
“Where’s Nicki?” Kevin asked, helping him out.
“Right behind me.”
On cue, moments later, Nicki surfaced as well. Her long, dark hair was loose, tendrils swirling about her shoulders in the water.
“I think that’s my limit,” she said, sounding regretful. “It was so beautiful down there today. Lia, I can’t believe you missed it. It’s so … medita
tive, y’know?”
“I don’t know,” Lia said dryly.
“You didn’t like it?” Nicki, too, was helped into the boat. In the wetsuit, her long legs appeared even longer, her browning skin flushed and more radiant.
“Nope.” Lia shook her head.
“Oh Lia!” Nicki poked out her lower lip. “I’m sorry. I was so sure you would.”
Nicki sounded genuinely apologetic, as though she could possibly have known or had some control over Lia’s reaction to her first dive. Once again, Lia felt that stab of guilt. These were good people, kind people. She on the other hand, was a fraud.
“It’s fine.” Lia shook her head. “Kevin kept me company.”
Nicki looked at her brother, then at Lia, and then back at Kevin. She smiled.
“Well, that’s great then.” She started unzipping her wetsuit, a little self-satisfied look playing about her lips.
“Now I’m hungry as hell,” Justin announced. “How ‘bout y’all?”
“We’ve got the roasted pig for lunch,” Nicki said. “Cooked Cuban-style in that box thingie.”
“La caja,” Kevin said. He looked at Lia. “You’re going to love it. It’s tender … flavorful … delicious.”
When he said those last three words, his eyes held hers and Lia almost blushed, wondering whether he was really referring to Cuban roasted pig.
“Home, Jeeves!” Justin clapped Winston on the shoulder as he started up the engine.
Nicki shook her head and gave Lia a look.
“Just as obnoxious as his sisters,” Kevin said leaning in to speak directly into Lia’s ear.
The heavy revelation that she had planned to share with Kevin was, for the moment, forgotten. And Lia concentrated only on the incredible sensation of having her face whipped by the salty, warm breeze off the rich, blue sea.
“Lia, why don’t you come sit over here with us?”
She had only just filled her plate with rice and beans, maduros, and a heap of the roasted pig that everyone had been looking forward to when she heard Mrs. Morgan’s voice. She was calling Lia over to the table she shared with her husband, with the wave of her elegant hand.
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