by Piper Lennox
“Oh. My. God.” As soon as she’s inside, Mollie shoves the dress into my hands and runs to the window wall. “This is incredible! I can see the ocean from here.”
“Barely.” I drape the garment bag over the back of the couch and join her. The smallest piece of the beach is visible in the distance. “The other half of the lot? That’s where the ceremony will be. You can see more of the beach from there.”
“And you said that woman won’t mind?”
“Not even a little.” I look out at the other side of the lot, where Rochelle’s house still stands. Selling the unused half of her land to Luka—my idea, not to brag—gave her more than enough to pay off the mortgage and finish some renovations. She still talks about selling the place, sometimes, but at least now it’ll be on her terms. The minute she heard we’d be hosting a wedding, she jumped at the chance to help.
I check my watch again. It’s become a reflex this weekend. “The boys will be here soon, so take the dress up to my room before Co—”
The doorbell pings through the foyer and into the living room. Right on schedule.
While Mollie runs upstairs, the dress crinkling in its bag behind her, I let Colby inside. “Thank you,” I breathe, as she smiles, wipes her feet, and enters. “You have no idea what a lifesaver you are, right now.”
“It won’t be perfect,” she warns. She brandishes her sewing kit like a paramedic with a defibrillator. “It’s been a long time since I hemmed anything. I’m more accustomed to doing stitches on, like, living things, by this point.”
My phone buzzes; a text from Luka.
“Surfing with Kai,” it reads. “One hour. Two, tops. Promise.” A second later, I get a picture: a selfie of Luka, grinning with his sunglasses on, giving Kai’s back the finger several yards behind him. The ocean is perfectly, impossibly blue.
“Gonna teach this punk a lesson,” he types.
I shake my head, my smile involuntary, and put my phone away. “We might need some stitches on living things, before this weekend’s over,” I tell Colby.
Luka
“I am so sore.”
Tanya snorts as she disappears into her closet. “That’s what you get for surfing all the way up until the freaking rehearsal.”
“We made it, didn’t we?”
“I wouldn’t call whipping your truck into the driveway with thirty seconds to go ‘making it.’ And I definitely wouldn’t count rash guards and trunks as formal attire.”
“If you and Mollie had just let us change—”
“Everyone was waiting and starving. You had your chance.”
Part of me wants to keep bickering, partially because it’s just too easy, mostly because I hate not getting the last word. But so does Tanya, and I just don’t have the mental energy right now.
“Hey.” I flop across the bed as she exits the closet, shutting off the light. “Thanks for getting Mollie the new dress. Kai said you saved the day.”
“She would’ve done the same for me. Besides, the real star today was Colby. I don’t know how she hemmed that thing so fast, but it looks totally professional.”
“In her blood. The Harlowes have a natural talent for that kind of thing.”
“Still, it was nice of her.” She shakes out her hair and tightens her bathrobe, then rolls her eyes when I immediately undo the sash. “Luka.”
“Tanya.”
She pretends to cover herself back up, laughing when I grab the front of her robe and pull her down onto me. Even though she’s being the loudest, she shushes me, both of us breathing hard in the silence, listening for any sign that Kai or Mollie are still awake.
“They’re all the way downstairs,” I whisper. I hook her chin and make her look at me. “Come on, we haven’t had sex since we moved in. I’m going crazy.”
“Crazy? It’s been a week.” She motions to the boxes and suitcases we still haven’t unpacked, and the master bathroom still in need of its sink. “We didn’t even have a bed until two days ago.”
“Exactly. Let’s christen it.”
Her laugh is softer this time, laced with slow acceptance. “I thought you were ‘so sore’ from surfing.”
“I am.” I slide my hands down her back and hold her against me as I lift my hips. Even through clothing, the contact makes both of us sigh. “Help me feel better.”
“You know what?” She rolls off me, shrugging herself out of the robe when I grab it and try to pull her back. “I spent all day getting stuff ready for this wedding. Mollie and I were losing our minds. And you were out surfing, all the way up to the rehearsal. Why should I make you feel better?”
I prop myself up on my elbow, head in hand, and make sarcastic listening noises while she speaks. Under the covers, while the bickering dances between real and pretend, I brush my fingers across her bare sex.
She keeps her gaze on mine, unblinking.
“Fine, I’m sorry I went surfing.” I push up and kiss her, flicking my tongue across her bottom lip. “Bet I can make it up to you.”
“I’m not really in the mood.”
My laugh is unchecked; she covers my mouth, giggling.
“Don’t even lie,” I whisper, as my fingers trace her opening, wet and more than willing. I push one inside, then the second. She barely has time to react before there’s a third.
My tongue trails from her jaw to earlobe. “See?”
“Luka,” she breathes, writhing under me as I flex. “Please....”
“I know, baby.” I keep my voice low: in volume, for discretion, but also in pitch. Just to drive her crazy. “You want more.”
With every inch I lower my mouth, her sex tightens. When I draw her nipple into my mouth and flick my tongue over the skin, she says my name again, chest heaving with the effort of staying quiet.
“You’re lucky we have company,” I growl, when I break the torture on one and immediately move for the other, the sweetness of her perfume rising to meet me as she arches her back, “or I’d have you screaming my name right now.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
I look at her. “Is that a bet?”
Slowly, she smiles.
“Uh-huh. That’s what I thought.”
I encircle her navel with my tongue and think of the time I drank tequila off this body, licked salt from this skin. All the nights I’d trace the shape of her curves in the dark and wake in a sweat, realizing she wasn’t beside me anymore.
For all my talk, I can’t wait much longer, myself. I pull my mouth down to her sex and envelop her quickly, drawing the pattern and setting the rhythm I know she needs.
“Yes, yes,” she gasps. I feel her hands on my head, holding me against her, as though I’d ever stop before she was ready.
When she comes, I shut my eyes and savor every aspect: the shudder of her sex around my fingers, the wetness I’ve brought out in her. The heat radiating from her skin and the shallow sheen on her breasts. The look of helplessness on her face when she finally gives in to all of it.
When she finally gives in to me.
Tanya
The music starts from the sound system. This is it. I take a breath.
I feel a hand plant itself firmly on my ass.
“Guess who.”
“It’d better be my boyfriend,” I hiss, all smiles, as the ushers—Jake and P.J., the latter of whom I’m surprised actually showed up in a suit—open the double doors to the back patio. Luka quickly repositions his arm, bent at the elbow, holding it out for me to take. I do.
“You look beautiful,” he whispers. The hibiscus petals that make up the aisle, snaking down Rochelle’s deck stairs and out to the altar set up under a koa tree, feel like fresh snow under our feet. “Makes me want to do a much louder repeat of last night.”
“I’m going to murder you,” I say sweetly, nodding hello to Rose and David as we near the front, “if you don’t stop talking.”
He laughs in his throat. “Seriously, though...you do. Look beautiful.”
My anger melts, jus
t like that. How I ever fell for someone who can rile me up and cool me off in seconds flat is beyond me. “Thank you. You don’t look too bad, yourself.”
We part ways at the end of the aisle. Luka taps Kai’s arm with the back of his hand, who just smiles like the lovesick guy he is. God help me, I already have tears in my eyes, parked there ever since I helped Mollie get dressed.
Actually, ever since I did her hair.
“I hate all of these,” she’d pouted this morning, flipping through the bridal magazine again.
“You can wear your hair down if you want,” I reminded her. “It’s your wedding. Who cares if your hair blows in the wind a little?”
She looked out the window at my backyard, where the trees and string lights for the reception were swinging wildly in the breeze. “‘A little.’ Right.”
“She really should have it up,” her mother remarked, in a quiet voice. I’d known from the minute I met her, back in college, that Mollie’s mom was not quite so sweet as her cardigans and animal brooches made her appear. If there were such a thing as a Most Passive-Aggressive superlative in high school, the woman would have been a shoe-in.
“Up it is,” I said, inhaling slowly, like I could draw patience from the air itself. I combed Mollie’s hair back from her face and told her to close her eyes. “Don’t look until I’m finished. If you hate it, I’ll take it out and do something else.” She winced as I drew the comb through a section and set it aside, readying it for a braid. “But trust me: you’ll love this.”
As I worked, I thought of my own mother.
It was probably all this wedding commotion, the air practically buzzing with barely-concealed tears; maybe being in such close proximity to Mollie and her mom was getting to me. Whatever it was, I couldn’t push the thoughts away like I normally would.
The thing was, I didn’t want to.
I liked thinking of my mom while I braided Mollie’s hair. It made it easier, somehow, to concentrate on the tension of the strands between my fingers, less of a hassle to work the comb through tangles more gently than I normally would. Even Mollie had to admit this was the least my braiding her hair had ever hurt.
“Are you doing a French braid? It feels different.”
“Keep your eyes shut. Don’t make me yell at you on your wedding day.”
I pinned the first braid into place, then instructed her mother for more bobby pins and hairspray. The longer I worked, the quieter she became. They both did.
“Where did you learn to do this?” Mollie’s mother touched one of the small pieces I’d pulled out of the front, letting it curl against her temple. I could barely control the urge to spank the woman’s hand.
“My mom,” I answered, around the pin in my mouth. In the mirror, I saw Mollie give a bittersweet kind of smile, eyes still shut.
I was surprised she didn’t reprise her usual advice of writing my mom a letter, getting everything out in the open and starting over. Luka had recently turned traitor, agreeing that it was a good idea. Each time, I ignored them until they shut up.
But right then, thinking of that antique mirror and the cool touch of my mother’s hands on my scalp, I could see it. A clean sheet of paper, filling up fast with so many things I’d never said. I couldn’t yet see the outcome, what would happen if we did, in fact, start over. But at least I could see trying. Even if I wasn’t ready, just yet.
Finally, with the very last of my clear elastic bands used up and a cloud of hairspray slowly suffocating us all, I was finished. “Take a look.”
Mollie opened her eyes. Her mom was grinning beside us, the three of us staring in the mirror as she took in the view: a braided crown, practically princess-worthy, with a few curls effortlessly falling near her face.
“Tan,” she whispered, already breaking down into a fresh sob, “I love it.”
“Told you.” I swung her hand in mine as she grabbed it over her shoulder. “Now quit crying so I can do your makeup. Waterproof mascara doesn’t work when your eyes are already wet.”
The wind, miraculously, calmed down to an easy breeze around the hilltop as the ceremony drew closer. Now, as the music changes and the small crowd on the grass stands, all eyes on the backdoor, the air is completely still.
Mollie steps into view. I hear more than a few gasps, along with several packets of tissues opening, and look at Kai just in time to catch him cover his mouth, broken out into the biggest smile I’ve ever seen.
When I notice the tiniest glimmer of water on his lashes, I’m dead.
Luka’s grinning, too, but mostly at me, already a mess as Mollie and her dad start down the aisle. I’m not sobbing, thank God, but it’s hardly a few subtle teardrops, either.
“Tissue?” he mouths, when I catch his eye.
I manage to wink at him. “Got my own,” I mouth back, and pull out the wad of tissues I stashed in my bra. He can barely control his laughter.
Luka
“Remind me why I agreed to this, again?”
I hold out my hand. She takes it, letting me help her over the last of the rocks. “Because you love me.”
“No. I must have been drunk.” Tanya pulls a bottle of water from her backpack and chugs at least half. “No way would I have soberly agreed to go hiking the day after a wedding. Why didn’t we bring the truck, if we aren’t even hitting the rest of the trail?”
“We don’t need the truck. This is the easiest trail there is. You’ve already done it once, and we hiked even farther last time,” I remind her. “Just remember how amazing the view is.”
“Oh, I remember. Still not worth it.”
The truth is, by now, even I’m feeling it. The climb really isn’t that hard, but we both had more than a few drinks at Kai and Mollie’s reception. “Okay,” I confess, “maybe we should have waited until tomorrow.”
“No,” she sighs, shaking a rock out of her sneaker, using me for balance while she puts it back on, “I’ve got to be at the paper for some meeting about the Wine and Food Festival.”
“You workaholics. Always keeping one foot in the office.”
She elbows me, laughing. “You have work tomorrow, too, remember?”
“Don’t remind me.” I channel my inner slacker to make this sound as convincing as possible. In reality, I don’t have work tomorrow. Neither does she, courtesy of my phone call to her boss.
Not that she has any idea, yet.
We walk to the cliff’s edge, where a group of people are either pacing nervously, hopping around to psych themselves up, or dripping wet as they ascend the rusty ladder and get ready to jump again. Tanya looks down into the water, a swirling mix of clear blue and bright green.
“You know why I like this spot?”
She looks at me. “Because you can pretend to push me in and scare the shit out of me?”
“No.” I smile and reach for her sunglasses, slipping them off gently. “Because this place,” I whisper, “is the only spot on the entire island where the water ever comes close to matching your eyes.”
Slowly, a deep blush rises into her cheeks. “That was smooth as hell,” she laughs, breathless.
We sit on the rocks and watch people jump, their screams pealing back to us from the water, just before the splash. The ground is hot, like sitting on asphalt. I lie back with my hands behind my head and let the heat draw the last of the alcohol from my pores.
“Mollie was so beautiful. I swear, I’ve never seen her smile so much.”
“And cry,” I add, pulling my hat over my eyes.
“Nah, I’ve seen her cry more than that. Seeing Kai tear up, on the other hand....”
“Oh, my God,” I laugh. “I thought you were going to collapse when he first saw her.”
She hits me. “Shut up. It was sweet.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I shift as she lies down beside me, resting her head on my chest. “Maybe one of these days I’ll get to see you in a wedding dress. I hate to break it to you, though: no way you’d make me cry. I’m way too macho.”
&nbs
p; “Beautiful proposal.”
“Oh, no. When I propose for real, it’s going to blow your mind. Trust me.”
“Have you been talking to Mollie?”
“I’m just saying, you know I don’t do anything small. Go big or go home.”
She sits back up and rummages through the backpacks for more water. “I vote ‘go home.’ I need a nap.”
“When I propose,” I go on, talking over her, “you’ll sense it coming. Like a hurricane or something. It’ll be that amazing. Like fireworks in the sky spelling it out. Or taking you somewhere really incredible, like the top of a skyscraper, or on some million-dollar yacht, or underwater while snorkeling—”
“Snorkeling?”
“—or on top of a cliff,” I finish, shrugging as I cross my arms over my chest. “Whatever.”
I can’t see her, but I feel her eyes on me. It’s even more intense than the sun. “Luka.”
“Hmm?” I flick the bill of my hat up and squint at her.
“Don’t joke about that. I mean, it’s one thing when you’re saying stuff I know is a joke, but when it sounds serious—”
“Who said it wasn’t?” I sit up and reach for my backpack; she immediately scoots away, like I’m about to pull out a jar of hornets.
I hold up the bottle of water. “No ring. Sorry to disappoint.”
She exhales, hand on her chest, and laughs as she hits me. “Jerk.”
We get up, stretching and sharing complaints over our sore muscles, which quickly turns into bickering over whose hurt worse. “I was in four-inch heels all night,” she reminds me, as we go back to the edge and look down at the water again. The sun is higher now, fewer shadows on the waves; the green has disappeared, leaving only blue.
“Okay, you win. Heels are probably much worse than dress shoes.” A kid, about twelve or thirteen, leaps from the platform a few feet to our right. “Dare you to jump.”
Tanya watches the kid’s dive; he comes out of form a little too soon, jackknifing so one leg slaps the water. Even though he comes up laughing, she grimaces. “No way.”
