by Nella Tyler
The hand on my waist grew firmer instead of more hesitant. He angled his head to the side, and our lips parted. We began to explore this new territory, and my whole body felt like I’d been engulfed in flame, and suddenly, I pulled away.
“I, um… we probably shouldn’t.” I was out of breath. I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d been kissed like that.
Dexter’s breathing was equally ragged. “Probably not,” he agreed, despite the ruddiness in his cheeks. “I want to show you something. Tomorrow. If you don’t have any plans, anyway; if you’ve got some time.”
I raised my eyebrows, and he laughed. “Not like that. Nina can come, too.”
“She’d love to!” Nina’s voice through the door made me groan and roll my eyes.
“Fantastic!” He laughed and stepped away from me. I almost protested the sudden space between us. “I’ll see you at 8, then.”
And just like that, he was gone, and I went into the room to have a serious talk with Nina about respecting personal boundaries.
Chapter 9
Dexter
“I wanna go,” Tyler said.
I raised my eyebrow at him. “Absolutely not.”
Tyler groaned and pushed back in his seat. We’d come to the coffeehouse at a particularly busy hour, about 7 o’clock on a Wednesday, so when he pushed back, he bumped into someone waiting in line to order. “Sorry,” he said to the person, and then pulled his chair back up.
“You wouldn’t like it,” I assured him.
“There’s gonna be girls. I love girls.”
“And making fun of me, and ruining things for me, and being an ass.” I tapped my fingers on the table and glanced at the counter to see if my coffee was ready. I’d called earlier and gotten coffee orders from Nina and Briella as well.
“So why did you invite her friend, then? Are you… you do not get to use the boat for threesomes. That’s fucking unfair.” Tyler sat up in his seat suddenly.
“I invited her because I wanted Briella to say yes, not because I’m a fucking pervert,” I said. I rolled my eyes at Tyler’s insinuation. Honestly, inviting Nina had been more about the nervousness of the moment. I wanted to make it crystal clear that I wasn’t suggesting we have sex, we were just hanging out, and inviting Nina cemented that nothing sexual would happen. Frankly, even if I got put in that situation, I wouldn’t have known what to do and probably would have opted out anyway.
“Whatever. I’m still a little pissed.”
“That’s fine. But you’ve gotta understand that I don’t want you scaring her off,” I said. “Briella’s… she’s special, I think.”
Tyler made a face at me. “Gross. Fine, whatever. Tell me about it later, or don’t, if it’s gonna be more romantic bullshit.”
I could tell that he was clearly still annoyed with me about the entire situation, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it. The coffees came out in a little carrier, so I picked them up and went on my way. One black coffee for me, one mocha for Nina, and an Earl Grey tea for Briella. Or, rather, hot water, and I’d brought an assortment of tea bags after Nina told me that Briella preferred tea to coffee.
The drinks were still hot when I reached the hotel room. Briella opened the door, and I almost wanted to cry at my situation. She was unbelievably beautiful, impossibly charming, and definitely leaving in about a week. Yet here I was, prolonging this interaction as though there was no chance that I would be hurt immeasurably when she left.
“Good morning. Nina’s still getting ready. You can come in. Might take a while to find a place to sit down. It’s been trashed,” Briella said, referring to the bedroom.
It had been trashed. There were shopping bags, clothes, and beach towels laying around everywhere. I suspected that Nina was the culprit of the mess. One side of the room was significantly cleaner than the other, and it was the side that Briella sat down in, and motioned for me to join her.
I offered her a cup, and she shook her head. “I don’t drink coffee,” she said.
“It’s water,” I explained. I pulled the plastic bag filled with tea bags out of my pocket, and she grinned.
“Nina told you!”
“Yeah. I didn’t know what kind, so I got… whatever they had at the store, honestly.” I’d grabbed one of everything. I didn’t drink tea, but there was plenty of it in my house now.
Briella selected an Earl Grey tea and unwrapped the package to drop the bag in the water. “Thank you so much. Where are we going today?”
“I wanted to keep it a surprise,” I told her.
She put the cap back on the drink and raised an eyebrow at me.
“It’s all perfectly legal,” I said. Realizing how dodgy that sounded, I shook my head. “Not that I would do anything illegal. Or, you know—”
She laughed. “It’s okay.”
“You’ll have cell service, so you’ll definitely be able to call the cops if you hate it,” I told her solemnly. “Or, Nina can kill me.”
“I think it’s more likely Nina would kill you,” Briella agreed. “She’s small, but she’s very fierce. And protective. Although, I’m not sure where we’re going that she would need to be protective.”
“Not telling,” I repeated, and she stuck her tongue out at me. I had the urge to kiss her at that moment, to return to what felt absolutely natural, and Nina emerged from the bathroom.
Most of the way to the docks, the girls tried to get me to tell them where they were going. I made sure that they were comfortable with that it was a surprise. I didn’t want them to think I was a murderer or some creep—I’d done enough to suggest I was a horrible psychopath. So instead of telling them where we were going, I let them know that when we got there, they had full freedom to decide whether or not they wanted to go.
That made no sense until we arrived.
“A boat?” Nina walked up to the boat and peered at it like it wasn’t real. “This is a fucking yacht.”
“Or, just a regular one,” Briella offered, and I laughed at the snappy joke.
“I’m a little bit, um… I hate the ocean,” Nina said.
“You love the beach!” Briella returned.
“The beach, yes. The ocean, no,” Nina said. “Remember that cruise we took?”
“Oh, right. Seasick.” Briella nodded slowly.
I frowned. “Nina, I can drive you back if you’d like. Or we can find something else to do. I don’t want anyone getting sick.”
“Nuh-uh. I’m not missing any of this.” Nina resolved.
Briella looked almost disappointed that her friend would be coming with us, which excited me. She seemed to want alone time with me. I helped her and Nina both get onto the boat, and talked to the captain, a man who went by ‘Sarge’ and spoke mostly in grunts.
When the boat started to move, Nina went below deck to lay down. I went up to the sunroof with Briella, and we sat with the sun on our backs, watching the water while the wind lapped at her hair.
“I’ve never been on a yacht before,” Briella said. “My family rented a motorboat once, and we drove that all up and down Lake Houston. But that wasn’t a yacht.”
“I hope it doesn’t come off as… pretentious,” I said.
Briella smiled. “It does,” she assured me. “But I like it.”
That was a very fair assertion. It reminded me of the previous night when we’d had our date. She was honest, above all, and didn’t seem to think of me as anything more important than I was because of my money. I probably should have found that irritating, and instead, I was thrilled to find someone who wanted to talk to me and not to my wallet.
“I’m still surprised you’ve chosen to talk to me,” I admitted, after a moment of appreciating the quietness of the water.
“What?” Briella glanced at me like I’d grown a third head.
“Well, you know, I’m an investment firm worker. Those are arguably two of the least sexy words in the English language,” I pointed out. “You plan weddings and talk to people from all over the pla
ce and go to weddings. It’s a lot of fun. At least it sounds like it to me.”
“Having a yacht sounds like fun to me,” Briella pointed out. “I think the grass is always greener, you know?”
That was a solid point. Regardless of situation, people always tended to want something other than what they had. I thought of how I had Tiffany and wanted Briella. Or did I have Tiffany?
“Something’s been kind of bothering me,” she said.
I hoped it wasn’t anything horribly serious. We’d gotten a ways away from the mainland now, and while we had internet, there wasn’t any way to get back quickly. “Yes?”
“The woman you were with the night that I met you, the blonde. You said she was a blind date, right?”
I had expected this to come up. “Yeah. Yeah, she was. My dad wanted me to, um, meet with her, and see if we would hit it off. Business prospects and such.”
Briella scrunched her face up. “That’s awful. People should get together for love, emotional reasons, not for business.”
“I think so too. But it doesn’t always work out like that when you’re up top in a company.” I shrugged. “He was hoping to secure a lot of money with her family. I don’t really know what I’m going to tell him yet, honestly.”
Briella quieted and said, “I know what that’s like, I think. Feeling like you’re obligated to be with someone that you don’t really want to be with.”
“You do?”
She looked for a moment like she might elaborate, and then she shook her head. “Yeah, long story short, I do. But now I’m on vacation.” She smiled. “And on a yacht, for that matter. Can you believe Nina’s seasick?”
“I don’t know her well enough to think it’s strange.”
“It’s not strange, just… we’re on a yacht in Florida, and she’s sleeping below deck!” Briella laughed and tilted her head towards the sun. “It’s so beautiful out here.”
The yacht wasn’t beautiful, though. Nor was the ocean, though it had caught my eye many times before. Briella’s face, lit aglow by the morning sun, and her eyes beaming from the light that bounced off the ocean: that was beautiful. “It is,” I agreed quietly.
The boat hit a wave, and Briella was knocked a bit off kilter. She scooted to the side slightly, and her thigh was against mine. She didn’t move it, but rather stayed there closer to me. I tried to keep my thoughts on the yacht and not anywhere else. Her hand found mine, and I held it while we talked more about light subjects.
“I am sorry about the business with Nina,” I said, as the yacht began to return to the docks. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have scheduled this.”
“Oh, don’t worry about her,” Briella said. “She’s just glad to get out of her hotel room.”
“If you say so.”
“And to be honest with you, I don’t think she had anything planned for this trip,” Briella said.
I smiled. I remembered that she’d told me something like that before, that Nina had gone to sleep the first night they’d come to Florida. “Wasn’t it her idea, though?” I echoed what I’d said that night.
“Yup. But she likes to sort of wing things. That’s where we differ. I plan probably too much.” Briella shook her head.
“Well, you’re a wedding planner. Some of those professional skills have to carry over,” I pointed out.
She smiled. “Ideally, they do. But I’m terrible at keeping a tidy space, so it all evens out.”
I thought about my own house. The maid who cleaned the parts of my house that I never visited didn’t clean my room or the kitchen, for the most part. I cleaned those spaces. For someone in my social class, that was relatively uncommon, but I knew that Briella would probably laugh at me for having a maid in the first place.
“I’m going to take Nina back to the hotel when we get back,” Briella said, “but after that, we can meet for dinner tomorrow.”
I raised my eyebrows at her request.
“If you want, I mean.”
“No! I mean, yes, I do, I do. I was saying ‘no’ because I didn’t want you to think I didn’t want to,” I hastily explained myself.
Briella shook her head. She turned me into an absolute mess, it seemed, any cool and confident version of myself swept under the rug when she talked to me. She knocked me down from my pedestal and made me feel like a fellow person instead of a caricature businessman made only for making money. “You’re such a dork.”
“Hey, I got picked on a lot in high school,” I said, smiling as I did so.
“No way!” Briella laughed. “That’s impossible!”
“I had a very pointy face and used a lot of big words. Everyone hated me,” I said, with an air of mock solemnness.
She kept laughing and shook her head. “Oh my God, I swear I’m not laughing at you.”
But she was, and it was all right; I was laughing too. I felt like I’d finally met someone that I could laugh with. An entire part of my life had been turned on and activated, and suddenly I felt like a kid again, or maybe a teenager.
“Tomorrow night?” I asked, to clarify that she did want to hang out with me and wasn’t playing some cruel joke. It seemed that she was every bit as fond of prolonging this doomed relationship as I was.
“Yeah. Let’s do something fun,” she offered.
I’d already set the bar pretty high with the yacht business, so I thought of something fun but not as flashy. I didn’t want to come off as a total dick with constant shows of wealth. Briella didn’t seem like the sort of girl who would be impressed by that, anyway. She appreciated conversation over anything I’d shown her so far, and instead of making me scared, it intrigued me.
I could finally be valued as a person.
“I could make you dinner,” I offered.
“Where?”
“My place.” Granted, my house was probably inherently a show of wealth, but it wasn’t as bad as it could be. I could offer to overnight her to Paris, or take her to the nicest restaurant in town. I wanted to do both of those things. I wanted to rush this, and I couldn’t put my finger on why.
“Ooh, we’re moving things along, are we?” Briella cocked a brow and bit her lip. It nearly made my knees weak. “Yeah, I can do that. Making me dinner at your place? Sounds like a dream.”
I couldn’t help but smile and hope that I didn’t fall off the sunroof for how unbearably excited I felt at that moment. She had agreed to spend more time with me.
Chapter 10
Briella
The moment I closed the door, Nina honed in on me.
“Sounds like a dream,” she mocked, in a nasally voice that didn’t sound like my own.
I rolled my eyes. “Shut up. It was… shut up.” I shook my head again and rubbed my temples. Everything with Dexter was happening so quickly, I barely had the time to stop and calculate my next move. “The boat was a dream. I can’t believe we did that.”
“More like a nightmare,” Nina groaned. She sprawled out on the bed and stretched out her arms. “I hate boats. I thought I was gonna puke. I think I might have puked.”
I raised an eyebrow and folded my arms. She’d been doing nothing but badger me about Dexter and hanging out with him, and now here she was, complaining about the interaction we’d had.
“The boat was a nightmare,” Nina elaborated. She sat up a little. “Dexter is great. He makes you laugh, at least, and I still think he’s unbelievably sexy.”
She wasn’t wrong, but I didn’t want to lead her on. Nina had accidentally stolen several of my potential love interests in high school, and I hadn’t forgotten about it. “Uh-huh.”
“I really do like him,” she insisted. “I mean, he’s not perfect. He’s kind of nervous. I like my men confident, you know? Like the strong, confident, bossy type.” She bit her lower lip and clutched a pillow to her chest.
I found myself rolling my eyes. Nina did tend to fall for assholes. Dexter was a bit nervous with me at times, but not… not where it counted. I thought of our kiss, and how sure of h
imself he’d been then. He wasn’t so much nervous as he was considerate. “I think it’s sweet that he’s nervous,” I said. “He’s not…well, he’s not always nervous.”
Nina threw the pillow at me and I winced, not expecting the assault. “You didn’t!”
“No!” I threw the pillow back at her. “No, we just sort of made out a little.”
Nina groaned again and flopped back onto her back. “You’re killing me, Bri! He’s the vacation you’ve been waiting for!”
“Oh my God.” I pinched the bridge of my nose.
“You have to surrender yourself, body and soul, during this one week of bliss!”
“Oh my God,” I reiterated. “Where’d you read that, the back of a romance novel?”
“That’s not important,” Nina said defensively. She clearly had read it from a romance novel, and probably from a terribly bad one. She had a penchant for reading those nonstop, and it showed in the way she talked about love. “But look, why not sleep with him?”
I stared at her for a second. Nina wasn’t particularly promiscuous. She had some one-night stands, but she didn’t go boyfriend hopping, and she certainly didn’t come off as sex-obsessed. It wasn’t unusual for her to read the occasional trashy romance, but I did the same thing, to be fair. I wondered why she was so insistent on this, and presumed it had something to do with her romantic idea of my personal liberation from a terrible former relationship.
“See? You can’t think of a reason.”
“I was thinking,” I retorted. “Anyway, I don’t want to. That’s enough of a reason for me. It should be for you, too.” I stuck my tongue out at her and started off to the bathroom. Before I could go, my phone started going off.
I walked to the counter to check who was calling. I’d long since deleted the contact, but I knew the number by heart, and my stomach turned. Jason was calling me.
