by JD Hawkins
“There you are, I was about to call you.”
We turn to see Gabrielle and Mickey heading toward us, looking like they’ve just stepped straight off a catwalk. Gabrielle a tall vamp in nothing but her black bikini and white blouse knotted at the waist, Mickey in dark, well-cut shorts and a polo shirt, both of them in black shades.
“Hey, Mickey. Gabrielle.”
“Hi!” Hazel greets them enthusiastically, and I notice the particular warmth she addresses Gabrielle with.
“I was just about to call you. Eddy called me to say the boat’s ready. We’re heading there now,” Mickey says.
“Okay,” I say, turning to Hazel. “You ready to go?”
“More than ready,” Hazel says.
The four of us head together toward the marina, set into a bay overlooked by mountains. The yacht is at the very end—it’s too big to get any further into the bay. As we near it, stepping past all the smaller boats, I notice Hazel’s expressive eyes widen before she suppresses her awe.
I step toward her, about to ask her what she thinks, finding her appreciation of the boat cute, but Sam calls from the edge of the boat.
“Hey, Nate! Mickey! Come give us a hand with these coolers, would you.”
“Yeah, get over here!” Warren adds, standing up to wipe sweat from his brow. “Why did I hire younger guys when I have to do the hard labor myself?”
I head over, noticing the large amount of drinks, ice, and other supplies there. So big that even the young steward helping them is struggling. Then immediately stop and look back at Hazel, reluctant to leave her alone.
“Come on.” Gabrielle smiles at her, taking her arm and leading her onto the boat. “I’ll show you around this monster. The girls are probably at the front. I’ve no idea why anyone would even want a boat this big, but you know men and their…”
As Gabrielle talks and carries her away, Hazel looks back at me, and can probably read the slight panic in my eyes. She shrugs helplessly, then mouths something like I’ll be fine.
But I’m not so sure.
Because if there’s anything that has the potential to bust the lie of our “relationship” wide open…it’ll be the women.
7
Hazel
Once I step onto the boat, I realize just how out of my depth I really am.
This is a long way from dinner party small talk and make-believe. In fact, the yacht is basically the size of my entire apartment complex—and a whole lot cleaner, too. Even the railings look too expensive for me to touch. The second I draw close to the boat I almost felt repelled, guilty, as if it was illegal for someone like me to be even near something like this. The effect is probably intentional.
After half a minute Gabrielle has only walked me about halfway along the sidewalk-sized edge of the boat toward the front. She’s still talking, but it takes me a while to tune out of my shock and back into reality—or at least some version of reality I’m supposed to be pretending at.
“…last summer in St. Tropez, but the shopping was surprisingly bad there. Makes you realize there’s absolutely no correlation between wealth and taste. In fact, I suspect it drops off a cliff once you can afford anything you could ever want.”
“That’s an interesting theory,” I say, if only to show I’m listening, and distract from my own sense of not belonging.
Gabrielle looks at me with a wry smile, and it only makes the tall, slim, catlike woman look slightly less dangerous.
“Plenty of time for philosophy when your husband takes care of the practical things,” she says, then slows down, compelling me to slow also as she’s still walking arm in arm with me. Though I can’t make it out completely behind her fixed lips and sunglasses, I get the impression she’s considering what she’s about to say.
Strangely, she seems more talkative now than she did all evening last night. Perhaps she only really opens up in the company of women, or perhaps she’s taken a shine to me.
“Actually, it is a theory of mine,” she says. “I really am starting to think that wanting things is the key to happiness, and getting them is often what makes us most miserable.”
I take a second to answer her, but before I can there’s a huge rumbling that I feel reverberate through my body. I grab Gabrielle’s arm even more tightly.
“Fuck! What was that?”
Gabrielle lets out a polite, delicate laugh, then eases me off her arm gently.
“That’s just the engines spinning up. First time on a yacht?”
“Ugh…” I sigh, relaxing a little before laughing my embarrassment away. “Yeah…sort of.”
We emerge at the gigantic front of the yacht, the size of a tennis court, with a lower deck where there’s some seating and equipment lying around, and an upper deck where several women are sunbathing, facing the front. The only thing between their loungers and the edge of the boat is a small, glistening silver railing.
Gabrielle urges me forward and I notice that there are a few more women than I’d met at dinner last night as they greet each other.
“Hi, Selena,” I say when they’re done and Gabrielle’s busy stretching out on the only available sun lounger.
“Hazel,” Selena beams. She’s sitting upright, a drink dangling in one hand, and she lifts her sunglasses as if to say hello properly. “You look wonderful.”
I laugh the compliment off, then pat my large cloth bag and frown. “Oh crap,” I say. “I didn’t bring a towel. I didn’t think we’d be sunbath—”
“Pierre,” Selena suddenly calls out. It’s an incredible shout—the volume of yelling but the same refined intonation of a word spoken softly.
I turn back toward the boat, where she directed her call, and see a man in a strange, uncomfortable-looking uniform emerge quickly and blank-faced.
“Bring out another chair for Hazel.” Selena glances at me then Gabrielle. “What are you drinking, girls?”
“Sparkling water with lots of ice,” Gabrielle says, already flat on her back, drilling her shoulders into the fabric of the lounger as if she doesn’t plan to move a single muscle for hours.
“Um…” I murmur, looking from Selena to Pierre a few times before I can gather my thoughts. “The same.”
“Oh come on,” Selena says, as if disappointed in me. She turns to Pierre and holds up her glass. “We’ll have two sparkling waters, but also another of these, Pierre.”
Pierre nods, though it’s almost like a bow, and disappears as smoothly as he arrived. Before I can feel a little silly, standing there while they all seem so relaxed, Selena points at the figure to her right. A long, extraordinarily beautiful body stretched out on a chair, golden hair bunched up while her face is laying on her wrists.
“This is Betty,” Selena says. “She’s sleeping.”
“She’s always sleeping,” says the women to Selena’s left.
“She’s something of a night owl,” Selena explains.
“Werewolf,” the woman adds casually.
“And this is Layla,” Selena says in a playfully reluctant tone, nodding to the woman on her left.
Layla looks more like a weapon than a woman. A collection of symbols that announce wealth and status as obviously and broadly as a road sign. Her face mostly hidden beneath a wide-brim summer hat and oversized sunglasses, leaving just her Botoxed lips—fixed in a permanent sardonic smirk—to express herself with. Long nails that look meant to tear people apart, blood-red as if they just have. A diamond bracelet cut so that it glints from every angle. Even the light sweat on her voluptuous, incredible body looks expensive.
“Hi, Layla,” I say, trying not to sound meek.
Pierre hurries back to us and I go to retrieve the towel over his forearm, but he only hands me and Selena the drinks before placing the towel on the deck beside Gabrielle—placing her sparkling water beside it.
“Layla,” Selena says, as Pierre disappears and I put down my bag to peel off my tunic, “this is Hazel. Nate’s fiancée.”
“Nate’s fiancée?” Lay
la says, her lips widening into a smile of pure interest as she scans me intensely. She nods, a small gesture exaggerated by her hat. “Interesting.”
I laugh the comment away nervously as I adjust the lounger and finally sit back on it. It’s only then that I realize we’re already far out of the bay, heading along the coast, further out to sea. The boat moves so smoothly I could have sworn it hadn’t moved at all.
There’s a pleasant, relaxed quiet for a few moments. My first sip of the drink sanding off a few of my nerves. For a few moments I start to wonder if this might actually be as easy as it looks, but then Layla says, without moving, “So Hazel, go on. Tell us how you did it.”
“Come on, L,” Gabrielle says, without moving also, “let’s not play high school games.”
“Who’s playing games?” Layla says, with mischievous humor. “Are we going to pretend we haven’t spent months speculating?”
“How did I do what?” I ask tentatively, the only person who feels compelled to lean forward and look across at them to speak.
“She wants to know,” Selena says, moving only her lips as well, “how you managed to bag a guy like Nate. She’s planning to ditch her husband for a younger model.”
“Ha!” Layla snorts. “No…they don’t make them like Larry anymore, and I’ve spent too much time breaking him in to give him up. Even if he does need a good kick to get going every once in a while.”
Nobody says anything else, and I can’t tell if they’ve just returned to their placid, non-committal silence again, or whether they’re actually expecting me to answer. I decide to answer just in case, and immediately realize how unprepared I actually am for this. Nate and I haven’t gone over anything—the story of our meeting, how he proposed, anything anyone might ask. I choose to try to mirror their nonchalant, dismissive humor.
“To be honest, I ask myself the same question every time he takes his shirt off.”
I immediately regret it, feeling like a complete phony, but Selena’s mild, amused hum makes me realize I got away with it.
I glance over and see that Gabrielle also flashes a tiny smile at the comment. I feel like I just broke into a house without tripping the alarm.
We settle into a patient silence again. I take another sip, and begin to appreciate the glistening sea stretching out on all sides, the mountains of the coast now incredibly far, but still crystal clear in the pure light of the sun.
“I feel sorry for him, to be honest with you,” Gabrielle says suddenly, and it comes so long after anybody’s said anything that I almost wonder if I’ve missed something. These women seem to live life on an entirely different timeframe. In a slow-motion catatonia interspersed with super-quick exchanges.
“Me too,” Layla agrees.
“It’s almost humiliating,” Selena says.
“What is?” I ask, resisting the urge to lift my head again and look over at them.
“Nate’s interview,” Selena says. “It’s been, what, four? Five months?”
“I wouldn’t blame him if he walked away from the whole thing,” Layla says, as Pierre takes her empty glass from her hand and places another there. “I get upset waiting for a drink too long.”
“I think he’s taking it fine,” I say. “He’s very intent on the job.”
“Does he even know why Warren is doing that to him?” Gabrielle says.
“Probably not,” Layla remarks. “It’s not exactly something Warren sings from the rooftops.”
“No…I’m not sure,” I say. “I don’t, to be perfectly honest.”
“Tell her, Selena,” Layla says sleepily, as if it’s the last words she can manage before drifting totally into a coma.
There’s a long silence, and I wonder if it’s just another weird pause, or whether Selena doesn’t want to say. Eventually she begins though.
“Warren likes to pluck people from obscurity. It makes them more loyal, work harder.”
“Plus it feeds into his ego,” Gabrielle says.
“I don’t think so,” Selena says. “I think he just likes to pick his employees like he picks stocks—spotting diamonds in the rough. He knows he could go to Wall Street and have his pick of anyone there, but where’s the fun in that? There’s only so much of the year you can spend playing golf. Anyway, the last person he hired was this young boy, Adam. Straight out of college. Quite a nerd.”
“Cute kid though,” Layla remarks.
“He was sort of a genius. He’d already become a millionaire, spotting inefficiencies in the market. Everyone was very excited about him. Warren put him in charge of a new West Coast division—Silicon Valley, start-ups, expensive computers and cheap clothes—you get the picture. The problem was that for all his brains—”
“He still had a penis,” Layla sparks, then laughs at her own joke.
“The smartest men in the world can be turned stupid with the right outfit,” Gabrielle adds.
“There was one CEO of a start-up who was very attractive but had no business plan, but Adam was such a bumbling wreck around her he still invested,” Selena says.
“Word got around there was a horny virgin with a billion dollars in venture capital,” Layla says, “and you can pretty much imagine what happened.”
“They would hire models,” Gabrielle says, “invite him to parties. Drugs, escorts, the whole thing. Of course, it collapsed eventually.”
“Warren was furious, as I’m sure you can imagine,” Selena says. “He sued anyone who even thought about reporting on it. He goes red just hearing Adam’s name now.”
There’s a little silence, and then I say, “So that’s why he put Nate through this whole interview process? To make sure he doesn’t have any…character flaws? That he hasn’t missed anything?”
“Precisely,” Layla says, sounding like she’s drifting away once again.
The ladies go quiet again, slipping back into their private worlds as the boat moves stealthily across the shimmering blue. But despite the beauty around me, and the sleepy mood, and the alcohol in my hand, I can’t let myself slip into the same reverie now, my thoughts stirring with Nate, and what he’s going through.
My phone ringing snaps me out of those thoughts, and I pick it up to see Mia’s name. I glance over at the other women, for a second about to excuse myself, before thinking that it’s probably not necessary—they’re oblivious to anything that doesn’t interest them. I set my drink down, get off the lounger, and carry my ringing phone back down to the lower deck, then along the side of the boat where nobody’s close enough to hear.
“Hey, Mia, how’s things?” I answer.
“Ugh, hectic. I forgot how many more drunken fights and car crashes people have in the summer. This is the first break I’ve had in two days. How are you?”
I smile, feeling almost guilty for what I’m about to say. “I’m on a boat!”
“What? I didn’t know the hotel did boat trips, I didn’t see that when we—”
“They don’t,” I interrupt. “It’s a private yacht. About the size of the hospital.”
Mia doesn’t answer for a second, but I can imagine her expression vividly.
“What? How did you…”
I laugh, and then tell her the briefest version I can of what’s happened. Nate’s random request to help him, the dinner, the day after—only omitting what happened after he’d said good night, only to pound on my door seconds later. Partly because it’s a bit much, and partly because Nate and I have acknowledged it so little I could almost imagine it hadn’t really happened.
“You’re not making this up, are you?”
“Of course not,” I laugh.
“Well what’s this Nate like? Is he hot? Is he nice?”
“He’s…extremely hot, actually. As for nice…I’m a little less sure. He’s really…like…intense. Like he’s holding so much back all the time. So dark and broody… That’s kinda what makes him so hot, actually. Along with the fact that, well, he’s hot.”
Mia laughs, and it’s the sound of someon
e delighted but wanting more. “Sounds like an upgrade from Theo, at least,” she says over her laugh—then immediately stops, and I can sense she’s regretting bringing him up.
“A root canal would be an upgrade from Theo,” I joke, if only to stop her regret.
“Do you like him?” she asks.
“I barely even know him.”
“Does he like you?”
My instinct is to say no, but a flashback to last night—my face buried in the sheets, his hands at my ass, his mouth on my back—makes it hard to lie. “Just as a friend,” I say.
“Ha! Don’t give me that,” Mia says, disbelieving.
“Honestly,” I insist. “And anyway, he practically told me this morning that he’s not interested. ‘I’m done with women,’ he said. But…”
“But what?” Mia asks quickly.
“I think…I think he likes who I’m pretending to be though. Gosh, I like who I’m pretending to be,” I say. “The well-kept desperate housewife of a tall, dark, financial hotshot.”
Mia laughs again and says, “You’d hate that lifestyle.”
“Well there you go,” I say. “Another reason for me not to try to make this anything more than it is. I wore heels last night for dinner and I still have blisters—the women I’m hanging out with probably shower in them.”
Though I did do more than just have dinner in my heels last night…
“Are you sure this isn’t some elaborate setup to get you into bed?”
I laugh loudly at this. “God, if he wanted to get me into bed all he’d have to do is—” I stop myself, turning and seeing Nate approach from the front of the boat.
He’s got his shirt off, and his pant cuffs rolled up. And even though we’ve already slept together, it’s the first time I’ve gotten a real look at his body. I completely forget that I’m on the phone.
“Hazel?” Mia prods.
“Oh, Mia. Hey, I’ll call you back later, okay? Gotta go.”
I hang up as Nate nears. I try to keep my eyes from scanning him ravenously, but I probably look like I’m about to drool. I certainly wouldn’t mind pulling him into the nearest closet full of cleaning supplies, or…
