When we finally break the kiss, I whisper, “I love you.” It’s nothing new, but I need to get it out once more, as if my heart might burst if I keep the words in.
“I love you too,” he breathes back, before marking a pause. “Island.”
“What is it?”
His jaw works silently for a couple seconds, and there’s a sudden solemnity in his eyes as he says, “I do have a gift for you. For your birthday.”
I shake my head with a smile. “It’s okay, I can imagine now’s not the best time—”
“It isn’t,” he confirms, perhaps a little stiffly. “But once we’ve escorted Rotwang and his family back to Berlin . . .” His voice lowers to a promising purr as he slowly maneuvers my body backward and my calves hit the cot’s mattress. “We’ll have the rest of the weekend to ourselves.”
Oh, yes. I can already picture myself stretched out on super soft sheets in an old European palace, writhing in delight while March catalogs—and kisses—every single mole peppering my body. It’s 139, by the way. We’ve played that game before, and my dermatologist counted, too, because skin cancer.
I’m sold. I shall spend my entire weekend curled in March’s arms and squatting his glorious chest hair like a skin mite. But before that . . . “I need a moment to check my messages. Joy texted me earlier, and she wasn’t doing great. I think Vince cheated on her with a girl in Cancún.”
“Dire news. How many emojis?” March inquires, having become familiar with Joy’s quirks over the past months.
“A lot. Also, she was at JFK, and she said she was about to take off. I’m really worried about that part.”
He raises an eyebrow at this. “She flew to Mexico to confront him?”
I give an emphatic nod. “I think so. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s loaded on a Mexican rail gun.”
March’s eyes take on an icy glint, and there’s not a trace of sorrow to be found in his voice as he says, “How unfortunate. Mr. Moravia will be dearly missed.”
No, he won’t: I can’t really expect March to sympathize with a guy who’s dubbed him “Alfred” and consistently refuses to wear his mandatory guest slippers in our apartment. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Vince—or rather, “Mr. Moravia”— tried to tamper with the deck last time we invited him over for Uno night. Unforgivable. March spent the entire evening staring back and forth between the cards and Vince’s feet leaving sweaty prints on the floor, and we had to mop every square inch of the living room afterward. Twice. As a result, Vince’s name now sits precariously close to the top of March’s hit list.
Secret satisfaction exudes from his every pore as he kisses my forehead. “Very well, Miss Chaptal. I’ll go watch over our ungrateful little patient while you monitor the crisis.”
“Thank you. I won’t be long.”
Okay, it’s bad. I’d better stock up on a few pints of Chocolate Fudge Brownie B&J when I get back to New York, because the next few weeks are going to be tough. No words could convey the extent of my outrage as I scroll once more through the text novel Joy sent me before boarding.
It goes like this: Cachemire Fazali is a twenty-four-year-old assistant producer for SciFi Unlimited, and Vince is doing a photoshoot on the set of some show she’s working on in Cancún. Joy’s vibrissae started tingling a few days ago after running into her at a party. Maybe it was the heated look Vince flashed Cachemire, or because she seemed to purposely avoid his gaze in return. One thing is certain, the new girl has perky breasts, she’s a brunette, and her pics are all over Vince’s iCloud, which Joy hacked last night—and, in doing so, became the paranoid girlfriend GQ columnists warn you against.
No need to remind her that that part was illegal; she knows it already. As an associate lawyer in a firm that does mostly family law and civil litigation, Joy’s days are spent advising cheated parties not to hack their spouses’ phone. Anyway, after five sleepless hours and an entire morning spent mulling over her options instead of working on her cases, she took the rest of her Friday off, jumped in an Uber, and raced to JFK. There, she bought two bags of M&M’s, a cool neck pillow that’s shaped like a hotdog, and a ticket to Cancún, where she plans to stage the mother of all breakups.
Hopefully, Vince will choose his security questions more carefully in the future if he survives this.
There’s a dull ache in my heart as I read her last message. He’s fucking her. I know he is. I should have cut my losses much earlier, but here we are. I just couldn’t accept I had wasted two years on a terminal douche. This time it’s over.
Water is still relentlessly whipping the Ekranoplan’s window as we tear toward India in the deep of the night. It’s over. Just three little words to draw the curtain over two years of emotional acrobatics through turquoise skies and tar-black storms, browsing boho wedding blogs one day, putting together achy-breaky cheating playlists the next. Even though I never liked Vince much—and the feeling was mutual—it feels weird to realize that he’s history already.
That things start and end.
I can’t help but think of March. Could he ever . . . ? No. He’d dump me if he met someone else; he’s just too single-minded, too rigid to ever juggle two girls. As if a secret switch flipped up in his brain every time I think of him, I register a soft rap at the door, and, sure enough, March’s voice. “Island?”
“Come in.”
“We’ll rendezvous off the coast of Porbandar in less than an hour. The yacht is there already. Is everything all right?”
I tuck my phone back in my pocket and rise from the cot. “Yeah. It’s just . . . a huge mess. He cheated on her, and he kept nudes of the other girl all over his iCloud. Joy found them, and you can imagine how that went down. I hope I can reach her when she lands in Cancún. She’s too angry to think straight right now. I don’t like this.”
March’s features freeze into a solemn mask as he verbalizes my worst fear. “Well, I suppose there won’t be much left of Yucatán after that breakup.”
THREE
The Cake Plate
He swiped his hungry gaze over her golden-brown buns and licked his lips: he couldn’t wait to get himself covered in her sweet cream.
—Terry Robs, Glazed by the Cook #5: Dulce de Leche
Jan knows a guy who knows some guys in Andaman and Nicobar, a smattering of some five hundred pin-sized islands sprinkled along the seam between the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman sea. He’s confident he can hide the Ekranoplan there for a few months because—quoting him—“It’s like Tajikistan . . . who the hell even knows where that is?” He should have refueled off the coast of Sri Lanka by now—God knows how he found someone willing to sell him forty thousand gallons of kerosene and look the other way, but he did.
And so, the job is done.
We took off from Porbandar airport five hours ago, exhausted but alive, just before dawn. If no one shoots the plane down above Ukraine, we’ll touch ground in Berlin in less than three hours. Standing in the galley of a Paulie Airlines Embraer, March and I are watching the Rotwang family doze, the parents cuddling side by side in their seats while the boys have elected to sleep on the sofa—next to Frederick’s shuttle, of course. He looks fine now, by the way. We gave him a handful of Wow Encore! Gourmet Rodent Pellets, which he’s happily nibbling on, along with his own poop.