“You still shouldn’t have called. Why do I have to keep saying that?”
More silence followed. I wondered if I could move close enough that I would be able to hear the voice on the other end of the call. Sometimes you can, because of the way the speakers on smartphones project. I took another step. I couldn’t get too close. If she suddenly came out, still talking, or the call was over without me realizing it, she would know I wasn’t just casually walking down the hall. I moved away.
“I just can’t—”
“But I—”
“Yeah, but I—okay, yes. Of course I do. But it’s…I’m confused. I need time to think.”
There were a few seconds of silence. She started talking again. “You need to show me some respect. I’ve told you how I feel and you need to give me some space. Otherwise—”
There was another pause before she started up again.
“It’s too much pressure. I thought it would be fun. Easy. And right now, I just can’t handle it. Okay?” She paused. “You’re pissing me off.”
I heard the sound of tapping—fingernails on wood. The sound of her losing patience. I shoved my hands into my pockets and leaned my head against the wall, tired of standing in the same position, all my muscles shouting for me to move.
“Darren! You’re not listening to me. Please don’t call or text me. I need a week off. I need to think. I need to figure out—”
The floor creaked. She was moving around. I’d pushed my luck far enough. She might not wait to hang up before she suddenly popped into the hallway. I turned and walked quickly back outside. I jogged across the lawn, looking up to see if Brad had seen me come out of the house, but he and Skye must have been inside the boat’s cabin. The lake and the surrounding area had that quiet of mountain air, nothing but the sound of some jays in the pine trees that grew in a wooded area on the other side of the house, leading up an incline and then turning to dense forest.
I settled on my beach chair and took a long, cooling swallow of the drink before the ice melted completely.
Later, while we were getting ready to change out of our swimsuits and jump into the shower to wash off sand and lake water, I told Skye everything I’d heard, trying to keep the conversation in the right order so she got the sense of how Maggie got more impatient. “She’s fucking that guy. Darren.”
“You don’t know that.” She kissed my chin and took off her swimsuit top.
I reached for her, but she moved away. “Not now.”
“It’s been not now all day.”
“Tonight. I promise.”
“You better not break it.”
“I promise. I do.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “I guess we’ll have to wait.”
“For what?”
“To find out what’s going on.”
“We know what’s going on. She’s cheating on him. She was talking to a guy—Darren,” I said.
“Maybe. But you could take what she said a lot of ways. We need to wait and see what she does.”
“What she does?”
She shrugged. She pulled off the bottom of her suit and went into the bathroom. When the shower water was hot, I stepped inside with her.
“Don’t think anything is happening in the shower,” she said.
“I don’t. But this is huge—cheating on him. We definitely lucked out. A royal flush.”
“We’ll see. We need to wait.”
“Why? You were right that something’s up with her. We can definitely get some money out of her if she’s hiding things from her devoted husband.”
“Do you think he’s devoted?” Skye asked.
“Yup. Very.”
She turned her back to me and tilted her head back, letting the water run over her face. I rubbed her shoulders, waiting for her to turn back to me. Instead, she twisted the knob to stop the flow.
We talked about it more, but Skye refused to change her mind. She insisted we weren’t going to rush things. We were going to enjoy this outstanding house and the lake and the boat and all their good food and alcohol and wait to see how things unfolded.
I’m not big on waiting.
The thought of getting a decent payout from a guilty Maggie revved me up. I couldn’t wait to turn the screws on her. Skye had been restless lately. Pushing me off was part of it. But there was more. Something I felt that I couldn’t really put my finger on, like she wanted something different from what we had. She loved conning people, so I couldn’t figure out what that different thing could be. But we hadn’t had a chance for a big payday in a while. Maybe that’s why things felt off between us. A nice check from Maggie Fromm would have Skye crawling all over me like she used to.
I loved that girl. Yeah, she was good at what she did. But I wasn’t with her just because of that. I loved her. Most people did.
6
Maggie
Brad was grilling steaks on the back deck. I’d made a pasta salad and a green salad that were chilling in the fridge. Skye was busy on her phone, a glass of ice water beside her. She’d insisted she would pass on the wine for now. She needed to rehydrate, and the water she was sipping was her third refill. Watching her drink all that water made me feel dehydrated, but I was too lazy to get up for my own. Instead, I took a sip of wine, trying to settle my mind, hoping that by the time my glass was empty, my fingers would stop twitching, along with my left eyelid.
For at least ten minutes, Skye’s head had been bent over her phone. Every few minutes Brad moved in time with the music coming out of the speakers in the living room.
And Joe was staring at me. No matter where I looked, no matter how I shifted my position, I felt his gaze on me. I couldn’t tell if he was coming on to me, or there was something inside my own head making me think his attention was fixed on me, but in reality, he wasn’t noticing me at all.
The day hadn’t been as relaxing as I’d hoped. It was bad enough that Darren had sent me twenty or thirty text messages the night before, not to mention calling me twice. He’d called again while I was trying to relax on the beach.
Until she’d gone to watch Brad get the boat ready, Skye had done a great job of getting my mind off Darren. She talked a lot and despite her attention to rather mundane subjects, she managed to make everything sound fascinating. Even her experience purchasing a bathing suit for their vacation was an entertaining story that involved disappearing salespeople and mismatched tops and bottoms.
Having Skye around had stirred up even more feelings of regret over my relationship with Darren. The woman who had decided to betray her husband was suddenly unrecognizable to me. I’d looked in the mirror before bed the night before and the face staring back at me looked tired and slightly confused. I couldn’t be sure how it had all happened. The opportunity was there and I was bored or hurt or angry or any number of feelings that I couldn’t even name, so I’d said yes. Listening to Skye, watching her flit about, I saw a different version of myself. I recalled being happy in my own skin. Now, I wasn’t so sure.
As if Darren sensed from two hundred miles away that I was trying to exorcise his voice and desires from my head, the memory of him from my body, he continued to insert himself into my vacation.