What Happens in Paradise(65)

Ayers folds her legs underneath her. How is it possible that even when she looks awful, she’s beautiful?

“This morning—” She laughs. “Which now feels like three days ago.” She picks up the joint and lifts a barbecue lighter off the side table, then seems to think better of it and sets both down. “It’s been a very long day.”

“Some days are like that,” Baker says. “Start at the beginning.”

“Last night Mick told me he had to go to St. Thomas to get restaurant supplies today,” Ayers says. “Whatever, I found it a little strange, but I didn’t question it. Too much.” She throws her hands up. “Anyway, then this morning, I saw him on the ferry with Brigid.”

Baker makes a face like he’s surprised. But he’s not surprised. He knew Mick would screw it up. He actually wishes Cash were here to listen to this. Baker leans in. “You’re kidding.”

“Not kidding. I saw them sitting together and I was…pissed. Livid. Suspicious.”

“I bet.”

“So I sent him a text telling him never to call me again.”

Baker spreads his palms against the cool, cracked leather of the sofa. This is real? He didn’t fall asleep in bed next to Floyd? Ayers is telling him exactly what he’s been waiting to hear, only much sooner than he had hoped. Her timing couldn’t be better.

“Then Cash and I had this weird, awful thing happen at work.”

“Yeah, I heard, sort of.”

“This girl got really drunk, and I thought she’d tanked while snorkeling. We stopped the boat, I dove off, your brother dove off, this other kid who’s probably going to be in the Olympics dove off, it was a total circus, and in the end the chick was in the head changing out of one inappropriate suit into a second, even more inappropriate suit, and this was all before we even got to Jost. The girl continued to drink and then puked off the side the whole way home.” Ayers sighs. “And I left your brother to handle it because guess who was waiting for me at the dock.”

“Mick,” Baker says, and he suspects that maybe this story isn’t going to have the ending he wants it to.

“Mick,” Ayers says. “He just left here a little while ago. Right before I called you. We broke up.”

“You broke up?” Baker says. He’s afraid to go back to feeling optimistic. “What did he say? Why was he with Brigid?”

“He said they bumped into each other. Unplanned. A coincidence. She was headed over to St. Thomas to get a tattoo of the petroglyphs.”

“Okay?” Baker says.

“I just got a tattoo of the petroglyphs a few weeks ago,” Ayers says. She holds out her ankle so Baker can see the tattoo; it’s a curlicue symbol in dark green. “We’re hardly the only two people in the universe with a petroglyph tattoo. Rosie had one. But still, I was chafed.”

“Understandably,” Baker says.

“Mick says they only talked for a couple of minutes, then Mick took Gordon, that’s our dog, his dog, up to stand at the bow and he didn’t see Brigid again.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I don’t want to believe him,” Ayers says. “But I do.”

“You do?”

“I do.”

“So…why did you break up?”

“Two reasons,” Ayers says. “Both are secrets that I’m keeping from him. One is this…project that I’m working on. I can’t tell him about it, and I can’t tell you about it yet either. Maybe in the future, once I’m finished, but not right now.”

“Secret project,” Baker says. “I won’t ask.”

“Please don’t,” Ayers says. She seems to shrink under her Treasure Island T-shirt and when she gazes at him, her eyes appear robbed of their pigment. They are very, very pale blue. “The second reason is…that I have feelings for you.”

“For me?”

“For you,” Ayers says. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you.”

“You haven’t?” Baker says.

She shakes her head and presses her lips together like she’s embarrassed.

“So, wait,” Baker says. Is this really happening? Him and Ayers? Does she want him to kiss her? Does she want him to—finally—make proper love to her? Baker can’t find the words to ask, he’s too overwhelmed, but it turns out it doesn’t matter.

Ayers stands up, takes his hand, and leads him to her bed.



He wakes up in the middle of the night; 4:20 a.m., his phone says. Ayers is naked in bed next to him. He’s in love. He’s beyond in love.

But he has to get out of there. He can’t have Floyd waking up and finding his dad gone.

Baker eases out of bed and uses the bathroom. He sees a clothbound book balanced on the edge of the sink. Ayers’s journal? Baker is, of course, tempted to open it and read Ayers’s innermost thoughts, presumably about how she’s stuck with crappy cheater Mick but can’t get Baker Steele out of her mind. However, back when Baker was in college, he read his girlfriend Trinity’s diary and all hell broke loose. That was why they’d split. Trinity had called it a “devastating breach of personal trust.”

If you learn one thing from me, Baker Steele, she’d said, I hope it’s never to read a woman’s private thoughts without her express permission.