Winter in Paradise (Paradise #1)(61)

“Your first ride in Edie,” Ayers says. “I’m so happy you fit. I was a little worried.”

He doesn’t fit—he has to hunch over and his thighs are cramping—but he’s so happy to be in Ayers’s presence, he doesn’t care. “Edie? That’s the truck’s name?”

“Short for Edith,” Ayers says. “Rosie named her. She had a pet gecko named Edith when she was a kid that was this color.”

“Gotcha,” Baker says. There was no room for his backpack up front, so he put it in the back, and he checks the side view nervously, expecting it to go flying out when Ayers takes the steep, twisting turns at breathtaking speed.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “Your bag is fine. I stopped at Sam & Jack’s for sandwiches. I got three because I wasn’t sure what you liked, and I got some of their homemade potato chips and a couple of kosher dills. And I went to Our Market for smoothies!”

Baker looks down in the console to see two frosted plastic cups, one pink, one pale yellow. He was too nervous to eat the banana Cash gave him so he threw it to the iguanas on the way down the hill. But now he’s both starving and dying of thirst.

“Which one is mine?” he asks.

“Take your pick,” Ayers says. “There’s strawberry-papaya and pineapple-mango.” She turns up the music—it’s Jack Johnson singing “Upside Down,” and Baker surprises himself by singing along. Until this very moment, Baker hated Jack Johnson, harbored an almost personal vendetta against him, in fact, because one of Baker’s former girlfriends from Northwestern, Trinity, had loved Jack Johnson so ardently. She would only have sex with Baker if Jack Johnson was playing in the background. Needless to say, this had made Baker jealous, and because of this jealousy, he declared Jack Johnson overrated. Now, however, sitting next to Ayers, who is singing along with gleeful abandon, sometimes in key, sometimes not so much, Baker fully understands the appeal. The music is happy, undemanding, and full of sunshine. It’s going-to-the-beach music, the same way that Billie Holiday is rainy-Sunday-morning music and George Thorogood is drinking-at-a-dive-bar music. Thanks to the many hours Baker spent with Trinity in bed, Baker knows all the words. He chooses the pineapple-mango smoothie, it’s delicious, and he finds a magic arrangement for his legs so that he can relax. He was right to come, he thinks. He’s happy.

They twist and turn and wind around until they’re somehow back on the Centerline Road. To the right is a stunning view of the turquoise water and emerald mountains.

“Coral Bay,” Ayers says. “Fondly known as the Other Side of the World.”

They cruise down hairpin turns until they reach a Stop sign, an intersection, a little town on a harbor filled with boats.

“Skinny Legs is that way,” Ayers says, pointing left. “Legendary. I wish I could say we’ll have time to stop for a drink on the way home but we probably won’t.” She turns right and they meander past colorful clapboard cottages, a convenience store called Love City Mini Mart, a round open-air restaurant called the Aqua Bistro. “Best onion rings on planet Earth,” Ayers says. She hits the gas and they fly up around a curve and nearly collide with three white donkeys standing on the side of the road.

“Donkey!” Ayers cries, and at first Baker thinks she’s as surprised to see them as he is. What are three donkeys doing on the side of the road? Ayers pulls to the shoulder and the donkeys leisurely clomp over to the car. Ayers reaches across Baker, grazing his leg with her arm, which sends an electric current right to his heart, and she pulls a withered apple from the glove box.

“Do as I say, not as I do. We’re not supposed to feed them.” Ayers sticks the apple out and the alpha donkey eats it from her outstretched palm. She looks at the other two and sighs. “I wish I had three. Sorry, guys!”

When they pull back onto the road, Baker says, “Whose donkeys are those? Do you know them?”

“There’s a population of wild donkeys across the island,” Ayers says. “I do have one favorite. I call him Van Gogh—he only has one ear, and I keep the apple for him. But I wanted you to see them up close. You haven’t been to St. John until you’ve seen the donkeys!” She throws her hands up. She seems positively radiant, and Baker hopes it’s because of him. She’s wearing a crocheted white cover-up with a white bikini underneath and her blond hair has been wrangled into a messy bun. She is so pretty it hurts, and she keeps an apple in her glove box for a donkey with one ear. Baker can’t imagine anyone being more infatuated than he is with Ayers Wilson right now.

He feels a buzzing against his leg and the sound of bongo drums. It’s his phone. He has to re-contort himself to slide it out of his pocket. He checks the display: Anna. He hurries to silence it, then to turn the phone off completely. He’d like to chuck it out the window. When he got home the night before, he saw he had six missed calls from Anna, but there was not a single voicemail. Anna doesn’t believe in voicemail; it can too easily be ignored.

What’s up? Baker had texted first thing that morning, but he had received no response. That was Anna’s way of punishing him for not answering his phone. But Baker didn’t want to talk to Anna on the phone and now that she had confessed to falling in love with Louisa Rodriguez, Anna no longer got to say when and how they communicated.

“Who was that?” Ayers asks.