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16

KIT

T he ocean is the first thing I see, such a perfect blue that it looks as if it was Photoshopped. The sand is powder white—no weeds and no grass—so the view is nothing but shore and sea and a cloudless sky.

On the other side of the door, there are quiet sounds—Miller, I assume. My heart begins to skitter, thrilled to have him back to myself when I’d thought I might never spend time with him again.

I brush my teeth and wrap the robe Elite sent around me before I walk into the main room. He’s in baby blue swim trunks and nothing else, his back to me while he does something at the kitchen counter. My mouth waters.

“Good morning,” I say quietly, newly re-aware of the fact that it’s just the two of us here alone.

He turns, with a coffee scoop in hand, and his eyes immediately drop to the tiny robe covering a tinier negligée. He blows out a breath.

“Wow,” he says. “Telling me we’re just here as friends and walking out here dressed like that seems more than a little unfair.”

“Obviously, I didn’t choose the outfit. I’m not sure who was giving them direction, but about half of the suitcase was lingerie. How was yours?”

He takes another glance over me and turns away to hit a button on the coffee maker. “Fine, actually,” he says. “Not a single pair of leather pants in sight, though there was a pair of pink swim trunks.”

I cross to the kitchen and jump onto the counter. “What’s wrong with pink swim trunks?”

He glances at my legs, and a muscle tenses in his jaw. “The Kit of ten years ago would’ve been able to tell you exactly what was wrong with pink swim trunks. In fact, she would have told me in great detail what was wrong, and I guarantee the phrases little rich boy and douche prince would’ve come into play.”

I laugh. “That does sound familiar actually. God, I was such a bitch.”

He pulls two mugs out of the cabinet and looks over his shoulder at me. “You were, but I kind of liked it.”

He pours us each a cup of coffee, and we walk out to the covered wooden porch just outside the open wall.

The breeze is warm already, but the porch roof provides enough shade to keep it comfortable. “This is the most beautiful beach I’ve ever seen in my life,” I tell him. I want to know if he brings a lot of women here but that probably isn’t something you ask a friend. “Do you come here a lot?”

He shakes his head. “No. I bought it a few years ago, but I travel so much for work that there hasn’t been a lot of time to get out here, and I don’t necessarily want to be here alone.”

“You say that as if you don’t date.”

“I haven’t dated anyone that I’ve wanted to bring here,” he says.

I wonder if he’d have been willing to bring me here under less dramatic circumstances. Probably not.

“Well, I appreciate you breaking the rule on my behalf,” I tell him. “If you hadn’t shown up last night, I’m pretty sure I’d be engaged right now.”

I’m still stunned by how close I came to making a terrible mistake, and slightly unnerved by the extent to which my mother—and perhaps Maren—were willing to help me make it. They had to have known, just like my dad did, that Blake and I weren’t right for each other. Maybe their willingness to overlook it is just a sign of their loyalty to me—that they took me at my word when I implied Blake made me happy—but it sort of feels like it’s one more way that they’ve just left me out to dry, the same way they do anytime I have to intervene on their behalf.

“ Kit went a little nuts ,” I once heard my mother telling a friend, without ever mentioning that it happened because I’d just watched a guy swing her onto the floor by her hair.

I close my eyes and breathe out, releasing the memory. Things haven’t always been great, but look where I’ve ended up: I’m in one of the most beautiful places in the world, with one of my favorite people—a man who has my back in a way my mother never did.

“It’s so peaceful here. Like…I don’t hear anyone. I don’t see any other houses, either.”

“There are thirty miles on this island, a tiny twelve-room hotel and only thirty-eight homeowners—who aren’t here often. Speaking of which, if you’re hungry, there’s a restaurant at the hotel. I also had them stock the fridge before we got here.”

I grin. “I hope you have the stuff for a good stew.”

He takes a sip of his coffee. “That’s one way to send you running back to Manhattan. And let me make it clear that I don’t want you to go running back. My office still thinks I’m in Africa, so I’m here as long as you want to stay.”

“You’re lucky I’m joining the finance team a week from tomorrow, or I’d make you regret how open-ended that offer is. Let’s go to the beach.”

He nods, biting his lip as he takes in the robe one last time. “Okay, although I’m a little scared to see what they sent along for swimwear.”

I’m a little scared too, but also...regrettably excited. I shouldn’t be excited to prance around in front of Miller in some barely-there bikini, to watch his gaze stutter in response. Knowing I shouldn’t feel this way, however, doesn’t change the fact that I do.

And indeed, when I return to the suitcase, I discover the two bikinis they’ve sent are basically pieces of floss up top and more floss below. I can’t imagine that my father was behind this, because he is still my father, the same man who once forbade crop tops, but it sure looks as if somebody was trying really hard to get me laid.

I twist my hair up on my head, grab a towel and flip-flops, and find him in the family room.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters, wincing as he looks away. “If your dad could see what they packed for you, he’d be shutting that entire magazine down.”

I grin and turn toward the open doors, with him in my wake. We step off the back porch and steer around the pool to reach the long white beach. Ahead, the crystal blue water stretches out toward a sandbar about two hundred yards away, as sparkling white as the sand we’re on now. How is a beach like this so empty? There isn’t a single person, a single chair, a single trash can, or other sign of life.

We could strip out of our suits, wander out to that sandbar and have sex repeatedly in the middle of an endless blue sea, and as long as a plane didn’t fly over, no one would be the wiser.

I point toward it. “I want to go out there. I have no idea why.”

He steps forward and grabs my hand. “Come on then,” he says.

I don’t normally hold hands with my friends , but this time I’ll allow it. We wade in and the water’s so clear I can see the chipped polish on my middle toe.

“Unbelievable,” I whisper.

“Yeah,” he says, but he’s only looking at me. As if I’m the thing that’s wondrous to him here and not the view, as if I matter more than everything else combined.

You deserve someone who has your back. And you belong with someone who wants to have it for you.

I’d never thought he was suggesting that he might want to be that person when he said it. The way he’s looking at me now, though? It makes me wonder.

“I think if I owned this place,” I say as the water reaches my waist, “I could never be persuaded to go do something like Kilimanjaro instead of coming here.”

“But how much more amazing does this trip seem to you, having just suffered through the climb we did? How much more do you appreciate the ease of our lives?”

He’s right. Maybe we need to suffer a little. Maybe we need to spend some time in the dark so we can spy the tiny bits of light we couldn’t distinguish, so we can marvel at the sun when it finally arrives.

I think I’ve been in the dark for a very, very long time. Since the day Rob’s mother called to tell me he was gone.

And here, with Miller, I’m finally coming back into the light.