Page 8

CHAPTER 8

ROUX

O h great. Now I need to make an excuse to get away from a guy on the beach. Is it too much to ask for a little peace?

“I don’t want to suck your dick, and I don’t need mine sucked,” I say when he gets close.

The man—who’s fucking breathtaking by the way—stares at me, startled, for a solid minute, then he bursts out laughing. “Thanks for the parameters. May I suggest something else?”

I frown.

“Just want to know the rules.”

Rolling my eyes, I say, “It’s not so far-fetched that a combination of those words was going to come out of your mouth at some point.”

“Oh, no, you’re absolutely right. I had no intention of saying them, but your odds that someone’s going to lead with that are high.”

“Astronomically.”

He’s still smiling, and damn, it’s pretty.

“I was actually just checking to see if you’re alright,” he says.

I stop to look at him. “Because I’m walking alone?”

“No. Because you were bent over like you were hurt and stayed like that for a minute. By the time you were walking again and I realized you were fine, you’d already seen me. It would have been creepy to suddenly turn away.”

“Ah.” I offer him a smile, though I’m still hesitant. “No, I’m fine. There was something sticking out of the sand, but I was afraid to touch it. The last time I pulled something from the sand, it was a butt plug. I’m still not sure I’ve washed my hands enough, and that was two days ago.”

He laughs. I like his laugh. It makes me smile.

“Oh, god. That’s fair. Don’t pick up anything unless you can identify it without doing so—best advice I’ve ever received on Kala.”

“It should be on the brochure. Or at least a table tent in the rooms.”

He snorts. For a second, we look at each other. This is the moment where it becomes awkward and he segues into a reasonable sex request, right?

“I’m Alka,” he says.

“Ruby,” I offer.

“I’m married and in an open relationship.”

Okay, now I’m not sure what to say. “Uh… congrats?”

He laughs and turns to face the direction I was walking. We fall into step as he explains.

“I’ve found that a good way to judge character is by leading with this. I’ll know right away whether you’re someone I’m comfortable associating with by how you feel regarding my relationship that has nothing to do with you.”

I grin. “Oh, I feel that. For the record, good for you. I don’t care who you’re in a relationship with, who you’re sleeping with, or whether you’re cheating on your husband. It’s not my business.”

“Finally. A reasonable human,” Alka says in exaggeration, though I don’t doubt at all that he’s being honest. “But for the record,” he repeats, smirking at me, “being in an open relationship means we’re not cheating on each other as long as we stay within the guidelines we’ve mutually agreed upon. ”

“Fair enough.”

We fall into silence for a few moments as we walk along the wet sand. The world around us has a soft orange glow as the sun continues to sink beyond the horizon.

“You here alone?” Alka asks.

“This is the part where I should lie and tell you I’m here with a group of people, isn’t it?”

He laughs. “Yeah, I just realized what that sounds like. Sorry.”

I shrug. “Yeah, I’m alone. I thought that I needed some solitary time to reflect on my life choices and… rediscover who I am. You know, grow and shit.”

Alka laughs again. “Yep. How’s that going?”

“On the one hand, I’ve made some important discoveries about myself. I feel like maybe I can call that a success.”

“On the other?”

“I’m not sure I like the answers.”

Alka sighs. “I get it.”

“Are you here on a self-discovery journey as well?”

He grins. “No.” He doesn’t expand for a minute, then he sighs heavily. “A little backstory. This seems like a strategic way to make friends by vomiting my deep-seated dilemmas, so hang on for the ride.”

I chuckle. “Go for it.”

“I’ve known what I wanted my life to look like since I was a kid. I specifically remember a moment when I was seven years old. Prior to that, when it would come up like it randomly does in childhood, I always told everyone that my husband was going to be an important chef. I don’t know why. Maybe I liked to eat.” Alka pauses. “Actually, now that I think about it, I think I believed cooking was the heart of the home. We were always gathered around the kitchen island while my mom cooked, so I just thought cooking was the most important thing. It brought family and love together. ”

“I can see that. My brother and his boyfriend cook together a lot. It’s cute,” I say.

“Right? Anyway, when I was seven, my mother had been trying to teach me to make my bed. I hated it. I didn’t want to make my bed. I thought it was stupidly unnecessary since I was getting back into it later and would just mess it up again. I told her, ‘I don’t need to know how to make my bed. My husband will do that.’ My mother, always pushing a female into my life, argued, ‘You’re going to make your wife do all the cooking and cleaning?’ Obviously, I was frustrated that I literally just said husband and she corrected me with wife.” Alka looks at me. “That’s a whole other story.”

I nod in understanding. It always is.

“Naturally, I corrected her. ‘I said, my husband , Mom, and no. One husband will cook and one will know how to make the bed.’ She looked at me like I had two heads. It was kind of funny.”

I smile in response.

“But what I never knew how to articulate at that age is I always saw myself with two husbands. It was a conversation and argument I had so many times growing up. It started out with my parents trying to ‘correct’ me, insisting a marriage is between two people—a man and a woman. I eventually convinced them that there was no woman in my marriage and never would be. They did end up being very supportive and accepting parents in the end. Not relevant to the story, but so you don’t think they’re dicks.”

“Had to work dicks in there somewhere,” I tease.

Alka laughs. “We are on Kala. It’s necessary.”

I grin and bend to pick up a shell as he continues.

“Anyway. I also managed to convince them that what I’ve always known about myself is that I’m polyamorous. Even before I knew what it meant, I felt in my heart that’s who I am. Yes, they eventually accepted this ‘alternate lifestyle’ as well. But the thing is… Living that life is turning out to be more ch allenging than seven-year-old me ever dreamed it would be.”

“I’m confused. I thought you were living it. That was your opening line. I think it needs a little work, but it’s very clear.”

Alka grins and shakes his head. “My husband is an adult content creator. Sometimes, it’s easier to say I’m in an open relationship than it is to say I’m polyamorous because Oscar and I have two separate kinds of relationships outside of each other. He sleeps with other people, and I… Well, I’m not going to say I haven’t on occasion, but I’m interested in finding my second husband.”

“Which hasn’t happened,” I guess.

“No,” he answers, his tone sounding both sad and frustrated. “My husband says I’ve stopped looking, and I’ve argued with him about it over the last couple days, but… I have. I’ve given up. Today, I decided that it’s probably just not going to happen, so I suggested that it’s time we stop waiting for it and move on to the part of our life together that we’ve been putting off—kids. He accused me of using it as another excuse to stop looking for love. I got upset.”

He doesn’t continue, so I take a guess. “Because he’s right.”

“Yep. He’s absolutely right. If I’m busy raising babies, that’s a really good reason not to have time to ‘put myself out there,’ right?”

“Seems legit.”

Alka nods. “I feel a little guilty now, but I’m so damn tired. I’ve tried. Every time I think I’ve found someone, it just falls apart. I don’t trust myself to fall for someone because now I feel so desperate to get to that place I’ve longed for my entire life that I’m going to make stupid decisions just to get there. I mean, get this...”

He grips my arm for a minute.

“Almost two years ago, there was this new guy at work. Declan. Ugh, he’s gorgeous. Kind and funny and maybe a little damaged, which we all know has its own appeal, right? ”

I nod. He drops my arm.

“I tried. I made it clear. I even pretended to be his fake boyfriend for a while so this other guy would leave him alone. In the end, he chose someone else. A different guy at work. A math man who’s, like, uber fucking smart. It stung. I was so damn convinced that Declan was just… it, you know?”

I nod again. “I do. My first real boyfriend once I got to college turned out to be an abusive, manipulative, controlling asshole. It lasted for like seven months. He broke up with me, but I begged him to take me back. I promised I’d be a better boyfriend, that I’d love him better and whatever. At that point, I knew something was wrong in our relationship. I knew that. I knew it wasn’t healthy, yet I still begged for him to give me another chance. For him to love me again. That’s how much he fucked with me.”

“Please tell me he’s now buried six feet under,” Alka says.

I shake my head, but then I shrug. “I don’t know what happened to him, honestly.”

“I’m going to put it into the world that he’s hit with a mack truck.”

I chuckle and bow my head, brushing the smooth surface of the shell I picked up. “But this is where I understand how you feel. I don’t trust myself to be a good judge of character. I’m the baby in my family. My brother is fifteen years older than me, so I’m, like, the true baby. By the time I got out of the house and to college, I was ready to live, but the first thing I did was fall for someone whose only interest in me was control. Now, I’ve spent the last year not trusting myself to meet other people and looking over my shoulder as if he’s going to materialize out of the ether.”

“It sucks. I’m sorry that was your first relationship experience.”

I shrug. “I thought coming here on my own for the summer would give me a while to kind of reset. I could find my confidence again. Learn to recognize unhealthy people or at least the kind of people that I don’t want to be around. I suppose we have the same method in a way—announce the thing that’s going to set the tone right off the bat and see what happens.”

Alka chuckles. “It’s tried and true.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve also realized some other things. Like I’m not the biggest fan of being alone all the time. I start wanting to make other unhealthy decisions which are only thwarted because I’d need to go to the tech center to make them happen.”

“And I’m being a good boy and have said hello to someone just as my husband instructed me to,” Alka says. “You know, putting myself out there and shit.”

I grin. “Seems about right.”

“How about this? Let’s be all woo woo and take a minute to manifest the future we want. Cleanse our auras or whatever.”

I eye him skeptically. Maybe I misjudged his sanity.

Alka laughs. “There’s a spiritual principle that states if you put into the universe what you most desire, it’ll put you on the path to realizing it. At the very least, it can’t hurt.”

“Or I do it wrong and end up with my body being buried in the sand, never to be seen again,” I deadpan.

He nudges me. “Have a little faith in the universe. It’s billions of years old, so clearly it’s got a good success rate.”

Shaking my head, I say, “Fine. What do we do?”

“Close your eyes and think about what you want. The thing you want most in this world. Then imagine yourself having it. Like… Imagine you living that future.”

I suppose this would work better if I knew exactly what I wanted. For a second, I think about Lix and Noah, then the couple that walked by, oblivious to the world because they were so clearly in love that no one else existed.

That’s what I want. It’s a start, right? I try to picture myself looking at someone like that. It’s hard to see because this person doesn’t truly have a face, but he looks suspiciously like Alka. Probably because he’s the one telling me what to do. Still, I try.

I hear the gentle waves on the beach. Distant laughter. I feel the cooling air as the sun disappears. I smell something that makes me salivate.

“Does your manifestation smell like delicious food?” I ask.

Alka snorts laughter. “Yes.”

I open my eyes and look around. We’ve been walking on the beach for a while, so we’re quite a ways from where we’d met up.

“There,” Alka says, pointing to the smoke in the distance. “Let’s see what it is. Continue to manifest but do so while mobile.”

I’m not sure I can still picture the future with the love of my life, so I mentally chant, forever love. Forever love. Forever love over and over again until we get to the giant smoking hole on the beach.

There’s a pit that’s lined with skewers of fish, leaning in toward the ring of black coals. There are also enormous steel pots that people are scooping seafood and vegetables out of.

“Hungry?” Alka asks.

“I literally just ate something, but I could eat this.”

“You grab the skewer, and I’ll get us a bowl of whatever’s in that pot. I just ate too.” He flashes me a grin and heads for the pot. I go grab a skewer, and together we sit on the sand and eat as we watch the moon begin to glide across the sky.

Our conversation is much lighter than it had been, talking about Kala and the different things to do on the island. We stay there for what feels like hours before getting to our feet. Alka explains that this is his seventh summer visiting Kala, so he knows a path to cut back toward the way we came without continuing on the perimeter.

Eventually, after we get to a point where I see the resort hotel, we stop at a crossroads where he needs to go in another direction.

“Thanks for the company,” I say. “You’re the first person who’s been interested in something other than dick, and I appreciate it. ”

Alka smiles. “Same.”

A moment passes as we look at each other, and I think, Maybe I’m wrong.

“Listen, I’m going to be on the island for a while, so if you want to hang out again, I’m staying in the bungalows right by where I met you on the beach. My husband would be thrilled if I talked to someone instead of reading a book all day.”

“Just walk on the beach, huh?”

He grins. “I look up often. I have this weird sixth sense that I can feel when someone crosses in front of my section of beach. As if they’re obscuring my vast view of the ocean and I’m offended enough to look up.”

I laugh. “Okay, cool. Thanks for the chat.”

He nods, but we don’t move. Seconds tick by. A minute.

“Can I kiss you, Ruby?” Alka asks.

I take a breath, chewing the inside of my lip.

“I’m going to point out that I didn’t ask anything about your dick.”

Laughter bursts out of me. “Yeah, okay. Just a small kiss. No dicks involved.”

“No dicks,” Alka agrees.

He steps closer until I can feel his body heat. My pulse picks up. I stare into his vivid green eyes as he leans in. His fingers touch my hand then loosely tangle with my fingers.

Finally, his lips touch mine. It’s soft, little pressure, but it lingers for a long time before he steps back.

“Good night, Ruby,” Alka murmurs.

I inhale, inclining my head. “Good night, Alka.”

He smiles and turns to walk down the path. I watch for just a second before turning to the hotel in the distance. I don’t meet anyone on the way, which is good because my mind is racing. My heart still beats quicker than it should.

He was sweet. Kind. I’m almost sad that we ended the night.

I step into the elevator, and there’s already someone there. I can smell the alcohol on him. He looks at me with a grin. “Hey, you’re hot.”

I nod politely.

“Want to fuck?”

“Not even a little. Thanks.”

“Aw, but you’re hot. I bet you have a nice cock.”

“I don’t,” I tell him as I step off the elevator.

“Those with the best cocks always lie,” he laments. The elevator doors shut, and he disappears.

Almost got back without being propositioned. Maybe there’s some code I need to wear that denotes I’m not interested.

My thoughts drift back to Alka, and I decide that, despite the email and the drunken man on the elevator, today was the best day I’ve had on Kala so far. That’s a good thing.