I want to go home
If I squint really hard at the horizon, I’m pretty sure I see you taking body shots off a guy with a handlebar mustache in Seychelles. Hope you’re having more fun than me.
BUT NOT TOO MUCH FUN
He would never read them. They’d sit, unsent on her phone with that annoying red exclamation point error forever. But she could pretend.
“I don’t think those texts are ever reaching that boyfriend of yours,” Waylon said as he knelt on his sleeping bag.
“I think Ford’s out of my league.” That earned an amused huff. “But no, um. Kent and I broke up.”
Broke updidn’t accurately reflect the way things ended. She was single—he was in denial. And, if she was honest, he had been for a good long while. Their relationship had been dead in the water for ages—months, years? She’d just been too scared to admit it.
For the last three weeks, she’d been pointedly ignoring his calls.If she hadn’t been so dead set on proving to everyone she belonged on this trip, it would have been too easy to fall back into their old patterns. The same routine of trying to please everyone except herself.
“I thought it was serious,” Waylon said.
“It was for him.” There was an itch at the base of her throat she couldn’t stop scratching. Sourness cut through her chest. “Actually, we got in a fight because he tried to tell me not to come on this trip.”
Waylon considered this. “Who among us hasn’t tried to talk our girlfriends out of crashing an international company retreat turned cage fight?”
Fletcher hummed. “I didn’t think you were the girlfriend type.”
The moment snagged and unraveled. Finally, he said, “Not lately, I’m not.”
“Not since Eliza?”
Waylon’s guard bolted into place in an instant. Fletcher watched it happen, the suave, charismatic character he played so easily being shuttered inside hurricane windows. Something cold, distant took form instead.
Normally, she’d relish the chance to dig under his skin, festering there like a splinter. Under the first dust of stars, it didn’t have the same effect.
“Kent wanted me to be his wife,” she blurted. “We were high school sweethearts, and I guess he always thought moving to New York was a phase I needed to, I don’t know, get out of my system. All he ever wanted was to get married in a little white chapel and drag me back to the same life I had growing up. A farm, a couple of well-oiled crop-dusting planes and combines, four kids, a hundred acres, and a tire swing.”
She didn’t know why she said it, except maybe it was easier to talk about Kent than the events of the last twenty-four hours. Andif she and Waylon were going to keep up this tentative truce, being on speaking terms helped.
Waylon laughed, bright and alive once more. “Let me guess, that didn’t fit in your five-year plan?”
“Ten-year, actually.” She sucked down a couple steadying breaths to keep her stomach from rioting again. There was nothingwrongwith little white chapels. But Fletcher had always been more of adestination elopement with a hot air balloon send-offgirl herself. Kent never understood that. “Maybe I should’ve listened.”
A sharp inhale. “To his marriage proposal?”
“To his insistence that this job is a soul-sucking whirlpool of depravity that will lead to nothing and no one.”
Waylon’s eyebrows did that infuriating thing. A breathwhooshed out of him that said,Well, was he wrong?
After that, silence. She couldn’t bear to look at Waylon, knowing he was looking back at her. Unsure of what he’d find.
Somewhere in the cloying darkness, an owl screeched, and the noise had Fletcher burrowing deeper into her sleeping bag.
“We should take turns keeping watch,” Waylon said. A yawn tugged at the corners of his lips, but he didn’t address it. “I’ll go first.”
“Oh my god. Do my ears deceive me? Does Waylon Cartwright have a plan?” Fletcher said, eyelids heavy.
The stars above them spun like snow globe glitter or a December night’s first flurries. As sleep sunk its claws into her, Fletcher couldn’t quite name the stir of warmth in her chest, but she knew that sleeping next to Waylon Cartwright was the safest she’d felt in years.
15
Three years earlier
