He looks like he’s about to say something else, but I’m in my room with the door closed before he gets the chance.
I leanagainst the door as it clicks shut behind me, tipping my head back. My chin wobbles, and as fresh tears spill down mycheeks, I have to remind myself that I’m at a resort in Cabo, and not on the floor of my room at my parents’ house, trying to accept that I am not getting married. And I am definitely not twenty-two, nursing a fresh heartbreak, crying on the drive home from my new teacher job. Even if right now it feels like that, I know it will pass.
And while I wait for the feeling to pass, I start a hot shower for myself. My instinct is to call Hazel. I know she would be there for me, but the therapist I’ve been seeing for the last few months encouraged me to try and take care of myself when I’m having a lot of feelings instead of outsourcing the processing to other people.
It’s especially hard at moments like this, when the sadness from my decade-old heartbreak bleeds into the feelings of my most recent breakup.
This trip was supposed to be an escape. Time away from the real world, time for just me without the stress of my job or the pressure to make a decision about leaving or staying. No reminders of Todd, enjoying a solo vacation—and after less than a half-hour near Miles, all of that feels so far away.
I take my time in the shower, letting the feelings move through me and the hot water bring me back to myself, to the present.
Dwelling on the past has never done me any good. I learned that as I was healing from my breakup with Miles. In the year after he broke up with me, I would find myself doing better, and then I’d get curious and search for him on the internet—looking for news stories about him. I’d watch his games sometimes, but it always ended the same way—I’d cry so hard I gave myself a migraine. I eventually stopped, made Hazel keep me accountable, and found that as long as I never thought about him or saw or said his name, I would be fine.
I thought I was doing well just six months out from Todd leaving me. The fact that I even told Hazel I was interested in kissing someone before I came on this trip feels like progress. But even if I am willing to have some kind of vacation fling, I’m obviously a lot more delicate emotionally than I thought I was, and Miles is a bull in a china shop that I need to stay away from.
I don’t want to spend my entire vacation fighting demons. I want to spend it reading all the books I piled onto my e-reader and calming my nervous system.
It’s clear I cannot be around Miles if I want to have the vacation that I need.
So I just have to figure out a way to spend ten days at this resort without running into him.
How hard could that be?
4
MILES
“Yo, where the hell are you?”
Two finely manicured nails snap in front of my face, jolting me back from wherever I just zoned out. I release the ropes I was holding taut for tricep extensions, realizing that I have no idea how many I just did or how it felt—was the weight too heavy, too light?
I give my attention to my gym buddy, Destiny, who was just snapping at me.
“I—I was in yesterday,” I say.
Yesterday, when I saw the one that got away at the pool. Abby fucking Ashe. At the same resort as me. At the same time. In that red bikini, with legs for days, and a body that time has only made better.
“What happened yesterday?”
“I saw a ghost.”
“Oh hell no, I don’t want to hear any ghost stories,” Destiny says, her slight Jamaican accent slipping out through her words as she adjusts the weight on the machine I was just using, only taking it down ten or so pounds. Destiny is the Zumba and yoga instructor here at the resort. We started working out together only a couple of weeks after I moved here. She likes to get ina workout before her morning yoga class as a “warm-up.” It’s almost offensive that my workout is her warm-up, but I take comfort that she’s a good spot for my lifts.
The gym is empty at this hour; I only ever see one or maybe two other people here in the mornings. It smells too clean for a gym, which is either a testament to the staff’s attentiveness or the amount of usage the place gets. It’s a well-maintained gym with a wide variety of equipment—dumbbells, kettlebells, machines, and squat racks. Destiny and I have already been at it for half an hour this morning, and I’m increasingly having trouble focusing. I thought coming to the gym would help me get Abby off my mind, but she’s been haunting me since I saw her at the pool yesterday.
“No, not a literal ghost. Just someone from my past—from college is here.”
“An old fraternity brother here on a bachelor trip?”
“Do I look like a frat guy?”
Destiny raises two perfectly shaped eyebrows at me, as if this is her entire point.
“Yeah, okay, fair. But I wasn’t in a frat. I was an athlete.”
“Really?” she says with mock surprise. “Mr. At-the-gym-at-5:30-on-the-dot, works out for an hour and a half every single morning, was a college athlete?”
“And a professional athlete,” I mumble, but Destiny isn’t impressed by me. She never has been. She doesn’t boost my ego, which is both refreshing and annoying.
