Kayla stamped her foot, but the pouting act hadn’t worked on Mack since the first Obama administration. “She knows Skye. She would have told her and blown the whole thing up. You know how she is.”
Mack gently banged the side of her head against the wall beside her. “Yeah. She has this weird thing about not lying and manipulating people.”
“I’m not manipulating Skye. I’m just…introducing data to help influence her decision.”
“And telling her you’re going to marry me.”
“Yeah.”
“Which is a lie,” Mack said.
“Okay, look, if you’re going to nitpick everything I say, we aren’t going to get anywhere, and we don’t have a lot of time.”
As if her mother had been listening in, Mack’s phone rang again. She held up the screen, unnecessarily proving it was Mom again. “Time’s up. God, why did you tell her anything?”
“I had to! She’s my emergency contact. What if we had died in a plane crash?”
“That option sounds pretty good right now.” Mack sighed and banged her head a couple more times. “Might as well get it over with.”
Kayla’s stomach plummeted, and she held out her hand to the inevitable. Mack, however, was nothing if not gallant. She slid her thumb across the screen and held the phone to her ear. “Hi, Mom.”
The thin, tinny voice coming from Mack’s phone was so loud that Kayla could hear it like she was in the same room. “Don’t you ‘Hi Mom’ me, McKensie Elizabeth Bristol. How could you not tell me you’re in love with my daughter? And where have you been?”
“Sorry, Mom. It was a long flight.” Mack turned and walked a few steps, picking up her usual habit of pacing while on the phone, and taking the muffled sounds of Mom’s voice too far away for Kayla to hear. “Yeah, I wanted to tell you face-to-face, but you know how LaLa gets so excited about things.”
Annoyance prickled across Kayla’s skin. Mack and Mom had a habit of ganging up on her. They thought they were so funny and insightful, and Kayla was their favorite target. Most of the time, it was cute, but when they did that thing of talking about her like she wasn’t in the room, it rankled. Of course, she couldn’t ignore the fact that the only reason Mack was in trouble with Mom was because of her. Mack was doing her a favor aboveand beyond anything she could ask anyone else. Heck, it was above and beyond anything she should have asked Mack. Kayla owed her one—maybe one thousand, honestly—and now she was deflecting Mom’s righteous indignation. Maybe a hurried three a.m. text message to say she was flying off to St. Lucia to marry her best friend hadn’t been the best idea.
Just as guilt was threatening to engulf her, the main airport doors opened, letting in a gust of fresh air laced with the humidity of the Caribbean and the scent of some exotic flower. Allowing the sounds around her to penetrate, she heard the chattering of a dozen different accents and half as many languages. Standing by the baggage carousel were a pair of local men, their skin dark and rich as expensive wood, their eyes alight with laughter, bright blue polo shirts and pressed khaki shorts fluttering gently in the breeze of the passing luggage. One laughed and slapped the other on the shoulder. The second said something in a lilting, melodic language that almost sounded like French but held a distinctly Caribbean cadence. Behind their heads was a massive poster for a local beer with the golden hue that promised light, crisp refreshment.
Everything around her was alive and exotic. In all the excitement, somehow Kayla had forgotten that she was in St. Lucia. That she had a new stamp in her passport. That soon she would have sand in between her toes from a beach she had never visited before. She would swim in the ocean and drink cocktails in a cabana. She was on vacation with her best friend and, God did she need it after everything the last year had brought. And after Mack’s secretary’s revelation it was clear Mack needed this as much as she did. Maybe that was what she could offer. Sure, it came with planning a fake wedding on that very beach under that sun and with those cocktails, but that was just one little wrinkle in the beach towel of joy this week could be if they let it.
“Okay. She’s pissed, but she isn’t disowning either of us,” Mack said as she rejoined Kayla.
Impulsively, she threw her arms around Mack’s neck and held on tight. “That’s great. Thanks for talking to her.”
“I should’ve talked to her earlier, apparently. You didn’t tell me Skye never asked Mom for her blessing.”
Kayla asked, “Do people even do that anymore?”
The crinkle was back between Mack’s eyebrows. “Of course. It kills me that I didn’t do that.”
“We aren’t really getting married, Mack.”
“Yeah, I know, but still.” A slight blush appeared on Mack’s cheeks, and it was so adorable that Kayla couldn’t help reaching up and cupping her face. “Have I ruined your masc street cred?”
“No.” Mack shrugged. “I mean, maybe. It’s the respectful thing to do, and now Mom has had two people propose to you without asking for her blessing first. I think it hurt her feelings.”
“Well, that’s sweet, but she’ll get over it when I come home married to Skye.”
Mack’s eyebrow rose in a clear show of skepticism. “You think she’ll be fine with you going to St. Lucia engaged to one woman and coming home married to a different one?”
“Probably not, but she loves Skye. Plus, she’s always wanted me to settle down.”
Mack started back toward the luggage carousel in search of their bags. “Remember how she tried to get us to date in high school?”
Kayla hooked her arm through Mack’s, who adjusted her gait to match Kayla’s shorter stride. “She just wanted to get you a girlfriend, and I was the only other lesbian in our school at the time. Plus, it would be easier to chaperone dates if we were going on the same ones.”
“She would have made us sleep in separate rooms, though, so then there would have been no one to clean your room.”
