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Right now, he had no clue how to dig into Tristan’s psyche and the lack of communication between them stretched out until Isaiah could almost taste the abject failure that laced everything he’d tried to do lately.
But he had a different job to do here. One that shouldn’t be as much of a challenge. And part of the reason he’d agreed to help Aria had to do with this feeling like the team had been divided, with Isaiah on one side of the yawning expanse and everyone else on the other. This was his chance to connect with Marchande outside of the team, one on one. Get things back on an even keel.
He’d sucked at it so far.
Granted, he’d only briefly tried once as they’d been working side by side at the barn. The backbreaking work hadn’t left a lot of room for chatter, not to mention that reaching out took energy that Isaiah didn’t have to spare. That, if anything, probably had more to do with his cluelessness when it came to the dynamics of the personalities in the car. Which meant he’d stepped into a minefield by organizing this outing and now he had to figure out how to dance.
“Did Tristan suddenly develop an allergy to hard work?” he asked lightly in the direction of the back seat. “I need to know if he’s going to start sneezing and reaching for the tissues in the middle of helping me secure the classroom dividers.”
“Ha, ha.” Tristan’s eye roll came through loud and clear without visual confirmation. “The only allergy I have is to women who make snap judgments without bothering to get facts. I’m good with everything else.”
“Snap judgments?” Cassidy’s voice bristled with sarcasm so thick that you could practically wrap it around you like a coat. “That implies that I might be wrong, and I really don’t think—”
Cassidy bit off the rest of her words so suddenly that Isaiah glanced in the rearview mirror to make sure she hadn’t leaped from the Yukon via the window or something. He watched in the mirror as Aria glared at her friend and jerked her head toward the front seat, mouthing something that was too hard to catch and drive at the same time, so Isaiah let her handle that half of the battle.
His half would have to wait until a more opportune time, like when the subject of Tristan’s animosity wasn’t four feet away. The second the coast was clear, he’d pull Marchande aside and get some answers about out what had crawled up his friend’s backside.
Because sorting out where to step in this minefield that he’d unwittingly thrown together sounded exactly like what he’d hoped to do on this group date. Wearily, he focused on driving. That was the extent of what he could handle right now.
Once he’d found the movie place with Aria’s excellent directions, he parked and they spilled from Hardy’s SUV. Marchande ate up the concrete with his long legged stride as he outpaced Isaiah and the women easily. About half way across the parking lot, he seemed to realize this wasn’t a one hundred meter dash and slowed down to wait for them. Then he carefully kept to Isaiah’s left side, presumably since Aria and Cassidy were on the right.
Isaiah sighed. There were women present and Marchande wasn’t even flirting with either of them, which was about as unlikely an event as the sun not rising in the morning. What was he supposed to do with that?
What he’d promised he would, of course. A bit desperate, he scrolled through his mental Aria file in search of something he could use to break the forty-foot wall of ice that had formed. “Hey Marchande, tell Aria about that last trip to Hawaii. That’s the place she most wants to visit.”
Tristan shot him the side-eye. “We spent fourteen hours in the water wearing seventy pounds of gear.”
Aria lifted a brow, clearly trying to figure out the punchline, which Marchande did not deliver.
Cretin. He wasn’t even trying to be charming and before today, Isaiah has assumed that was one part of Marchande’s DNA that would never fade. There was a running joke that he’d be chasing the nurses at the assisted living facility even after he hit ninety.
“But we went to the beach that one time,” Isaiah reminded him. “That was nice.”
“You were there. You tell he
r,” Marchande muttered with an eye roll.
“You’ve been to Hawaii?” Aria elbowed Isaiah good-naturedly. “You didn’t bother to mention that during the original conversation. What was it like?”
“It was a lot of work.” Now he sounded like as much of an idiot as Marchande, but she’d thrown him for a second with the light accusation, as if she’d really gotten twisted up over the fact that he’d held out on her. “We went for a training exercise at the base in Pearl Harbor a while back. It wasn’t a vacation.”
“Oh.”
She seemed disappointed, but that last thing he’d wanted to do was make it sound like he’d led some kind of glamorous life while trying to play up the sour puss on his left. “Tristan’s been a lot of places on vacation though. He likes to travel.”
“That sounds interesting,” Aria commented brightly, clearly recognizing her cue again, which gave Isaiah a brief spurt of warmth inside despite all the ice. “Where have you been?”
Tristan shrugged with a tiny glance in Aria’s direction. “Je ne sais pas. Lots of places. South of France. Brief stopover in Prague. It’s easy to get around Europe when Stuttgart is one of the main pass-throughs for SEALs.”
“That’s in Germany?” Aria asked.
“Ouais.”
And just as Isaiah started breathing a little easier, the conversation ground to a halt, as it generally did when Tristan switched to French—which he had done on purpose. Of course. Because leading four adults through the rigors of a normal conversation had suddenly turned into a feat of epic proportions. He gave up and slunk to the counter to get tickets for everyone. Thank goodness he’d picked the movies for this excursion, where they could sit in silence on purpose. Imagine if he’d planned something monstrously difficult for this ill-fated outing, like eating a meal.
After he’d handed off tickets to the women, he let them go ahead so they could pick out whatever seats made the most sense to them given the climate. The last thing he wanted to do was get in the middle of a knock-down-drag-out over who refused to sit next to who.
Since Tristan had likewise hung back, it smelled like Isaiah’s one chance to dig. He grabbed Tristan’s arm and pulled him to the side, out of the flow of traffic.
