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“You weren’t even gone for three hours!” Stacey cries out.
Nina bursts out laughing again.
“If it was a week, it would be different,” Stacey continues. “No wonder your feelings are all confused. If you told us that from the start, we could give you different advice.”
“Yeah?” I ask. “Like what advice?”
Stacey looks at Nina and Kelsey, who both shrug.
“Thanks a lot, guys,” I laugh. “You’re incredibly helpful.”
Stacey shakes her head. “I just think that you should see where it leads. Maybe it’s something you can really run with, you know?”
“Oh, no,” I say. “I’m not running with anything.” We study a shelf filled with bikinis that are so small, I can only imagine what parts they’ll cover up, leaving the rest for the world to see. “He lives here. And he’s my ex’s best friend. Isn’t that wrong on some level?”
“Is he still friends with your ex?” Stacey asks.
“I have no idea. I haven’t talked to Noah in years.”
“I don’t think after ten years it still counts,” Nina says. She holds up a one-piece bathing suit and looks in one of the mirrors. When she shakes her head at her reflection, she shrugs and adds. “And if you’re not going to make it a long-term thing, it doesn’t matter, anyway. Have fun, make it a wedding fling, and be done with it when you go home. Love is in the air right now—this is a wedding!”
I sigh and nod. Maybe I should just say that it’s a fling, admit that I feel something, and leave it at that. It can’t go on forever because he’s not close enough for us to really make a thing of it. I don’t do long distance. So, maybe he’s not quite my type, but I don’t have to panic about it because he’s just a fling.
A fling doesn’t need to be Mr. Right. Just Mr. Right Now. And that’s fine.
“I have an idea!” Stacey cries out. She’s been typing on her phone while I was mulling over the definition of a fling.
“What?” we ask in unison.
“Let’s go watch the guys train. It’s great fun. Sweaty, muscular hunks of meat running into each other by force, out of free will.”
“You guys are so eloquent,” Nina laughs. “Seriously, I want one of you to meet Adam one day and describe him to me like that, too.”
We all laugh, and I agree that watching the guys train is a good idea. Stacey is excited—she wants to see Marc in action. And Nina and Kelsey seem eager, too. It’s better than blowing all the extra cash we have on outfits we’re not going to use back in real life once we leave the island again.
The football field where the guys are training is a deep green, with crisp white lines painted recently. The stands are empty, with only a handful of tourists here and there watching the guys train.
We shuffle into one of the front rows and sit down. I glance at a photographer. I'm becoming allergic to paparazzi. But this guy only takes photos of the team and I relax. I don't think he's here looking for trouble, and by some miracle, none of the paps at the hotel figured out where we are.
I hope it stays that way.?
“Look, there he is,” Stacey says, pointing to someone with broad equipment under a red jersey. His head looks ridiculously small with his pumped-up chest and shoulders.
“They all look the same to me,” Nina says.
I nod. They really do. But Stacey can tell Marc apart from all of them, even though they’re not wearing numbers on their backs with their training jerseys.
They’re at the backend of their warmup, stretching it out. The guys are helping each other, with one playing on his back, leg in the air, and the other kneeling right up against him, pushing the leg back as far as it will go.
“Is this football or something more…adult?” I ask with a grin.
“Come on, you know how this goes, Jen,” Stacey says, rolling her eyes. “You dated a quarterback, for crying out loud.”
She’s right. But since Noah left, and I had to rebuild my future without him, I stopped following football altogether. It hurt to watch it at first, and later, I stopped caring about something that—to me—ruined everything.
If it hadn’t been for that damn football scholarship Brett had gotten, Noah would never have wanted to tag along to see if he could make it big, too.
“Oh, this is the good part,” Stacey says when the guys line up. “The idea is to get through them with the ball.”
