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"Just trust me: you want the truth on this one, Ruby. You want him to be honest with you and with himself. Anything else will end up in disaster."
Ruby reaches over and takes Banks's hand for one small moment, squeezing it and then letting go. "You're right, and thank you."
With that, Banks pulls his AirPods out of his pocket and holds the little square up to Ruby. "I think I've hit my advice capacity for this morning. Mind if I listen to some Pink Floyd?"
Ruby's mouth quirks in a smile. "Of course not. I'll do the same." She pulls her own AirPods out of the fanny pack around her waist. "But not Pink Floyd," she says, still smiling.
They put their respective earbuds in and Ruby listens to the opening notes of “Message In a Bottle," as The Police play in her ears and the sun blazes its way above the horizon and into the bright morning sky.
Dexter
Christmas Key feels too close--like he can turn around and just go back to Ruby if he wants to--and Dexter can't settle in. It took about five minutes of standing in his tiny home on the north side of the island before he realized that he needed to put more distance between himself and Shipwreck Key.
"Aren't you glad you're here?" Dexter's cousin June asks with a wry smile as she watches him laying on the carpet of the rec room while Amanda, Bentley, Heath, and Margeaux dogpile on top of him.
He laughs as his cousin's quadruplets giggle and squeal. "I am," he says through the melee of little voices. "This is perfect."
June stands up and walks out of the room, returning with a basket of clean laundry on her hip. "This is me: the woman with a laundry basket permanently attached to her side. That, or the woman who is always cooking something, putting a band-aid on someone, or refereeing a disagreement."
"Sounds pretty awesome," Dexter says. He disentangles himself from the kids and promises to come back and play more after he talks to their mom for a few minutes.
"So," June says, lifting just her eyes from the laundry that she's folding. She sets a small flowered shirt on top of a pile of girls' clothes. "Things went sideways with the First Lady?"
Dexter reaches for a pair of jeans that clearly belong to one of the boys (grass stains on the knees, a boyish cut to the denim) and folds them, setting them with the red and blue t-shirts that are covered with tractors and cars.
"I don't know exactly," Dexter admits. "Things were going well, we were enjoying each other's company, and then...I guess I realized how much I really care about her."
"So you took off?" June frowns at him. She's a pretty woman with light reddish-brown hair and eyes the color of root beer. Her nose is covered in freckles, and her cheeks have a high, pink flush to them. "That doesn't sound like you, Dex."
"It wasn't that simple." He hands her a pair of folded pink leggings. "My editor didn't like the direction the book was going. He thinks I went soft on the whole project, and that's not what I do. I pull back layers, I dig deep, and I explore things without fear. But being involved with Ruby means that her feelings are more important to me than any other source I've ever worked with."
"Ohhhh," June says. "I see."
"So I started to tiptoe around things. To worry that I was going to say something she didn't like. And my writing suffered."
"Hence the escape."
"I had to." He folds silently for a minute, placing clothing in piles without realizing what he's doing. June reaches over and wordlessly moves a pair of princess pajamas from the boys' pile. "I needed to get some work done without feeling as if I should run it all by Ruby first."
"So that's it?" June looks skeptical. "You just wanted to work on the book alone?"
"That's not all of it. We were reading her husband's diaries and working through that project everyday--"
"Ooooh. Anything juicy from the president's personal journals? Tell me, tell me."
Dexter laughs; he can't help it. Anyone would want the inside scoop on Jack Hudson's inner thoughts. "Uhhh. Let me think." Dexter folds a few t-shirts and June re-folds them. "Totally confidentially, of course."
"Of course."
"Jack Hudson was a very complicated man. His writing was eloquent, and he had a lot to say about being in love with two women."
"Like?"
"Mooommmmmm," Amanda calls, running up to the couch where they're folding laundry. "Margeaux bit me!"
Without missing a beat, June takes the arm that her daughter offers and inspects the supposed bite mark. "She didn't even break the skin," June says, applying a kiss to the arm and then tickling her daughter a little to get her to smile. "Go and tell her that we're not playing cats and dogs right now, and that if she bites again like a puppy she'll be in time out."
Amanda runs off and immediately starts calling for her sister.
