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I couldn’t be sure, but I had assumed that Kiera had been involved in a large part of the wedding planning for them. Talia was Kiera’s best friend, so there was no question in my mind that the two of them had been working on this regularly over this last six months, even if Kiera hadn’t ever discussed it—or anything else, for that matter—with me.
Overall, dinner with the group meant that there was very little pressure on Kiera and me when it came to needing to pretend. From a conversation standpoint, it was all about Zac and Talia’s wedding and everything they had planned for this week.
But even if the pressure to pretend in front of our friends wasn’t particularly difficult, it wasn’t nearly as easy as I had imagined it would be with Kiera.
Last night, when it was time for us to leave to head down to the resort restaurant for dinner, Kiera had walked out of the bedroom she was occupying in our two-bedroom villa wearing a dress I’d never seen on her before.
She looked absolutely stunning, and it took a lot out of me not to react the way I might have if the two of us weren’t in this awful fucking place in our marriage.
Just when I thought I’d composed myself enough to be able to make it through dinner without much effort, I got the clue that I was mistaken.
The truth was that over the last six months, Kiera and I had mostly kept to ourselves. We weren’t often within close proximity of one another, and I hadn’t fully prepared myself for what it would be like now.
Sitting beside her at dinner, having her scent surround me, I almost didn’t survive.
And if I thought I struggled with that, the sad truth was that today was going to be something akin to torture.
Because Zac and Talia had planned a beach day, complete with at least one game of beach volleyball. From the minute they’d shared their plans for the week with us at dinner, it was all I could do not to focus all of my thoughts on this.
A day at the beach in the hot sun.
Since we were still keeping up the guise of a happily married couple, Kiera and I somehow managed to communicate without hardly ever needing to speak. We both seemed to know what needed to be done, and we both did our part to make it happen.
Dinner reservations were scheduled at a certain time, so each of us did what we had to do to be ready on time yesterday. The same thing happened this morning, and to say I’d gotten myself ready early in an effort to have more time to compose myself and prepare for today would have been an understatement.
Kiera had stepped out of her bedroom this morning, already dressed for a day at the beach. She was wearing one of her favorite coverups, and I knew that meant she had on a bikini underneath.
This was where the torture was going to come into play.
Despite knowing what was ahead, I tried to ignore it. I pretended it didn’t matter to me, even when, deep down, it was all I could think about.
“Ready?” I asked when she stepped into the shared space in the villa.
She nodded. “Yeah.”
That was it.
One word from each of us, an understanding we had. We were doing what we had to do to get through the week, and I couldn’t say that I didn’t hate every fucking second of it.
No matter that we’d had the conversation that we did in the car before we left our house yesterday, it didn’t seem to do anything to ease the tension much between us. Granted, we weren’t arguing with one another or spewing nasty words to each other, but things did not feel good between us.
Fortunately, by the time we stepped out onto the sand, we located our friends and joined them. Kiera and I both exchanged friendly greetings with them, and nobody knew the secret we were hiding.
And that’s when it happened.
All the effort I’d made to prepare myself for today and to convince myself that this was going to be a piece of cake flew out the window.
Kiera took off her beach cover up, revealing the bikini and her beautiful body beneath. Two things became abundantly clear to me in that instant.
The first was that no matter how well I might have thought she was coping with our impending divorce, especially considering she was the one who initiated it, maybe she wasn’t as happy about it as I had originally thought.
Until now, I hadn’t noticed it, but Kiera had lost weight. It wasn’t so much that I thought anyone else would notice, considering Kiera had always been slender. But I noticed. This was taking its toll on her as much as it was me.
Aside from that, there was the one thing I had been anticipating today. Seeing Kiera’s body in a bikini.
It had been months.
God, months of not seeing her naked body.
