“That’s hilarious,” she says, shaking her head. “I see people dressed up in all kinds of strange costumes, dancing on the side of the road holding up signs, but I have never thought to pull over and hit on any of them. It’s an unfortunate, unsexy job.” She chuckles.
I poke her back with my foot in her thigh.
“Apparently not for all of us,” I say with a grin.
Every now and then, in times like this one, Sienna seems back to her playful self again, forgetting about having to leave. But she always slips back into that seemingly depressed state of mind that bothers me, even though she tries really hard not to let it show. I don’t want her to go. Hell, I’m crazy enough about her that if I didn’t think it’d be crossing some kind of line too soon, I’d tell her I want her to stay here with me for as long as she wants. But I know it wouldn’t be that simple. It wouldn’t be like it was that day two weeks ago when I asked her to miss her plane. Or when I told her to stay for two weeks. Sienna has a family and a job and a life in California. And I have all of that stuff here.
No, it wouldn’t be that easy.
It’s just an hour after dark and Sienna is inside taking a shower. The second she got in there, I went into my bedroom and dug through a box in my closet where I keep the holiday stuff I haven’t used in two years. It takes me five minutes to unravel a string of solid white Christmas lights. I plug them into an extension cord and take them outside, stretching the cord across the yard as far as it’ll go. I string the lights around the base of a palm tree.
I step back and cock my head to one side, looking at my work.
Damn.
OK, it kinda looks like shit—this crafty chick stuff really isn’t my thing, but I continue with it, going around the front of the house to get the other stuff out of the trunk of the car that I picked up from the store on the way home from the shop.
It doesn’t turn out at all like it was supposed to.
I feel like an idiot.
Sienna
I have to tell him. I’ve been avoiding it all day, both because I didn’t know how to say it, and also because I’ve been trying to force myself not to see it that way. I had hoped that maybe my mind would change and I’d be able to accept it, his dangerous lifestyle. Because it’s true—I care about Luke enough that I want desperately to just accept it. But the longer I thought about it, the more he held me in his arms, kissed my lips, made me smile and laugh and feel unlike I’ve ever felt before about any guy, the more it became clear to me that it would hurt a thousand times worse to lose him.
It would kill me to lose him like that.
So the only thing I can do is let him go like this, now, before we get so close that nothing can separate us other than death.
I blow-dry my hair and pin it to the top of my head before putting on a tank top and my ball shorts.
Luke isn’t anywhere inside the house, so I go out onto the lanai to see if he’s sitting at the table. He’s not. I start to go back inside, but then I notice an out-of-place arrangement of white lights and flickering flames out ahead in the short distance closer to the beach.
I follow the light, tiptoeing my way through the prickly grass in the dark in my bare feet. Soon the grass becomes sand and the flickering lights become brighter and the steady lights become more apparent. A string of white Christmas lights have been wrapped around a palm tree, illuminating the sand and the grass poking up from it. A blanket has been laid out over the sand beneath the tree, surrounded by a few Mason jars propped in the sand, glowing with little white candles inside.
After I’ve shaken off a little of the surprise and I see Luke standing there smiling back at me, all I want to do is smile and cry at the same time—smile because he did this for me and cry because he’s made it that much harder to tell him what I need to tell him.
He waves a hand, palm up, at his handiwork, a blush in his face he’s trying so hard to hide. “It looked better in my head,” he says and then reaches behind and scratches the back of his neck nervously.