Damn it. The memory still hurts, with an echo of the nervous pinching in my stomach when I walked over, my head spinning with the possibilities. I hadn’t heard anything from him, so maybe he was going to pretend it had never happened, but maybe he wanted to wait to talk in person. To let me down easy, or to tell me he felt the same way? Hope fluttered in my chest.
That’s when I saw all the guys clustered around the bulletin board in the common room, jostling each other and snickering. I can still hear Will’s voice, reading with wry amusement the words I’d written so sincerely the night before.
“ ‘Sometimes a person comes along who makes you think all the clichés and fairy tales could be real.’ ” He chuckled and nudged whoever was standing next to him in the throng. “Can you believe that?”
My heart had started thudding hard enough to shake me, and my cheeks flared searing hot. For a second I couldn’t convince my legs to move. I knew I should march on over there and give him a piece of my mind, take him to task for treating my emotional so cruelly. So I did what every courageous, independent woman would do.
I turned on my heels and ran.
Reliving that moment, I swallow hard. Brooke touches my arm. “Ruby?”
I make myself shrug. “He pinned it to the bulletin board in the common room for everyone to gawk at. All the guys in the frat were laughing at it. Will was standing there laughing about it with them.”
Maggie sucks in her breath. “Yeah,” says Brooke. “Exactly.”
“I gave him my heart and he took a dump on it, basically,” I say. “He couldn’t have cared about me even a bit. I was an idiot to think he did.”
“You weren’t an idiot,” Brooke says firmly. “He put on a good show. I’m so sorry you’re going to have to put up with him here. I really didn’t know Trevor’s Will was your Will.”
“How exactly did that happen?” I ask, grateful to change the subject from my past humiliations. “He wasn’t at Trevor’s birthday party last year, or your engagement party, or, like, a gazillion other things everyone else showed up for. I never ran into him once before now.”
“The story I heard is that they were on the rowing team together at USC,” Brooke says. “You know how guys are. They’ll barely talk in five years and still see each other as BFFs.”
That explains it. I straighten my spine. “Well, I’m not going to let him get to me. I learned my lesson. I’ll steer clear of him, and we’ll both be happy.”
After a shower—not the rainfall kind—and a wardrobe change into my favorite teal halter dress—it sets off my eyes and makes my figure look nearly hourglass; magic!—I venture out of my room to explore.
Beyond the lobby desks, the main floor opens up to an outer deck where teak recliners circle a sparkling infinity pool. Palapas spot the golden sand of the beach beyond. The layout of the resort allows the jungle to sprout up here and there around the deck, and a natural breeze flows through the whole place. An environmentally friendly substitute for air conditioning, I guess. I can’t say it isn’t pleasant.
Really, there’s nothing unpleasant I can say about Will’s resort, as much as I might enjoy getting a mental dig in. It’s one of the most un-unpleasant places I’ve ever had the satisfaction of inhabiting, down to the modern-yet-classic styling of the columns and doorframes.
But then, Will has always been good at appearances, hasn’t he?
Speak of the devil. The man himself ambles into view on the deck, side-by-side with a woman I haven’t seen before. Her ebony hair is pulled back in a chignon, and a sleek indigo sheath dress cloths her tall, svelte frame. She doesn’t look more than a year or two older than me, but she’s exactly the sort of woman who always makes me feel like even at 28 I’m just a frivolous girl.
I watch their stroll, safely hidden from view by a massive fern. It doesn’t help that she’s absolutely gorgeous. No wonder Will can’t seem to take his eyes off of her. And why wouldn’t she be into him? Successful, handsome, charm to spare—he’s even more the playboy than he was in college.
The thought pinches at my chest. Is that jealousy? Oh, no. He can flirt with whomever he wants—it’s no business of mine.
And yet I’m still standing there when Will gives the woman a brief wave and turns to head straight toward me.
Ack! The last thing I need is him thinking I’m lurking around to spy on his canoodling. I scoot backward and spin around to hustle off—and find myself face-to-face with a speeding luggage cart.
I yelp. The porter gasps and yanks the cart to the side. Several of the smaller bags tumble off the stack of suitcases onto the floor.
Nice one, Walters. “I’m so sorry!” I babble as I grab a few of the runaway bags. I’m just setting the last of them back on the cart when someone taps my shoulder. My heart sinks.
“You know, if your things were ruined in the rain, there are alternatives to hijacking other people’s luggage, Ruby,” Will says with a teasing arch of his eyebrows.
I glower at him. “I’m just giving your employee a hand.”
The porter, clearly a generous spirit, hurries off without mentioning I caused the problem in the first place.
“So what do you think of the place?” Will asks, reminding me of how much I don’t want to tell him the answer to that question. But I’m not going to lie.
“It’s nice enough, I suppose,” I say nonchalantly, “if you’re into comfort and splendor and that sort of thing.”
Will’s smile twitches as if he’s trying not to laugh. I’m not sure if that’s a victory for me or a fail. “As hard to impress as always, I see,” he says. “Let me guess: You’d be happier spending your vacation adventuring off on some uncharted planet?”
I don’t go around broadcasting my sci-fi geekery to everyone I meet, but I’ve never been ashamed of it either. If you ask me, the world will be a much better place if the Star Trek vision of the future ever comes to be. All races and nations living in harmony, on a grand quest to bring the same kind of peace and compassion all across the galaxy? What’s not to like?
And that’s not even getting into how fantastic it’d be to have the technology to conjure any food you wanted out of thin air or zip across the planet in an instant.
But right now Will’s comment makes my cheeks burn. Star Trek was always our thing, the shared geek bonding that brought us together. I had written him off as another shallow frat douche when I noticed the logo sticker on the back of one of his notebooks. We wound up talking for hours in the campus pub that night, going over our favorite episodes, and which characters we were most like. (He was obviously a Riker, the full-of-himself ladies man gunning for the captain’s chair, and Will insisted I was a Janeway, breaking new ground and breaking balls as the first female captain in the franchise.)