Page 45 of The Wife Upstairs
“We should’ve gone on more vacations,” I said, letting my gaze drift to his lips. “Maybe back to Hawaii.”
I glanced up at him then, and his face was open to me, finally. His eyes warm, his lips parted, the Eddie I knew.
The Eddie I understood.
And suddenly the best way to get out of here was very, very clear.
She hadn’t come to Hawaii to meet a guy. She’d come to sit in the sunshine and drink overpriced frozen cocktails. To look out at the Pacific Ocean, which she’d never seen before that trip. In fact, the only ocean she’d ever been to was the Gulf of Mexico, that one summer Blanche’s family took her to their place in Orange Beach.
Blanche hadn’t approved of the trip to Hawaii. “It’s tacky,” she’d told Bea, wrinkling her nose as she’d tucked her hair behind her ear. “And you can afford better. Do Bali or something. Fiji, even.”
But Bea had wanted Hawaii, so that’s where she’d gone, and Blanche could get fucked with her judgey face and pointless opinions. She was just jealous, anyway. Tripp hadn’t taken her anywhere since their honeymoon in Italy, and Bea knew for a fact he was still paying off the credit card bills.
But she sat there in her beach chair day after day, looking out at the ocean—as blue as she’d hoped it would be—and Blanche’s words had spun around her mind. Should she have gone somewhere a little more exotic? Somewhere harder to get to? Somewhere where she wasn’t spending her days avoiding families and honeymooners?
It was always a balancing act, separating the wants of the girl she used to be from the needs of the woman she was now.
Another mai tai, too sweet, but she drank it anyway. No, Hawaii was good. Hawaii wasaccessible,and that’s part of what Southern Manors was selling, right? Class, but in a comfortable way. She might do an entire Hawaiian line for next summer. Hibiscus blooms painted on glass tumblers. Napkin rings in the shape of pineapples. A cheeky hula girl print.
Thinking about work calmed her as it always did, made her brain cease that constant circling, like she was forever looking for the places where she’d stepped wrong, orcouldstep wrong. She never had that uncertainty and self-doubt when it came to her business.
Bea pulled her iPad out of her beach bag where it sat next to the three magazines and two books she’d picked up at the airport, but knew she wouldn’t read.
Within a few minutes, she had a page of ideas for the summer line, and was trying to think of a name for the collection that would be fun and catchy, but not overly cutesy. Another fine line she walked all the time, but easier.
She was on her third attempt (“Something with Blue Hawaii? Too dated?”) when a shadow fell across her chair, and she heard someone say, “Working at the beach? I’m not sure if that’s inspiring or depressing.”
It was the smile that did her in, almost from that first moment. Looking up at the man standing there in striped trunks and a white T-shirt, one hand casually in his pocket, his sunglasses spotted with dried seawater, his hair falling over his brow like he was the hero of some rom-com she’d just stepped into.
Bea smiled back, almost without thinking. Later, she’d realize that he was good at that, at breaching walls before you’d even had a chance to put them up, but on that sunny afternoon, there hadn’t been anything sinister about his charm.
“Beats working in an office,” she heard herself reply, and his grin had deepened, revealing a dimple in his left cheek.
“I’ll drink to that,” he replied, and then he was offering her his hand, that smile as bright as the sun overhead.
“I’m Eddie.”
Eddie. It was a boy’s name, Bea thought, but it suited him because there was something boyish in his smile.
And she liked that. Liked it enough that she let him sit in the empty chair next to her and that she accepted his invitation for dinner that night.
Why not?she’d thought. Wasn’t this the kind of thing that was supposed to go along with this new life of hers? Expensive vacations, fancy cocktails, dinner with a handsome stranger?
They ate in the hotel restaurant, near the big plate glass window overlooking the sea, the sky a violent mix of pink, purple, and orange, a candle flickering between them, expensive wine sweating in a bucket of ice by the table.
Looking back, Bea could see how it was almost too perfect, too much of a romantic cliché, but at the time, it had just felt exciting and… right, somehow. Like she was finally getting everything she deserved.
They talked, and she was surprised at how easy it all was. How easyhewas. He was from Maine, originally, and loved boats. He was in Hawaii because he had a friend looking to get into the yacht charter business, and they were scouting out other companies, seeing how it was done.
And she’d told him about growing up in Alabama, leaving out the more Southern gothic aspects of her childhood, focusing on the fancy boarding school, the debutante scene, the all-girls college she’d attended in South Carolina. As she spun out her tales, she realized that she was doing it again, papering parts of Blanche’s life over the less savory parts of hers, but she’d been in the habit for so long that it hardly registered anymore.
Over dessert, laughing sheepishly, a little chagrined, rubbing his hand over the back of his neck: “You are really fucking beautiful.”
Shake of his head. “And I am clearly really fucking drunk,” he added.
But he hadn’t been. He’d had one old-fashioned earlier, and his wine was mostly untouched.
Maybe it should have alarmed her, that he was faking being drunk as an excuse to say something like that to her, a woman he’d just met.
