Page 66 of My Favorite Bad Decision
“Until recently,” I agree, “it was mostly about what I’d say to you in hell.”
“Hell?” he asks, raising a brow.
I nod. “It’s where you go when you break up with someone by text.”
He shrugs. “That’s fair. So, will you be needing a tentmate there?”
I grin. This is the extent of my infatuation with Miller: he suggests sharing a tent in hell, and it sort of sounds like a good idea.
For dinner, we take the golf cart and bounce down the bumpy dirt road to a small hotel that sits right on the beach. Even here, there are very few people, and the staff knows Miller by name. He introduces me as his “friend,” but it’s clear they think the word is a euphemism, and it’s a strange, delicious thrill, being thought of as more. Being thought of as someone who slept in his bed last night, someone he might have pulled close to kiss right before we walked in here together.
Except if that were true, we wouldn’t be here at all. We’d be back in that big, soft bed. Or at his kitchen counter, enacting my favorite fantasy—him the aggressor, unwilling to listen to a single one of my objections.
I order a burger. He orders a steak. I groan as I bite into it, and he watches with a look on his face that I’m seeing from him more and more. A look that says the choice is mine, and he really wishes I’d make it.
“What are you going to do when you get home?” he asks.
“About Blake?”
He shakes his head. “Blake is done. I’m talking about work.”
I hitch a shoulder. “I can’t just jump ship the day I get back to the city. I’ll go join the finance team and see if I like it. But I haven’t ruled out med school.”
“Look,” Miller says after a moment, “even if it’s not med school…get out of publishing. If it doesn’t interest you now, it won’t interest you in ten years either. I’m not sure why you ever thought it would.”
“I’m not sure Ididthink it would,” I reply. I was broken after Rob died. I’d tried to create a new life away from Manhattan by going to med school, by falling for a guy from California who didn’t give two fucks about money. It went disastrously, so I ran home to what I knew, as if it could shelter me from all the coming storms.
“My family and New York—they were like this island of safety. And when my own island sank…I rushed back to theirs.”
“That makes sense,” he says. “But it’s been four years. Don’t you think maybe it’s time to start looking for your own island again?”
That was what I’d thought I was doing. But on Monday I’ll return to all of it, and I think I’d rather just stay here, on his.
I will definitely never be this happy again.
19
KIT
In the morning, we make a huge breakfast, then snorkel out to the sandbar, where we stretch out in the sand, side by side. “This is so perfect,” I whisper. Behind us, an endless blue ocean; ahead of us, the crystal water we swam through to get here, an unblemished white beach, and the small green palms that separate his home from the shore.
He lifts up a strand of my hair, already bleaching to the palest blonde in the light.
“I’ve always loved your hair,” he says. “I loved the way it got during the summer.”
“It’s just like Maren’s,” I say with a shrug.
“No,” he says. “It’s really not. Yours has this little wave to it and it gets lighter. It was almost white by the time I left the Hamptons.”
A fist squeezes in my chest at the memory of that week— wandering around lost in our beach house, sick with how much I wanted him, desperate for him to stay and also desperate for him to leave to make the feeling stop.
I used to look at the calendar every single night, counting the days until he left for law school. I couldn’t wait and I knew it would break me at the same time.
Right now, with my hair in tangles, my skin turning gold, it’s as if I am seventeen again. Seventeen and so infatuated with Miller I can’t quite think straight. So infatuated I’d have sabotaged my lovely older sister’s relationship in any way I could.
“So when you got back from Kili,” he asks, “how did you avoid managing to break up with Blake?”
I sit up with a grin, brushing sand from my arms. “Are you trying to give me shit for dumping him by text again?”
