Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [61]
“But . . . you love a nice tan,” he says, as I flip over and hand him the bottle to slather more block on my back. “That’s part of the reason I chose Miami.”
“The sun is terrible for you!” I exclaim, reaching for my linen hat, whose circumference outsizes a watermelon. And it’s true: I’d learned all about the horrors of the sun via my diligent magazine reading in my old life. Wrinkles. Lines. Melanoma. I’d flip through the pages, then assiduously examine every mole on my body, holding up a mirror to peek at the ones on my back, and compare them all with the gruesome, gnarly pictures in the articles. And Katie never left the house without a full coating of SPF 50. Even in the rain. “You could never be too careful,” a renowned Stanford professor was quoted as saying in the latest piece I’d perused in Allure.
“Um, okay,” Jack answers with confusion, still rubbing. “But you spent all of last summer laying out in the park.” Don’t remind me! My skin nearly crawls at the thought of the damage I’d wrought in years past.
I turn my head away from him, pressing my face into the chair, and grunt a response. Slowly, I feel his fingers veer from my shoulders into the edges of my armpits and then slightly on the cusp of my breasts.
“Not now!” I try to sound serious, but mostly, I giggle.
“Now,” he says, leaning into my ear.
“It’s the middle of the afternoon!” His hands weave farther underneath my bikini.
“And that’s a problem, why?”
He’s right, I tell myself. Just because you and Henry never had sex in the middle of the afternoon, or if you did, it was because it was your only window while Katie was napping, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t run up to your suite and screw Jack’s brains out.
I push myself off my stomach, tie a towel around my waist, and grab his arm, then we race to our room, tugging, pulling, clawing at each other until twenty minutes later, I’m curled naked in bed, inhaling the sweetly cloying scent of suntan lotion and sex, and finally, it seems, blessed by a too-cold blast of air-conditioning, my body ceases to sweat. Just as I’m drifting into unconsciousness, that deep haze brought on by a great orgasm and strong sun, I hear Jack rustle in the sheets next to me.
“God,” he says. “I could lie here with you forever.”
Forever, I think. What’s that?
But rather than answer him, I place my hand over his beating chest, and then soon, I am spent.
THE RESTAURANT that Jack has chosen for dinner is impossibly hip, with smooth granite walls and towering bamboo shoots and models whose faces I double take because I wonder if I know them personally or have just seen them in one of my many magazines.
We’re seated in the back, away from the pulsing bar and the even-more pulsing music, and though I’ve been back in my old life for nearly three months, I am struck with an overwhelming sense of surrealism. Sort of like déjà vu, only not really, since I know that I haven’t been here here before. Because seven years ago tonight, not only was I not in Miami but also it was the fateful night that I, armed with the security of having met Henry, untied my anchors to Jack for good.
In the weeks leading up to the breakup, we’d spiraled from ailing to critical, and when he announced, yet again, that he was heading to visit his mother for the weekend, and failed to invite me along, I erupted. In retrospect, now with my neutered temperament, which clamped down on my niggly comments about his under-achievements and overbearing gene pool, it seemed like I could have taken steps to prevent the blowout. Maybe I overreacted, I tell myself now, sipping a mojito and glancing at Jack, whose tan had brought out the blue in his eyes and whose hair had grown two shades lighter in just a few short days.
Back then, Jack asked me to rethink things. “This is ridiculous!” He shouted, loud enough that our neighbors could hear. “She’s my mother! It’s a weekend!”
“It’s not about your mother!” I cried back. “It’s about . . .” I shook my head and flitted my arms in a circle. “This!