Diving In (6 page)

Finally, when his neck began to ache, and the yawns were coming only seconds apart, he leaned back and closed his eyes.

He couldn’t shake the vision of the naked, juggling goddess.

 
This was going to be a problem. He hadn’t had a girlfriend in almost a year, and stress always made him horny, his body’s way of demanding he deal with excess tension.

He sat up and went back to work. He couldn’t afford to get distracted.

No matter how much he wanted to be.

* * *

First thing in the morning, Nicki put on one of her new outfits: a white sundress, a silk scarf, and jeweled thong sandals. Dressing in such feminine clothes, after years of baggy athletic wear, made her feel like a character in one of her theatrical productions at school.

She kept waiting for the day she got used to it. She wasn’t a man; there was no reason to feel like she was in drag. Just because she was tall and weighed more than average and had the shoulders of a linebacker. And could bench press a water buffalo.

No reason. She grabbed her makeup bag and set up near the mirror by the dresser, and while she was swiping fresh powder over her nose, telling herself she was awesome and beautiful, she heard the front door open and close.

Ansel. He’d finally gone out.

She cringed, remembering the look on his face when he’d found her juggling. She shouldn’t be embarrassed; it wasn’t as if he’d found her surfing porn and playing with herself, but still. He was a handsome guy. And she was a goofy chick who juggled—except the goofy part was supposed to be trapped inside the Old Nicki, not lingering around the fun, fashionable, pretty one.

Unfortunately, she needed the juggling to help her deal with stress. Some people had yoga; she had beanbags. From now on, she’d make sure she indulged in a juggle only when he was out.

She put on eyeliner, lip gloss, and blush, telling the familiar voice that told her she looked ridiculous to shut up. Then she left her room, made herself a quick breakfast with the supplies she’d bought at the store downstairs the night before, and spent a few minutes exploring the condo. She resisted the temptation to peek into Ansel’s room before going out herself. She didn’t want any unnecessary exposure to his attractive male essence. He was a slob, but he was a sexy slob, damn it.

Once again, she avoided the elevator, juggling imaginary beanbags in her mind as she passed the doors, to take the stairs down to the ground level. One day at a time.

The resort was a long, sprawling property along the coast consisting of several high-rise towers, swimming pools in various shapes, an elongated golf course, intertwining bike and jogging paths, two spas, a high-end shopping center, and an underground parking garage. It was so unlike her usual no-frills wilderness camping spot, she felt guilty for liking it so much. Some people owned their condos, others rented them out, but most paid for their rooms by the night from the resort itself.

When she reached the main floor, she paused to inhale the thick, sweet scent of gardenias growing in pots along the wide tiled foyer and took out her phone to call Betty. “I made it,” she told her, wiping the sweat off her upper lip.

“Did Phobic Phoebe need the Valium I gave her for the plane?” Betty asked.

“Of course not. I’m not that bad.”

Betty exhaled a soft snort of disbelief. “You hyperventilate on escalators.”

“Maybe if escalators went to Hawaii, I wouldn’t have a problem.”

“I guess.”

“Plus,” Nicki admitted, “there was this amazing juice in tiny little glass bottles a woman on the plane gave me. It burned my throat at first before I got used to it.”

“Aha,” Betty said, laughing. “But how did you get to the hotel if you were wasted? Was there a shuttle?”

Nicki helped herself to a cup of citrus-infused water on a table near the elevators and felt the tension inside her ease almost as much as if she were throwing beanbags in the air.

This. This is why she’d come. She could become whomever she wanted in this beautiful, dreamy place.
 

“I sobered up and rented a car,” Nicki said. “No problem.”

“Really?”

Nicki decided not to tell her about getting lost and crying in a gas station’s bathroom. Week after week, she’d spilled her guts for Betty’s blog, every little fear and failure—but what if it merely reinforced the weaknesses of her character? To remake herself she had to change
everything
, not just her clothes but also her conversation. No longer would she tell stories, laughing at herself for being neurotic, obsessive, and ridiculous. Self-deprecation was for losers.

“I’m a perfectly good driver,” she told Betty coolly.

“You’re okay, but you know how you are, all freaked out and sweaty about it, especially if you’re somewhere new.”

“I’m not that way anymore.”

“Uh-huh,” Betty said.

Nicki sipped the fruity water and walked down the path past the spongy green lawn to the beach. Everything in the resort pointed to the sea, nudging your gaze and your body to the sand, the waves, the wind.

But before she went to feel the sea with her bare feet, she had to tell Betty about Ansel. Not in an emotional way as if she were, after all these years, vulnerable, but matter-of-fact, lightly, amused. The way she imagined Miles’s redhead would say it.

Oh, Miles, Miles, Miles…

No, not like that. More like, “You won’t believe what I found at the condo,” Nicki began, forcing a laugh.

Betty perked up. “Drugs?”

The water caught in Nicki’s throat. Coughing, she said, “No. Her brother is here on business for a week or so. I have to share the place with him.”

“Holy crap.”

“It’s no big deal.”

“Wasn’t this the guy you got to third base with in high school?”

“College.”

“I thought it was your first time fooling around,” Betty said.

“It was.”

“Jeez, I was gay and even I had a guy put his hand down my pants in high school,” Betty said.

“And look where that got you. Now you’re a bitter, promiscuous lesbian.”

Betty snorted. “I’m not bitter.”

“Neither am I. I’ve moved on. I barely recognized him.”

“You keep lying to me,” Betty said. “You must totally be freaking out.”

Nicki opened her mouth to protest, but being fake went against thirty years of living honestly. “I’m fine,” she said weakly.

“Write about it for the blog, and I’ll expense the airfare. He’ll be like Thor II.”

“When hell freezes over,” Nicki replied. “I’m never writing about the men in my life again. I still have nightmares about Miles Girard.”

“Do you wake up all hot and sweaty?”

“If you keep insulting your most popular unpaid contributor, she might decide to stop contributing.”

After a melodramatic sigh, Betty said, “All right, you won’t write about him, even though it would be great material and the perfect opportunity for you to work through your issues.”

“You’re so full of shit. You just want the page hits.”

Betty laughed. “He’s there a week, you said?”

Beyond the resort, the sand sank sharply into the rough surf. Nicki sat on a bench near an open public shower for people to wash off the salt water. “Maybe longer. Of course I have to stay. I’m not giving this up, no way. But, oh, if you’d seen him…”

“You showed me a picture once.”

“I did not.”

“Isn’t he the guy in your bathroom cabinet?” Betty asked.

“What the hell were you doing looking in my bathroom cabinet?”

“Looking for condoms.”

Nicki nearly dropped the phone. “What?”
 

“Kidding. I needed a tampon. Is he still cute?”

“Oh, yeah.” Nicki’s thoughts turned to salt-and-pepper hair, a naughty grin, that compact, athletic build.

“Any chance you might—”

“Still be an idiot?” Nicki cut her off.

“Practice your new persona on him?”

“No.” Then, “No way.”

“Hold on,” Betty said, her voice rising. “What did he do when he saw you? Was he totally embarrassed?”

Nicki couldn’t bring herself to say anything.

“No, he wouldn’t be, I suppose,” Betty went on. “Probably smiled and asked for seconds. Did you wear that dress?”

“I did.”

“And?”

“I sweated like a pig in it,” Nicki replied.

“I’m sure he was too busy looking at your breasts to notice a few sweat stains.”

“God, listen to you. It wasn’t like that at all.”

“I bet it was. You looked hot in that getup.”

 
“He was very polite, no drama. We agreed to share the condo and went our separate ways.” Nicki got up and returned to the walkway to find a recycling bin for her cup. “Besides, I don’t have any boobs.”

“They look like perfect little mouthfuls to me.”

“You’re just saying that to gross me out, and I don’t appreciate it.”

Betty laughed. “Don’t let him know you still have a thing for him.”

“I don’t.”

“Every time you look at him, remember how you felt when he never asked his sister who you were, or if he could see you again.”

“I shouldn’t have told you anything. Ever.” Nicki tilted her head back to lose herself in the sky. A bank of clouds hovered over the inland hills, casting dark green shadows and reminding her a little of the fog that rolled into the Bay Area.
 

But only a little. The soft warm moisture in the air, the volcanic peaks of the land, the sweet-smelling flowers everywhere, even on the people, reminded her of where she was. “I’m going to say good-bye now. I’m about to hit the beach.”

“You didn’t follow him there, did you?”

“Yeah,” Nicki said. “And I don’t want him to get out of sight, so I’ve gotta run.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Can’t talk. I’ve got to get my fins on so I can chase him underwater.”

“Now I know you’re kidding,” Betty said. “I hope you go into the water at least once while you’re there, though. You can’t go to Hawaii and not go swimming.”

Nicki reached the western boundary of the resort, where manicured sod and tidy gardens ended at pale sand. The beach was surprisingly narrow and steep at that spot, the crashing waves only thirty yards in front of her, where a dozen people of all ages and physiques were jumping, surfing, paddling, floating. The sight of a grown man with huge muscles being thrown up against the shore, arms flailing, tumbling and powerless as if he weighed no more than a tennis ball, made her freeze where she stood.

Betty’s voice broke her daze. “Nicki? Promise me you’ll go into the water once while you’re there.”

Nicki looked back at the resort complex. The water in the wading pool closest to her barely reached the belly buttons of the toddlers splashing in it. “I promise.”

“You’ll love it. Once you get over your fear, you’ll love it.”

Nicki took off her shoes to feel the hot sand under her bare feet. “It’s not only fear. It’s common sense. I never learned how to swim.”

“So learn.”

“Stop nagging and get your own life, Mom,” Nicki said. Oh, the sand felt good. Why wasn’t the sand back home ever hot and soft like this? The last time she’d been to a beach near San Francisco, she’d had to wear hiking boots and wool underwear.

When Betty finally let her off the phone, Nicki turned and marched back to the resort, eyes fixed on the baby pool. Her pulse raced.

There was absolutely no reason the sight of ten inches of water should make her mouth go dry, her breath shallow, or her knees tremble. No reason. She wasn’t a three-year-old staring up at the sun from underneath six feet of shimmering pool water; she was an athletic, healthy, adult woman.

Why should that one little incident twenty-seven years ago still haunt her? She hadn’t been afraid at the time—in fact, she’d been thrilled to be swimming, proving she wasn’t a baby anymore—when a nearby grandmother, fully dressed, had jumped in and rescued her from the tile bottom of the City of El Cerrito’s pool that afternoon in late August.

But then, apparently, she’d refused to go near the water again. Screamed throughout every swim lesson her mother had ever signed her up for. Eventually, understandably, everyone had given up on her.

And so had she, until now. Just the thought of getting in the water made her fall apart. She stopped and wiped the sweat off her forehead.

All of her stupid anxieties had flared up since that afternoon with Miles and his fiancée in Betty’s kitchen, and were getting worse. It was as if getting passed by in love—again—had resurrected every latent fear in her psyche. She’d written a lot of Phobic Phoebe from memory, as a joke, reliving her adolescence. But now…now she jumped at the sight of her own shadow.

Gritting her teeth, she marched to the pool. It was a pinprick of turquoise, the rest of the world disappearing into the shadows of her peripheral vision.

Woodenly, without taking her eyes off the pool, she leaned down to unbuckle her right shoe, her left, and then kicked them off.

Chapter 5

A
NSEL
HIT
THE
UPLOAD
BUTTON
on his laptop one last time before closing the screen with a weary sigh.

He’d taken more pictures of the office building in Kihei than a lonely, unemployed photographer would of his firstborn child. Only six hours as a real estate investor, and he’d already overdone it. Hundreds of pictures of drywall and gray carpeting.

He smiled, unplugging his phone from his laptop and walking out to the condo balcony, savoring the daydream of Brand making himself study each boring, soul-crushing image because he was too perfect not to. They’d need a roomful of computers to store those high-resolution suckers. Luckily, they were about to be the proud landlords of their own climate-controlled office building.

The sun felt good on his face. He’d been in his room for hours with the shades drawn, going over the pictures and researching the property. He sank into the chaise, took out his phone, and called Brand.

“How was it?” Brand asked without saying hello.

“Great. What do you think about solar?”