The Worst Wedding Date

I know what Emma wants.

Emma wants a peaceful, joyful wedding week.

And that means I need to leave her and Chandler alone.

After the hand incident, I’m not too keen on being stuck with Laney all day, so once I check on the kittens and get them fresh food, water, and litter, then ping Lucky to verify Chandler is golfing and nowhere near this side of the resort, I head to the beach for a long swim.

Sitting still has never been one of my talents. If I went and found Dad and Uncle Owen, they’d be lounging by the pool debating which tropical drink to try next, or hanging out at a restaurant arguing over the quality of the taxidermy tropical fish on the walls.

Love them both, but no thanks.

Not today.

Today, I’d rather push myself, get my head back on straight, and work up a sweat in the salty ocean water protected from the bigger swells by a sea wall.

Eventually, I wade back out and find a good spot on the beach for making a sandcastle, which is more of a sand mountain. Great place for building a sand mountain range. The golden sand is interrupted with black lava rocks of all shapes and sizes, which means the terrain’s already there. I’m just helping it along.

Three kids wander over to help me—all of them under seven, I’d guess, with the youngest wearing inflatables on his arms—while their parents keep a close eye on us.

One mom’s staring too close.

Wouldn’t bother me back home.

But back home, I don’t have a lot of reason to strip down and run around in just swim trunks.

Most of the time.

And even then, they’re used to me. And they trust me with their kids because they all know me.

I actively ignore the curious mom while we all keep playing in the sand and more and more kids join us.

This? Playing with a bunch of kids and helping them work together to build something with their imaginations, where we’re all on even ground and no one’s bad and no one’s perfect and everyone’s having fun?

This is my freaking heaven.

Our sand mountains are rapidly turning into sand volcanoes which are threatening to destroy our pretend dinosaurs, which are all of the kids’ beach toys. Even the beach toys that aren’t dinosaurs get repurposed as dinosaurs. So do a few lava rocks. Snorkels. Shovels. If we can call it a dinosaur, we call it a dinosaur.

And that’s where Delaney finds me. Helping what’s grown to be a group of a dozen kids defend the dinosaurs against blow-up flamingo floaties of death and imminently erupting sand volcanoes.

I feel her the minute she steps on the beach. It’s this mix of judgment, irritation, and curiosity that invades my senses and has me casting covert looks around to spot her while I dash around the beach flying the floatie of death.

And there she is.

Wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, sunglasses, a tank top that shows zero cleavage, and a long tropical skirt. Settling down on a flat lava rock where the resort grass meets the sand beach. Pulling her phone out of that annoying alligator purse like she has nothing better to do than work while she’s in paradise.

She annoys the fuck out of me.

“Ahh!”

Oh, hell.

I just ran over a kid and knocked her down because I was paying attention to my babysitter instead of watching where I was going.

“Oh, no,” I cry. “The Flamingo of Death got Briley!”

“Death to the flamingo!” a little boy named Xavier yells. He lets out a Tarzan cry—seriously, you’d think he’d go Braveheart, but this kid is all in with the Tarzan impression instead—and then he leaps onto the flamingo floatie and pours lava—aka water—on it. “Take that, Flamingo of Death!”

And while he’s taking on the floatie, I squat down to the poor girl who got caught in my distraction. “Sorry about that. Forget I’m not a little kid too some days. You okay?”

Her nose twitches and she blinks fast before she nods. But I still feel like an ass until she follows it with a grin. “Death to the Flamingo of Death!” she cries.

The kids all rally around her and Xavier, celebrating them as heroes.

But it kills the mood.

At least for the parents.

Two moms call their kids back for snack time.

A third declares they’re going to be late for their hiking trip.

They all file away after that, taking their toys and leaving me with a bunch of destroyed sand volcanoes and the watchful eyes of my babysitter on me.

“You gonna sit there all day and pretend you’re not watching me?” I say to the ocean while I try to rebuild a volcano.

Don’t expect her to answer. Waves aren’t quiet, and I’m facing away.

But she’s right behind me, and she definitely heard. “No, I thought I’d join you and help smooth out the sand again.”

I twist around to look at her. Smooth out the sand? “Or we can build a sandcastle.”

She stares at me like I’ve just lost the last of my marbles.

And I double down.

If I have to have a babysitter, I’m setting the terms, and these are my terms.

“It’s called fun,” I prompt. “Playing in the sand? Building something? Using your imagination? C’mon. Let’s build a sandcastle.”

Her nose twitches and she studies me like there’s some kind of hidden message in my invitation to make a sandcastle.

Or maybe like she thinks I’m acting like a child and doesn’t want to say it out loud.

“Sandcastles aren’t just for kids,” I say.

“I didn’t say they were.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

She doesn’t sound sure.

She sounds like she just can’t handle the idea of me being right.

Forget this. I can have fun another way. I sigh and scrub my hand over my face. “Can you please consider, for one minute, that—ow.”

Fuck.

My eyeball suddenly hurts.

I blink. Stare down and blink some more while my eye waters and burns.

I lift my hand to swipe at it, but Delaney grabs it before I can make contact.

“Did you just get sand in your eye?”

“No.” Yes.

“Let me see.”

“No.”

“Theo.”

“I’ve got this.” Ow ow ow. Fuck. Fuck. My eyeball hurts. Not as much as my pride at the moment, though, which is a sure sign the swim and a morning playing with kids is still not enough to make me get over my reactions to Laney whenever she’s around.

“You’re covered in sand. Here. Look up. I have eye drops in my purse.”

“Of course you do.”

She growls.

Delaney.

She growls.

And fuck me if that noise doesn’t have a direct impact on my dick while I’m sitting here with sand in my eyeball.

“It’s just sand,” I mutter. “I can handle this without you treating me like you’re my fucking babysitter. And my hand was asleep.”

She sighs. “Okay. Fine. Your hand was asleep. Can you please let me help you before you end up wearing a pirate patch to your sister’s wedding?”

I glare at her, but lifting my eyes is a bad idea right now.

Is there sand in both?

Fantastic. I have sand in both of my eyes now.

I stare down and blink a lot again. Sun’s bright off the water.

Sand is officially a bigger nemesis than Delaney now.

“I’d wear a pirate patch to her wedding if she asked me to,” I say.

“And if she sees you like this, she’ll freak out, because even small things are big things to her right now.”

“Believe it or not, I’m not causing problems on purpose.”

“What’s done is done. All we can do now is fix it and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

“You sound like your mother.”

The beach freezes over. Frost. All over the sand. Waves stop rolling because they’ve been hit by a blast from the ice queen and the entire ocean is officially glaciers now.

This?

This is the sound of well, Theo, you really stuck your foot in it now.

Of course I did.

This is Laney.

It was inevitable.

“Tilt. Your fucking. Head,” Delaney says.

One, holy shit. She said fuck.

Two, this I’m speaking through a clenched jaw and if you weren’t in danger of losing your eyeballs right now, I would be pulling that same move I pulled on you to shove you into the pool yesterday except this time I’d hold your head underwater until you weren’t my problem anymore thing that she’s doing is hot.

Hello, my name is Theo, and I am irrepressibly turned on by judgmental Little Miss Perfects who won’t make sandcastles with me, and I don’t know why.

I tilt my head.

She grabs the skin around my eye socket—the one that’s worse—including my eyelid, forcibly separates it, and squirts a whole purse-size bottle of eye drops into it.

Hurts.

Hurts like a motherfucking hemorrhoid has exploded into flames in my eyeball.

But I don’t flinch.

Or whimper.

No matter how much I want to.

This is my medicine, and I will take it like someone who needs to be stoic in the face of imminent death.

It’s like she wants me to be able to see her before she kills me.

I probably owe her that.

Have a lot of respect for it, actually.

That’s hardcore.

I like it.

But also, when she’s drained the entire bottle into my eye, there’s still gritty sand in it.

“Better?” she demands.

Sounds a little like she’s ordering me to be better so she can be done with me, to be honest.

“Yep,” I lie.

She grabs me by the face and peers into my eyeballs, which I can tell less because I can see anything clearly right now and more because there’s a humanoid-shaped thing looming close and it smells like that shampoo that she left in the bathroom last night.

It’s not fruity or flowery or baked goods-y.

Reminds me of being little and going with my mom to her once-a-year pamper-herself haircut at the fancy salon that she’d get back home before she passed.

“Did you bring anything out here with you? Where are your shoes?” Laney asks.

“Came barefoot.”

“Get up. We’re taking you to urgent care.”

“I don’t—”

“You are not losing your goddamn eyes on my watch. Okay? Get up. Move. March. Now.”

I hate authority.

Always have. Always will.

But as I’m stumbling after her, I swear I hear her mutter, “So much for the sandcastle.”

Like she wanted to build it, and didn’t know how to say yes.

For the first time in my life, I realize much like I’m not who Laney expects me to be, she might not be exactly who I always thought she was either.