I stop and follow her gaze to the couple standing near the railing of the outdoor seating area. They’re not hard to spot, because other than Stella, they’re the only Black people here. “That’s them.”
“Fuck,” she exhales. “We’re not the most beautiful couple in the room anymore and that makes me furious.”
That’s one way to pay them a compliment, but Stella’s rightno matter how she phrases it. Joshua and Amara are a striking pair.
“My conceited wife,” I warmly tease her.
She turns that sparkling grin on me again. “If only you’d known what you were getting into when you married me.”
“Oh, I knew from the start.”
“That’s right,” she muses. “You did say you liked cocky women.”
“I still do. Very much.”
Our eyes lock and something charged arcs between us. It steals my breath for a second, tempting me to lower my lips to hers in an attempt to reclaim it—or at least steal hers too. Stella’s not unaffected either. I can see it in the way her pulse flutters at the base of her throat, how she swallows hard, her gaze sweeping over my face as if she’s searching for a reason to keep abiding by the rules we’ve set.
She must find it, because she clears her throat and glances away, snapping us both out of the moment.
“They know the truth about us, right?” she asks, nodding in Joshua and Amara’s direction.
I don’t miss the slight waver in the words, but I don’t call her out on it, even though I’m desperate for us to stop ignoring the potent attraction refusing to ease, despite the lies we keep telling ourselves that we can move past it. We haven’t yet and I doubt we will unless we do something about it.
For now, I play along. “They do.”
“That’s a relief,” she says as I nudge her into walking again. “You know I can put on a show, but I hate lying all the time.”
Then maybe we should stop lying to each other, I want to suggest, but again, I crush it down. “You can be as honest with them as you want.”
Just a shame we can’t do the same with each other.
As I suspected would happen, my friends like Stella more than they like me. Tragic, but understandable.
I’ve been (happily) pushed to the side as they’ve gotten to know her over the past couple of days. Stella and Amara have practically taken up residence in the ocean, doing their best mermaid impressions from sunup to sundown. They shut up whenever I swim closer, giggling and snickering and making it abundantly clear they’ve been talking about me. The only time they separate is when Amara and I go off on Jet Ski or speedboat adventures, our spouses with less daredevil spirits left behind to enjoy drinks on the beach.
Stella and Joshua always seem to be engaged in some sort of deep conversation when we drag ourselves back to land, but when Stella’s attention finds me, she lights up so brightly that it makes Joshua eye me in a way I can’t quite decipher.
Christmas arrives with little fanfare, barely acknowledged past the gifts we’re exchanging before heading to dinner. With a £20 price limit, the items range from useless and laughably offensive—like the key chain Amara got for me from D’Ambrosi—to actually thoughtful and kind—like the vinyl record Stella gives Joshua from an Afrobeat artist that I told her he liked…a full month before it’s slated to even be released. I don’t ask how she pulled that off, and while the price tagtechnicallydidn’t break the limit, it certainly required more work than £20 could cover.
Her gift for me? A sunset-orange Stella Margaux’s–branded apron.
“You look good with my name on your chest,” she teases as she watches me tie the strings in a neat bow around my waist.
It’s only fitting that I toss her a McMorris T-shirt with myname and number on it. “Then you better wear mine on your back.”
She cackles and tugs it on over her dress, preening for Amara, who pulls out her phone and snaps photo after photo. As the women venture out to the deck for their shoot, Joshua shifts closer to murmur, “I get it now.”
I cut him a look, but he’s staring out at our wives pretending to be models. “Get what?”
“Why you married her.”
I snort, rubbing my thumb over my wedding band. I haven’t taken it off since the end of the season. “I don’t think anyone knows why I did that.”
“Then I get why you want to stay married.”
“I never said I wanted to.”
It’s his turn to shoot me an unamused glance, seeing right through me. I know I’ve been transparent about my attraction to Stella, and I know my actions speak louder than anything I could ever say. He’s never seen me this dedicated to a woman.
