pasty chest? I don’t think so.”
Julie thought, Go ahead, blind me. And then she identified the horrible clenching grip on her stomach. It was the hand of jealousy, clutching tight. Which was ridiculous, because the last thing she needed was a nerdy, straight-arrow guy from a big, clingy suburban family like her own, who worked with her every day. Besides, Alan was like a brother to her. A brother. She told herself that all the time, so it must be true, right? There were work spouses and there were real-life love interests, and never the twain should meet.
“Lay off, Amanda. If he’s not comfortable he should keep it on. Maybe you can reconsider it after a couple drinks,” Julie suggested to Alan. “When it’s dark out.”
Pretending not to see the puzzled glare Amanda turned her way, she headed for the door.
* * *
They never made it into the water. Drinks led directly into dinner. Night fell as they finished dessert and a last round, so they took themselves down to the beach, where a respectable bonfire and innumerable tiki torches illuminated the partiers’ faces with glowing, hellish intensity. A temporary grass-roofed bar was set up nearby. Beachy music thumped through the crowd, tempting everyone to dance, but the trio skirted the gyrating crush and continued past the fire to the water’s edge. Three in a row, arm in arm, flip-flops kicking up warm sand with every step. Alan was the monkey in the middle, and he’d already made several threesome cracks. He couldn’t resist, sandwiched between two undeniably hot women as he was, but damn was there an uncomfortable undercurrent.
Amanda laughed too loud at the jokes, and Julie could barely muster a smile, so the normal order of things felt entirely subverted. It hadn’t been bad at first, but the more relaxed they all got, the more obvious Amanda’s flirting became. The penny had finally dropped about halfway through dinner. She’s actually coming on to me. And Julie looked like she was about to cry—or possibly throw up, although she hadn’t had that much to drink. She was also doing an extreme version of the aggressive, outgoing good cheer that signaled she would rather be alone. Wearing her extrovert armor to protect her soft, chewy, introverted center, which usually only happened when she was stressed or upset about something. He wasn’t sure what to make of it all. Alan’s nerves rose, making him talk too much and say stupid, obvious stuff that nobody really ought to be laughing at. He couldn’t seem to make himself stop, though.
Underneath the nerves, however, there was a flicker of resentment he hated to acknowledge. Where did Julie get off pouting when she’d fixed him up with Amanda in the first place for their previous mildly disastrous attempts at dating? What was it to her if they hooked up for a vacation fling? Since that was obviously what Amanda had in mind, with the broad hints she’d been dropping. Now that he thought about it...it hadn’t been all that disastrous between them. More lacking in instant chemistry than anything else. Awkward moments, too many lulls in conversation. They had trouble agreeing on where to eat for their first date, because they had wildly different preferences in food. On their second try they’d gone to a movie, and hadn’t laughed in exactly the same places. Effort number three had been the “let’s meet for coffee and talk” outing, the end of the experiment.
But no animosity. And their brief make-out session on date two had probably been the highlight of the whole non-relationship. He could see them having a no-strings fling. Except for one thing, the part of their dates he thought wouldn’t translate well to meaningless sexytimes. The part where both of them kept talking about Julie. She was their best topic, the main thing they had in common. His favorite coworker, Amanda’s best friend. And that had been three years ago. These days, Julie was probably Alan’s best friend, as well.
It ended up not mattering whether he was receptive to the idea of hooking up or not. Instead of Amanda continuing to work up her nerve with him, she stopped in her tracks and pointed, gaping, at a guy standing near the water’s edge. And when the guy turned around to walk back toward the hotel, he spotted Amanda and friends. The mutual recognition struck like a lightning bolt, shocking the three friends into a cartoonish freeze pose that would probably have been comical to onlookers. Except the only onlooker wasn’t laughing.
“Oh my god!” Julie blurted. “He’s the mystery jogger!”
It was Jeremy.
“Whoa. This can’t be a coincidence,” Alan said.
Amanda dropped her arm from his, taking a step away. “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
Okay, maybe there was a little animosity.
Jeremy lifted a hand, not quite waving. Alan had only met him a few times before the breakup, but he remembered him well enough to see he’d clearly made a lot of changes in the last year or so. The buzz cut, for one thing. And he had obviously been working out. Holy crap, had he ever been working out.
“So...are you gonna go talk to him?” Julie asked Amanda. “Or do we all just stand here looking at each other across the sand? Awkwardly? Like we’re doing right now....”
“Fuck. All I wanted was a damn vacation. And maybe some action. Was that really too much to ask? Really?”
“Oh, he’s coming over here. Please go talk to him. But, you know...report back. Because what the fuck?”
Sensing Amanda’s worsening mood, Alan tugged at Julie’s hand in a “cut it out” way, but she ignored him. Kept her hand in his, though. He liked that.
“Fuck,” Amanda repeated. But to Alan’s vast relief, she went. He and Julie watched for a minute as she met Jeremy and they started conversing. Over the party and the surf, they couldn’t hear the words, but it didn’t look pretty.
“We should probably go,” Alan finally suggested, though his feet stayed put. Amanda was starting to gesture, her hands flying wider, Jeremy leaning away in an automatic retreat. It was like reality TV with the sound down.
“It’s a train wreck.” Julie echoed his thoughts. “I don’t even want to watch, but it’s like I can’t drag my eyes away.”
“I know. We have to, but...I know. What were you planning to do tonight, anyway? After this, I mean?”
“Um...what? Oh. I thought I’d go back to the dancing over there and see if I can pull anything interesting out of the crowd.” She turned and gestured toward the party, eyeing it with not-that-eager speculation. Watching Amanda and Jeremy’s tense reunion had sucked the fun out of the evening for both of them, apparently.
“No, seriously.”
“I am serious. To the extent I had a plan, that was it.”
Pull someone interesting, she meant. He got that, but his brain pushed the idea out forcefully. No. He started toward the lights and noise, pulling her along. “Better the dance floor than the train wreck.”
“But what are you gonna do?”
He looked at her, puzzled. “The Hokey-Pokey? The Electric Slide? I don’t know, whatever sort of dancing is going on.”
“Yeah, but—” She looked like she was choosing between bad options for what to say. Finally, she settled on, “But you can’t dance.”
“I can totally dance!”
“I have never seen you dance. Not once in... How many years have we known each other?”
“Four? Maybe?” He had no idea, because it felt like he’d always known her. Not so much the first few months after she started working for the company, but definitely the first time they worked a project together. And after she moved to his floor of the office, he’d recognized a kindred spirit. “I’m sure you’ve seen me dance, Jules. I can absolutely dance. And more to the point, there’s no way I’m gonna let you wander off alone into a torch-lit crowd of drunken strangers. You were planning to do this with Amanda, so you can do it with me instead. Dance, I mean. Not... Jesus. You know what I mean.”
“Let me? You’re not going to let me? What is this, Victorian England all of a sudden?”
She didn’t