It wasn't more than ten minutes later that Marcus and Eli found Jay, standing exactly where she’d left him.

They’d taken one look at his face, glanced at one another, and rearranged all their plans for that evening.

“Come on,” Eli said, sending a text to Tia, his girlfriend and almost fiancé (and Laura’s sister). Eli was a major NFL star, the starting quarterback of the Ocean City Stingrays. And tonight he’d clinched entrance into the Superbowl for his team. They were headed there in three weeks. Not to mention he’d just publicly announced his retirement tonight. It had been a doozy of an evening. And all he really wanted to do was curl up with his woman and their goofy, pudgy dog, Ham. But he’d never seen Jay like this before. Not in the 30 odd years of being best friends. And he sure as hell wasn’t bailing.

“Where?” Jay asked.

“Does it matter?” Marcus raised an eyebrow. “Just not here.”

Jay shrugged, capitulating to his friends’ demands.

Twenty minutes later, they found themselves in the quiet back booth of a bar around the corner.

The waitress excitedly brought over three whiskeys for them. She tried very, very hard not to stumble as she carefully carried the drinks over. After all, Elijah Bird, star quarterback of her home team was sitting right there. She couldn’t wait to tell her friends. She’d heard that he was pretty well settled down with his new girlfriend. And that might have put a damper on her spirits if his other two friends had been any less good looking. But as it were, damn. The three of them made a very attractive group.

Eli was the biggest at 6’5” or so, his broad shoulders and messy brown hair were attractive enough, but add in his permanent, handsome-friendly grin and pretty much no panties within a twenty-mile radius were safe. Then there was the blonde one. He had kind of a surfer thing going on. Between that tan and those muscles showing clearly through his shirt, the waitress had one thought. Yum. But he had such a dazed, heartsick expression on his face that she was willing to bet that he was off the market for the night as well. No matter, because it was the third one who’d really caught her eye. He had dark wavy hair and dark eyes to match. His nose and mouth were both wide, demanding. He had a look in his eye. A look that told her he was a lot to handle. That he’d be competent, and fierce, and very, very thorough. Yes please.

The waitress set the drinks down in front of the men.

“What the hell is this?” the blonde man asked, scowling down at the liquid in front of him.

The waitress jumped a little at the disapproval in his tone.

“It’s whiskey, dumbass,” the dark one muttered.

“You know I don’t drink liquor,” Blondie scowled back.

“It’s medicinal,” Elijah Bird replied, raising an eyebrow at his friend’s short tone. And then he turned the full wattage of his famous smile on the waitress. “Thanks, sweetheart, that’ll be all for right now.”

“Sure,” the waitress cleared her throat and averted her eyes from the smile that threatened to burn her heart right out of her chest. The dark one. She was into the dark one, she reminded herself before stumbling away.

“Damn it, Eli,” Marcus frowned at his friend. “That waitress was making eyes at me before you had to horn in with the whole panty-melting grin thing.”

Eli raised his eyebrows back at Marcus. “I’m sorry, were you planning on making a move on her?”

All three of them knew that Marcus was practicing some idiotic self-imposed celibacy thing. Not that Jay or Eli understood it in the least.

Marcus scowled and pushed Jay’s whiskey across the table toward him. “We’re not here to talk about my fucked up shit with women. We’re here to talk about Jay’s fucked up shit with women.”

Jay frowned down at the amber liquid and twirled the glass in a circle.

Marcus surveyed his friend. The very fact that he was even considering drinking the alcohol was a clear indicator in itself that he was spinning.

“Start from the beginning.”

Jay scrubbed a hand over his beard and took the whiskey in one shot. He grimaced. “I met her during the hurricane.”

“I thought you were alone on that island?” Eli asked, his brow furrowing.

Jay cleared his throat. The whiskey was still burning him. “I wasn’t.” He took a deep breath. “She was there too. In the hotel where I got rescued from. She was scared of me at first. But we got used to each other. And then we got to need each other. That kind of thing, that level of intensity, it… it…”

Jay trailed off, looking for the right words.

“It bonds you,” Eli supplied. “Irrevocably.”

Jay figured that he knew what he was talking about, considering Eli had met his girlfriend after she’d performed emergency surgery on him last year. He knew about being bonded from intense, life-threatening situations.

“Yeah,” he agreed gruffly. “We bonded.” He tried out the word. “It was like cramming a whole relationship into just a few days. I trusted her with my life. I know she’d say the same. We didn’t know what was going to happen next or when we’d get off the island, but we had each other. We had those moments. The present.”

Jay sighed and leaned forward onto his elbows. “Maybe it was because we were in the present so hard that we didn’t exchange any information. I never knew her last name or where she was from or where she lived.”

“You didn’t exchange any information?” Marcus asked incredulously. The FBI agent in him had extreme difficulty understanding that.

“Yeah, man. We were a little busy doing other things.”

“Ah,” Eli understood with a grin.

“Plus,” Jay continued. “We were alone on an island, I’m this big stranger dude and she’s this little gorgeous slip of a thing, I never wanted to push her for more than she could give. I was so careful to never pen her in or trap her in any way. She gave me her body; I wasn’t comfortable pushing for more.”

The men were silent. They’d heard Jay be philosophical a million times. Thoughtful a million more. But they’d never heard him this sad, this resigned.

“It was the last day that I fell through the stairs, like I told you. I passed out and woke up on the roof of the hotel. She’d hauled me up at least four flights of stairs.”

Marcus’s eyebrows shot up into his hairline. “That little tiny slip of a woman dragged your giant ass up four flights of stairs?”             

“She’s an athlete!” Jay insisted, defensive on Mari’s behalf. “And she’s strong as hell. You should see her muscles. The woman is cut.”

Marcus and Eli grinned and Jay frowned. “On second thought, I don’t want either of you pervs seeing her muscles.”

“So what happened next?” Eli prodded.

Jay frowned even harder. Sometimes he still couldn’t believe that it had all happened this way. “Next the med evac helicopter came. They loaded me onto it. But there wasn’t room for Mari. They told her that she had to wait for the coast guard.”

“Jesus,” Marcus muttered into his whiskey.

“I tried to get up, to tell them I wasn’t going without her. But I’d lost so much fucking blood. My leg was…dying. I was so fucking exhausted. I could barely keep my eyes open. But I was fighting the paramedics. And then she came over and told me they’d agreed to let her sit in the front. And that I needed to chill out or I was gonna hurt myself more. She kissed me. And I passed out.”

Jay scrubbed his hands over his face again. “Next thing I knew, I was waking up in Miami. Figuring out that she’d lied to me just to get me to lay back and take the chopper ride. And she didn’t know that we detoured to Miami instead of Grand Bahama. And I didn’t have any way of finding her.”

“No wonder you were such a dick while you were laid up there,” Eli reflected with no censure in his voice. “I thought it was just your leg.”

“The leg was nothing compared to losing her,” Jay replied so quickly, so vehemently, that his best friends knew for sure that he meant it.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Marcus asked, his eyes burning into Jay’s. “I work for the fucking FBI. You’ve been suffering over losing this girl for five years? I could have helped.”

“I hired a P.I.,” Jay admitted. “A hack P.I. that was a waste of my money. But part of me has been scared to look for her. Hope is scary, you know? I thought, if I get my hopes up and don’t find her, then it’ll be like losing her all over again. And I legitimately didn’t think I could handle that again. You remember what it was like after that, don’t you? It took me two years to get remotely back to normal.”

They did remember that. And they’d attributed it to the physical pain. But looking closer, it was obvious their boy had been going through something emotional as well.

“Jesus,” Marcus said again. “I thought all that shit was just because you were still dealing with how fucked up the hurricane had been. PTSD or something.”

“Yeah,” Jay nodded. “I’m not gonna pretend like it was easy moving on from that. It’s still the scariest thing I’ve ever been through. But no, it was all twisted up.” He thumped his chest. “The hurricane, my leg, losing Mari.”

“And now you found her,” Eli said cautiously. They’d gotten through the parts of the story that Jay knew well. And now they were venturing into fresh territory. Fresh as in still bleeding.

“Yeah. I mean, what the fuck?” Jay let out a semi-hysterical little laugh, tracing his hand through his hair and making it stick straight up. “I found Mari.” He thumped his knuckles against his forehead with each word. “I. Found. Mari.”

He laughed again and this time there was no humor in it. “And she’s engaged.”

“To a douchebag,” Marcus added, swallowing down his whiskey and signaling for more from the cute waitress. “Did anyone else get a douchey vibe from him?”

“Yes,” Eli and Jay responded in tandem and grinned at one another.

“But he’s a very rich douchebag,” Eli added.

“Mari wouldn’t care about that.”

“Well, he does a lot of really great things with that money.” Eli shrugged. “Charities up the wazoo. Maybe she cares about that.”

Yeah. Mari would care about that. Doing good by the world would be something that Mari cared about a lot.

Jay stared into his empty glass, considering his options. He knew what he was going to do. But he wanted to know what his friends thought first. “What would you guys do? If your girl was engaged to a douche.”

Marcus scoffed instantly. “I’d do whatever it took to get her back. No question. All’s fair.”

Eli side-eyed him. “No way, man, I’d take it slow. Try not to fuck things up for her. If it seemed like this guy was good for her, treated her right, then I wouldn’t consider it my place to mess up her life like that.”

Yup, exactly what he thought they’d say.

“Anyways, doesn’t matter what we’d do,” Marcus said. “It matters what you’re gonna do.”

“Yeah,” Jay looked up at the waitress who was setting down more whiskey in front of all of them. She didn’t even glance his way. She split her time between Eli and Marcus. Eli grinned at her again, just to fuck with Marcus. But Marcus, expecting it, beckoned for her to lean down. He whispered something in her ear that had her cheeks flaming with heat. Biting her lips, she straightened up and stared him down. Eli was apparently wiped from her memory. She nodded once and then wobbled away on her high heels.

Marcus turned back to his friends, a shit-eating grin on his face. “And that’s how it’s done.”

Eli rolled his eyes and responded, but Jay didn’t hear. His phone had buzzed in his pocket and he pulled it out to read the text from Mari’s number.

Can’t believe I’m texting you. So surreal. It’s almost like we met in a different era, before phones or internet or anything.

That’s what you’re marveling at? I still can’t believe we have the same freaking last name.

Yeah. WTF, universe?

Jay laughed at her instant response.

There’s something so cruel about it being my own last name. I mean, it’s literally the LAST name I would have thought of.

Were you surprised that it’s Irish? (My last name?)

You only told me that tu mamá era de Colombia. You never said where your papá was from.

Mi papá preferred that I call him ‘Da’. He was Irish. Black Irish. Which explains why I don’t have any red in my hair.

Again, Jay noted the past tense that Mari used. God. She’d lost both of her parents. Jay wondered if that had been true on the island as well. He used the same response that he had when he found out her mother had died.

Lo siento, Mari.

It was a long time ago.

Jay noted that that was barely a response.

Will you surf with me tomorrow, Marita?

There was a very long wait for the next text and Jay was introduced head long into the torture/ecstasy of texting with someone you were so, so into.

When fifteen minutes had gone past and she still hadn’t responded, Jay texted her again.

Baby?

***

“Oh thank god,” Linc said as he undid his tie. Mari had just told him the abridged version of how she and Jay really knew one another. She’d been truthful about the hurricane and about their romantic connection. But she’d spared him any of the details. “When I saw you all wrapped up in his arms, I was worried that you’d been in love with him at some point.”

Mari froze as she pulled on her flannel pajama bottoms and her tank top. She didn’t quite follow Linc’s logic.

“But some fling that lasted less than a week? Pffft.” Linc tossed his hand through the air like he was wiping Jay from the slate. “That’s nothing.”

Mari pulled back the covers on their bed and slid herself into the fancy silk sheets. The truth was, she hated silk sheets. They were hot and so soft that they felt like water. She’d been having more and more nightmares about drowning since moving in with Linc.

She leaned back on her pillow and watched him take the change out of his pockets, take off his watch.

She cleared her throat. Ultimate honesty. It was her thing. She knew that not being honest with Linc was the equivalent of a death certificate on her relationship. Even if the honesty was really hard for him to hear.

“I was in love with him.”

Linc froze and turned back to her, his shirt halfway unbuttoned. “Oh.”

“I know that’s hard to hear but—”

“No, no, no.” He interrupted her. “I’d rather you were honest, you know that.” He came to sit at the edge of the bed, his brown eyes flitted back and forth, catching her on the downswing.

“Well, the truth is, we got separated so fast at the end, during the rescue, that we didn’t get to say goodbye.”

“Oh,” Linc interrupted again. “So now you feel like things are unfinished with him?”

“I’m not sure. Unfinished is definitely a word that applies. But also I just feel connected to him still.”

Linc winced a tiny bit and stood up, finished taking off his shirt. He opened his closet door so that he could see Mari’s face in the reflection on the floor-length mirror inside. “Are you still in love with him?”

“I don’t think so, but I’m not sure. I’ve been pretty much grieving him for years, so it’s hard to just switch to another feeling all the sudden and know what it is,” she answered, painfully honestly. It hurt both of them equally to hear her say it. “I am deeply confused. That’s all I really know. I’m so relieved that he’s alive and in good health. I’m having all these memories and all these feelings I haven’t had since the hurricane. I love you, Linc. I just, I don’t know. I’m overwhelmed.”

She paused and glanced at her cell phone for a second. It had disquieted her that it had been so easy to text with him. “If there’s one thing you should know, Linc, it’s that I never intended for my relationship with Jay to continue beyond the island. I knew it was something that was based in the circumstances of the hurricane. I knew that we weren’t meant to, like, date or something. It was too…” she found she couldn’t find the right word for why it wouldn’t have worked. But Linc didn’t need her to finish it.

“So are you going to see him again?”

“Yes.” The words were out of her mouth before she’d even realized she’d made the decision. “I want to go surfing with him tomorrow.”

Linc turned back to Mari. If there was one thing he knew about her, it was that she would tell him the truth. He cleared his throat. “Well, that’s good. I mean, it’s been a long time since you’ve surfed. I was beginning to worry. I know how important it is to you.”

The thought struck Linc suddenly, like an elbow to his gut, that perhaps surfing was so important to Mari because it had been a way to stay connected to Jay. It was something they’d always shared. But Linc swallowed against the feeling.

“So it wouldn’t bother you if I went tomorrow? Or if I started spending time with him?”

Linc stood next to the bed, his hands in the pockets of his pajama pants. He spoke carefully. “I know you’re not asking for my permission, Mari.”

“Of course not.” She threw her hands up in the air in frustration. “I’m trying to find a way to make sure you’re comfortable while I do what I have to do to figure this out.”

“Right. Well,” he slid under the covers of the bed and they faced each other, not touching. “No, I’m not terribly comfortable with it. You going to spend time with a man you used to be in love with. A man that you can’t tell how you feel about anymore. But I trust you, Mari.”

Linc searched her eyes. And next he spoke with great care, willing her to understand the meaning behind his words. “I also trust that marriage is complicated. And that you’re a person who is capable of feeling lots of things, while still honoring the bounds and expectations associated with your primary relationship.”              

Linc kissed Mari on the forehead and leaned over to shut off the light.

She stared blindly into the dark.

What had he meant by that? Was Linc telling her that he would still want to marry her even if she realized she was in love with Jay?

The thought pinwheeled in Mari’s head until she felt almost dizzy with it. Could that possibly be true? Was she about to marry a man who would be okay with her, what, cheating?

Linc’s breathing had long since grown even when she pulled herself out of her bed. She saw that there were two unread texts from Jay. He was asking again about surfing. He was calling her baby.

She wasn’t sure what to do exactly, except for moving slowly. Backing away wasn’t her style. And besides, her body wasn’t going to let her turn away from Jay. She’d found him and she was desperate to see him again. The gala had almost been like a dream. Mari needed confirmation that he was out there, kicking around. Alive and well.

But damn she didn’t want to cross any lines or do anything to hurt Linc. Mari looked out at the inky night outside her window. The night was overcast, so she couldn’t see any stars and Mari desperately wished that she could.

She looked down at her text thread and watched her cursor blink in her text bubble. Slowly, with extreme intention, Mari typed three letters. Y-E-S. But as she blinked down at them, they looked so final, so extreme. The word looked as if she were saying yes to a hundred unsaid things as well. She deleted the letters.

She needed to be clear. She needed to agree to give only what she could.

I’ll surf.

She got a text back unbelievably fast and it made her smile. He must have been looking at his phone when he’d gotten her reply.

Good. Pick you up at 4:45.

Mari’s stomach flipped and her impulse was to ignore it as she set her phone on the nightstand and pulled the covers back up. But no. Pretending that stomach flip didn’t exist was traitorous to Linc. She couldn’t afford to lie to herself. Not when such a delicate balance had to be walked.

So Mari sighed into the black night. Jay Brady was a part of her life again. And he made her stomach flip. And what the hell was she going to do about it?

***

Mari was shivering on her front porch, clutching a cup of coffee in the dark of the early morning, when Jay pulled up into her driveway. The headlights swept over her and she squinted her eyes. Her stomach flipped at the first flash of blonde hair that she got.

She still couldn’t believe that it was him. That he was here in real life. About to speak with her. All the things she’d wanted to ask him for years rose up within her but she swallowed them. There was time, she reminded herself. And she had no desire to rush sloppily forward in order to match the frantic pace of her heart. That would only serve to hurt Jay and Linc, she was sure of it. Slow and steady. That was the only way she could think to integrate Jay into her life as a friend, to get everybody used to everybody else.

He got out to load her board and her bag into his truck. “Morning,” he said to her, leaning forward to kiss her cheek.

His eyebrows went up when he observed the three-story house behind them, and Mari felt strangely self-conscious. She always felt self-conscious of Linc’s money. But more so now that they were engaged. She was relieved when Jay didn’t say anything, rather, he opened the passenger side door for her and jogged around to his side.

They were quiet as he drove them through town, toward the beach.

“What?” he finally asked as Mari glanced over at him for the hundredth time.

“Nothing!” Then she couldn’t help but grin. “It’s just so weird to see you drive. Honestly it’s weird to see you do anything that isn’t hacking through a jungle.”

He matched her smile. “You’re telling me. You’re the one who’s drinking coffee out of a thermos over there. So weird.”

Mari took a deep breath. And then another. They were driving parallel with the water now and she knew he was going to be taking her to some secluded spot. Even if it was too early for tourists to be out and about, Jay wouldn’t risk his solitude with a popular location. She gathered strength from the huge, expansive ocean beside her and turned to face Jay.

“Is this going to be a problem?” She tried hard not to look at his large, tan hands on the steering wheel, so competent. So strangely handsome.             

“Is what going to be a problem?”

Mari sucked her lips into her mouth and surveyed him. She wondered if he was playing dumb or if he just wanted her to say it out loud. “Our past. The way we are together. Whatever it is… between us.”

Jay was quiet for a minute as they rode along, the sun was still a good half hour from rising, but the sky had turned a purplish gray on the horizon. “I guess that depends on your definition of the word problem.”

Mari didn’t smile. “I’m serious, Jay. I want to find a place for you in my life. I really do.”

“But?”

She cleared her throat. “But I don’t want to have to tear apart my life to do it.”

He squinted into the distance and put on his turn signal, taking them down a dirt road. Mari was about to say more when he finally spoke again. “I don’t know about you, but I’m still spinning. I can’t begin to say how I feel about all this. Except that I want to keep seeing you. In whatever way feels right.”

God. Why was he so good at this? Just like always he phrased things in such a way that made Mari just soften. It brought her defenses down. Made her want to meet him in the middle. He was undemanding. In a way that made her want to just go ahead and give him what he wanted.

“Maybe once I get used to the fact that you’re not gone forever,” he said. “Then I can get back to you on whether or not this is going to be a problem.”

Mari pursed her lips and looked around at the dark forest they were slowly driving through. She could see a lightening at the end of the road and knew they were driving toward the water. What was she doing? She was driving down a dark road in the middle of a night to go be alone with a man who wasn’t her fiancé.

“But Mari?”

She turned and faced him.

“I’m not trying to pressure you here, okay? I just wanna surf with you.”

Again, it was the perfect thing to say. She sighed and nodded.

Twenty minutes later they were side by side and silently paddling out into the surf. The sun was just beginning to rise and there were actually some decent swells out here. It was better than the surf by the boardwalk, that was for sure. Mari was grateful to Jay for showing her.

They didn’t speak. Mari took one wave in and Jay took another. After a while, when the sun was split across the horizon, they both lay on their backs on their boards, watching the clouds get set on fire.

“Can I ask a question?” Jay asked.

She tilted her head to look at him. “Shoot.”

“Remember that first night at the hotel? When you had the nightmare and I woke you up?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you remember what you were dreaming about?”

Mari turned and really studied him, their boards started floating away from one another and Jay automatically reached out to hold hers in place. The position was intimate. Lying next to one another the way they had done in the supply closet back at the island. But it was also buffered by the motion of the waves beneath them, by the sky opening up over them, their wet suits, the caws of the pinwheeling seagulls.

“Yeah, I remember. You’re still thinking about that?”

Jay shrugged. “I think about all of it. But when you had the dream I didn’t know you well enough to ask you yet. What it was about. And then when I did know you well enough to ask, well, everything was moving so fast and I never asked. I’ve wondered about it since. Was it just a nightmare about the hurricane coming? You were yelling about the water.”

“No,” Mari shook her head sadly. “I was dreaming about my parents. About the night they died.”

Jay slipped his hand around hers as they bobbed over the ocean, staring up at the sunrise.  The information sliced through his heart. Made his stomach tight with dread and nausea and sadness for her. “You don’t have to tell me, Mari. I’m sorry I asked.”

“No,” she squeezed his hand. “It’s okay. It doesn’t hurt as much as it used to. It’s been fifteen years now.”

She rolled her head away from the sky and looked straight into his eyes. And the gesture arrested him. It was just like Mari to do that. She never turned away or took the easy way out. If she had something hard to tell him, she told him right in his eyes.

“Their car was on a bridge that collapsed back home in Sioux Falls. They fell into the river below. They drowned.”

“Oh god,” Jay muttered and couldn’t help but pull her halfway onto his surfboard so that her head rested on his shoulder. He didn’t know if this was what she meant by “a problem” or not, but in that moment, he couldn’t bring himself to care. He knew what she needed. She pressed her forehead into his shoulder for just a second. “Must have torn a hole into your life.”

She froze for a second before she rolled back to her surfboard. “That’s exactly what happened.”

Her words from earlier came echoing back to him. I just don’t want to tear my life apart to do it. He could understand that. She’d already had to patch her life back together when her parents died. And she’d likely had to do it again after the hurricane. She was asking him not to make her do it a third time.

He was quiet. He understood where she was coming from and that made it a lot harder. Jay had been truthful. He was feeling too many things to know exactly what it was that he wanted from Mari. But he highly suspected that he already knew how he was going to feel when the dust settled. He was going to want her. The way a man wants a woman. The way a husband wanted his wife. And telling her was going to present her with a terrible choice.

Jay let out a full breath. But today wasn’t that day. Today he was too mixed up to do anything but float alongside her, listening to the ocean rise and fall around them.

“Do you have that dream a lot? About them?”

“More often these days, for some reason. I used to have them every night. Right after they died. I wasn’t in the car with them, but I would dream that I was. And always that the water was rushing toward me, trapping me. I was terrified of water for two or so years after they died. And one day, when the dreams had gotten so bad I could barely close my eyes without seeing it, I signed up for a swim class at the Y around the corner from my apartment in Boston. And the swim class led to a scuba certification class. And then I went on a vacation to Hawaii to test out my new scuba chops. And that’s where I first got interested in surfing. The rest is history. If the sport was on the water, I learned how to do it.”

“Did it help with the dreams? Battling your fear of the water?”

“Yeah,” Mari nodded. “It really did.”

“But you said you’ve been having them more often lately?”

“Yeah,” she shook her head. “I’m not sure what that’s all about. Probably because I moved and hadn’t spent much time out on the water or something. Anyways. I’m cold. Wanna go in?”

Jay nodded and paddled in behind her. His thoughts churning the whole way.