Chapter 10

Sierra

WE HOPPED in the golf cart in the double wide seat behind the driver, with nary more than a ‘how d’ya do’ on Jacob’s end and a waterfall of ‘thank yous’ from mine. Would I ever get used to his proximity? The way sweat smelled on his skin, how his hair gave off that fragrance you couldn’t buy in a bottle? I doubted I’d ever cease to marvel in it. Miraculous things don’t become less miraculous with repetition — you just discover more nuanced ways in which they are, indeed, miraculous.

I turned to him, and whispered, “Should we try to make polite conversation?”

He shook his head emphatically. “After that ordeal? Let’s just keep to ourselves, and like, pretend as though we have something clever to talk about.”

“Good plan.”

We bent our heads close in mock engagement, but stayed mostly silent. It was, in a way, lovelier than making strange chitchat — to be part of the same ruse made me feel almost like a spy, albeit a very low-paid one.

Luckily, the man we’d hitched a ride from drove like the dickens. We were back at the clubhouse in ten minutes flat, though not without a mussed hair or two. I smoothed my skirt, hoping that it hadn’t ridden up too far, not so far that Jacob could see more than a glancing hint of thigh.

“Thanks so much,” I said, as Jacob hopped off the back seat and I shook the man’s hand. “Really appreciate it.”

He tipped his cap. “Anything to help such a handsome pair of young lovers.”

“Oh, no, we’re not—”

But he was already speeding off, presumably to lock up his cart, possibly to find another stranded young pair. Maybe he’s like a golf course Coast Guard, I wondered. And I suppose I couldn’t blame him — after all, we had been falsely locked in heated conversation. I wondered if we were becoming too used to this adopted relationship, like it was settling too easily. That couldn’t be allowed — it’s not like anything serious could come of a relationship built on false pretenses and awful history.

“Well, we made it,” I said, turning to Jacob and pumping a fist over my head in a show of victory.

“We sure did.” He held out his arm. “Now let’s go inside, fellow young lover.”

I laughed, and looped my hand around his proffered elbow, noticing in the back of my mind that this time, I wasn’t so reluctant to touch him. Funny, how such old barriers can drop with such relative ease. Well, maybe not drop. Lower, perhaps. Jacob wasn’t out of the woods with me, not yet. Er, figuratively speaking. Technically, thanks to a stranger, we were out of the literal woods.

Together, as a united front — whether in reality or in pretend, even I couldn’t say — Jacob and I walked into the clubhouse.

He whistled as we entered. “Swanky.”

“You’re not catching on to the fact that everything is swanky around here?” I scoffed. “Keep up, dude.”

His eyes caught the rows and rows of painted white men who hung on the walls in perfect oak frames, their gazes leveling and disconcerting. “No,” he replied, in a world of his own. “I’m catching on. I guess it just never ceases to shock me.”

I didn’t know what to make of that, so I set it aside. Jacob was often a shiny showman, juggling balls in the air to distract from the bird up his sleeve. That is to say, if you looked past the flash and the charm, you saw that there was something desperate to get out and greet the world. I wondered, as I had even while we were dating, why he closed off parts of himself to the outside world, or even to me, at the time his girlfriend. Maybe some people don’t want to open all their doors. I certainly don’t.

Speaking of doors, it took us a few glances behind several mahogany ones before we at last located a private section off the main dining room. There was boisterous laughter coming from that end, as well as a string of curse words.

“Think that’s our party?” I asked.

Jacob cocked an ear, listening. “Well, they’ve got the volume of about thirty people, but mouths too dirty to belong to a country club. So yup, I’d reckon that’s Pillers.”

We turned a corner, walking towards the noise, and sure enough, there was our group, eating fabulously — lobster, wine, the works — all spread out over a pristine white tablecloth. I wondered.

Everyone seated at the table abruptly turned at our entrance, a greeting I hadn’t expected given our total lack of signal. Shit. That must’ve meant they’d been waiting for us — we were causing trouble, a thing I was doing a bit too frequently these days. Or I guess, not waiting, as they were well into their meals.

Joe was the first to cry out. “Where did you two go?!” he exclaimed, red in the face and waving a wine glass around. “We’ve been worried about you.”

Tom, not to be outdone, gestured to the food with a crab leg and added, “We were looking for you and everything, but, uh, we got hungry, figured you’d make your way back. And you did, so…”

Well, it was nice to hear they’d put so much effort into finding us. Good work, fellas, I thought.

Unable to keep a touch of sarcasm out of my voice, I replied, loudly enough for all to hear, “We got stuck exactly where you left us, on the hole. Our golf cart broke down. Nobody thought to check there?”

Jacob gave me a swift shove in the ribs. Didn’t matter — still worth it.

“Ouch,” I muttered, knowing he was right but feeling resentful nonetheless. It wasn’t like me to get saucy with the bosses, especially considering my current ill-standing within the company. I was gonna have to do a thing I didn’t like to do if it could be avoided — let a man in the wrong get off scot free. I straightened up and tried to modulate my tone.

“Anyways,” I continued brightly, “we’re here now. A stranger spotted our cart and gave us a ride back. We’re fine, don’t worry about us. I’m glad you started to eat, I would’ve felt so guilty if you waited. I mean, the whole rule about waiting ‘til everyone’s seated is so outdated.”

Okay, give me some credit. I’d at least tried to play sugar sweet. And if I got a little barb there in at the end… so much the better.

“Hm,” Charles grunted from the head of the table. I wondered if he always assumed that spot out of some kind of digestive need. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, producing a disapproving tsk. “Shame to see you couldn’t even solve such a simple problem as fixing a golf cart.”

Um, excuse me?! All right, now my inner bitch was really gonna jump out. “Well, we did manage to make it back here, without any assistance from you all, so—”

He waved away my explanation, saying, “Thanks to outside help. Not a lot of teamwork in that.”

Jesus, were we back on this ‘teamwork’ thing? I didn’t have to look to my side to know Jacob was rolling his eyes and flaring his nostrils. He was generally a laid-back guy, but start to question his work ethic and commitment and that chill attitude quickly turned flaming hot. Though at least he was managing to keep his mouth shut. I felt like someone had just twisted my verbal spigot all the way to the right, and now I couldn’t turn it back.

“Charles,” I said, interrupting Jacob before he could do something too impetuous. If I was gonna be verbal spigot-y, I had to watch the words that came out, and make nice. “You’re right. We should’ve been able to figure that out. So, let’s do another team-building activity to make it up to you, to show that Pillers is a group of problem solvers. How’s that sound?”

The old man grinned. I’d nailed it. In fact, the grin was so immediate, I almost wondered if that’d been his plan all along. No, that couldn’t be right… could it?

“What an excellent proposition.” He turned his attention away from us, and let it fall on the rest of the group. “Everybody, get a doggy bag. We’re taking this lunch to go.”

As our company scrambled to pack up their lunches, I grabbed Jacob’s arm and pulled him down to my height.

“Keep it together,” I reminded him. “No point losing your shit at Charles.”

He snorted, “Says the girl who almost lost her temper on him in front of the whole company.”

Touché. My cheeks turned a deep pink, and I changed the topic. “Let’s just get our damn lunches.”

We scrambled to piece together something resembling a meal, and before we knew it, we were back on wheels, this time in a van headed to the mansion, apparently just abandoning the second half of our golf game. I’ll never understand the one percent, I thought to myself.

In less than fifteen minutes, we were back at the mansion and assembling in the backyard. Jacob and I joined the throng of Pillers people amidst the perfectly manicured plots of flowers. The enormous pool, easily Olympic-standard size, glittered beneath the midday sun.

“How could he arrange another activity for thirty plus people so quickly?” I asked Jacob, still on the trail of this conspiracy.

“Maybe it’s been a part of his evil plan all along,” he replied with a waggle of his brows.

“Maybe,” I joked back, “he cut the brakes on our cart and poured acid in the gas tank, just to strand us out there, all so that we wouldn’t do the second half of the game, and so he could avoid being embarrassed by our mad golf skills.”

Jacob barked a deep, throaty laugh, the one that I’d missed so much in the intervening years. “I think you nailed it,” he said through a chuckle.

A waiter appeared alongside us. “Care for a drink?” he asked as he furnished a plate of cocktails.

I looked at Jacob and decided that, after the day we’d had, a drink was exactly what I needed. “Thank you, yes,” I replied, snagging one from the tray and hoping that alcohol would dull my senses, maybe take my mind off my Jacob’s rock-hard body and refocus it on the business mission at hand.

Jacob shot a look at me before also taking a drink. Against all hope, I wondered if he’d been thinking the same thing as I. The way he poured the liquor down his throat in one fell swoop suggested he had. And what did that mean? Sure, it was all well and good to be attracted to him, and I liked feeling parts of my body that had been dormant for too long, but nothing could come out of it. We were exes, and now, co-workers. Fantasy was fun for a minute, but too messy to be actualized.

Luckily, Charles raised a glass in front of the group to signal that he wanted our attention. If nothing else, the man had a knack for distracting me from all my uncomfortable feelings.

“Here’s my plan,” he announced to his rapt audience. “The Newlyweds Game.”

“Huh?” Jacob blurted. At first I thought it was an objection, but then I saw the sincere confusion on his face.

I gave him a questioning look. “Did you, like, not own a TV as a kid?”

He gave me a look of his own, and replied, “I was more of an outdoors type.”

Well, okay, that ring a bell and did track with his whole rugged persona. I let it slide and wondered if all my memories of him were just below the surface, waiting to remerge.

Charles, as if he’d heard Jacob’s outburst, which, given the commanding bass in Jacob’s voice, was possible, preceded to explain, “The Newlyweds Game tests your listening skills, and the extent to which you know one another. I like to play it with all the companies I’m considering doing business with. Shows me whether or not you are family, or just distant cousins, so to speak. And a group that can listen to one another is a group that’s gonna communicate well with me on my projects. So all the couples will take a turn in the chair. After all, a happy home life is a happy work life.”

Reluctant as I was to admit it, Charles had a point — with the game, that is. It was a stupid, possibly too personal test, but it did tend to be revealing, at least in my experience watching the game show. Though shouldn’t we be playing it with colleagues, not couples? What the fuck did he care about our relationships? I wanted to pipe up, tell him to take a hike and quit acting like we were all there as hired clown crews, not actual humans.

Then I heard Jacob’s deep sigh, and caught Joe, Tom and Amy staring at us from across the gathering, all of them with an equally petrified and panicked expression on their faces. And in a split second, I put it together.

“Shit,” I muttered.

My bosses thought Jacob and I had just met this weekend. Charles thought we’d been dating on and off for a year. Either we threw the game to avoid telling the Pillers CEOs about our history, or we maybe — and that was a big maybe — aced it, and curried the favor of our future client, which meant we’d have some pretty hard questions coming down the line from Joe and Tom vis-à-vis how the hell we knew so much about one another.

We were between a Piller and a hard place.