The tears started then. But they weren’t the great gasping sobs that had overtaken her at the bar, just hot, silent tears that flowed fast and uncontrollable. She could no more stop them than she could stop breathing. But she was okay to just lie here and cry for a while in the quiet night. Dax was a couple feet away from her, and he looked almost like he was sleeping. In fact, all the heat that had characterized their frantic make-out session on the boat seemed to have dissipated. It seemed almost comical now—or it would have, if she could manage to stop crying—that she’d come to the island with the intention of sleeping with him. At the time, it had seemed the perfect countermove. Get jilted. Have casual sex to prove a point. What point had that been? She wasn’t sure anymore. And really, she hadn’t been thinking about it those terms. She’d been so crazily, uncharacteristically attracted to Dax—Dax!—that she hadn’t really been thinking at all. Sure, the guy was good-looking. You’d have to be blind not to see that. But God, the way he’d talked to her. I don’t make love. I fuck. The feeling of his hands all over her on the boat, like he wanted to rip off her clothes. Like he couldn’t get enough.
The world had turned upside down. That was the only explanation. Sweet, steady Mason had left her, and a few hours after that, she’d been on a boat with her legs wrapped around Dax Harris, her office nemesis. The worst part was that even though she was still crying, her body remembered the feeling of being plastered against him, of rocking against his erection as his big, warm hands cupped her bottom.
She could almost feel him stroking her thigh even now.
“Jesus Christ, you’re freezing.”
“Ah!” He was stroking her thigh. She bolted to a sitting position, and since he’d moved to sit near her, they nearly knocked foreheads.
“And you’re crying?” He raked his hands through his hair. “I’m sorry.”
She swiped at her eyes and cursed her renegade body, which was still distinctly lust-addled. “It’s not your fault.”
He hopped to his feet. “Yeah, well, we can at least get you warm. I’m pretty sure the post-jilting etiquette handbook has a rule about not allowing the jiltee to freeze to death.”
She accepted his outstretched hand and let him help her up. “So now I’m the jiltee?” she said, her voice back to that humiliating chipmunk quality. She cleared her throat.
Instead of dropping her hand, he grabbed the other one and rubbed both of his vigorously over hers, which really were like icicles. She hadn’t noticed. “Well, I don’t think we should call you ‘the bride’ anymore. But point taken—‘jiltee’ probably isn’t the best choice, either.” He dropped her hands and began walking.
“Yeah. I was going to be Mrs. Mason Madison by now.”
“You were going to change your name?”
“No!” she scoffed. “I just meant it figuratively.” She had a vast network of business associates who knew her as Amy Morrison. She may have had a whole domestic fantasy built up around the idea of marrying Mason, but she was also a modern girl. “Give me a little credit.”
“So his last name is Madison?”
“Yup.”
“See? One more piece of evidence that you got lucky with this break up, even if it doesn’t seem like it right now. Mason Madison sounds like a porn star—a female one.”
She giggled. “It kind of does, doesn’t it? Paging Dr. Mason Madison. Too bad he wasn’t…” She checked herself. Now that she was sober, she had to stop defaming Mason. Mason was fine. Mason was very conscientious in all things—sometimes so much so that she faked it just to move things along.
I don’t make love. I fuck.
“So.” She cleared her throat. “If I’m not the bride, and I’m not Mrs. Madison, I guess I’m back to being just plain old single Amy Morrison.”
Dax led her to the edge of a path that marked the beginning of the residential portion of the island. “If you’re looking for a new identity, may I suggest Strawberry Girl? It can be your superhero incarnation.”
“Strawberry Girl?” she echoed, but then all thoughts of names, jiltings, and Mason flew away, replaced by utter delight. “Oh! This is the sweetest place I’ve ever seen!” There were no roads—she remembered reading once that no cars were allowed on the islands—just paths that crisscrossed between the houses, forming a grid between yards and gardens and the cutest little houses. Some were larger, modern structures, but most were still cottages in varying states of being retrofitted and improved. Even in the dim light, she could see that some of them were painted whimsical colors. Residential architecture in Toronto proper was almost without exception done in brick. By contrast, the brightly colored wood frame houses on the island, surrounded by lush, aromatic flowers, made it seem like they were walking through a fairyland.