Island. Mick follows the road almost to the tip of the point, then he signals and turns into a driveway marked with a sign that says PURE JOY. This leads to an adorable white cottage with bright blue shutters. It reminds Ayers of the months that she and her parents spent living on Santorini.
They climb out of the car. “Follow me,” Mick says. He steps up onto the wraparound porch that has an uninterrupted water view.
“What are we doing here?”
“This is my new place,” Mick says.
“You bought it?”
“Renting,” Mick says. “Long-term. But it’s mine. You want to see the rest?”
He leads her inside, and everything is picture-perfect. There’s a bedroom, living room, dining nook, kitchen, and a brand-new, sparkling-white-tiled bathroom; every room in the house has a view of the water. On the deck is a grill and a hot tub, and around the corner is an outdoor shower painted the same blue as the shutters.
It’s a real place. Not a hole-in-the-wall like where Mick lives now, which meant that he was always crashing at Ayers’s in a way that felt like he was infringing on her space. For years, Ayers has been begging him to find someplace better. And now he has. This cottage—Pure Joy—is a dream.
“This is amazing,” Ayers says. “You’ll be much happier here.”
“We will be happier here,” Mick says. “I got it for us. See those chairs?” He points to two stools, upholstered in blue, in front of a bar counter. “Those are what convinced me to take it. I pictured the two of us coming home from work late at night and having a drink there together—and can you imagine the sunset from here?”
“Hashtag sunset,” Ayers says. “Your Instagram account will blow up.”
“We can have our coffee out here in the mornings,” Mick says.
We broke up, Ayers thinks. But Mick’s expression is so earnest that she doesn’t have the heart to say it.
“It’s nice,” she admits.
One last hurrah, she tells herself again, though Mick is slowly but surely wearing down her resistance. Her night with Baker—which had seemed so vivid and unforgettable right after it happened—is now fading from her mind.
Has she merely fallen prey to the sexual attraction she feels for Baker because it’s bright, shiny, and new? Her relationship with Mick is deep and long and intense. Mick is the person Ayers tells things, even the small, inconsequential things, because he’s the one who has shared her history. He has context.
If she starts something new with Baker, she would have to go back to square one. The thought is, frankly, exhausting.
Ayers wades through the crystal water of Frank Bay and climbs into the boat. Mick is borrowing Funday, a thirty-two-foot Grady-White, from his boss for the day, something he normally does only on special occasions. Mick loads Gordon in and turns up the music and they go zipping across the surface of the water at breathtaking speed. Ayers loves nothing in the world more than being out on a boat—Treasure Island included—though the experience is much better when she isn’t working. She fills a Yeti cup with rum punch—Mick makes the best—and belts out, “Save it for a rainy day!”
It’s well known that Monday is the weekend for people in the service industry. La Tapa closes on Monday nights after the holiday rush, as do a bunch of other restaurants, so when Mick and Ayers arrive in Christmas Cove, it’s a Who’s Who of St. John hospitality all rafted together on either side of the Pizza Pi boat. The guys from 420 to Center are there and so is Bex from Rhumb Lines and Mattie the bartender from the Dog House Pub with his girlfriend, Lindsay, who works at the Beach Bar with Mick, and Colleen from Pizzabar in Paradise and Jena from Extra Virgin Bistro. Alex the bartender from Ocean 362 is on a catamaran—with Skip. From the looks of things, Skip is pretty far along in the partying department. When he sees Mick and Ayers pull in, he raises his arms over his head and hollers at the top of his lungs, “They’re here!” As though Mick and Ayers are the king and queen of this particular St. John prom.
Ayers grins at everyone and waves. This is her family.
Mick and Ayers tie up to a sleek, black Midnight Express that has a woman on board who looks familiar. She’s wearing a tropical-print bikini and enormous sunglasses. She waves and says, “Hey, Ayers!” and then she helps Mick with the ropes and