Slightly Engaged (31 page)

“Jack!” I say, and kick him back.

He says, “They don’t even know Raphael.”

“Come on, Jack, do you honestly think Raphael would care?”

“Is Raphael the blushing-bride-to-be?” Daniel asks.

“Yup.” I proceed to tell them all about Raphael and Donatello and their upcoming nuptials as Jack glowers at me over the rim of his glass.

When he excuses himself to go to the bathroom, Gregory asks, “What’s up
his
butt?”

“Hello, I could make
such
a comment right now,” Daniel announces, throwing up his hands, “but I won’t even go there!”

Ew.

“Danielle!” That, of course, is Gregory’s pet name for him. “Please
don’t
go there!” “Yes, please don’t,” I say. “Jack’s really a great guy. I think it’s just jet lag.”

“I don’t know about that.” Daniel leans in and says in a singsong lisp, “I think somebody’s got a bad case of the homophobic blues.”

“Jack? Oh, he’s not homophobic.”

“Honey, my hand brushed his arm by accident and he jumped out of his chair,” Gregory tells me.

“Maybe he thought it was an iguana,” I say, and crack myself up all over again, though somewhere in the back of my head, I’m thinking it might not be all
that
funny. Maybe I’m a little tipsier than I thought.

Then again, it feels damn good to be slaphappy for a change, so I giggle away.

Until Daniel says, “Maybe we’re cramping your boyfriend’s style and he just wants to be alone with
you.
”

Hmm. I didn’t think of that. I guess double-dating with a strange—all right, in the most literal sense—couple isn’t the most romantic way to spend an evening. Still…

“If Jack wants to be alone with me so badly,” I ponder aloud, “then why won’t he engage me?”

“Engage you in what?” Gregory and Daniel ask in unison, then laugh and say, “Jinx!”

“You know…in an engagement.” I tell them about Wilma and the diamond, and they’re suitably sympathetic.

When Jack comes back, they glare at him over the fresh drinks I defiantly ordered while he was gone.

Our guitar player is back, too, a little wild-eyed as he does a cover of “Brown Eyed Girl,” dedicated from Gregory to Daniel. They get up to dance, leaving me alone with Jack.

“I wish you could just loosen up and have fun,” I tell him.

“I am loose.”

I snort into my yummy, strong drink. “You’re about as loose as…as…”

“As the banana hammock Gregory’s wearing?” he supplies.

“That’s not a banana hammock,” I protest, laughing. I gesture at the elevator-size dance floor, where our pals are cavorting to the music. “See? Those are shorts.”

“Well, if he does that high kick again, his dirty banana is going to fall out the leg hole.”

Laughing together seems to heal all wounds.

“Come on,” Jack says, holding my hand and pulling me up off the bar stool, “it’s getting late. Let’s go back to the hotel and change so we can go out for a nice dinner.”

“Okay, but I just want to say goodbye to Gregory and Daniel.”

The only way to do that is to shimmy over to the dance floor, where I find myself instantly roped into their outrageous dance moves as Jack watches from the sidelines.

“You go, brown-eyed girl!” Gregory twirls me around and around, then passes me to Daniel before I can throw up.

“Woo-hoo!” Daniel shouts. “Come on, honey, now do-si-do!”

Do-si-do?
I think dizzily, trying to recall my fourth-grade square-dance moves.

Too late.

Daniel is already mincing around me, arms folded across his chest, head bobbing maniacally.

I glance over at Jack, whose arms are also folded, but who is not do-si-do-ing to “Brown Eyed Girl.”

He actually looks like he might start tapping his foot any second now—in impatience, rather than in time to the music—so I finally holler, “Boyfriends, I have to leave now! See you on the beach!”

“When?” Gregory wants to know, as they do-si-do around each other, and Daniel asks, “Where?”

“Tomorrow at noon, behind the Sea Plantation. It’s down the road!”

“Sounds good,” Gregory says, “and afterward, we’ll all go to dinner together somewhere.”

“Great!”

Jack’s going to kill me!

I look over at him. He gestures for me to hurry up, for God’s sake.

“Toodle-ooh, Tracey! Bye, Jack!” Daniel calls energetically.

“It’s been real,” Jack responds dryly, with a Miss America wave.

It’s still drizzling out as we walk the short distance back to the hotel, and so humid that everything about me is damp/limp in moments: linen shorts, T-shirt, hair and all.

Now that we’re away from the noise and music, I’m feeling conspicuously tipsy. You know, I probably should have eaten the box lunch they handed out on the plane earlier. Despite the turbulence, Jack ate his meal, and then mine. No wonder those drinks didn’t affect him as much as they did me.

Anyway, I would have eaten on the plane if I hadn’t just watched the guy three rows up gobble down his meal, then promptly upchuck it into his airsickness bag.

“That was fun, wasn’t it?” I say to Jack far more loudly than I intended. I hope I’m not slurring.

“Pretty much. Those guys were just a little too over the top for me.”

“Over the top? Gregory and Daniel?”

“Tracey—” He looks at me and sees that I’m grinning.

“They were fun, though,” I say.

“I would have rather been alone with you.”

“Really?” That’s sweet. No wonder he was so grouchy. “Well, we can be alone all night.”

“I’ll take a shower first,” he says, unlocking the door to our room, where we’re greeted by a refreshing blast of A.C., “and then I’ll go scout out some good restaurants and make a reservation.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

The only problem with the plan is that there’s too much lag time built in. I sit down on the bed to wait while Jack’s in the shower, then lie down because I’m a little sleepy, and the next thing I know, I’m out.

Jack wakes me up as he’s getting dressed, and I promise him I’ll get right on it, but the second he leaves to go scout out restaurants, I’m asleep again.

Maybe it’s more like passed out, because when he returns to wake me up again and tell me all about this great seafood place he found by the water, and how we can have a good table if I can be ready in fifteen minutes, I can’t seem to rouse myself.

“Do you just want to stay in tonight?” Jack asks, clearly disappointed.

I’m too out of it to do more than nod before drifting back into unconsciousness.

I wake up at three in the morning to find the air-conditioning blasting and the room an icebox. Jack is snoring blissfully beside me in the double bed, hogging the thin bedspread same as he hogs our comforter back home.

For a few minutes, I do my best to repeatedly tug it away from him and get back to sleep.

Then I fool around with the air-conditioning control, but it turns out it’s already on the lowest setting. A moment’s exploration reveals that the windows are hermetically sealed, so turning the A.C. off and opening them isn’t an option. Turning the A.C. off and going back to sleep is also not an option, as it will be a thousand degrees in here in no time.

Finally, shivering, I decide to wrap myself in the spread from the other bed. When I do, it smells like it’s been soaked in B.O.

Ick.

Now what?

Too bad I didn’t listen to Jack and bring a sweatshirt.

I bet he did, though.

I go to the closet, flip on the light in there and close the door almost all the way so that I can rummage through his bag without waking him.

I have to dig down beneath a stack of T-shirts and shorts before I find a hooded Old Navy sweatshirt. As I open it up to pull it on, something hard and heavy drops out onto my bare foot.

It’s all I can do not to cry out in pain.

Looking down, I see what it was.

It’s all I can do not to cry out in glee.

It’s a ring box, folks.

That’s right.

A ring box, not black velvet, as I have oft pictured in my dreams, but a ring box nonetheless. It’s that white faux-leather kind.

At the rate things have been going, I’m half expecting to find it empty.

But when I open the box, I find a beautiful diamond ring twinkling up at me.

“Oh my God,” I gasp softly, overcome with emotion.

It’s a marquis cut, set in white-gold with several baguettes on either side. It’s the kind of ring I would have picked out for myself, if he’d given me the opportunity…but he didn’t have to, because he knew.

There’s no longer a doubt in my mind that we were meant to be together.

I’m about to tug the ring from its satiny slot so that I can try it on when I realize that would be cheating.

I want Jack to be the first—and only—one to put this on my finger.

Now that I know it’s here, waiting for me, I can put it back into his bag and wait for him to give it to me.

But was it folded into his sweatshirt, or what?

Maybe it was just sitting on top of it, between the sweatshirt and the T-shirt above…?

I rearrange the sweatshirt and ring box in his duffel bag a few times, trying to figure out how he would have had it packed.

Wait a minute, why am I stressing? I mean, it’s not as though he had the bag booby-trapped, hoping to catch me snooping.

Then again, maybe he did.

I
certainly would, if I were him and I knew me as well as he should by now.

Finally, I give up and simply tuck the ring box into the folds of the sweatshirt. With any luck, he just tossed it all in and will have no clue that I went snooping. If he figures it out, I’ll just tell him I was cold and borrowed a sweatshirt.

Except he’ll ask why I don’t have the sweatshirt on.

And if I put it on now, he’ll know I was in his bag.

It’s a catch-22 that I can’t possibly win, so there’s nothing to do but zip the bag closed, turn off the closet light and go back to bed.

Naturally, I don’t sleep.

I find myself lying restlessly awake, wondering when Jack is planning to give me the ring.

Is that why he went out scouting restaurants? Was he looking for the perfect place to propose?

I certainly shot that romantic plan full of holes with my oblivious alcohol-induced haze.

Mental note: do not drink another drink for duration of trip.

No, my teetotaling will make him suspicious.

Mental note: drink one, and only one, dirty banana per day for duration of trip.

That resolved, I move on to the next problem: ditching Gregory and Daniel.

Why on earth did I have to make beach and dinner plans with them?

Were they really that fabulous?

There’s a possibility that their fabulousness was greatly exaggerated by my intoxication. After all that liquor, I would have been asking Mike’s wife, Dianne, to be my matron of honor.

If she were here.

And if I were already engaged.

Oh, well, maybe it’ll rain.

If it doesn’t rain, maybe Gregory and Daniel won’t show up.

It doesn’t rain, and Gregory and Daniel not only show up, but they’re both wearing bona fide banana hammocks this time, along with wide straw beach hats, pink sunglasses—more like goggles, actually—and thick zinc sunblock on their noses. They’re also shirtless, and not as buff as one might think. I can see that their guts are pale squishy soft, both of them, even from a distance.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jack says when he spots them sashaying down the beach toward us. “Duck, Tracey. Maybe they won’t see us.”

I pretend to duck, since I don’t have the heart to admit we’re a prearranged foursome for the day.

Then the boyfriends are upon us, with kisses all around before they set up camp beneath an enormous pink-and-orange polka-dot umbrella.

“Danielle, can you do me?” Gregory asks, laying out his towel and flopping down on his stomach.

I’m paralyzed with horror until I see Daniel grab a tube of lotion and begin massaging it all over Gregory’s white, acne-riddled back.

Relieved, I look over at Jack, and even with his eyes masked behind his black Daggers, see that he’s still pretty horrified. Especially when Gregory makes these icky purring noises in response to Daniel’s lotion-smoothing skills.

“I just hate tan lines,” Gregory comments.

I have to wonder A) how he expects to get a tan using that SPF 60 lotion and B) where he can possibly expect to have tan lines given that Speedo thong he’s wearing.

“So do I. You know, it’s really too bad nude sunbathing is outlawed on Anguilla,” Daniel says, mostly to me and Jack.

I murmur something like, “It is.”

Jack mumbles something like, “Too bad.”

Then we proceed to spend the rest of our Caribbean afternoon listening to Gregory and Daniel’s incessant chatter about their friends back in Jersey, their three dogs, their apartment, which they’re remodeling, and their jobs. One of them is a secretary at a travel agency, the other is a veterinarian’s assistant. Both perfectly respectable careers, but you’d think they were NASA scientists, the way they go on and on about their work-related adventures.

Several times throughout the ordeal, I’m tempted to flag down the guy roaming the beach selling rum drinks, even with the massive hangover headache I’ve had all day. But I promised myself that I’d stay lucid, so as not to ruin my engagement moment when it finally comes.

Which it might not, thanks to me and my big mouth.

When the sun is sinking lower and Jack at last asks, “Ready to head back?” I open my mouth to say yes.

But Daniel opens his mouth faster, informing us, “We made a dinner reservation at a great little place down the beach, you guys.”

Jack smiles politely, already shaking the sand out of our towels. “That’ll be fun. Enjoy it.”

“Honey, you’re coming with us,” Gregory protests. “Tracey! Didn’t you tell him about dinner tonight?”

Jack is all, “Huh? What?”

And I’m all, “Dinner? What dinner?”

As in, I must have been smashed out of my mind last night and have no recollection whatsoever of dinner plans that were ostensibly made by me.