“Excuse me, I have to take this call,” Pradeep said after a glance at his ringing phone. “Nice to meet you, man. I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other the next few days, right!”

He gave a hearty, good-natured laugh, kissed his girlfriend on the cheek, and took the call as he walked into the shade of the lounge. He paced the threshold between the indoor and the outdoor spaces, a large archway between pillars. Close enough to see but far enough to keep his conversation private.

“Nice boyfriend,” Sunny commented, droll as usual.

His ex smiled. “Very nice. We’ve been together for almost ten months.”

“So you got together only a month after we broke up?”

“Can’t wait around forever. And timing.”

“Yeah. Timing. He must be something if you bounced back that quickly after breaking things off with the love of your life.” He said “the love of your life” with mocking.

“I really did love you, Sunny. But we would’ve never worked out. And once I accepted that, I broke up with you and pushed myself to move on. I deserve a romantic, sweeping love story, and you weren’t it.”

I grimaced. Ouch. Then I took another sip of water and continued watching.

Sunny curtly shook his head, his lips pressed, and I prepared for an explosive rebuttal. Instead, he said, “Congratulations.”

Anticlimactic. But maybe that was Sunny. I’d never seen him get angry.

He swiveled away from her, but turned back when she scoffed, “That’s all you have to say?”

“I’m happy that you’re happy. Did you expect me to throw a fit? Be depressed? Challenge him to a duel?”

“Some type of emotion. But, oh, right, I remember who you are and precisely why we broke up.”

“Because I should be run by emotion all the time? That’s chaotic. I like calm.”

She crossed her arms, extended one leg out, and tapped her foot, daring him with every fiber of her challenging expression. She…wanted him to be jealous. Ew. In my experience, when people wanted their exes to be jealous of a new flame, it was because some part of them was still stuck on the ex or whatever they’d once had. Or they liked the drama. Obviously, I didn’t know this woman, and she seemed a bit scathing although alarmingly sweet…but she didn’t look like drama-incarnate walking around in a red bikini.

“You came alone, didn’t you? Have you even dated since we broke up?” she asked.

“That’s not really your business, is it?” Sunny retorted, a flicker of annoyance in his voice.

“I worked really hard on you, and you just let all of that shrivel away?”

Eh? What sort of work was she claiming here? Now her tone was cutting edge, and I didn’t believe I cared for it.

“I wasn’t broken,” he replied. You tell her!

She guffawed. “Sunny. You had so much to work on. I gave you so much and you did nothing. Your mother still messages me. If you’re like this forever, you’ll never find a woman, much less keep one.”

Sunny’s jaw stiffened and his posture returned to that hard, rigid line. He was suddenly twice as tall, took up twice as much space. The chair between us dwarfed in his shadow. The bartender had disappeared. The few other guests around us vanished. This felt like one of those Western showdowns…but in resort swimwear.

“You should probably stop,” he said in that dark, commanding tone. “Don’t mess with this wedding.”

“Says the only guy in the group without a date. You’re going to be the seventh wheel in all the activities and pictures. Couldn’t even scrounge up a date with promises of Hawaii to even out the numbers?”

The tic in his jaw returned. Sunny got annoyed with me all the time and acted like he was upset, but he was never unprofessional, never actually angry. But right now? He was teetering on the verge of losing his cool, that leveled baseline he was so well known for having. He was hardly ever loud, rowdy, or irate. He was usually mellow as could be. I stilled with bated breath for his reaction.

“Focus on yourself and your new boyfriend,” he said.

“I’m focused on us, don’t worry. You’re not that special.”

“Then why are you talking to me when your boyfriend is alone?”

Resentment flickered in her large brown eyes. Like she was both vexed and hung up on Sunny. “Don’t be such a downer all weekend, huh?” she said sweetly.

An actual vein appeared snaking down Sunny’s neck. All right, listen, I needed this guy. He was a brilliant dev and our biggest project of the decade was going to fail without his specific expertise and insight. The way this man drifted between lines of code, no glitch escaped him. He was the last line of flawless user experience. All the work before him in various stages of research and design would mean nothing without those nimble fingertips typing away at the speed of light, those hawk eyes zooming in on the subtlest out-of-place symbol that could crash an entire program.

Error 404 was not happening on his watch.

“Did you mess with my reservation?” Sunny said out of nowhere, dragging my thoughts back to their conversation.

Her right brow arched. “You think I think about you enough to do that?”

“The hotel said my reservation was for yesterday. I’d made that reservation with you almost a year ago. They said it was a glitch…but I know I had the correct date. You had access.”

She blew out a breath. “I needed a room. They were supposed to give us two separate rooms instead of the one.”

“Did you check to make sure the original reservation would end up with a room for me on the correct date?” He fumed, answering without waiting for her, “Because now I don’t have a room. This place is booked, every hotel is booked.”

“I’m sure there’s a room somewhere,” she replied indifferently.

“Don’t play this game with me.”

“How dare you!” She began passively pulling Sunny apart, fault by fault. And he began lacing his responses with ice jagged enough to pierce souls.

I found my annoyance dissolving into temperament and I wasn’t here to have my vacation ruined by drama or let someone tear down the most important dev on any of my teams. Sunny needed to return from this wedding intact and recharged to tackle the last phase of work projects, not end up a frazzled, incensed mess. He was, by far, the best dev ever. Despite our issues, even I acknowledged that our company had lucked out snagging him. Thanks to his speed, precision, and genius, we’d turned out more projects at staggering prices.

Crap. If Sunny had interviewed for PM, then he truly was serious competition.

This woman wasn’t even my ex, but I could see how triggering all of this was for him. A wedding—happy couples everywhere. His ex with her new man, shoving it in his face and reminding him of all the ways he’d failed at their relationship.

Mr. Grumpy was about to turn into Mr. Aggravated. I didn’t want to run into these vibes every time we happened to be in the same place this week, much less have him haul this crap back to work. More than that, I didn’t think Sunny deserved this.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I didn’t know a thing, I mean, I hardly knew Sunny in the first place. Maybe their rotting atmosphere was just getting to me, dismantling my chill. A headache teased at my temple, a sign of a sharper headache. But whatever the reason, it had me cutting through their increasingly heated exchanges.

“Do you mind?” I asked her.

She barely hinted at having heard me, spewing nonsense at Sunny while he paused to glance my way. His moment of ignoring her only made her angrier.

“Can you leave him alone?” I said, and not in a nice way. My tone came out surprisingly sharp.

She finally turned to me. “What?” The return of the sweet voice. Okay, so maybe she was just mean to Sunny. Exes tended to bring that out. Breakups were known to be ugly and even malicious.

But I wasn’t having it either way. I sighed, crossing my legs, and swirled my almost empty glass of water. “Can you leave him alone, and maybe take your drama down a notch? I’m trying to relax. At this very splendid resort in what tourists call paradise,” I added with a grand sweeping motion, as if maybe she’d forgotten where she was.