“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.
“Oh. Sorry. Didn’t mean to bother you,” she replied without any sign of leaving. In fact, she shifted so that she was turned from me.
“That’s not going to make your argument any more private. Can you please, for the love of all the sea turtles you just saw, leave him alone?”
She gave me a quiet look. I gave her one, too.
At that, she replied, “I mean, you can leave.”
Bitch, I was here first. Of course, I didn’t say that. At this point, Sunny had stood, taking a step in between us to defuse the situation, but there was no situation. I didn’t pick fights with strangers or get into woman pitted against woman escalations of cattiness.
I spoke calmly. “No. I was here first, and we were talking before you came over, blocking off the sunshine with all this shade.” I gestured at her. Because she was the shade.
“Um. I’m sorry. Who are you?” she asked around Sunny’s protective frame. I leaned around him, myself. He probably just wanted both of us to go away, yet here we were.
“Why are you getting defensive?” she asked, seemingly both hurt and jealous at Sunny’s oddly protective barrier of me. “Wait, is she…no. No way. Not for you.”
My head was going to splinter the way this headache was sprouting tentacles, and now I just wanted quiet, but I would be damned if I left. I was here first, in the perfect spot for the bartender, drinks, snacks, breezeway, shade, and minimal passersby with an even smaller chance of runaway kids zooming by. I just wanted peace, and for her to leave so that my lead dev didn’t pop that giant vein now vehemently bulging in his neck. An incapacitated lead wasn’t much use and I sort of absolutely needed him to help finish this gigantic project for the biggest client our company had ever had.
I blurted, “Yes I am.”
