“Well, either it works out or it doesn’t,” Blake said, and then wondered if all his months on the road were reducing him to such a pile of platitudes that he’d never be able to write a decent script again.
“The only thing you can do is try.” Jamie raised his glass and swallowed the whisky down, making a face. “Or maybe it’s better to stick with what you’re good at, like making cachaça instead of whisky. Yikes.”
Blake laughed, shuddering as the alcohol burned down his throat. Jamie made it sound so easy, but it wasn’t. Jamie and Chris were the kind of people who took risks. Blake wasn’t. It was as simple as that. He’d planned out his whole trip and now he was sticking to it. No more distractions. No more deviations. Argentina was calling to him.
“Rio’s a great city,” Jamie said after a pause. “Julia’s going to have a great time.”
“Sure,” Blake said. He tried to keep his face impassive as he picked up cards from the deck. Jamie was creaming him and now Blake didn’t have a single diamond to play. “So’s Buenos Aires,” he added.
“You’re sure there isn’t anything you’ll miss in Argentina?”
“Not pretty girls, I can promise you that.” Blake flashed a grin.
“I was thinking more about one girl in particular.”
Jamie threw down his last card: six of diamonds. Damn. Blake should have changed suits when he could. He swept up the pile of cards to shuffle.
“I’ve got other plans.”
“What, get drunk by yourself in Patagonia? You’ve got no plans.”
“Travel by myself, then go back to Sydney. Emphasis on the by myself, you know?”
Silently Jamie pulled on a strand of his beard.
“C’mon,” Blake said. “What does it matter if I say good-bye to her now versus saying good-bye to her on Saturday? It’s better to stick with the schedule I have. Besides, you heard her—it’s not like she even minds.”
“If you say so,” Jamie said. “You deal this round.”
Blake cut the cards, listening to the cicadas in the darkness. The table was lit by the glow from the pool and the pale lamps overhead. Some part of him knew what Chris meant. It was hard not to want to live like this forever.
He knew, too, that he was lying when he told Jamie everything was fine. Julia’s face had closed like a screen door when he told her to have a nice trip. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t thinking something entirely different underneath. Something undoubtedly not very good about him.
It didn’t matter, though. They were done. And it wasn’t like she’d given any sign that she wanted him to stay with her. She could have said something, too.
Blake sighed. “We’re not all so lucky to have someone who wants to—what was that crazy thing you guys did? Bungee jumping in Panama?”
“Chris was cheering the whole way down. I almost shit my pants. But you find someone you can nearly die with, you hold onto her.” Jamie wagged a finger at him.
“Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Sometimes I think Chris wishes she were, I don’t know, with some extreme sport maniac daredevil. Someone a little more—”
“Daring?”
“I was going to say crazy, but sure, daring works. A children’s advocacy lawyer doesn’t exactly scream stud.”
“I thought women loved men who care for kids.”
“You try telling Chris that.” He rolled his eyes as he rifled through his cards, arranging his hand.
Blake set the deck between them and flipped over the top card. “Your move,” he said. “I thought this was the big hurrah before Chris makes an honest man out of you and starts hopping on the baby train.”
Jamie picked up a card, played it, and groaned when Blake slapped down another heart. He started picking from the deck, looking for a card he could play. “That was the idea. But you heard the woman. Who wants to settle down when you can—what did she say? Open up a beach resort along the Brazilian coast?”
“Yeah, with Lukas as your concierge.” They both laughed. It was hard to imagine the Dutch photographer taking directions from anyone, let alone snippy guests in an inn.
“Talk about risky,” Jamie said. “You never know who she might run off with. And then—” he caught himself in time. “I’m sorry, man, I didn’t mean it like that.”
Blake held up a hand. “Don’t worry about it.”
“We don’t have to—” Jamie started.
“Talk about it? No. We don’t.”
Jamie’s mouth shut. He played his card.
Immediately Blake felt bad for cutting him off. He was supposed to be re-learning how to do this whole friendship thing, not alienating people at every turn. It wasn’t Jamie’s fault that anything that reminded him of Kelley made him want to punch somebody’s lights out. And while the list of things that reminded him of Kelley wasn’t quite as long as it used to be, it still could fill a few ledgers. Hearing about girlfriends running off with the ones you least expected was pretty high on another list he kept, the one about things he didn’t want to talk about. Ever.
But Jamie was just joking around, one bloke to another, the night dark and the cicadas loud and the cards shuffling back and forth across the table, keeping them busy while everyone slept. Blake wondered what Julia was like when she was sleeping. If her little mouth opened as she breathed. How her limbs splayed out on the sheets. Whether her hair fell into her eyes so that he could lean over her sleeping body and brush it from her face. He took a shot so fast it made him cough. That bus to Buenos Aires couldn’t come fast enough. Once he was on his way, there would be absolutely no more thinking about another body in his bed throughout the night.
Blake poured another thumb of whisky into their glasses. Thinking about Julia sleeping so close and yet untouchable made the image of Kelley the last time he saw her pop unbidden into his mind. That look in Kelley’s eyes hadn’t been shock or shame or sadness, but delight that she’d finally been caught.
He never wanted to see anything like it again.
Jamie didn’t know that he carried that face with him now, whenever anything came up—even jokingly—about losing one’s love. But he would never tell anyone the truth about Kelley. Whatever Jamie wanted to know, he could read about online. He might not think it was true, but it probably was. That was precisely the problem.
“Chris is just talking about opening up that inn,” Blake said. “Everyone loves to fantasize out here.”
Another image popped into his mind, this time of the way Julia’s eyes crinkled when she was so close to coming, one flick of his finger sending her over the edge.
“To fantasies.” Jamie raised his small glass. “And to as many years of good sex as we can possibly get.”
They swallowed the shots with a sour face. Blake played his next cards, a two to make Jamie draw two cards from the deck, a queen to skip his turn, and an eight to change the suit to spades, which he had three of left in his hand.
“Fuck,” Jamie groaned as he watched Blake make his plays.
“You’ve been kicking my ass the last two turns. It’s time for me to have a go.”
But Blake already knew that like all his seeming victories, this one would also be short-lived. Jamie played an eight and changed the suit to clubs, correctly assuming that, of course, Blake was stuck with spades. He flashed Jamie the finger as he reached for more cards, his hand building back up until he finally got one he could play.
Blake wasn’t sure how seriously he should take Jamie’s concerns about whether Chris really wanted to settle down. Hadn’t she talked about their plan to return to their home in Melbourne and start planning their wedding? Even if Chris was having cold feet, it was just the idea of their trip winding down, and he told Jamie that reassuringly.
There were times to step out of your life and jump off a cliff and trust that the rope would hold you. And then there were times when the only thing to do was board a plane in Santiago and go home. Chris would know the difference, when the time came.