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Kai, in the meantime, was working on Sloane, asking her if she thought the east wing of the house was original. She explained in great detail that the proportions were wrong, then lengthened her spine, smiling softly when Kai casually acknowledged her architectural prowess. I blushed on everyone’s behalf.
I found Sofia flustered at the seafood table, which had become a display of maritime violence, an enormous pile of crab legs towering where the discarded husbands had been demolishing them like hyenas. I left Damian and Kai to mingle and rescued her.
Guests settled into loungers and cabanas. Lark slumped into a pool float with her drink in her hand, her legs dangling lazily over the plastic. Parker emerged from the lemon trees to orbit the younger end of the party, doing his signature move: standing slightly too close to a seated woman so she’d have to look up at him, drink held at chest height like a shield he’d never need because no one was ever going to swing at Parker, much as they might want to. He tried it on Lark, who simply rotated her pool float with one lazy kick of her foot. He drifted back toward the martinis, unbothered, patient, and awful.
The conversation lulled, and the afternoon took on a lazy cadence. Damian joined me on a lounger, and Kai took a discreet break, scrolling on his phone. The husbands sat around a patio table, losing social steam as they digested half the Pacific’s crustaceans. For fifteen dangerous minutes, the party became exactly what it was supposed to be.
We were moments from golden hour, and the photographer approached me with her camera in her hand.
“I need movement in the water. One person. Not a group,” she said.
Vivienne, who was just a few feet from me, turned.
“Marlowe’s man will do it,” she said shamelessly. “Sofia, remove the pool floats.”
I took a long drink of wine, annoyance and opportunism braiding themselves together inside me.
Damian set his drink down. “Of course,” he said. He stood up and took his time unbuttoning his shirt, shrugging off his shoes. I watched Kai clock him from across the pool, a smirk working the edge of his lip, which he quickly smothered.
His shirt seemed to fall from his shoulders in slow motion, or perhaps it was just that the harpist missed a beat, then recovered.
He unzipped his pants with the same measured grace.
On the other side of the pool, Sloane lowered her sunglasses, then remembered herself.
Then his pants came off, sliding off his hips while the party silently rearranged its focus around him from under the brims of hats. Underneath he was wearing a pair of trunks that I knew, without a doubt, would cling to him when wet in a morally destabilizing way. I took another long sip of wine.
Karen stood up from her cabana and walked to the bar for water she didn’t need. Raff looked at Damian, then at his own stomach.
It took everything I had not to break into a wild, nervous laugh.
Sofia watched it all happen from the lawn, where she was struggling to stack the removed pool floats.
Damian took a clean dive into the pool, then swam across it, his tattoos moving beneath the water, appearing and vanishing with each stroke.
The photographer aggressively photographed him from angles that couldn’t possibly have been necessary. Blythe turned her lounger toward the pool, reportedly “to get out of the glare.”
Lark had taken up residence on a lounger by Vivienne, and suddenly her sunglasses were on, her face turned to the water.
My phone distracted me from the show.
Callie: Is it working???
I think so, I replied.
“He manifested for Marlowe, if you can believe it,” Vivienne said to Lark, leaning toward her.
Lark pulled her sunglasses from her face.
“Manifested?”
And there I was. Proof of delivery. The before and after ad for Aurora’s empire. The conversation quietly caught fire after that. For the first time ever, Vivienne had finally been helpful. The rest of the terrace had fallen quiet, except for the soft strumming of harp strings and the sound of Damian’s body carving through the pool water.
I spoke humbly about the spiritual enlightenment I’d gained since the retreat, which was the kind of white lie that will probably end up underlined in the akashic records. I spoke about the unlikely serendipity of meeting Damian so soon after the event, which I twisted into the heart-warming tale about buying gelato at the same time at the farmer’s market. Lark gave a little squeal at that, despite herself. Kai joined us just in time, with the pretense of a freshly corked Chardonnay, to discuss his own miraculous union with Callie, leaving out the deception and witchcraft and the night of marijuana-induced weeping and hysteria on my doorstep, of course.
Blythe now had her head turned toward the conversation, and Sloane had gone very still.
Damian emerged out of the pool, taking his time, the trunks doing exactly what I predicted. Karen looked up from her phone. Davina looked like grief had loosened its grip.
