“Hey, bitches,” Lotus says, her smile easy and loving. “I barely recognized you without your guys attached to your hips.”
“They have real jobs and couldn’t stay the whole time.” Yari sighs, flopping into an empty chair at the table. “And look who’s talking. You got a whole baby from your man.”
Lotus rubs her little stomach, oiled up with sunscreen in her bikini, and beams. “He got me!”
“I really like these,” Billie says, her green eyes widening as she studies the sketches on the table. “Is this for the Carnival theme next summer?”
“Yeah,” Lotus says. “Takira’s giving me the inside scoop. She’s from Trinidad and goes back all the time for Carnival.”
“That’s so cool.” Yari scoops her dark, curly hair into a messy bun, her arms even browner now from the sun than when we started our trip. “Can you teach us how to wine?”
“How to what?” Billie asks, peeking at us from beneath the wide-brim hat offering her fair skin shade. She’s a classic redhead and has been careful with the sun.
“It’s dancing.” I laugh. “And I’ve never tried to teach anyone how to do it. It’s just…in me. I grew up watching my mama and aunts, cousins, sister—it’s something in our blood, and as soon as the music starts, it catches me.”
“I actually think I’m pretty good.” Lotus makes a show of brushing her shoulders off. “If I do say so myself.”
“I’d like to see that big belly wining,” Yari teases.
“Sun’s out.” Lotus scrapes her chair back, stands, and smacks her ass. “Buns out. You got anything we can wine to?”
“Anything we can…” I giggle. “Oh, my god, Lo.”
“Music!” Her hands go to her slim hips. From the back, you can’t even tell the girl is six months pregnant. “Gimme a beat.”
Laughing, I look through the playlist on my phone and pull up some Soca to dance to. Within ten minutes, the four of us are lined up on deck in our bathing suits in various states of wine.
“It’s not twerking,” I tell them. “So put that out of your mind. And I don’t wanna see no hula hoops.”
I bend my knees a little, roll my hips to demonstrate, and immediately feel good. It’s like serotonin to my system, the mellifluous motion of my limbs, my torso and hips, and the beat that pounds through my blood.
Lotus actually is decent. She jokingly claims she learned from watching Rihanna.
At least, I think she’s joking.
Yari says she’s Dominican and can dance to any beat under the sun. Also, decent.
That Billie, though.
If there’s a stage that is pre-beginner, that’s Billie.
But she’s trying, and we’re laughing, the spray from the sea kissing our faces and the sun warming our bare skin.
“Now you pelting waist, gyal,” I shout over the music, nearly losing the flow because I’m laughing so hard at Billie trying.
My hips are still swimming in the balmy air, the delicate body chain draped over my neck and around my stomach glinting in the sun, when two large hands bracket my waist from behind. I look up to see Naz towering over me, an indulgent smile shaping his lips.
“You gonna teach me?”
The thought of this huge man—six feet, seven inches of athletic grace, but dancing awkwardness—bubbles laughter out of me.
“Them hips weren’t made for wining,” I tell him, turning into his hug and tipping up to kiss his chin. “How was volleyball?”
“Intense. You’d think the ballers would be the most competitive, but Jared’s a savage.”
“I can actually see that, but then, you hear him FaceTiming with Angela every night, reading to her in Spanish…major heart melt.”
“True. One of his clients, a soccer player, owns a villa in Positano. We’ll stay there for a couple of days when we dock for Kenan’s birthday party.”