Page 3 of No Judgements

“Well, that’s just great, Sabrina.” Now Caleb sounded offended. “Excuse me for caring. You know, last time I talked to you, you were mad at me for not caringenough—”

I felt a different kind of spurt from my gut, far less pleasant than the one I’d experienced at the sight of Drew’s naked stomach. “That’s not what I said, and you know it. There’s a difference between not caring and calling me a liar.”

“I never called you a liar, Sabrina. I just said that maybe you were overreacting—”

“Overreacting? Really, Caleb?”

“Yes, overreacting. You know Kyle gets a little frisky when he’s had too much to drink—”

A little frisky? I was so mad, I had to force myself to gaze past the harbor, out where the turquoise blue sky met the aquamarine sea, in order to steady myself. Something about the sight of that calm, azure water stretching as far as the eye could see always seemed to help me find my equilibrium. I’d taken to painting it during my time off from work—not, however, when anyone else was around—and it always soothed me.

“I don’t want to get into it again, Caleb,” I said. “I need to go back to my job, or I’ll lose it.”

“Oh, wouldn’t that be a tragedy,” Caleb sneered. “Yourwaitressingjob at somebeachbar inFlorida.”

I glanced hastily in Drew Hartwell’s direction, fearful that he might have overheard—Caleb could be as overbearingly loud on the phone as he was in person.

But fortunately, Drew still seemed preoccupied with his own call.

“At least,” I hissed at Caleb through gritted teeth, “Ihavea job.”

“Oh, was that supposed to be a blow to my ego, Sabrina?” Caleb said snarkily. “Because I’ve never had a job, I’m somehow inferior to you? Excuse me for not rising to the bait. Look, if you won’t come with me, at least let me send you a ticket for a commercial flight, since you can’t seem to be bothered to buy one on your own.”

“Don’t even try it,” I snarled into the phone, “because I’m not leaving Little Bridge Island. And it’s Bree now, not Sabrina.”

Then I hung up on him.

Chapter Two

A hurricane is a rotating storm system that begins over the ocean and can span hundreds of miles across, at the center of which is a region of low pressure called an eye, from which rain bands spiral outward.

It wasn’t until I was jamming my phone back into the pocket of my jeans that I realized how quiet it had gotten all of a sudden. I couldn’t hear anything except that Drew Hartwell’s conversation had ceased... and that his gaze was no longer on the harbor in front of us, but on me.

It was difficult to tell given the slant of the sun—it was shining full on into his face, and I’d left my sunglasses inside—but he appeared to be smiling, that sardonic smile for which Drew Hartwell was well known, and about which Angela had also warned me. I couldn’t tell how much of my conversation he’d overheard.

Oh God, I thought, my heart thumping. Don’t let it have been too much.

“First hurricane?” he asked.

I bristled. “What? No.”

The last thing you wanted was for one of these native islanders to accuse you of being “Fresh Water”—new to the place. They took great joy in informing tourists that “conch”—a shellfish and local delicacy, served fried at the Mermaid in sandwiches, on salads, and on their own, hush-puppy style—was pronounced “konk” and not “konch,” and that there were man-eating sharks along the reef, where tourists loved to snorkel (though the truth was that the sharks ate only other fish and were extremely shy, and there’d been only one reported shark attack in the past fifty years, and that had been when a tourist, showing off, had attacked the shark first).

Getting a sunburn or mosquito bite was a sure sign that you were “Fresh Water.” All native-born Little Bridge Islanders woke up and applied SPF 100 and several layers of mosquito repellant first thing after showering. This was how they managed to avoid both melanoma and the various mosquito-borne illnesses that had been running rampant in South Florida for centuries. Whenever a beet-red, mosquito-stung tourist limped into the café, even my self-absorbed teenage coworker Nevaeh would shake her head and murmur, “Oh, poor thing.”

Which was why I lied to Drew Hartwell.

“I went through Wilhelmina when I, uh, first moved here.”

“Oh, Wilhelmina,” he said, and nodded at the memory of the fierce Category 3 storm that a decade earlier had done so much damage.

I didn’t mention that at the time I’d been sixteen and living in my parents’ vacation rental, and that at the first hint of wind my mother had insisted on evacuating us to an exclusive resort and spa outside of Miami, where we’d ridden through the outer rain bands of the storm in a three-bedroom suite with full power, room service, and our own butler.

Technically, I’d still gone through Hurricane Wilhelmina... just not the way Drew Hartwell thought I had.

“So. You going to evacuate?” he asked.

“I wasn’t planning on it,” I said. “Though people in my family seem to think I should.” I gestured toward my pocket to indicate my phone.