Island Escape

I told myself I was going to Jamaica alone because I needed the rest. Six months of eighteen-hour days, a promotion that came with more headaches than it was worth, and a dating life that had flatlined somewhere around February—I deserved a vacation. The fact that I'd originally booked this trip for two, back when Marcus and I were still together, was irrelevant. I wasn't going to let a failed relationship ruin a perfectly good resort reservation.

What I didn't expect was to return from Jamaica with something far more valuable than a tan and some duty-free rum.

My name is Brianna Cole. I'm thirty-five, a marketing executive at a firm that specializes in luxury brands, and until two weeks ago, I thought I knew exactly who I was and what I wanted.

I was wrong on both counts.

📅 Day 1

The resort was everything the brochure promised: pristine beaches, crystal-clear water, palm trees swaying in a warm breeze. I checked in, unpacked my carefully curated vacation wardrobe, and immediately headed to the beach bar for something frozen and alcoholic.

That's where I first saw her.

She was at the bar ahead of me, ordering in a voice that carried a hint of an accent I couldn't place. Australian, maybe, or New Zealand. Tall and athletic, with sun-bleached hair pulled back in a messy braid and a swimmer's build visible beneath her linen beach dress. When she turned with her drink, she caught me staring and smiled.

"First day?"

"That obvious?"

"Only because you're still wearing shoes." She gestured at her own bare feet, sandy and brown from the sun. "Give it a day. You'll adapt."

I laughed, ordered my drink, and somehow ended up sitting next to her at a table overlooking the water. Her name was Tessa Morgan, she was from New Zealand, and she'd been at the resort for a week already.

"Extended sabbatical," she explained. "I was working in finance back home, realized I was miserable, quit my job, and decided to figure out my life somewhere warm."

"And have you? Figured it out?"

"God, no." She grinned, unabashed. "But at least I'm confused in paradise."

There was something refreshing about her honesty. In my world, everyone was always fine, always succeeding, always performing some version of themselves that looked good on social media. Tessa didn't seem to care about any of that.

We talked until the sun started to set, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink. When she suggested we get dinner together, I said yes without hesitation.

I told myself it was just nice to have company. I was on a solo trip, after all. Making friends was part of the experience.

But when she put her hand on my arm to point out a school of fish visible in the shallows, I felt a jolt of something that friendship didn't explain.

📅 Day 3

By day three, Tessa and I had fallen into a rhythm. Morning swims together before the beach got crowded. Breakfast at the outdoor café, fighting off the bold little birds that tried to steal from our plates. Lazy afternoons reading side by side on lounge chairs, occasionally sharing passages from our books.

I learned that she'd left behind a high-pressure job as a portfolio manager and a fiancé who couldn't understand why she wasn't happy. "I had everything I was supposed to want," she said. "But I woke up every morning feeling empty. Eventually I realized the emptiness wasn't going to fill itself if I just kept doing the same things."

"That takes courage."

"Or stupidity. Ask me again in six months."

I told her about my own life—the career I'd clawed my way to the top of, the relationship that had crumbled because neither of us had the energy to maintain it. I found myself being more honest with this stranger than I'd been with anyone in years.

"Do you miss him?" she asked. "The ex?"

"I miss having someone," I admitted. "I don't know if that's the same thing."

"Probably not." She was looking at me with an expression I couldn't read. "Do you know what you actually want? If you could have anything?"

The question caught me off guard. I opened my mouth to give some rehearsed answer—stability, success, a meaningful relationship—but what came out instead was: "I don't know. Maybe that's the problem."

That night, we had dinner by candlelight on the beach. The resort had arranged it—a little private table, toes in the sand, waves lapping nearby. It felt romantic, even though it was just two friends sharing a meal.

When Tessa walked me back to my room afterward, she hesitated at the door.

"I should tell you something." Her voice was different—nervous, maybe. Careful. "I'm gay. I don't know if that's obvious, but I wanted to be upfront. I'm not trying to—I don't expect anything—I just don't want you to feel weird about the time we've been spending together if you're—"

"I'm not weird about it."

"Okay. Good." She still looked uncertain. "Some women get strange when they find out. Like they think I've been secretly trying to seduce them."

I thought about the electric charge I felt every time she touched me. The way my eyes seemed to find her across any room. The fact that I'd spent more time thinking about her this week than I'd spent thinking about my ex in months.

"Tessa..." I hesitated, not sure how to say what I was feeling. "What if... what if I wanted you to?"

Her eyes widened. "Wanted me to what?"

"Seduce me."

The words hung in the warm night air. Tessa stared at me, and I watched her expression shift from surprise to understanding to something that looked a lot like hope.

"Brianna, that's—are you sure? Because I don't want to be some vacation experiment, and I really don't want to mess up whatever friendship we're—"

I kissed her. It was impulsive and probably foolish and absolutely the best decision I'd made in years.

She froze for just a moment, and then her hands came up to cup my face, and she kissed me back with a passion that made my knees go weak.

"Inside," she murmured against my mouth. "Now."

I fumbled with the key card. My hands were shaking.

The room was dark except for the moonlight streaming through the balcony doors. We didn't turn on the lights. We barely made it past the entryway before her mouth was on mine again, her hands running up my sides, finding the hem of my dress.

"Tell me if you want to stop."

"I don't want to stop."

"Tell me what you want."

"I want you to touch me. I want—" I pulled back just enough to look at her, see the desire and tenderness in her face. "I don't know exactly what I want because I've never done this before. But I know I want to find out. With you."

She smiled, slow and warm. "Then let me show you."

She led me to the bed, laid me down like I was something precious. And then she proceeded to take me apart piece by piece, her mouth and hands mapping every inch of my body, finding places I didn't know could feel so good, drawing sounds from me I'd never made before.

It was nothing like being with a man. It was softer and more intense all at once. She knew instinctively what I needed, when to tease and when to satisfy, building me up and letting me fall over and over until I was boneless and gasping.

And then I wanted to do the same for her.

"Show me," I said, still breathless. "Teach me how to make you feel like that."

She did. Patient and encouraging, guiding my hands and my mouth, making appreciative sounds when I got something right. When she finally came apart beneath me, crying out my name, I felt a surge of satisfaction unlike anything I'd experienced before.

Afterward, we lay tangled together, the ceiling fan stirring the tropical air above us.

"So," she said, tracing patterns on my shoulder. "Was that what you expected?"

"I didn't know what to expect." I turned my head to look at her. "But it was definitely more than I hoped for."

"Just a vacation fling, then? Get some experience and go home?"

There was something in her voice—a vulnerability beneath the casual tone—that made my heart ache.

"Is that what you want it to be?"

"I'm asking what you want."

I thought about it. Really thought about it. About going back to my empty apartment and my demanding job and my life that looked perfect on paper but felt hollow inside. About the way I felt lying here with Tessa, more alive and present than I'd been in years.

"I want to see where this goes. If that's crazy—if we barely know each other—I don't care. I feel something with you I've never felt before. I'm not ready to let that go."

She kissed me, soft and sweet. "It's not crazy. Or maybe it is. But I feel it too."

📅 Days 4-10

The rest of my vacation became something entirely different than I'd planned.

We spent every moment together. Swimming in the cove at sunrise. Exploring the island's hidden waterfalls. Learning to paddleboard (badly, in my case, with much laughter). Making love in my room, her room, once memorably in a secluded beach cabana where we probably shouldn't have been.

But it wasn't just physical. We talked for hours—about our pasts, our fears, our dreams we'd never admitted to anyone else. I told her about being a perfectionist since childhood, about the pressure I'd internalized, about the way I'd shaped my entire life around meeting expectations that weren't even my own.

"You know what I think?" she said one night. We were on the balcony, watching stars that seemed impossibly bright. "I think you've been so busy building the life you thought you should have that you never stopped to ask what you actually wanted."

"And now I'm having an existential crisis at a tropical resort with a woman I met a week ago."

"Could be worse. You could be having it alone."

She was right. Whatever was happening between us, it felt like the opposite of crisis. It felt like waking up.

On day ten, the night before I was supposed to fly home, the reality of separation finally caught up with us.

"What happens now?" Tessa asked. We were in bed, the room around us a mess of our shared days, and I could hear the tension in her voice.

"I go back to New York. You..."

"Keep wandering, I suppose. That was the plan. Figure out my life while hopping around tropical destinations."

"That sounds like a good plan."

"It was. Before."

Before me. Before us. The word hung unspoken in the air.

"Come with me."

I said it before I could talk myself out of it. Tessa's eyebrows shot up.

"To New York?"

"Why not? You're taking a sabbatical. You can take a sabbatical anywhere. And I have a spare room—or, well, my room—and I know it's insane, we've known each other ten days, but I don't want this to be over. I don't want to go back to my life and pretend this didn't change everything."

"Brianna—"

"Say yes. Take a chance. Isn't that what you said you were doing? Figuring out what you actually want?"

She was quiet for a long moment. Then she laughed—not mockingly, but with something like wonder.

"You're serious."

"I've never been more serious about anything."

"I could come for a month. See how it goes. No pressure."

"No pressure."

"And if it's a disaster?"

"Then you go back to island hopping and I go back to pretending I'm satisfied with my life."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Yes. Okay. Yes." She kissed me, deep and promising. "Let's be insane together."

⏳ Six Months Later

The one-month trial turned into three, then six. Tessa got a remote consulting job that let her work from anywhere, which currently meant my living room. I started leaving work at reasonable hours, delegating more, remembering that I was allowed to have a life outside the office.

Coming out at thirty-five was strange. Not as hard as I expected—most people just said "cool" and moved on—but strange nonetheless. I had to rethink so many assumptions about myself, so many stories I'd told about my past relationships and why they never worked.

The answer, it turned out, was pretty simple. I'd been looking for the right person in all the wrong places.

My mother took some time to adjust. But when she met Tessa—really met her, over a long weekend where they bonded over a shared love of true crime documentaries—she pulled me aside and said, "I don't think I've ever seen you this happy."

She was right. I hadn't been.

The apartment that used to feel too big for just me now feels like home. Tessa's surfing magazines scattered across the coffee table. Her running shoes by the door. The way she sings (badly) in the shower every morning and brings me coffee exactly the way I like it.

Last week, she asked if I wanted to go back to Jamaica for our anniversary. Stay at the same resort, sit at the same beach bar, find the spot where we had our first real conversation.

"That's sentimental," I teased her.

"I'm a sentimental person. You'd know this if you'd paid attention."

"I've been paying attention." I pulled her close, breathed in the scent of her. "I paid attention from the first moment I saw you."

"And yet you still seemed surprised when you fell for me."

"I was surprised. That I was capable of feeling this much. That this was what I'd been missing all along."

She kissed me, slow and sweet. "So? Jamaica?"

"Jamaica."

We leave next week. Same resort, same room if we can get it, same magic but with everything different. This time I know exactly who I am and what I want. This time I'm not alone.

This time, I'm going home with the person I love, to a life I never knew I needed until I found her.

Sometimes the best things happen when you stop planning and just let yourself fall.