Chapter Five: The Honeymoon Stage
"- and then he fell off his chair because he was so surprised!" Cody finished, flailing his arms wildly in a silly-looking miming of his story.
Sadie giggled and leaned her elbow on the edge of the drink bar. "That's hilarious!" she said. "I, like, had the same thing happen to me in Spanish class."
"I can't really imagine that," Cody said, cocking his head to the side. "You seem too graceful for that."
"No, I'm totally clumsy," Sadie replied, waving the compliment off. "I've, like, managed to trip up stairs before."
"So have I!" Cody said, his eyes lighting up. There was a slight pause in the conversation where Cody realized that what he had just admitted wasn't exactly the coolest thing he could have shared about himself. (It definitely wasn't the dorkiest either.) He mentally cursed his loose tongue - the conversation had been going so well, too - and worked up the courage to sneak a peek at Sadie's expression. Amazingly, when he finally did look at his new girlfriend, he found that she was smiling delightedly at him.
"You're so cute," she said fondly.
He deflated a bit at that comment. "Cute?" he echoed.
"But super manly!" she corrected quickly.
He puffed up and flashed her a lopsided smirk. Maybe the compliment hadn't come in exactly the way he'd imagined it previously, but seriously, when was a car chase that culminated in him leaping off a moving truck to save his lovely girlfriend from an untimely demise going to take place? To hell with it, he was going to take the compliment and bask in its satisfying glow.
"I'm kind of hungry," she said off-handedly, swiveling the stool around.
"Let me get you something!" Cody popped up from his stool so fast that he smashed his knee into the bar's edge. His feet hit the water with a splash that soaked him up to the waist.
"Are you oka-" Sadie began.
"It's fine, I'm fine," Cody cut her off, limping towards the buffet. "What do you want?"
"Could you get me some of whatever they're barbecuing?"
He waved a thumbs up in her direction and ran into Noah while he was still looking at Sadie. "Watch where you're going, loverboy," Noah said.
"Heh, heh, sorry," Cody said quickly, backing away from the bookworm and turning to go around him.
Sadie sucked up the last of her virgin Mai Tai and plucked the umbrella out of the pineapple stuck on the rim. Cody was such a good boyfriend. He listened to her talk, was totally polite, and thought she was the most wonderful person in existence. It was a win, win, win situation as far as Sadie could see. The past two days had been so totally amazing. She spun the tiny paper umbrella between her index finger and thumb and smiled, satisfied.
The sense of satisfaction that was giving her such a warm fuzzy feeling evaporated and was replaced with a mild sense of irritation when Noah took the seat Cody had recently vacated. Silence rose up between them as both Noah and Sadie tried to think of what exactly had possessed Noah to approach her.
"I heard you're going out with Cody," he said finally, reaching across the bar to grab an empty glass.
"Who told you that?" she said testily.
The look he gave her would have withered flowers at twenty feet. "Cody."
"Oh," she breathed out faintly. Embarrassment twisted in her stomach.
"Anyway, be nice to him. The guy's never had a girlfriend and we don't want you destroying the self-esteem of any more people." His mouth quirked up into an odd smirk and she winced, remembering the incident with Ezekiel. "And he thinks you're pretty much the salt of the earth."
"Salt of the earth?" she repeated.
"Look it up," he said, slipping off the stool into the water with a small splash.
"Okay," Sadie replied, feeling like she should be upset. But, for some strange reason, she wasn't. She nodded. "I will."
He nodded curtly and walked away without a backwards glance, passing Cody, who was carrying two plates with burgers. Cody gave him a curious look before sliding one of the plates onto the bar with a flourish that almost sent the burger into the water. "Thanks," she said.
"What were you guys talking about?" Cody asked, feeling that his new boyfriend status – oh yeah, he was the man - allowed him to ask invasive questions. The question had the underlying message of "I thought you were currently holding a massive grudge against him, so why are you giving him the time of day?"
"Nothing much," she said, picking up the small drink umbrella again. She spun it quickly enough that the pattern turned into a blur of yellow and red streaks, wondering why she suddenly felt out-of-sorts. "He said…." She paused, tried to think of how to phrase what she wanted to say, and gave up. "Never mind."
Cody shrugged and took an enthusiastic bite of his burger. "The boat is coming tonight," he said casually.
"Any idea who's getting voted off?" she asked.
"Heather," he said without a beat of hesitation. "Or Courtney, hopefully," he added. "I have no idea what she did to Duncan to get him voted off, but she was ready to kill him when I was still in the competition. The only reason she didn't get him kicked off then was because their team didn't lose."
"I thought you liked Courtney."
He laughed a little nervously and leaned both elbows on the counter. "No, I'm kinda scared of her."
Sadie agreed whole-heartedly with that sentiment. She'd rather face down a raging bull than an angry Courtney. "She is kinda scary," was all she said. Both of them took a few more bites of their burgers in silence.
"You guys are the most boring couple I have ever seen! I was expecting alligators and fireflies spelling your names and bombs that go BA-BOOM but all I got is you two being laaaaame."
Both Cody and Sadie's heads flipped back and forth wildly, searching for the source of Izzy's voice.
"Up here, sillies!"
Of course, being the silly, semi-rational people that they were, they had not deigned to look up. They both gaped at Izzy, who was perched on the drink bar's roof. The situation brought two questions to mind, both almost impossible to answer. First, and most obviously, how had she gotten up there? Second, how did she manage to place her full weight on the roof of the drink bar without breaking the flimsy thatching that held it together? Cody grappled with the answerless questions while Sadie got right down to the business of interrogating the redhead.
"When'd you get here, Izzy?" she asked.
"Oh, a couple of hours ago," Izzy replied nonchalantly, peeking over the edge of the roof. "Chris got tired of me blowing stuff up and kicked me out early. I think he knew that I was planning on setting his hair gel on fire. Or maybe he saw my secret stash of bobby pins. Either one."
Sadie didn't even bother to puzzle over the last part of Izzy's explanation, as her policy with Izzy was to ignore anything that registered over a five on the weirdness scale. Generally, it was a good policy. "Is he going to eliminate someone else this week too?" Sadie asked, secretly hoping that neither Courtney nor Heather would be descending upon the Playa to cause mayhem any time soon.
"I dunno. Chris' brain works like a baboon on drugs. He's crazy." She sang the last word and flipped off the tiki bar, landing in the water with a splash that drenched both Cody and Sadie. After letting out a cackle, Izzy raced off in the direction of the main hotel building.
"I swear, she acts like that on purpose," Cody said, watching her go.
Sadie nodded and bit into her burger.
The remainder of the afternoon passed in a blur of contentment for Sadie. She saw neither hair nor hide of Katie at the pool all day, which was almost as large a factor in her uninterrupted happiness as Cody's presence. Because she was pretty sure her pasty skin was about to jump headfirst into lobsterland, she suggested they go inside for dinner a bit earlier than usual. Cody, who frequently got a sunburn just from the mention of the word sun, cast a look at the last remaining rays of sunshine and nodded vigorously. They quickly headed inside and made their way towards the dining room.
"Why is this place so huge?" Sadie wondered aloud as they turned down the hallway leading to the dining room.
"I dunno," Cody said. "I guess they ju-aaAAAH!"
Sadie stopped in her tracks, dumbfounded, as Cody's feet slipped out from underneath him. He hit the hard tile floor with a thump that made Sadie's back ache with sympathy. "I'm okay," he called from the floor, attempting to get up. The floor, however, was simply not cooperating. His sneakers slid away from him, sending him back onto the floor.
"Are you okay?" Sadie asked, stepping forward to help him. She shrieked as her feet moved in two separate directions and she ended up staring at the ceiling.
The unwelcome sound of hysterical laughter resounded throughout the hallway. Sadie pushed herself up on her hands, which slid around on the overly shiny surface of the tile, and saw Duncan standing in the open doorway to the dining room. "Ohhhh, man," Duncan got out through his laughter. "You should have seen your faces!" He smirked at them from where he stood inside the dining room. "He was all like, AHHH!" Duncan threw his arms out and did a reasonably good impression of Cody falling, minus the actual falling. "And you were all like, EEEE!" He leapt forward in a movement that resembled a leaping dolphin more than Sadie, and then broke down into laughter again.
"Dude, not cool," Cody said from where he laid on the ground. "I think I broke my spleen."
Duncan's only response was to laugh harder and slap a hand to his forehead.
Over the course of the next ten minutes, Sadie and Cody managed to get back to their feet several times, only to lose their footing on the slippery floor each time. Duncan, who eventually stopped laughing, began offering suggestions on how to get over to the dining room that were slightly patronizing and entirely irritating.
"Maybe if you pushed yourself up with only one hand?" he called.
Sadie, who had already tried that, fixed him with an angry glare. "What is this stuff?" she asked, gingerly getting on her hands and knees.
"Butter," Duncan replied smugly.
"Man, you are an evil genius," Cody said admiringly. About five minutes previous, his back had stopped hurting and he had regained his sense of humor.
Sadie stood slowly and didn't move, gaining her balance.
"Why don't you skate over here?" Duncan suggested. "I'm sure it's slippery enough."
Nodding, Sadie pushed off with her right foot. Her plastic flip-flop, which was amazingly still attached to her foot, moved smoothly across the buttered floor. Surprisingly, the idea actually worked, unlike the rest of Duncan's so-called "advice". That should have been her first clue that something was up. The second should have been the maniacal grin on Duncan's face.
She gracefully skated down the remainder of the hallway, gaining speed as she went. And then she hit the Saran Wrap strung across the doorway. Duncan's laughter rang through the room as she went down.
"Owwww," she moaned on the ground.
On his hands and knees about ten feet away, Cody gaped at her. He half-crawled and half-scrambled across the rest of the hallway. "You okay?" he asked, peering into his girlfriend's face.
She giggled and popped up to kiss him on the cheek. "I'm fine."