Page 29

A group of guys slow as they walk past and I put my head down. “I didn’t call her a cunt, actually, I asked her not to act like a raging cunt, so I didn’t call her a thing. It was just a simple request. And then…”

My eyes fill with tears. Goddamn shots. They’re the only explanation for why I’m on the verge of crying right now for at least the third time.

“And then…” he prompts.

I want to say it all. I want to say that my stepbrother told me I’d ruin the party, that my mother said my career was ending and I was going to need them, that even my asshole stepfather who destroyed my family thinks he gets to chime in. I want to say all of it and hear a single person agree with me, but the truth is that when everyone is telling you you’re a piece of shit…you’re probably a piece of shit. I’m silent for so long he has to prompt me again.

“My family kind of piled on,” I whisper.

“Get in the car,” he replies.

I look up to see the Jeep the Baileys rented directly in front of me. He came here to get me. And the zipper was the sound of him dressing because he was already in bed, and he still came here.

I don’t know why that makes my throat swell. I cross to the passenger side of the Jeep. “You didn’t have to do this.”

He hands me a bottle of water and then leans over to buckle me in. “Yeah, I did. Has anyone ever suggested that you are alarmingly unconcerned with your own welfare? It’s late. Anything could have happened to you out here.”

“No one even recognizes me now that I’ve cut my hair.”

He sighs. “I wasn’t talking about the fact that you’re famous, Drew. I was talking about the fact that you’re pretty.”

I laugh. “Oh. MY. God. You actually paid me a compliment?”

He rolls his eyes. “Shut up. And no. I didn’t pay you a compliment. I didn’t say anything you haven’t been hearing since the day you were born. That’s not a compliment. It’s just, like, a line item on a list of assets.”

“You paid me a compliment.”

He laughs. “Whatever.”

The breeze whips through the Jeep and I lean my head back and look up at the sky, slamming the water. It’s ice cold. Josh is kind of a keeper, I think. I consider telling him, but even I’m not drunk enough to think that’s a good idea.

That he came to get me, though, feels like the first embers of sunlight coming out behind Diamond Head, warming a cold gray sky. I hope tomorrow I manage to hold onto this feeling, that I remember what it’s like when someone actually cares. And then I hope I get on a plane and get my ass back home, because I know this situation can’t lead anywhere good. Josh isn’t mine, and even if I wasn’t with his brother, and he wasn’t with Sloane, he’s too smart and too good to ever fall for someone as damaged as me.

18

JOSH

I can’t believe my brother hasn’t fucking noticed she’s not with him. I can’t believe she puts up with a man who doesn’t notice that much. Is there any polite way to tell your brother’s girlfriend she can do so much better? To ask what the hell she’s thinking?

“My dad had a Jeep,” she says. Her eyes are closed. “It was such a piece of shit, and so old, but I loved it.”

She’s never, not once, mentioned her father. I feel like she’s finally letting me peer behind the curtain and I don’t want her to pull it closed again.

“Yeah?” I ask. I take a left when I should turn right. I don’t want to get back to the hotel too soon.

“We’d go for a drive, and he’d sing these stupid songs and I’d hold the six pack. My job was to open a new one for him just as he emptied the one he had in his hand, and then we’d split the last one.”

My stomach sinks. I thought I’d get some cute childhood anecdote. A tiny pigtailed Drew being driven to soccer practice or going to McDonald’s. “You’d split it? How old were you?”

She shrugs. “Nine? Ten?”

I glance at her and take an extra turn. “Drew, that’s…kind of terrible.”

She shakes her head, her eyes still closed. “It isn’t though. You’re just seeing it as, like, a responsible adult. Drinking bad. Spinach good. Like that. But as a little kid it was just fun. He liked having me around and I felt…I don’t know. Special. He was the only member of the family who liked me just as I was.”

“You’re talking about him in past tense.”

“He’s dead,” she says with no emotion whatsoever. She could be reporting his year of birth, his eye color. “Drunk driving accident.”