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“So, if he didn’t lend you money, why is he mad?”
“He’s mad that I borrowed from our parents,” I say.
“Oh, got it,” she says. “How does that affect him, though?”
“He doesn’t think it’s fair. He started his own business a couple of years after me, and he didn’t have the luxury of borrowing from our parents because they’d given anything extra they had to me, and Josh was upset about that.”
“What do your parents say?”
“They never took sides. They’ve never said anything about it, really. My mom will just let me know now and then that she’s disappointed Josh and I aren’t close anymore.”
“Were you? Before everything?”
“Oh yeah,” I say, wiping my hands down the front of my swim trunks, my palms feeling sweaty from the discussion topic. There’s a reason I don’t talk about this much. “We were super tight growing up. He was one of my best friends.”
Mila is silent for a bit. “So is the money thing why you don’t see your parents?” she finally asks.
Again, I’m impressed by how perceptive she is.
“I talk to them every once in a while. But there’s a lot of guilt there. I haven’t been able to pay them back yet,” I say, feeling a churning in my gut and a heaviness in my shoulders, my body’s exclusive reaction to this topic. The money I owe to family members plagues me like a constant chirping in the back of my mind.
I haven’t been able to bring myself to see my parents face-to-face, knowing I wouldn’t be able to pay them back anytime soon. It’s not like I just decided one day to stop seeing them. I became so singularly focused on paying them back, I stopped finding time to make visits happen. And they eventually stopped asking.
“I’m sorry, Grayson,” she says. “That must be hard.”
I don’t know why I do it. Maybe it’s the softness of her tone and the genuine way she’s listening to me—truly listening. It could be how she’s leaning into me, or maybe it’s because it’s fully dark outside now and I need the contact. Regardless, I find myself reaching for her hand, taking it in mine, and intertwining our fingers.
It’s a friendly gesture. That’s what I’m telling myself. It’s also for Dave, who isn’t here to witness this but should probably know I’m not trying to steal his girlfriend. Except I very much want to.
Mila doesn’t pull away. In fact, she places her other hand on top of our intertwined ones.
“It’s been hard,” I say. “I … miss them.”
“I bet they miss you too,” she says, squeezing my hand. “So, what happened with Aaron?”
“Aaron,” I say, not able to keep the disdain out of my voice. “When things weren’t going as well with TourSpotter, when we weren’t making the money we’d thought we would, he bailed.”
“He just left you?”
“Well, not like that. At first, he tried to convince me we should file for bankruptcy and then we’d be free of our debt. He’d borrowed from his parents as well, and one of our other uncles invested.”
“You didn’t like that,” she says. It wasn’t in the form of a question because she understands me.
“No,” I confirm. “There was no way I was going to just leave everyone hanging out to dry like that. So, Aaron signed the company over to me, and last I heard he’s in Arizona, working in construction.”
“I’m guessing you don’t talk to him either?”
“Nope,” I say. “I’m not interested in repairing that relationship, and I doubt he is either.”
“I probably wouldn’t be either,” she says. “We hate Aaron.”
This makes me laugh. I love that she included herself in that.
“So, what did you do after he bailed?” she asks.
“I knew I had to pay back the debt to our families, so I kept at it. I got TourSpotter to a point that it was profitable enough to stay afloat, and it gave me the room to work on GlobeTrotter, and also the ability to hire some people to help me get that going.” I nudge her when I mention hiring people. I can still picture her sitting across from my desk that day. Her dark hair was around her shoulders, a soft pink color to her lips. I even remember what she was wearing—a black skirt and jacket, with a white shirt underneath. Thank goodness she didn’t wear the red dress, or I’d probably have asked her to marry me on the spot.
“So, you need GlobeTrotter to kill it so you can pay everyone back?”
