Joshua returns with my inhaler, looking like he sprinted the entire way. “Jesus, you own a lot of makeup,” he says, handing it to me. I take it from him, shake it, and place my lips around the mouth, feeling the rush of cool air sink through my throat and open up my lungs. I do it again and begin to relax at long last.
Josh glances at the coffee beside me. “Thank you,” he tells Sloane.
She looks up at him. “Just like old times, eh?”
He laughs. “The waitresses in Dooha weren’t quite so efficient.”
They smile at each other like old friends, and I wonder if this incident is going to help them find their way back to each other.
I don’t know why that bothers me.
11
JOSH
Thirty minutes since seeing Drew sinking beneath the ocean’s surface and my stomach still remains in a tight knot.
She goes back to her room and I flag down the waitress and order a scotch. I need something to ease this strain in my chest.
I haven’t been in a fist fight in at least six years, but I’m still trying to talk myself out of one with that prick from the surf shop. I know I should probably be mature about it and settle for getting him fired once Sloane’s not around to overhear, but it won’t be nearly as satisfying.
The scotch is delivered and I take a healthy swig of it, willing myself to calm. Drew is fine, I tell myself. She promised she’d lie down.
My eyes close as I picture it. She will shower first and barely dry off before she collapses in bed—naked, I imagine. She seems like the type. She’ll let all that hair of hers soak the pillow. If I were sharing a room with her, she’d forget the pillow was wet until bedtime and then she’d beg me to trade with her. She’d look at me from under those long lashes and smile and say Come on, please, it’s not that wet. The double entendre would be an accident, but she’d lean into it, letting the word wet pop off her lips like a promise. And it would totally fucking work.
Sloane looks at my drink, which is now down to ice. “Too much adrenaline?” she asks.
I set the glass on the table, wondering how bad it would look if I ordered another. “Yeah,” I say, with a long exhale. “It was surprisingly stressful to be a half mile off shore with someone who can’t breathe.”
It was a joke, sort of, but also not a joke. Her smile is muted at best.
“So she has asthma and panic attacks?” Sloane asks. “Or is she just confusing one with the other?”
I don’t fault her for the question. I already texted Michael, one of my best friends from med school and now a pulmonologist, to ask the same. “Apparently, people with asthma are more prone to panic attacks and one can trigger the other,” I tell her.
Sloane raises her sunglasses, graces me with one of those long looks of hers, meant to convey something her words won’t, not entirely. “She’s messy,” she says quietly.
I could argue she’s being unfair. I could argue she’s punching down, given that lots of people would panic in that situation, and she’s clearly had it in for Drew since her first day. But I know what she’s really saying: Drew is more complicated than she appears, more fragile, more damaged.
I say nothing, because I know what Sloane is really doing is giving me a warning.
And I don’t want to hear why she thinks I might need one.
When Sloane finally goes up to the room, I grab my phone to pull up the video of Drew falling offstage. I haven’t wanted to see it, but there’s something in my head. Her saying It always happens at the worst times.
She’s in a tiny white dress, platinum blonde ponytail swinging. With all that makeup, she looks more like a doll than the girl I know. The crowd is chanting for her to sing Naked and she smiles but it’s forced. Even through a long-range lens, you can tell it’s forced.
She isn’t stumbling at first. She’s just wide eyed, staring off to the side of the stage as if she’s thinking of making a run for it. For a moment the camera zeroes in on her face, and there is absolute panic there, her chest rising and falling too fast.
The music starts and she misses her cue and then she takes one step out on the catwalk, and another, as if she’s lost or doesn’t know where she’s supposed to be, before her eyes flutter closed. The microphone falls to the stage with a discordant crash and she falls right over the side.
She had a panic attack.
And she’d rather let the whole world think she was drunk than tell the truth.
12
DREW
“So what I hear you saying,” Tali says once I’ve finished updating her about the trip, “is that Joshua rushed across the ocean to save you, lifting you into his brawny arms.”
“Oh my God. Stop.” I’m out of the shower after the incident in the ocean, still shaken enough that I needed to hear a friendly voice, and Tali is pretty much the only friendly voice I know of. I pull off my robe and climb into bed naked.
“And for the first time in your life,” she continues, “you felt found and seen, and a piece of you, a secret piece you hadn’t even known was there, recognized he was what you wanted all along.”
Tali just published her first book last summer and is now at work on the second. She can romanticize almost anything.
“Jesus,” I groan. “Are you just reading to me from your next book?”
“My next book is even worse,” she says with a reluctant laugh. “It’s so much worse, you wouldn’t even believe it. Pregnancy is making me so dumb—I couldn’t remember our phone number the other day and Hayes said Well, let’s hope he gets my brain and your looks. But I want to hear more about Joshua.”
I pull the towel off my head and sink back into the pillows. “I was drowning—please don’t turn that into a metaphor—and he decided not to let me die, though he was obviously a little on the fence. It was in no way romantic.”
Except I can still see the sheer determination on his face as he paddled toward me, and the fear in his eyes. I suppose, had Tali been watching, she’d still argue it was a little romantic.
“Is he good looking?”
I sigh heavily. “He’s not repulsive.”
“Oh my God. You’re so full of shit. I’m looking him up. Joshua…what’s their last name again?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“Ha! Bailey. The baby hasn’t taken every brain cell. Bailey, doctor, Somalia…oh. OH. Wow.” And then she starts to laugh. “Holy shit. ‘Not repulsive’？ You are such a fucking liar.”
I wish I could see what she sees and I’m also glad I can’t. It’s probably some picture of him refusing to smile, a brooding Viking with a baby in the curve of one bicep and a puppy in the other.
I snort. “Maybe it was a good picture day for him.”
“This guy is a living good picture day.” I hear her then laugh and say Yes, Hayes, you’re handsome too, before she returns to the phone. “And I notice we haven’t discussed Six even once. I assume he’s still in prison?”
I exhale and scratch the back of my neck. “They think it’ll all be settled tomorrow. And don’t make him sound like a serial killer. He made a little mistake, and you’ve got to take the good with the bad, Tali. You put up with Hayes being British, I put up with Six smuggling weed in a guitar case.”