When I return, the bra is off and if I look, there won’t be enough gruesome amputations in the world to keep my dick in place. I focus on her face instead, noting the tiniest scar on the bridge of her nose. “How’d you get that?” I ask, tapping my own nose. I’m only mildly curious about the answer until I discover she doesn’t plan to provide it.
“Cage match,” she says. Her smile is wide, as fake as her hair color. It’s as if she’s pulling a curtain shut before my eyes. “I won.”
Messy, I hear Sloane saying, but I suspect the messy part is me. Every time Drew closes herself off to me, I just want to pry further, to dig past all her secrets until I get to the small piece at the center of her that’s never been hurt.
“This view will be impossible to beat,” she says, changing the topic and looking out toward Diamond Head, its edges now a bright, brilliant orange.
“The other islands might be even better,” I tell her. “You never know.”
“Listen to you, being all optimistic,” she says, accepting a cappuccino from the waitress with a grateful smile. “Maybe there’s a bit of your mother in you after all.”
My eyes fall closed. “I hope there’s more than a bit.”
“You and your dad seem to get along,” she argues. “Like, every time we’re together it’s only you he’s talking to.”
Yes. Talking to me about reimbursement, billing, how irritating it is that people can’t pay his cost out-of-pocket. And his business practices aren’t even close to my biggest issue with him.
“If it weren’t for my mother,” I reply, in a moment of unprecedented honesty, “I’d probably never speak to my dad again. Instead, I just moved halfway across the world to prove I would never be like him.”
Her teeth tug at her lip. “Haven’t you proven it yet?” she asks. “Couldn’t you…come home now?”
There’s something tentative in her voice, something simultaneously hopeful and worried. I like it, and know I need to crush it at the same time. “That’s a very far way off,” I tell her. “The camp I run had some issues last summer. We’re so severely understaffed, I can’t imagine a time when we won’t be.”
I’m crushing that hope for both of us. Because there’s a piece of me that wishes I could finally say Yes, I’m going to come home soon, and I need to remember how impossible it is. My father got into medicine to make a lot of money and the patients were secondary at best. I want to be a different kind of doctor, a different kind of man, and abandoning thousands of helpless people would be the opposite of that.
When the sun is fully out and our cappuccinos are gone, we rise and begin walking toward our wing of the hotel. Her gaze flickers to the white dress in the store window the way it always does.
“I don’t know if I’m coming with you guys to Lanai,” she says, just as we step onto the elevator. “If Six doesn’t make it, I can’t keep being the fifth wheel on your family vacation.”
My stomach tightens. She’s misunderstood something vital about this trip, about our family dynamic right now. Mostly, I think I just don’t want her to go.
The elevator arrives at our floor and we walk down the hall together. She opens her door.
“Hey, Drew?” I say. She looks over at me. “Just so you know, you’re not the fifth wheel, right now. You’re the glue.”
I open the door and slip quietly into my room, feeling as if I said too much. Because I’m not sure if she’s really holding all of us together, or just me.
14
DREW
Once upon a time I thought fame would insulate me from criticism. I thought it would get me to a place where I no longer answered to anyone. But an all-caps text from Davis over breakfast saying CALL ME IMMEDIATELY is enough to make my stomach lock up, proving it hasn’t happened.
If I weren’t still floating from what Josh said to me this morning, I’d be in a raw panic. Instead, I think You’re not the fifth wheel. You’re the glue. And then I smile and continue to eat, waiting until I’m back in the room to call Davis—a bit of petty defiance I enjoy far too much.
I slide the balcony door open as I wait for him to answer. You’re not the fifth wheel. You’re the glue. It’s the first time in a decade someone has suggested I’m not the source of all their problems. That I am inexplicably the thing holding people together. I want to bathe in those words of his. I want to tattoo them on my chest and keep them with me forever. I know it won’t last, but I like what I see when I look through Josh’s eyes. It almost makes me want to leave while I’m ahead, before I disappoint him.
And disappointment seems inevitable. I’m still me, after all.
Even Davis’s breathing is angry when he answers. “The pictures of you drunk yesterday are everywhere,” he seethes.
“Um…What?” I ask. I was prepared for any number of valid criticisms because God knows I make a lot of mistakes. This one has thrown me for a loop.
“I’m not sure how I can make it clearer,” he says between his teeth. “You were drunk.” Being accused of something I didn’t do makes me feel like I’m a kid again, takes me straight back to those days when my stepbrother would accuse me of something with so much certainty I’d start to wonder if he was right. Davis and my stepbrother have a lot in common, and they’re both capable of making me feel like shit even when I’m completely innocent.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I reply. “I didn’t even go out last night.”
“I guess it was your identical twin, then, who had to be held up getting out of the ocean yesterday,” he says snidely.
My stomach drops—I should be used to people stealing every moment of mine as if it belongs to them, and I should be used to hearing the narrative twisted, but there are times, like right now, when it feels like nothing could possibly be worth it. “I was surfing and I nearly drowned, Davis. I wasn’t drunk.”
“Well, I’m in the middle of booking your apology press tour,” he continues, “and you need to watch how things look. The last fucking thing I need right now is you out acting like you aren’t even sorry.”
“First of all, apology tour? To whom do I even owe an apology?”
“All the teenage fans who just watched their role model plunge off a stage? All the ticket holders in Paris and Berlin who didn’t get to see you perform? All the parents who supported their teen daughters’ obsession with you, only to have you wind up as the before picture for the Betty Ford clinic? Do I need to go on, or have I made my point?”
“I wasn’t drunk, and you know it.”
“I don’t care what you were,” Davis says. “If I’m trying to fix this for you, the least you can do, the absolute bare minimum, is not start more fires I will have to put out.”
I stare at Diamond Head, and think once more of escape. Perhaps Davis needs a little reminder that he’s not the one of us who’s vital to the operation.
“Maybe I should just go live off the land,” I tell him. “Quit while I’m ahead.”