“Why are you here?” I ask. My voice is rough, like I smoked a carton of cigarettes.
“Why am I in my room?” he asks. “Great question.”
“Shit,” I whisper. I struggle to push off the heavy blanket on top of me and sit up, burying my head in my hands again. I’m sweaty and filthy and I want to be placed in a medically induced coma until the alcohol is out of my system. “Shit.”
More snippets of the evening are coming back to me now. We were in the rental car. And I was remembering my dad singing me those stupid Russian songs from his childhood in his piece-of-shit Jeep and drinking the whole time, and I think I might have told Josh about it.
I reach for the water he’s set out for me on the coffee table. “Whatever I said to you…can we just pretend I didn’t say it?”
He closes his laptop and turns in his chair to look at me. “Why?”
I close my eyes. “I don’t…discuss my father, okay? With anyone. And that’s all just…it’s shit I don’t want out in the world.”
“Hold on. Let me see if I can stop that telegram I just sent The New York Times,” he says.
If I wasn’t in quite so much agony, I might laugh. But I’m in no mood. “Don’t tell Six,” I whisper. “And please, please don’t tell Sloane. She’s already got it out for me.”
“You didn’t say anything worth repeating, Drew,” he says. “Don’t worry about it. And she’s gone, anyway.”
My head whips up to look at him. “Gone?”
There’s a quick flash of worry in his eyes before he glances away. “She headed back to Atlanta. It’s for the best. You might have noticed there was some tension.”
“No,” I say with a half smile. “You two hid it really well.”
He doesn’t smile back. “My mother is devastated. I told her earlier and she burst into tears.”
My stomach drops, and not simply because I hate the idea of Beth being upset. Between the bar last night and waking up now I had decided to leave. But if Sloane’s already gone and Beth’s upset, how can I possibly leave too? “Doesn’t she see that everyone’s better off this way? Like, why waste all that time on something that isn’t going to work?”
He shakes his head and for a moment there’s something grim in his face, something he doesn’t plan to share. “She wants to see us all married,” he says quietly. “I think she blames herself for the fact neither of us are inclined to settle down. Thank God you’re staying, at least.”
I swallow, unable to meet his eye.
He looks at me, then. A long look, like he knows exactly what I’m thinking. “Drew, promise me you’re going to stay. I can’t get into it but…this trip is really important to my mom. If you leave, too, I’m not sure she’ll be able to rebound from it.” My stomach drops farther. I don’t think any reasonable person would argue that it’s better not to know the truth. But I imagine Beth struggling to stay chipper through the rest of this trip and feeling like a failure because neither of her grown sons can keep a girlfriend, and that seems worse. “Please,” he adds.
“Okay,” I whisper. “And I’m sorry…about Sloane.”
His tongue darts out to wet his lip and then his teeth sink into it. God, I hate when he does that. I hate it so fucking much. “I’m not. I just wish my mom wasn’t upset.”
“You’re probably a little sad. I mean, come on, you dated the girl for a while. As unfeeling as you are, there must be something there.”
His mouth moves into an almost smile. “Unfeeling, huh? That’s how you see me?”
I rise shakily to my feet. No, I think. I don’t see you that way at all anymore.
Once housekeeping arrives to let me into my room, I enter to find Six’s clothes spread over the floor like Hansel and Gretel’s trail of bread crumbs, straight to the bed where he’s in nothing but boxers.
There was a time when the sight of him like that might have appealed to me.
At this exact moment, he just looks a little unclean and a whole lot selfish. I check my phone: he didn’t reply to last night’s text for two hours. It took him two hours to wonder where I was and check his phone, for fuck’s sake.
And that’s exactly what I wanted: someone who was never going to depend on me, and someone I’d know better than to depend on. But I think back to last night, to that moment when Josh appeared in front of me in the Jeep. The way I felt found, and safe. And it felt a lot better than this does.
Six is dead to the world, so I close the bedroom door and sit on the couch with one of his guitars. Frustratingly, it’s not well-tuned but I leave it alone and start trying things out, this song that’s been in my head for the past few mornings. The words aren’t quite there, but the chorus gives me chills, and I’d sort of forgotten what that felt like—the quiet thrill of creation, the moment of realizing I did something, and loving it enough that it almost doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.
An hour before we’re due downstairs, I put his guitar away and wake him.
“Hey,” he croaks. “What happened to you last night? Where’d you sleep?” His worry is coming about twelve hours too late.
I could tell him his role in the whole thing but I’m still tired, and it hardly matters at this point. “Josh picked me up. You had our room key so I slept on their couch.”
He sits up, suddenly stiff-spined and tense. “You called Josh? Jesus Christ, Drew, all you had to do was—”
“I didn’t,” I reply, unduly irritated. I cross the room and get my suitcase from the closet. “He called me, looking for you. You told me you were going to text your mom. She was worried.”
“Right,” Six says, rolling his eyes. “And I forgot. Thank God Saint Fucking Joshua was there to step in and save the day.”
I’ve been in his shoes so many times—when I’ve screwed up and someone has fixed it for me, and made sure to let me know they had to fix it for me. It sucks to be the screw-up. It sucks to be the one people roll their eyes over, about whom everyone’s saying Well, what did you expect? to each other.
But I’m not willing to sit here agreeing with him that his brother is a dick for coming to get me, for fixing problems he, in part, created. “Well,” I reply, “he really did kind of save the day.”
I set the suitcase on the bed and walk onto the balcony to take in Diamond Head. I hate that I won’t really be able to hold onto this trip. Memories are like artwork left in the rain. They blur and smudge until all that’s left is your weak interpretation of it, your best guess as to what it was. One day I’ll merely say I watched the sunset here, but I probably won’t remember the way Josh made me laugh. I won’t remember him saying Tell me something real, as if what I said and what I felt and what I thought actually mattered.
I’m going to miss this place, I think, taking it in for one last moment, and it won’t ever be the same without him.
“There you are,” says Beth when we arrive in the lobby. “We were worried last night.”