The idea makes my mouth go dry, my knees suddenly watery. How fucking stupid and selfish I’d been. How reckless.
“Where are Nico and Amma?” Jake asks, and Brittany sits up, sand clinging to her bare back.
“What’s going on?”
“Need to have something of a group meeting,” Jake replies, and Eliza stands, her smile fading.
“Jake, what’s happened?”
“Robbie,” is all he says, and then, thank god, Nico and Amma wander up before we have to go looking for them.
“Something up?” Nico asks, his eyes darting over to me.
We haven’t talked in days, and I honestly thought I’d miss him more, even though he’d hurt me. But the longer we’ve gone without speaking, the more I’ve begun to realize that Nico and I never really talked that much in the first place. Not about important things, or stuff that really mattered. Everything was vague, these rosy-tinted dreams with no concrete details that allowed us to project whatever we wanted onto each other, without ever needing to confront who we actually were, as a couple. Turns out, we weren’t right for one another. We never had been.
Amma is just behind him, her face hidden by her huge sunglasses, her lower lip caught between her teeth as she crosses her arms tightly over her torso. I can’t see her eyes, but I know she’s looking at me.
“Robbie’s dead,” I say, the words falling out of my mouth like stones.
Jake glances over at me, eyebrows raised. “No beating around the bush for Miss McAllister,” he says, even as Brittany says, “What?” and Eliza sucks in a breath.
Nico rubs the back of his neck the way he does when he’s nervous. “Jesus, seriously?”
“He was camping in the jungle,” I go on, still seeing his body lying there, the bottom of that one shoe. “Like I’d thought. Looks like he caught some of those fish out in the lagoon. The really colorful ones?”
“The poisonous ones,” Jake adds. “So yeah. Thus goeth Robbie.”
“Fuck,” Nico says on an exhale. “What are we going to do about it?”
“The ship with the radios gets here in the next week or so,” Jake says, shrugging. “We’ll let them know. I didn’t find any ID in his stuff, and fuck knows where he’s anchored his boat. We’ll let someone else worry about that.”
“Well,” Eliza says, hands on her hips. “I wish I could say I was sorry about it, but the guy was a certified wanker.”
She sounds like she’s mimicking Jake as she says it, her normally crisp inflections sliding into the wider vowels of his Aussie accent for a second.
“How did you two find him?”
Amma is definitely looking at me now, and I make myself meet her gaze.
“We were just checking out the jungle,” I say, willing myself not to blush, for my eyes not to slide guiltily to Eliza.
“A man can only take so much sun and sand before he has to go adventuring,” Jake agrees, nodding, and he’s so casual, so light, giving nothing away.
“God, you poor thing,” Eliza clucks, coming forward to chafe her hands up and down my arms. “That must’ve been awful to see.”
I don’t deserve her sympathy right now, but I take it anyway.
“It was, yeah. But like you said, he wasn’t a good dude, and like Jake said, we’ve … we’ve done all we can do, really.”
“Do you know what we need?” Eliza says, wrapping her arms around me from the back. “We need a party.”
“Because a guy died?” Amma speaks for the first time, and her voice is icy. Eliza shakes her head, her hair brushing over my shoulders.
“Nothing that morbid, love. It’s just that … look, can we all admit it’s been a shitty few days? We’ve all been off in our own little worlds, there’s been all this tension, and we’ve still got a week or so to wait here. We can’t keep going like this. So, I say we loosen up a bit, hmm?”
Leaning forward, she playfully presses a kiss to my cheek. “Lux? Party?”
It feels wrong and macabre, but it’s not like anything else sounds better. Besides, it is really appealing to imagine recreating those first few days on Meroe, before Robbie showed up, before everything got so fucked.
A reset.
“I don’t know that a bonfire and a few bottles of wine can help that much,” Amma says now, still looking over at me.
“Oh darling,” Eliza says, winking at me. “We’ve got something much better than wine.”