Before I realized who he was talking about, he reached out and grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the palapa. I stumbled after him, glanced back, and saw a strange expression on Deputy Bobby’s face—like the quicksilver smile, there and then gone, only this hadn’t been a smile. Worry, maybe. Or something adjacent to worry.
West led me under the palm-thatch roof of the palapa, and we got in line for the makeshift bar. The crowd around us seemed evenly split between guys who had made a modicum of effort to dress up for Halloween (a cowboy, a police officer, Where’s Waldo?), and others who had clearly decided that going as a surfer was costume enough—lots of board shorts, flip-flops, and hoodies. Most of the women, on the other hand, had put a little more work into their getup. I counted two Playboy bunnies, one girl from Stranger Things, an evil (but sexy) clown, and no fewer than three Wonder Women. The clink of bottles mixed with the swell of voices, and the music was louder here—more of that acoustic surfer rock. I figured I could stand about ten more minutes of it before I started looking for a power cord to chew on.
“Am I making a mistake?” West asked.
I glanced over at him. His eyes were wet, and he was blinking rapidly, staring straight ahead.
“With Bobby.” His voice broke as he added, “Am I screwing everything up?”
“What?” I looked around, but aside from a lot of drunken surfers and one Wonder Woman who was trying to climb on a cowboy’s shoulders, there was nobody who could help me. “I don’t—”
“I love him so much. But I keep feeling like I’m—like I’m messing up, you know? And you know how Bobby is. It’s impossible to read him. He never says what he’s thinking. And then I ask him, and he says he loves me, or he’s happy, or—I don’t know. And I just want to scream.” Some of the tears spilled, and as he wiped his cheeks, he ducked his head and said, “Never mind.”
I could run away, of course. I could pretend I hadn’t heard him. I could simply let the conversation drop—he’d made it possible. I could hope that drunken Wonder Woman fell on me and her armor crushed me to death. (It looked like a possibility; that cowboy was definitely not off-roading material.) But West was still wiping his cheeks and sniffling, and he just looked so…miserable.
“I’m all in favor of screaming,” I said and touched his arm. “And crying, for the record. So if you want to do some screaming, we can walk out to the beach, and you can scream your head off. And I’ll hold your drink. And then we’ll get more drinks. And then I’ll hold your hair while you puke. And someone will take pictures of us passed out next to the toilet.” The line moved forward, and I said, “I’ve never actually done this before, so I’m mostly basing this off of movies.”
A tiny laugh made his shoulders tremble. He looked up. His eyes were red. (And the really annoying part was that it didn’t make him even one percent less gorgeous.)
“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?” I asked. “Is this about, uh, the thing at the beach?”
“No.” And then he said, “Yes.”
“You sound like me.”
We both laughed.
“I don’t know,” West said as we moved forward again. The song changed, but the music didn’t. Eight minutes to power cord. “I mean, yes, we argued about that. I argued about it. That’s—that’s the whole problem. He just agrees with me. And he apologizes. And I know he means it, but—” He was breathing rapidly; the hi-vis vest made it easy to see how his chest and belly rose and fell with shallow breaths. “I don’t think he wants to move. And I don’t think he’s happy. And sometimes—sometimes I think I’m ruining his life. But when I ask him, he says he loves me, and he wants to be with me, and everything’s going to be okay.”
The couple in front of us stepped aside, and we found ourselves stepping up to the bar. The guy behind it had sleepy eyes, lots of interesting muscles, and a tiny pair of black trunks. It was starting to feel like the Twilight Zone. Was I the only person who got cold anymore?
“What’s up, kitty cat?” he asked. And then somehow he managed to lean on the bar in a way that made a LOT (cue Millie’s voice) of muscles pop in his arms. Like, some of those muscles I hadn’t even known existed.
West started giggling.
“Uh,” I said.
That made West giggle harder.
“Damian,” the guy behind the bar said. He did some more of that very interesting leaning. I was trying to remember how to swallow.
“I’ll have a vodka cran,” West said through the giggles. “And two beers—an IPA, whatever you’ve got. What about you, Dash? His name’s Dash.”
“Hi, Dash,” Damian said.
My face was hot. Pins and needles ran across my chest. My throat had closed up.
West was dying by now, but he managed to say, “He’ll have a vodka cran too.”
As West started to pat himself down (although God only knew where he could be carrying a wallet), the bartender (Damian, said a treacherous voice in my head) shook his head. “Everything’s comped. Gerry’s picking up the tab.”
He must have understood our confusion because he tipped his head toward the clearing. It took me a moment to recognize Gerry in the flickering firelight—the real estate developer had opted not to wear a costume, and he was in deep conversation with a woman dressed as a luchador.
“Two vodka crans,” Damian said as he set the glasses on the bar. Two bottles of Rock Top’s IPA followed. “And two beers.”
“Thank you,” West sang out. “Say thank you, Dash.”
I managed “Thanks.”
“See you around, kitty cat.”
As we stepped away from the bar, West said in an unnecessarily loud voice, “Oh my God, he is gorgeous! And he’s totally your type!”
My face still felt like it was on fire, but the pins-and-needles sensation faded as we left the palapa and moved into the shadows beyond the fairy lights.
“You’re welcome, by the way,” West said with another giggle. “Now he’s definitely going to come find you.”
I took a gulp of the vodka cran rather than answer—it was good; not ordinarily my drink, but still good.
Either West took pity on me, or he was still focused on his own problems, because he said, “I don’t know what to do. Bobby’s the first guy I’ve ever been in love with. He’s the first guy I’ve ever shared an apartment with. He knows my family; they’re obsessed with him, of course. But I feel like we’ve gone as far as we can in Hastings Rock. Things aren’t…progressing. I keep thinking if we don’t leave—” He stopped, and his voice had an unexpected catch at the end.
The ideal solution, of course, would be to have a bottomless vodka cran, and to keep drinking until I passed out so that I never had to respond to any of this. But I didn’t have a bottomless vodka cran. And West was wiping his eyes again. I drew a deep breath.
“I feel like I need to be totally upfront and tell you I’m terrible at relationships. Like, horrible. So, I don’t really feel like I’m qualified to give advice.”
“You’re my friend,” West said. And then he laughed softly. “Besides, who else am I going to ask? Damian?”
“Definitely do not ask Damian. He looks like one thousand percent trouble.”
