by Edie Claire
Yes, Maddie, Kai longed to say. There is. But he could not say yes without explaining everything, because with Maddie there was no in between, there was only no or now. And although he didn’t agree with his mother entirely, he did agree with her on one point: the best way for Maddie to learn the truth was from her father. If Bill Westover had learned only minutes ago that his daughter had not only reconnected with the Nakamas but was planning to continue visiting Lana'i regularly, and if he had promised to call her back, then there was a good chance that Kai’s interference would not be necessary.
“There it is!” Gloria shouted, jumping up and down and pointing southwest again.
Maddie whirled and put a hand above her eyes.
She gave up and turned back around faster this time, but Kai was ready. “I just wanted to make sure you told him that everyone in the family remembers you both, and that he shouldn’t doubt that he’s more than welcome to come visit, too.”
Maddie blinked. “Oh.”
She looked disappointed. But it was more than that. Deep in her light gray eyes, he glimpsed a simmering brew of angst that yanked at his heartstrings. She knew something wasn’t right. She didn’t think Kai was lying to her — which in strictly technical terms, he was not — but she knew there was something off between them, nevertheless.
He hated that.
And he would not let it continue. He would give Maddie’s father through tonight to make things right, but that was it. The man had had fifteen years already, for God’s sake!
Surely Kai could manage to keep Maddie occupied and away from wagging tongues for the rest of the day. That was certainly his family’s intention. Gloria was too little to remember it all happening, but even she was aware of the situation Maddie was in now. Gloria was a loose cannon, but maybe if Kai asked for her help…
“Stupid whale,” Gloria complained, walking around the two of them to head up the trail first. She nudged Kai’s elbow and winked at him covertly. “I think it keeps disappearing just to make me look bad.”
Kai lifted an eyebrow, then smiled warmly. There might be hope for his baby sister after all.
Maddie followed Gloria up the trail next, and Kai watched as his childhood best friend’s new-and-improved body climbed, her long, muscular legs carrying her shapely torso up the trail of red dirt, every aspect of her figure crafted as if made to order for his own personal tastes. A chicken and egg scenario, perhaps, since a week ago he might have had a difficult time articulating exactly what his personal taste entailed. Now, for better or worse, her perfection was burned into his brain for all eternity.
He was in trouble. Deep, deep trouble.
All around.
Chapter 18
Maddie breathed in deeply of the salty air as the wind whipped her hair about her face. She knew it must look dreadful by now, having not seen a brush since she’d stepped out of the ocean, but she wasn’t concerned. She was among friends. Among friends, and standing at her favorite place on earth.
She shrugged out of her flip-flops and wiggled her dirt-caked toes on the bare ground. A few paces in front of her the earth dropped away and the ocean crashed against rocks over a hundred feet below. Beyond her was the blue Pacific. Thousands and thousands of miles of water and whales and fish and sharks and seaweed and giant squid and all sorts of deep and mysterious and unknown things. The ocean was vast and unknowable and infinite, and she was small and wholly insignificant, and for the moment, she liked it that way. It had always helped her put her troubles in perspective.
Just offshore, rising up from the churning whitewater, was her beloved icon of Lana'i, the Sweetheart Rock. She smiled at the slant-topped tower, which seemed impossible to swim out to, much less scale the sheer rocky sides of. Yet somehow, some ancient someone had managed not only to get there, but to build what looked like a burial mound on top of it. The feat had always amazed her, as had that ancient someone’s motivation. Kai had made up some pretty clever stories to explain the presence of those rocks, but secretly she preferred the native Hawaiian legend, because despite its macabre nature at least it had some romance.
Maddie’s smile went deep. The day had had its ups and downs, but right now, her soul was soaring. “So,” she called back over her shoulder, still soaking up the view, “you said they found a woman’s bones in there, right?”
Behind her, she heard Kai sigh loudly. “You never give up, do you?”
She laughed out loud. He did remember. And to think she had considered apologizing to him for being dead wrong all those years.
As if.
She turned around, still chuckling. He and Gloria had settled onto some rocks and he was pulling their lunches out of his pack. Maddie felt a flicker of envy as she remembered the small cooler he had loaded into the truck earlier. When they were kids heading off on a day trip, Malaya used to make “rice bowls,” which weren’t really bowls at all but rice wrapped up in wax paper along with various mystery ingredients. Maddie would always attempt to pack her own lunch, but depending on what she found in her own kitchen on a random Saturday, she could head off with a plastic baggie of dry cereal, a handful of cookies, or nothing at all. And yet, strangely enough, Kai always managed to have an extra rice bowl on hand.
She shrugged off her pack, sat down near them, and pulled out a protein bar and her water bottle. “Here,” Kai said, smiling at her. “You don’t think Mom would leave you out, do you?”
Maddie looked at the carefully wrapped meal and her eyes nearly teared up on her.
“That’s what took me so long to come out of the house earlier,” Gloria explained. “Mom had two made up already, and when she saw I was changing to go with you she freaked out. ‘I have to make an extra for Maddie!’ I swear, she fussed over it for five minutes.”
Maddie did tear up. She took the rice bowl from Kai’s hand and began to unwrap it with an almost holy reverence. “That’s so nice of her,” she sputtered.
Both of them were grinning at her with disbelief. “Don’t be too grateful till you’ve tasted it,” Kai said good-naturedly, leaning back and stretching his long legs along the ground. “The teriyaki’s been around a while.”
Maddie took a bite. The sticky cold rice and mystery meat tasted as unappetizing as it ever had. “I love it,” she said truthfully. “It’s perfect.”
Gloria looked skeptical. “You didn’t eat stuff like this when you went to the mainland, did you?”
Maddie shook her head. “Didn’t exist in Kentucky. Actually, steamed rice doesn’t exist in Kentucky. They do know how to barbecue. But everything else is breaded and fried.”
“Even, like, vegetables?” Gloria asked.
Maddie chuckled. “Especially the vegetables.” She shot a glance at Kai. He seemed relaxed, soaking up the sun, his eyes closed. He had always been the quiet kid in their group. But she knew he had always been listening, and she knew he was listening now. Gloria seemed to be enjoying herself, and he appeared to be both surprised and happy about that, but she could sense that he was stressed about something else.
“Did you and your friends come up here much when you were kids?” Maddie asked Gloria, hoping to continue the easy camaraderie their hike seemed to have encouraged between the siblings. “Or take day trips up the mountain?” She nudged the recumbent Kai with her foot. “Those treks were the best, weren’t they?”
“We came to the beach,” Gloria answered. “We didn’t go up in the mountains much. There’s nothing to do there, really.”
Kai opened his eyes and frowned at his sister.
“Nothing to do!” he and Maddie protested together. Then they looked at each other and shared a smile.
“We had so much fun!” Maddie insisted. “We’d go swinging in the Tarzan trees. We’d take off our shoes and race along the ground barefoot. Or we’d race from tree to tree, pretending the ground was hot lava and you’d burn up if you fell into it. We’d eat our rice bowls in the first couple hours, and then we’d snack all afternoon picking lilikoi and strawbe
rry guava…”
“And you and Sammy would go nuts trying to find the meanest spiders,” Kai added dryly.
Maddie’s heart warmed anew. Surely most people wouldn’t remember so much of what happened when they were in elementary school. She knew she was different, that she always held those memories especially dear because of her situation, but with him…
His brown eyes sparkled at her from behind his dark, curling lashes, and for a second he looked so damned gorgeous she almost forgot who he was again.
“You fought spiders?” Gloria said with disgust. “Ew. That is so… like… Ew.”
“Oh, it was not,” Maddie protested. It was rather a morbid hobby, and she did regret it a bit. But she could hardly admit that now. “Nobody made the spiders fight. They lived for it. And they didn’t hurt each other. The loser just ran away.”
Kai shook his head at her. “Blood sport,” he teased. “You and Sammy the cyclone.”
Maddie smirked back at him. Could she help it if she was good at it? If she knew just where to look to find the creepy-looking crab spiders? If she could hold them and watch them move and somehow just sense a winner? The kids used to keep them in matchboxes, and when opponents were found, a “fight” would commence. Some kids would throw the two in a paper cup, but Maddie preferred to draw a ring in the dirt and let them loose. One spider — hers, of course — would take off after the other one, they would spar a little, waving their arms and legs at each other, and then one spider — the other guy’s, of course — would scuttle off in shame. Her crowd didn’t bet because they never had any money. It was just for fun. And it was fun because she won all the time.
“Sour grapes,” Maddie teased back. “Your spiders were such wimps.”
He scoffed. The telltale line of disapproval appeared between his eyebrows again. “I did not fight spiders, and you know it.”
Maddie smiled. No, he had not. He seemed to derive no pleasure from it, and didn’t care who knew, either. You couldn’t shame Kai when it came to being odd man out. Having a different opinion, doing something his own way. He never gave a crap what was “in.”
“Sheesh, Maddie,” Gloria persisted. “So far all I hear about you doing when you were a kid is swinging around in the trees, throwing Kenny off cliffs, and fighting spiders with Sammy… didn’t you ever do, like, girl stuff? With girls?”
Maddie considered. “No. Not really. Your brother made me promise I wouldn’t be a girl.”
“I what?” Kai protested loudly.
“Don’t you remember?” Maddie insisted. “When we first met you told me you didn’t like girls, but you were willing to be my friend because I wasn’t like the other ones. And then, on my tenth birthday party when my dad bought ice cream for everybody at the park, Sarah Lu gave me a little plastic pouch with sparkly lip gloss and nail polish in it, and I cooed and said I loved it and you flipped out and yelled at me and said that I promised I would never turn into a girl.”
Gloria cracked up laughing.
“Did I really say that?” Kai asked.
Maddie smirked. “You did. Word for word.”
“I deny it,” he retorted. Then he cleared his throat loudly. “Anyway, Gloria, the girls in our grade were really ‘girly,’ for whatever reason. That’s why it was always Maddie and the guys.”
“That,” Maddie conceded, “and the fact that I couldn’t jump rope worth crap.”
Kai laughed out loud. “Yeah, there was that, too.”
Maddie tried to frown at him, but couldn’t help laughing herself. She did totally suck at jumping rope, which unfortunately happened to be the rage among all her female classmates. Her early attempts had resulted in several injuries, although none to herself. It was the girls holding the ropes or standing innocently nearby who somehow got walloped.
It was bad.
Ergo, the spiders.
“You people,” Gloria said derisively, “were just sad. You did have internet in the nineties, didn’t you? Computers? Phones?”
“Yes,” Kai retorted. “But we did not all carry around smart phones every minute of the day. We liked being outside. We made our own fun.”
Gloria shrugged. “Meh. We have apps for that.”
Kai pretended to whack her on the head, and Gloria pretended to flinch. Maddie grinned at them both, then watched as Kai stretched his arms behind his head and closed his eyes against the mid-day sun. She and Kai had become comfortably familiar again, and quickly too, and that unexpected triumph elated her. But at the same time, it presented a problem.
When he had hugged her shoulders earlier, it had seemed so natural and normal that for a second she had thought he was Chad, and she had reacted accordingly. Her friend Chad, whom she had known throughout four years of grad school, was a big guy and had always been a hugger. She hadn’t seen him since she’d served as an usher at his and his husband Jim’s wedding six months ago, and she didn’t know when or if she would ever see him again. But she missed his hugs. Living in Alabama away from her family and with no dating life to speak of, she had craved physical affection more than she cared to admit, and sinking into one of Chad’s undemanding bear hugs was a privilege she had dearly enjoyed.
She’d felt completely safe with Chad, but that feeling was a rarity. She hadn’t expected to feel the same way with Kai. When men who looked at her the way Kai looked at her put their hands on her — which they did all the time — their fingers felt like alien tentacles. But Kai’s touch had felt like a warm blanket straight out of the dryer.
Maddie sighed to herself, long and low. She knew she could trust him. And she hadn’t wanted to pull away. But she knew better than to seek affection from a straight male friend. She’d been burned too many times. She would not be accused, again, of sending mixed signals, of being a tease. Her signals were not mixed. They were unequivocal. Maybe other girls could get away with flirting a little, touching a little, hugging a little. But she couldn’t. Her attempts at affection were always misunderstood, sometimes willfully so. Unless she was certain she wanted more than friendship, she had to stay off that slippery slope altogether.
Which meant no hugging Kai, because it would mess with his head, and he deserved better.
No matter how incredibly good it would feel.
“So, what’s on the agenda for the rest of the day, warden?” Gloria asked, poking her still-recumbent brother in the ribs with her elbow as she finished up her lunch and packed away the trash.
Kai opened one eye and shot her an exasperated look, and Maddie studied them both. It sounded like Gloria’s key-stealing attempt last night had resulted in a sort of mobile grounding. So, the guilty teen could either sit at home or be chaperoned all day, eh? The perfect punishment. Aki was good at that. Perhaps a little more quality time with her respectable yet fun-loving bro was exactly what Gloria needed.
“Yes,” Maddie joined in. “What’s next? How much time do we have with the truck?” An idea came to her and she practically bounced with enthusiasm — before she remembered Nana’s warnings about bouncing. “I know! Why don’t we take a nice long drive out past town? We could head toward the shipwreck first and then drive out to Garden of the Gods and Polihua Beach and just stop here and there and look around at everything!”
“At what?” Gloria protested. “There’s like… nothing out there!”
“There’s no people out there,” Maddie corrected. “But there are plants and animals and rocks and trees and sky and fungi and—”
Gloria groaned and rolled her eyes. “Oh, whatever!” She rose and dusted off the seat of her shorts.
“Do you have time?” Maddie asked Kai hopefully. It wasn’t a long drive in miles. No drive on Lana'i was. But much of the road wasn’t paved, the rough dirt surface was impassable without a four-wheel drive, and it could take forever to bump and rattle all the way down to the northwestern coast of the island and back again.
He smiled at her, but his expression was guarded somehow, and Maddie’s gut twisted unexpectedly. She had be
en trying her best to ignore whatever he was hiding from her, but his eyes kept reminding her, regardless. The guy was terrible at subterfuge — he was far too honest. For that trait he had Aki to thank — or to blame, depending on your point of view. Surely that kind of integrity was a liability to an attorney? She could not look at him without seeing his sympathy for her, and his concern… and the thought of what knowledge might be at the root of those emotions disturbed her.
She didn’t want to think about it.
“I’ll have to double check with my dad,” he answered, getting up. “And I need to make a couple more calls for Riku. But then we can probably work it out.”
He held out a hand to Maddie to help her up. It was a perfectly ordinary, chivalrous gesture, and she tried not to make too much of it as she put her hand in his and rose to her feet. She dropped his hand as quickly as possible and, without looking at him, shouldered her pack.
Chapter 19
The afternoon was glorious. Even Gloria enjoyed it, although the childish antics of her older companions had her rolling her eyes so much she finally pleaded a headache and started saying “eye roll” instead. Maddie noticed that once Kai made his phone calls and secured the truck for the afternoon, a good part of the weight he’d been carrying seemed to lift off his shoulders, which buoyed her spirits as well. She tried to convince herself that his earlier distress was all about Riku, and not about her, and she resolved to revel in the remainder of the day like they had never reveled before.
This was a challenge, because as children they’d set the reveling bar high. But today was different, because today they had wheels. And although being able to drive himself on the island was nothing new to Kai, Maddie could tell that her own enthusiasm for doing what they couldn’t do as kids was contagious.
