“In a swimming pool. My physical therapist said she doesn’t want me battling waves and the uneven ocean floor just yet.”
“Ah.” I stare out at the ocean for a moment. I didn’t come over here to make small talk with Colby, but I can’t seem to figure out how to go about telling Colby about the life-changing series of events that happened to me today. I’m not even sure I understand them myself.
“Okay, let’s hear it,” Colby says, pulling me out of my thoughts.
I look at him.
“You look like a madman again, Ry. I assume you got some news about your Argentinian whale?”
I laugh. Fucking Colby. “Yeah.” I exhale. “You’re not gonna believe this, but she’s here.”
“In Maui?”
“No,here—literally—at this resort.”
Colby makes a truly comedic face. “But Josh rented out the whole... Sheworkshere?”
I bite my lip, forcing myself not to smile. “She’s T-Rod.”
Colby makes another hilarious face. “What?”
“The Whale is T-Rod.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
I laugh. “It seems ‘Samantha’ gave me a fake name and occupation at the bar. I found out when I walked into the lobby.”
“But what about the flight attendant uniform?”
“Her friend’s a flight attendant. I guess it was a ‘girl’s night out’ kind of thing.”
Colby pauses briefly, apparently processing everything I’ve just said, and then he throws his head back and bursts into booming, hysterical laughter—a ten out of ten on the Colby-Morgan-laughter scale—and, even in my state of complete mind-fuckedness, I can’t help smiling at the sound of his uproarious laughter.
“So that’s why you were such a dick to T-Rod when we first got here?” Colby asks, wiping his eyes.
“I was pissed,” I say. “She sent me on a wild goose chase, man.”
“Bullshit. T-Rod didn’t send you on a wild goose chase—yousent you on a wild goose chase. All that girl did was yank your chain in a bar, the same way girls have been yanking guys’ chains since bars were invented.”
“That’s exactly what she said.”
“Oh, so you’ve talked to her about it? Did she know about you being Kat’s brother before you got here or was it a mutual mind-fuck when you walked into the lobby?”
“A total and complete mutual mind-fuck. And, yeah, we talked, but only briefly. I was too shocked and pissed at her to say any of the bleeding-heart shit I’d planned to say to ‘Samantha,’ so I basically grilled her about the uniform-thing and then she had to go.”
“So you didn’t tell her about your crazy quest?”
I shake my head.
“Thank God. What’d she say about the uniform—just that she was having fun?”
“Yeah.”
I tell Colby everything T-Rod told me about why she wore a uniform that night, opting not to mention that said conversation happened in my hotel room right after we’d fucked each other’s brains out, and when I’m finished talking, Colby says, “Women are hilarious. Remember how Kat used to go to bars and say she was ‘Matilda Blackburn from Australia’?”
“I forgot about that,” I say. “I sure wish I’d remembered that little nugget before I let Henn loose on the entire airline industry.”
Colby chuckles. “How any guy ever believed Kat was Australian with that ridiculous Crocodile-Dundee accent of hers, I’ll never know.”
