“You,” he tells me. “You changed everything. All of it.”
“Paige!” I hear my name being called, and I whip around to see Jessica storming down the beach at a runner’s sprint.
I scramble away from Jordan and stand up, my legs wobbly. “Slow down!” I call to her.
“Can’t,” she says. She reaches us, panting. She sticks her hands on her knees. “Rehearsal. Starting. Early,” she says. She straightens up and arches her back. “It is sad how winded I am right now.”
“I just need five,” I say. I look at Jordan. His expression is open, and I want to tell him that he changed everything, too. That the world is entirely different because he’s in it and that I’ve been looking at everything upside down and I want to see things right-side up now. That I can.
“You’re already ten minutes late,” Jessica says. “We gotta move. Jordan, your call time isn’t until nineAM.”
“Thanks, Jess,” he says. “I’ll see you guys later.”
I’m about to follow Jessica when I feel Jordan loop his pinkie finger through mine. I remember the premiere—how he took hold of me the same way. Then it was our good-bye, but now it feels like something else. A promise, maybe.
And then he’s picking up his surfboard and heading toward the water as I climb the path back to the condos.
I work mostly alone for the rest of the day and wrap an hour after Rainer. Jordan is still on the soundstage rehearsing through a scene with Alfonso.
My phone rings on my way back up to the condos. It’s Alexis. “Gorgeous!” she says before I have a chance to say anything. “I’m hopping on an earlier flight.”
“Alexis—I can’t even believe—”
“We’ll have plenty of time,” she says. She sounds like she’s on speakerphone. I hear the sounds of traffic. “Tell Rainer and Jordan to be at the airport at ten twenty with you.”
“Alexis, we love you, but I highly doubt the three of us are going to voluntarily get in a car together.”
“I just came out in front of the world,” she says. “You can sit in the car with the two of them for twenty minutes.”
“You’re really gonna milk this, huh?” I say.
“Till it’s dry. Tell them if they don’t show up I’m holding a press conference to release all their secrets.”
“I think they’re already out.”
“Darling,” she says. “I’ve known those boys for ten years in Hollywood. You are just the tip of the iceberg.”
“We’ll be there,” I say.
“I know.”
As promised, I get the three of us to the airport. I tell Rainer that Alexis had requested we all pick her up together, and to my surprise, he’s into it. When we get to the lobby, Jordan is waiting for us. “She called me,” he says. “Shall we?”
Rainer’s neon-blue convertible comes around, and we all get in. Rainer drives, Jordan sits shotgun, and I climb in the back.
I lean forward and fiddle with the radio, and when Katy Perry comes on, I leave it. Jordan tries to give me a hard time about it, but Rainer just turns it up. I catch his eye in the rearview, and he winks at me.
Rainer has brought a lei, and he hands it to me when we get out of the car. “You should give it to her,” he says.
It smells like sugar and sunlight. These gorgeous yellow and white flowers. Plumeria and pikake. My favorite Hawaii scents.
I loop the lei over my arm and walk behind Rainer and Jordan. Jordan points out an old yellow Cadillac that is parked outside baggage claim. “It’s Rhonda,” he says to Rainer.
Rainer shakes his head. I see him laugh. “God, remember what a piece of shit that car was?”
“We asked a lot of it,” Jordan says.
“That we did.”
