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Greyson Cartwright, aka a guy who should’ve picked a different bar…
It would’ve beennice if today could’ve told me it didn’t intend to go as planned.
Rude, today. Very rude.
But not as rude as the woman currently sitting next to me.
Correction.
Pretendingto sit next to me whileactuallyattempting to crawl into my lap and take my kombucha.
“Ooh, is that the lime mojito flavor?” she asks, poking at a glass in my sample flight. The outdoor beach bar is lit mostly with tiki torches and the music is drowning out the sound of the ocean waves. But it’s not drowning out the woman. “They ran out before I got any. Is it good?”
Should’ve picked a different seat.
In a different bar.
Considering how much of a failure every bit of today has been, I didn’t even need to come to this state.
My phone buzzes on the bar. I lift it, see that both my sister and my former business partner are sending me walls of texts, grimace, and flip the device back over without reading it.
Much.
The main points are hard to miss.
Selfish asshole.
You agreed to this.
If you were really over it, you’d send her a birthday gift.
Quit being a dick and get the lights turned back on.
Both of them mad at me for vastly different things.
Both of them telling stories vastly different from the truth in order to—oddly enough— try to get back on my good side.
I should change my number. Maybe my name too. And if I don’t quit gripping this glass so hard, I’ll have to change my shirt as well.
I make myself put it down as I realize how badly my hand is shaking.
“Can you think of anything sadder than leaving Hawaii without trying lime mojito kombucha?” The woman leans even closer, her hair brushing my arm.
I landed in Hawaii four hours late because of a maintenance issue with the plane. Then I was assigned a rental car with a flat tire and waited an extra hour before the company could find another car. And once I arrived at the resort where I was supposed to attend—okay,wreck—a wedding, everything was crickets.
The whole reason I flew across the Pacific was canceled. No destination wedding. No reception. No chance to watch Chandler Sullivan’s face when I announced to his family, friends, and new bride that he was a failure who had to sell his family’s Colorado mountain café to me because of online gambling problems.
A jilting, apparently. At a resort with so few staff, I gave up on finding someone to check me in and found a different hotel a few miles up the road.
And while Chandler Sullivan deserves every shit thing that’s ever happened to him, I’m irritated that I didn’t get to play a part.
Not that I’m normally a dick. Current circumstances happen to be extenuating.
I enjoy the hell out of justice being served, and the opportunity presented itself at the exact moment when I needed something to land on the right side of karma but couldn’t get justice anywhere else.
And now I’m debating if I want to finish my flight with this woman next to me, or if I want to give up on trying to figure out the mystery flavor in this lemon ginger kombucha and find a better place to attempt to enjoy my limited time in Hawaii.
