“You don’t.” I bite the insides of my cheeks, but the words come out anyway. “I drink too much.”
A soft laugh. “I know.”
“And I get fixated on things.”
“I know.”
“And I don’t have a job. Or friends. And nobody likes me.”
“I know to the first one,” Jake says, steady as a rock. “But you’re wrong on the other two.”
It hurts, how much I like him. His strength and his humour. The way he never lets me get away with things he knows aren’t true. So I say the one thing I’ve never told anyone.
“My parents don’t want me,” I whisper. “They don’t like me. I don’t think they even loveme. And what does that say about me?”
“Baby,” he says, so tender it’s like he’s peeling my skin off. “It doesn’t say anything about you. It says everything about them.”
“Don’t,” I plead, scrubbing at my eyes with my fist, smearing makeup everywhere. “I’ll die if you say more.”
“So where are you?”
I don’t answer.
“I’m your friend, Ada,” Davis calls from the background.
I snort, tears and snot spraying down my face. “Fuck off, Mall Pig.”
All three of us laugh.
“I’m your friend, too, Davis,” I say, still scrubbing my face. “Jake… I don’t think we’re really friends.”
“No.” Another huff of a laugh. “But we’re inevitable, aren’t we, baby?”
I press the base of my head against the bathroom wall. It certainly feels that way, but do I have to say it? Feel it? Right now?
“I want you,” Jake says. “I love you. You don’t have to love me back. I’m just… yours.”
I can’t answer, can hardly breathe. I feel so unworthy of the words coming through my speaker. If he knew who I really was, he wouldn’t be telling me this.
“People care about you. We don’t pity you. We don’t want anything. We just love you, and we’ll be gutted if something happens to you.”
“I know,” I whisper. “But it can’t work. You’re not my family.”
“I could be,” Jake says. “If you let me.”
The tears I hear in his voice split the last of my resistance into splinters. “Nikau Palms Hotel. Room 406.”
There’s a sound I’d swear was Jake slapping the dash in victory. “Fuck yeah.”
I try not to smile. “Are you coming right now?”
“Wild horses couldn’t keep me away from you, Renaldo,” he says, and I hear a screech of tyres. “We’ll be there in five.”
I know I should stand, wash my face or at least brush my red-wine teeth. Instead I sit on the bathroom floor, crying softly until myhotel room phone rings. I stumble to my feet, wrapping my robe around myself as I answer. “Hello?”
“Ms. Renaldo,” a woman asks in a judgmental tone. “There’s, uh, two men here to see you? Jake Graves-Holland and a Mr. Davis Sanderson?”
She definitely thinks I’ve put together a Friday night threesome with two rugby players, but there’s no way to deny it without sounding even guiltier.
