Page 125 of Bulletproof

“It’s always an adventure.” He chuckled, sitting down beside me, patting my leg. “So, you gonna walk me around this town or what?”

“I feel bad. You’re not seeing much of Hawai’i but this tiny patch of beach and the inside of this cottage.”

“I don’t care,” he said, leaning forward, his hand sliding around the back of my neck. “All I wanted was to see you. Everything else is just gravy.”

He enjoyed walking through town though, and he had a good time, meeting my new friends after I saw Ipo at the farmers market and she invited us for lunch on a Saturday afternoon that had gone from gray to cloudy to dumping down rain.

“I thought Hawai’i was supposed to be sunny all the time?”

“How you think everything stay green?” she asked him.

“Okay.” He smiled at her, and I watched her take a breath.

She liked me because I was cute and funny and she thought of me like one of her girlfriends. Her reaction to Sam Kage was all woman. There was the breadth of his shoulders to consider, the muscles that bunched when he lifted the bags of dog food out of the back of the truck for her, the way he opened the door for her, and the laugh lines in the corner of his slate-blue eyes.

He took off his hiking boots at the front door because no one walked into anybody’s house in Hawai’i with shoes on—it simply wasn’t done. When you had a party, there could be a pile of flip-flops (my word) or slippers (Ipo’s word) at the front door. But Sam’s boots stood out in the corner, and my sneakers were next to his.

Everyone showed up for lunch. It was the weekend after all, and Sam sat at the table, surrounded by my new friends, and ate everything that was put down in front of him. Because Sam fished and the patriarch of the family—my friend Tetsuo—fished, they had a lot to talk about. My host even brought out several of his poles for Sam to look at, and when I seemed bored, Sam explained how expensive they were and how he had nothing that good at home. I asked him what he would need it for since he didn’t fish on a boat but off a pier or in a stream. I had, apparently, missed the point.

I was forgotten. The women were all over him. Ipo found him mesmerizing, and Tetsuo’s wife, Judy, and Randy’s wife, Maile, could not stop smiling at him. When he showed Maile that he could lift and easily carry the cooler full of food that she had packed for her son, she made Bambi eyes at him.

I was shaking my head as Kawika joined me in the kitchen.

“Ho, Jory, Sam get all the wahines check him out, eh?”

The noise of disgust I made sent the man into peals of laughter.

When we got back after a day away, Sam carried the cooler back to the room while I went to the front desk to make arrangements to check out the following morning and for the shuttle to take us to the airport.

“Jory.”

When I turned, I saw Aaron sitting out on the veranda alone.

After I finished speaking to the clerk, I jogged over to him. “Hey.”

He cleared his throat. “You changed the billing on your room.”

I squinted at him. “Of course.”

“Of course,” he sighed, looking out at the water.

“So, we’re leaving tomorrow, but I wanted to thank you for a⁠—”

“It’s fine,” he said, cutting me off, still not looking at me.

I sat down beside him, hand on his thigh, and he turned and looked at me, leaning close, like he had been waiting for me to do exactly what I had.

“Tell me what I could have done to keep you.”

“Aaron”—I smiled at him—“we both know you have not been pining away for me all this time. It’s crap.”

“Like I said before,” he told me, moving my hair out of my eyes with his long fingers, “you, I never got bored of, and apparently, keeping my interest is pretty damn hard.”

“I like Jaden.”

He nodded. “I do too.”

“But?”