Page 17 of Try Easy

“And your ribs?” she asked.

“What about dem?”

Lou reached over and touched his side.

“Oomph,” Keoni said, grimacing.

“They’re broken.”

“Nah.”

“Are they as bad as your face?” she asked.

“Nothin’s as bad as his face,” Bones joked from the front seat.

“Shut up,” Keoni said.

“In this movie I saw, the waves at Waimea looked fifty feet high. Are they really that big?” she asked.

Keoni pressed his tongue to the raw cut on his lip. “We don’t measure the waves in feet,” he said. “We measure them in fear.”

Lou stared at Keoni in horror, and then realized from the quirk in his smile that he was teasing.

“That must have been pretty scary,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“But you went out there anyway?”

“I live for days li’dat.”

This time Lou sensed he was serious. There was something far off in his gaze as if he was planning out his future.

“So, you girls want to start the tour right away, or what?” Bones asked from the front seat.

“Sure,” Penny said. “But you’ll probably have to feed Lou pretty soon. She turns into a beast if she doesn’t eat every two hours.”

“That’s not true,” Lou said.

Bones laughed. “I could eat,” he said.

“Me, too,” Keoni said.

Lou glanced at Keoni to see that some of the tension had gone from his body. He looked almost relaxed with his legs sprawled into the space between them.

“You sure?” Lou asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “What about you?” he asked.

His words almost sounded like a dare, and she straightened her shoulders and nodded.

Keoni smiled, and the temperature in the car suddenly rose ten degrees. Lou grabbed the tourist pamphlet she’d taken from the airport and fanned her face. Dammit if she didn’t feel Keoni’s smile from the roots of her hair to the tips of her toes.

Lou looked away from Keoni, opening the tourist pamphlet to the map on the back. She spread the map over her lap and pretended to study it while trying to clear her senses of Keoni.

It didn’t work.

He was too big. Too close. His leg brushed against hers as Bones switched lanes. If Lou took a deep breath, she could smell the ocean in Keoni’s hair. He smelled like a lazy afternoon on the beach with the sun caressing her body.

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