Page 73 of Here for a Good Time
“But they’ll be happy when this damn company leaves, that’s for sure,” Nita agrees.
“They’ll just rebuild it,” I say.
At that, Leila starts laughing. “Are you kidding? Look at this place.” She opens her arms. “Do you know how much it costs to build a resort on a remote island? Garima has an MBA.” She jerks a thumb at her cousin. “She’s crunched the numbers, and it will cost way more to clear out the damage and rebuild it than just cut their losses and leave. All those shits care about is profit. Our island will be ours again.”
I’d said earlier that almost all character motivations came down to love, money, or power. I had been right.
They’re burning it all down. This sprawling, picture-perfect, extravagant resort—and they want to literally burn it to the ground. For love.
“What about everyone else?” Zwe asks. “The people who work here are innocent.”
Garima gives aDuhscoff. “We agree. They’ll be okay. Cold, but okay. Like Leila said, we never planned on hurting any of them.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Zwe yells. “You said it yourself, they can’t escape a fire! You’re really going to kill all of those innocent people? How does that make you a better, more responsible person than the ones who own this resort?”
The beach. A barrier. Andrea had worried they weren’t going to be safe, but Leila said the beach would be a barrier.
“They’re on the beach,” I say. “The sand will stop the fire from spreading.”
Leila gives me an impressed look. “Well done, Little Miss Plotter.”
“Fuck, she’s smart, I’ll give her that,” Nita says.
Footsteps quickly stride toward us, and for a moment, I’m thinking it’s the police sneaking in to ambush them. But instead, Andrea’s voice comes. “Got my laptop. The rest of the cans are already lined up outside. Let’s finish here before the rain picks up?”
They file out, Leila last. Before she’s fully out of our line of sight, she swivels around, and we get one final look at the last person we’ll ever see. Her expression is almost remorseful. Almost. “We’d have let you stay lost in the woods, you know, if only you hadn’t tripped and kicked off Nita’s mask—” She sighs, giving a pointed look at my ankle.
“Please don’t do this,” I beg, although even to myself, I sound like someone who’s given up. “Our parents still need us. They’ll never get over this. Imagine if something like this happened to one of your cousins. Think of what that would do to your family. You knowwe’renot the ones you want to punish. Leila, please.”
She stops mid-pivot, turning her head so that she can look at us over her shoulder. I see her bite her lip as though in hesitation, and a thin string of hope tugs at my heart. She opens her mouth, closes it, thinking, studying us.
Zwe picks up on it, too. “I get why you’re angry, Leila,” he says. “I would be, too. If someone hurt my family the way these people have hurt yours, if someone pushedmyparents out of their home, I’d be so mad there wouldn’t be any limit to what I’d do for justice. But you’re a good person. You made sure your cousins looked after everyone, I know that was all you.”
I see her forehead creasing as she thinks.
Finally, she shakes her head. “If it’s any consolation, I’m pretty sure it’ll be over fairly quickly. And hey, at least you’ll have each other.”
It’s the last thing she says to us.
The squeaking of her sneakers along the gasoline trails is the most ominous sound I’ve ever heard. They’re gone, and all we can hear is the brewing storm.
I’m too worn out to try to come up with an escape plan. And after a long silence, I think,Fuck it. We’re going to die within minutes.
“You didn’t want to kiss me.” I squeeze my eyes shut as the words leave my mouth. It feels exactly as good as I’d always imagined it would to address it, this albatross of a memory that’s been weighing me down for over a decade. When I gather the courage to face Zwe, he’s looking at me like he doesn’t know if I was addressing some invisible person behind him.
“What are you talking about?” he asks.
“That night. At dinner. The summer after freshman year,” I say, suddenly realizing that maybe he has no idea what I’m talking about, either because he was too drunk to remember it, or because… it meant nothing to him at all. I hadn’t considered that this one moment in time that I’ve replayed throughout the years, like a botched pass in slow motion, didn’t leave so much as a thumbprint onhistimeline of our friendship—and now I have a worse, more embarrassing fear. “You know what, it’s okay, you probably don’t remem—” I try to laugh it off.
“My mom’s dan pauk and your terrible cheap wine,” he interrupts. “How could I not remember? You had on this sugar lip balm that tasted so sweet.”
“And you didn’t want to kiss me.”
“Because you were tipsy, and we had three years of college on different continents ahead of us. And as much as I wanted to, and believe me, I wanted to, I had to remind myself,Not like this. Not with these odds.”
“It wasn’t because… you didn’t want me? Like that?”
His eyes are glistening as he laughs. “Not want you?” he asks, sounding incredulous. As he speaks, hope flounders inside of me, like a determined animal with a broken leg. “Of course I wanted to kiss you,” he says, voice raspy. “Kissing you, being with you, is all I’ve ever wanted.Youhave always been all I ever wanted. But I kept thinking that if we were going to do this, we were going to do it right. And then fucking Vik.” He shakes his head.
