Page 54 of The Other Side of Paradise
She took a second before, carefully, she said, “She is… very nice to be around,” and I looked over at her.
“Are you hooking up with her, or are you… I don’t know, actually dating her?”
She pursed her lips, a soft blush spilling out over her cheeks. God, Ryan was catching feelings on vacation. For a hot lesbian bartender fling. Bisexual bartender fling. This was so not on my bingo card. “I had a feeling you’d go straight togo be in love together forever…” she said with an awkward sigh. “She lives here on the island, and I do not. No amount of enjoying what’s happening here would make me want to do a long-distance relationship.”
Ugh, right. Not the situation to catch feelings. “Yeah… again with that. That sounds really lonely.”
“It does,” she said with a little sad sigh. “She seems generally happy, but whenever she’s talked about it, it seems like…”
She trailed off, and I filled in the gap. “Like she wishes she had something serious with someone.”
“I think it just starts to feel aimless… arbitrary,” she said, her gaze off into infinity, “after a time.”
Huh… that sounded miserable. Nothing true love couldn’t fix, though. I elbowed her. “You travel a lot for work,” I said, and she laughed awkwardly.
“I amnotgetting into a serious relationship with this girl I met on Monday,” she said. “Go… go say hi to Allison or something. She’s looking like she never wants to touch a climbing wall again. I bet if you go around then she’ll be motivated again.”
Right. Because she had a crush on me. How about that? I guess I really wasn’t doing too badly on the island after all, if I had gotten someone to want me. I jumped up to my feet, a laugh spilling out as I threw Ryan a look over my shoulder. “So, I’m guessing you and Brooklyn are busy tonight and just want to get back to her place after this.”
She reddened further, putting her hands up. “What would be the point in denying it?” she said, her voice almost irate in embarrassment. I grinned.
“Have fun, you two,” I said. “I’ll take Allison to go look for cute people tonight.”
She looked away. “She’s not going to notice any girls as long as you’re there with her,”
“I’m not the only girl on the island,” I said, ignoring the weird lump in my throat. “She’ll find someone else she thinks is cute. Someone artsy and romantic.”
Ryan sighed, rolling her eyes. “All right, whatever. Tell Allison I said she’s doing great. Make sure it sounds patronizing.”
“I will,” I laughed, and I made good on my promise—got to the other side of the gym just in time to miss Brooklyn when I wanted to ask her a million probably inappropriate questions, grabbing her stuff before heading back towards Ryan, and I caught up to Allison at the bottom of the wall, where she looked at me and her whole demeanor changed when she saw me. Like she would if she had a crush on me. Was it weird that it was kinda fun? Maybe I was just shallow and wanted an ego boost. “Hey,” I said. “Ryan said you’re doing great. Really patronizingly.”
She snorted. “Appreciate you passing that along.”
“I do love keeping people informed,” I said, my hands on my hips. “Like howyoucould have told me Ryan and Brooklyn have been hooking up this whole time.”
She flinched in surprise, eyes wide, before she broke out laughing, turning to face me and stepping back from the wall. “I wasn’t about to out Ryan,” she said. “So she finally owned up to it?”
“When did they start?”
“The night before that whole fight in the lobby where your grandma wanted to get me fired… Ryan had been there talking to me beforehand about how Brooklyn was screwing her senseless.”
“Oh mygod,that woman,” I laughed, arms folded. “I cannot believe she’s been doing this right under my nose.”
She laughed, shrugging. “She’s still coming to terms with her own sexuality, as near as I can tell. She never actually told me she’s queer directly, she just danced around it and implied it, that whole thing.”
“What a loser. I love it. I’ve been trying to convince her to have a vacation fling, and she went and beat me to it.”
She scratched her head. “Yeah, I had to work really hard to keep a straight face when you kept talking to her about all that kind of thing…”
Well, I guess I was fully a part of the little unit we’d all formed here now. I laughed. “Hey, Allison?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you want to hook up?”
“Huh—” She went red enough it verged purple, pupils dilating. “What?” she said, her voice thin and awkward and high.
Yeah, that was a crush for sure. I grinned. “Ryan and Brooklyn are already getting it on, so, you know… I’ve got to hurry up with finding you a girl.”
