“I followed her over here,” Seth says from somewhere behind me. “I knew she’d be pissed that you weren’t going with us on Saturday, but honest to God, man, I didn’t expect that. I tried to calm her down.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I say distantly with my back to him. Then I turn around. “Look, I don’t want to deal with this right now.” I walk into the kitchen just a shot away to get two beers from the fridge. “Sienna’s waiting for me out on the beach and I’ve left her out there long enough.”
“All right, I’m gone,” Seth says. “Just give me a call when it’s OK that I crash in my bed again.”
“I will. Thanks, Seth.”
Seth nods and leaves.
I use this brief moment alone to gather my composure. I don’t want to go back out there with the girl of my dreams, oozing leftover chaos and bullshit.
Letting the back screen door close behind me, I start to descend the steps of the lanai, but my heart stops and the air sticks in my lungs when I see Sienna sitting at the bottom of them.
She heard.
For a few long seconds that feel much longer, I can’t get any words out. Finally I make my way down the steps and start to sit beside her, but she gets up.
“Sienna, I—”
“You don’t have to explain anything,” she says kindly, with not an ounce of bitterness or anger or anything that might make this easier—just a lot of hidden pain that only makes it harder. “I-I really would rather if you didn’t explain, anyway, OK?”
Disbelief and confusion take over.
I set the beers on the lanai railing and step toward her.
“But I need to explain it to you,” I say.
She takes a step back.
Shaking her head gently and looking down briefly at her hands, she says, “Luke, I just want to go back to Oahu, if you don’t mind giving me a ride to the airport.”
“Sienna”—I gently take her arm, trying to stop her—“I swear to you there’s nothing going on with me and Kendra. I know it might seem like that with the way we argue, but—”
She moves her arm away from my hand and my heart falls with my shoulders and my breath.
“Then what was she talking about, Luke?” Pain lies in her face as plainly as I know it does in my own; her eyes are hard and filled with conflict and disappointment, but not with anger or resentment, which makes this so much harder for me. “What did she mean when she said ‘when I find out about you’?”
Wounded—Sienna is the epitome of the word and just seeing her like this, it guts me.
“Sienna, no, listen,” I start to say, wanting to wash that wounded look off her face before it deepens. I reach out to touch her cheek with the backs of my fingers, but she takes another step back. I sigh and go on. “Kendra wasn’t talking about her and me—it’s not about that—it’s … She was talking about what we do, the part of my life I’ve not told you about.”
I get the feeling she doesn’t believe me, but for a moment at least, she’s listening. I still have time to fix this.
But then suddenly she blurts out, “No, please, Luke,” and stops me again, a hint of pain rising in her voice. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t do this. It was never going to work anyway, and I think you know that: you living in Hawaii, me in California; this … whatever it is you and Kendra haven’t resolved—I can’t be a part of that not to mention the very different lives we live.”
I swallow hard.
“It’s probably better that we part ways now,” she goes on, “before we go too far.”
I hear Landon’s words in the back of my mind again—I’ve never known you to run away from anything, Luke.
Sienna’s words—it was never going to work anyway.
Seth’s words—you know better than to get involved with a tourist.