“Well, did you at least ask for an explanation on the stuff you overheard?”
“No,” I say. “He started to tell me—he did tell me some, but I stopped him.” I look down at the smoky glass texture in the tabletop, reflecting on the hour earlier. “I was scared to know—but I knew I was going to have to leave Hawaii anyway and I didn’t want to get more invested … more invested than I already was. But Luke and Kendra being involved at one point isn’t what would’ve bothered me, Paige; it was him lying to me about it that I knew I couldn’t forgive. He swore to me that he’d never kissed or slept with her, and he was pretty adamant about it. I can’t stand a liar, Paige. More than anything, I can’t stand a liar.” I sigh heavily and rest my forehead on my fingertips, my elbow propped on the table. “I was falling fast and hard for him. I liked him too much”—I like him too much—“and if it turned out that he’d lied to me about his involvement with Kendra, everything I felt for him would’ve been a lie, too, and I don’t want to give any of that up. I guess I just wanted to leave with the memories intact, know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I guess I understand,” she says. “If it were me, I would’ve confronted them both, but I still get where you’re coming from. But what did he tell you?”
“That it was something about their lifestyle,” I answer, though with difficulty as I try to understand it myself. “That there was something they were involved in that he hadn’t told me about yet.”
“Another red flag,” Paige points out—I wish she’d stop doing that. “These people could be serial killers or something.”
“Paige,” I cut in before she goes off on another tangent, “they’re good, normal people. That much I’m confident about. I just—”
Already I’m starting to regret … everything.
“Like I said,” I finally go on, “I knew what we had wasn’t going to go further than my two weeks on that island.”
Neither of us says anything for a long, tense minute; and for a moment I forget I’m even on the phone with Paige. All I can think about is Luke, and the more I think about him, the more I want to cry into my pillow until sleep gives me some reprieve.
“Things between us felt so real. I just …”
“Sienna.” Paige says my name as if preparing to scold me. “Don’t talk yourself into giving him the benefit of the doubt. Don’t you dare. Just leave things like they are, like you said you’d rather do, because you know he’s lying. You don’t want to believe it, but I think deep down, you know.”
Paige is right. I do feel that way deep down—it’s the main thing that gave me reason to stop him from lying to me further and to get up the courage to finally end it and leave.
After I hang up with Paige and tell her I’ll be heading back home tomorrow, I give my mom a call to tell her how my vacation has been going. I don’t tell her as much as I told Paige, but I do tell her about Luke and how he made me feel.
“But what is your heart telling you, Sienna?” my mom asks.
“I’m not sure,” I answer distantly, thinking about it. “All I know is what I want it to be telling me, Mom.”
“Well, baby, don’t you think that’s pretty much the same thing?”
My mom always knows the right things to say. But that doesn’t mean I’ve always listened. As I lie in bed, missing the feel of Luke’s lumpy pillows pressed against my face, all I can think about are all the things that I knew going into this: We live in different states; Kendra hates me and seems out to make my life a living hell if I trespass on her turf; Luke seems to have a lot of baggage he has yet to unpack and put away.
But what gets me the most, what confuses me to no end, is that even though I’m running away physically from this situation, emotionally I’m not ready to let go. I have to, but it’s going to be hard when I get on that plane tomorrow.