Before I Ever Met You

“Way to set me up with a gay man, Claire Bear.” I elbow her in the stomach.

She nearly spits out her chip. “Hey, how am I supposed to know? He agreed, didn’t he? Anyway, my whole point was to get you distracted and it worked. Besides, you’re a turbo-babe, you’ll have men lining up around the block once you put yourself out there, and this is the first step.”

“Turbo-babe?” I repeat, rolling my eyes. “Please. And what about you?”

“What about me?”

“You’re also a turbo-babe, yet here you are still single.”

She gives me a haughty look, that on her baby face looks totally adorable. “I’m not denying my babeness, but I am picky and that’s okay. Maybe I’ll have better luck if I move to Hawaii.”

I know she’s joking but even the mention of the word Hawaii still burns deep inside.

“I don’t know,” I muse, trying to get over the feeling, “if you’re picky, you’re not going to have a lot of luck where most men don’t wear shoes.”

She wrinkles her nose. “Seriously?”

I shrug. By the end of it, I wasn’t wearing shoes around the compound either. In fact, I miss that, the feel of the spongey grass beneath my feet, the sun-warmed dirt and grains of sand.

She clears her throat. “So, how was your mom?” her tone is softer now. “On a scale of awkwardness.”

“A seven,” I tell her, taking an even larger gulp of my wine. “It was only awkward when Arch realized how fucked up we were. Other than that, I was able to ignore her.”

“And her touches of motherly love?”

That’s code for insults and passive aggression.

“Oh that was at an eight,” I tell her. “She brought up Juliet and the whole dinner went sideways.”

“Man,” she says, crumpling up the rest of the chip bag, “I honestly don’t know how you deal with all that.”

“Well you know,” I tell her. “A lot of tears and early morning jogs through the city, dodging muggers.”

She adjusts herself on the couch to face me, folding her leg under her. She pauses her Better Call Saul marathon on Netflix. “You know I never told you this, but I’m proud of you.”

I raise my brow and side-eye her. “Why?”

“Because, stupid, I don’t know how I’d handle being in the situation you’re in.”

Well it helped when I had someone who understood. I know sexual attraction is what ignited Logan and I to begin with, that and a sense of not belonging. But it was Juliet herself and who we were to her that furthered it on. We both understood each other like no one else could.

I sigh and finish the rest of my glass, placing it on the coffee table with a clink. “Family is complicated. You love them because they’re blood, but that’s only because you’re told you have to. What I had on Kauai…they were my family. Don’t get me wrong, you’re my family too. But at Moonwater, that’s where I felt I really belonged. I had everything. And it was all by choice. By people who chose to accept me as family and because they wanted to, not because they had to.”

“Then why did you leave again? Was it because you couldn’t handle anymore Jack Johnson?”

I swallow hard and give her an acidic look. “You know why. My mother would have destroyed everything he worked so hard for.”

“But don’t you think that should have been Logan’s decision?”

I close my eyes and lean back into the couch. “Yes. No. I don’t know. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about the choice I made. That maybe it should have been his choice. But I couldn’t live with myself if he lost that hotel on my account.”

“I don’t know the man,” she says, putting her hand on my shoulder. “But I would be willing to bet that he would have gladly given that place up for you.”

“I could never have asked him to do that.”

“And you wouldn’t have had to ask. He would have done it because that’s what you’re worth to him.”

I shake my head, pretending my fingernails are utterly interesting. “He would have resented me.”

“Ron,” she says, her tone sharp enough to make me look at her. “That isn’t how love works. You don’t resent each other. You gladly give up whatever you have to in order to keep the other. It’s a compromise and if you love someone, the compromise is always worth it. You don’t think about it, you just do it.”

I don’t want to argue with her. I don’t have the strength. The fact is, I would have lived with a lot of guilt if I had stayed with Logan and he lost the hotel. There’s no way I could have believed I was worth it, and I was already juggling my guilt over Juliet. If I stayed, it would have torn us apart. Even if Logan would have been okay with it, I wouldn’t have.

“It is what it is,” I tell her. “Somethings just aren’t meant to be.”

And at that, I get another glass of wine and watch a bit of Netflix with her before I drag myself off to bed. I’m not exactly tired, but I need to be alone to gather my thoughts and put them away in their compartments. It’s the only way I get through this.

My room looks like a transplant of Moonwater. I packed in such a hurry when I left that I didn’t have time to grab the souvenirs that I would have, and even though I had time in the airport, shopping for memories seemed like the last thing I wanted to do. I just wanted to forget.

But now, now I’m trying to live in the memory. I have a trucker hat that says “Hanalei is my Bae” up on my wall and Java Kai stickers on my computer. I’ve printed out photos and created a collage inside a large tiki frame. I have little things too that I had randomly squirreled away during my time there. On my bookshelf I have a mini shrine, coasters that say Ohana Lounge, that Pupus t-shirt Charlie finally got us to order in, Moonwater Inn stationary I would often smuggle from Kate, along with the hotel’s plumeria-scented toiletries, and a few bags of Kauai coffee that they served in the hotel rooms. I haven’t had the heart to make it yet, figuring once the coffee is gone, it’s gone. Hanging on my dresser is a fabric lei that was left over from the luau, a few drink umbrellas I stole from Daniel, the party hat from New Year’s Eve.

I take the party hat off my dresser and hold it in my hands, turning it over.

This was the moment he kissed me in front of everyone. The moment that he told the world he wasn’t ashamed, that he was no longer going to hide who he was and what I was to him. This was the moment when I knew without a doubt that this was going to be the man I’d spend the rest of my life with. The moment that our first meeting all those years ago was building towards.