Heat Wave

Kate is standing there, barricading it.

“I don’t know if I can let you do this,” she says. “As your friend, I should stop you.”

“As my friend,” I plead, “you need to let me go.”

Our eyes are locked in a match, seeing who will look away first.

Kate does, looking utterly defeated. I feel a million times worse. I feel like I’ve crawled out of a swamp, a dark, damp place I belong in.

Because Logan is at reception, Kate heads over to her car in the parking lot and I go around past the pool to the service entrance.

I try not to think about what I’m doing.

I try not to take it all in.

I try to deflect everything.

It’s working.

Until I see Charlie coming out of his place.

Sees me with my luggage.

“What the hell?” he asks. “Where are you going?”

I’m so angry. I thought I could get through it, past it, but I can’t. Every single ounce of rage and hate I have burning away in the pit of my stomach is rising, rising, rising.

Charlie stops in front of me, a brown tank-top, backward cap. Looking like he always does.

I don’t even think.

I punch him square in the nose.

He yelps, doubling over, covering his nose with his hands. “What the fuck?” he squeaks.

“You know exactly what that’s for,” I sneer at him as he looks up at me. “You fucking snitch.”

“Wait, what?’ he cries out, whimpering. His eyes are watering from the pain. “I don’t…wait, is this about your mother?”

I laugh. It feels like acid. “Oh and the truth comes out. Whether you meant to or not, you ruined everything, Charlie. And if you dare speak of this to Logan, you know he’ll destroy you.”

“Ron,” he says, examining his fingers as he pulls them away from his nose. No blood. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know…”

“You knew enough,” I tell him, looking him dead in the eye with as much venom I can spare. “You knew about my family and me and our relationship. You knew I was at the bottom of the barrel with them. You knew it all and you talked to her and you kept it from all of us and now you’ve gone too far. You may have thought you were doing the right thing, you may have thought you were important by being the one person my mother had to talk to. But the fact that you kept it a secret from us all says something else entirely.” My throat feels thick with jabbing pains as I try to swallow. “Goodbye Charlie.”

“Goodbye?” He reaches for my arm as I rip out of it. “Where are you going?”

“Home.” I tell him, pressing my hands to his chest and pushing him away. “Where I can’t embarrass my family anymore.”

I hear Kate honk her horn from the street. I quickly open the gate and bring my bags through. Charlie looks over my shoulder, eyes widening at the sight of Kate in her car.

“You’re actually going?” he squawks.

“And it’s all your fault,” I tell him, not caring that I’m being overly harsh. “When you see Logan later, you can fess up to what you did and lose it all. Or you can keep your mouth shut and keep your job. Your choice.”

“Ron,” he says again. “Kate!”

But Kate is out of the car and quick to get my bags in the backseat and the trunk.

“Kate,” Charlie says again, coming forward.

Kate narrows her eyes at him and jumps back in the driver’s seat before peeling out of the lane with both of us in it.

I’m silent the rest of the ride. I’m heading to the airport way too early, I don’t know how I’m going to handle it. I don’t know what I’m doing.

“I know you don’t want to hear it right now,” Kate says to me later as we pull over at Lydgate Park to watch the ocean, a way to kill time since we are so early for my flight. “But I really do think Charlie will be hurting. I’m not saying this because I like him. I know him and I honestly think he didn’t think. He loves you both, he would have never said anything if he knew this would be the end result.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say with a heavy sigh. My hand still hurts. “He said it and whether it was an accident or not, we can’t change it. My parents know. And it’s just as well. I would have told them one day. I was under the very na?ve impression that they would understand.”

“Ron, there’s nothing na?ve in thinking your parents would be happy for you if you were in love.”

“It’s na?ve when I should have known what they’d do. I thought it too. In the back of my mind, I knew this was all too good to be true.”

“What? Love? Love is never too good to be true. Love is true.”

I give her a look.

She shrugs. “What? People fall in love, people fall out of love. But in the end, almost everyone in the world gets to feel it, live it, taste it. Love is never too good to be true because it is the original truth. And everyone deserves it. Everyone.”