The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea

by Elizabeth O'Roark

  THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA

  ELIZABETH O’ROARK

  Copyright © 2022 by Elizabeth O’Roark

  Developmental Editor: Sali Benbow-Powers

  Editor: Staci Frenes, Grammar Boss

  Copy Edit: Julie Deaton, Janis Ferguson

  Cover Design: Lori Jackson

  Photography: Rafa Catala

  Model: Xavi Cortes

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  For Sallye Clark, the best travel buddy a girl could ask for. Thanks for showing me how the other half lives.

  CONTENTS

  I. Oahu

  II. Lanai

  III. Kauai

  IV. Oahu

  V. Home

  Untitled

  Also by Elizabeth O’Roark

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PART I

  OAHU

  “Argued by many to be the most beautiful of all the islands, it is not to be missed.”

  From Oahu, The Adventure of a Lifetime

  1

  DREW

  January 21st

  A love story is like a bus ride. You can take the express—short and to the point, not exciting but it gets you where you need to go—or you can make it a road trip. Lots of transfers and stops, operating with blind hope in search of the extraordinary.

  I don’t need extraordinary, and I’m not a big believer in blind hope, but a thirteen-hour flight to meet an ex-boyfriend could hardly be deemed express either.

  Honolulu comes into focus through the window of the plane—the jagged cliffs of Diamond Head looming to my right, white sand and the bluest water you’ve ever seen.

  Come to Hawaii, Six said after the incident, the one that propelled me from mere fame to infamy. Let your publicist spin the whole thing as exhaustion.

  He’s very persuasive, my ex. My best friend, Tali, would use the word opportunistic. In fact, that’s precisely the word she used. But she has far higher expectations of men than I do.

  So here I am, sleep-deprived and stumbling off a plane into bright sunlight and clammy air, ready to give him another chance. Trying to ignore that there was a catch to this whole thing, one he waited to share until I couldn’t back out: his family is coming too.

  “There she is!” cries a voice, and suddenly Six’s mom, Beth, is pushing through the crowd to hug me as if I’m her long-lost daughter instead of the ex-girlfriend she’s only met once.

  It’s sweet, I guess, but I really need to remove my hoody. This airport either doesn’t have air-conditioning or considers eighty-five degrees pleasant.

  “We got here a bit ago,” she says, still hugging me, “and thought why don’t we just wait for Drew?”

  “Funny,” says a grim voice I’d know anywhere, a voice that makes my stomach tighten like it’s being sewn too small from the inside. “I don’t quite remember it happening that way.” I look up, up, up to find Joshua Bailey, Six’s brother, looming just past his mother like the Shadow of Death, six foot five inches of glowering male. His eyes meet mine, and we both scowl at the same time. The look he gives me is one part loathing, one part assessment. It’s the way you’d look at someone if you were hoping to make her death look like an accident.

  “You’re sweating,” Joshua says, running a hand through his light brown hair. He makes the human ability to cool off when overheated sound like a personal flaw.

  “And you look like you’re dressed to attend an estate planning convention,” I reply, letting my gaze raise from his khakis to his neatly pressed button-down. God, he’s such a dork.

  A hot dork, however.

  If karma was really a thing, Josh would be hideous, but in truth he has the kind of eyes a lesser female might get lost in, such a pale blue against his dark lashes they hardly seem real, perfect bone structure, and a disarmingly lush lower lip—if you’re into that sort of thing. And he’s also ridiculously tall and broad-shouldered and muscley, the sort of guy who’d feel like a force of nature above you.

  Again…if you’re into that sort of thing.

  He turns to the statuesque blonde behind him. “Sloane, you remember Drew,” he says, dropping my name like I’m the girl who poisoned the town well…or wanted to steal the family silver, which he apparently believes.

  And how are they even still a couple? They were in Somalia together, but Sloane moved to Atlanta last summer and she’s way too uptight for phone sex. She probably sends illustrations of her fallopian tubes in lieu of nudes.

  She extends an expertly manicured hand to me with a stiff smile on her face. I notice her ironed blouse isn’t even wrinkled after a flight that must have been as long as mine and is perfectly dry to boot. One of the benefits of her being half-snake, I imagine, is that it keeps her core body temperature low.

  “Sorry about Joel,” she says.

  I blink then. First, because I’d forgotten Six’s family still calls him by his much-loathed given name. Second, because where the hell is the guy who called me just a few nights ago, swearing he’d changed?

  I attempt to look past them. I’m five-six, but they’re all so damn tall I can’t see a thing. “What?”

  They glance at each other, locked in some silent exchange, and my stomach drops.

  “I texted you,” Beth says. “Maybe it didn’t go through. Oh, shoot. It didn’t. Airports always have no signal.”

  She frowns and starts messing with her settings, still hoping to get the text to go through, apparently. I doubt it’ll help much at this point.

  “He’s in jail,” Josh provides, without a trace of emotion.

  I give a startled laugh. Because arriving halfway around the world to vacation with Six’s family but not Six is too ridiculously terrible to be real. “What?”

  “It’s all a big mix-up,” Beth assures me, while Joshua rolls his eyes. “The band was searched at the Tokyo airport. One of them had a bit of marijuana in his bag, and they were all arrested. But his lawyer says he’ll be out on bail by tomorrow and this whole thing will be settled in three days.”

  I stare at her. She cannot be telling me I’m stuck on vacation with a retirement-aged couple I’ve met once, plus two people I loathe—one of whom suggested to his mother, when he thought I was out of earshot, that she’d better lock up the family silver until I was gone.

  But no one is laughing, and Beth is wincing. If this was all a joke, I don’t think she’d appear quite this worried.

  I look behind me, as if there might be a way to scramble back on the plane before the Baileys have seen me, but that would require time travel, something I haven’t yet mastered.

  A camera flashes, and Josh’s gaze jerks in that direction. Heads are turning, a crowd is gathering. It’s the fucking hair. I have one of those vaguely ethnic, Eastern European faces you see everywhere in New York—high cheekbones, pouty lips—but the long platinum blonde hair is what gives it away every time. I put my hood back on but it’s too late…once they know you’re in the airport, it’s game over.

  “We should go,” Josh says, glaring across the room. “Someone better hold Drew’s hand so she doesn’t get trampled by all the normal size humans.”

  “Extreme height is correlated with early mortality,” I reply, craning my neck back to maintain eye contact.

  He raises a brow. “That’s Marfan’s syndrome. And you sound hopeful.”

  “Only if it could take place without ruining the trip.”

  I see the smallest twitch o
f his mouth, but it doesn’t leave me feeling victorious. I think he just gets excited when people bring up death.

  We get through the crowd to baggage claim where Jim Bailey, Six’s father, waits. Unlike his wife, he’s a man of few words and—thank God—not a hugger. He places a hand on my shoulder, nods, and asks what my bag looks like just before the crowd surges.

  I told myself I wouldn’t need security here, but I’m not five minutes into this vacation and I’m having second thoughts. Phones are held in the air, filming me, and things are waved in my face to be signed—a boarding pass, the inside of a book, a Sbarro receipt, an arm. I feel the first signs of encroaching panic: sweat dripping down my back, heart thudding in my chest, the sense that I’m about to suffocate.

  “How drunk were you in Amsterdam?” someone shouts and someone else is asking if I’m here to go to rehab. Pretty much everyone alive has seen the video of me falling off a stage by now. Drew Takes the Plunge! was The Daily Mail’s headline. So very clever. Within hours, there were gifs, memes, stitches on TikTok. You haven’t truly made it until the whole world unites to ridicule your personal crises.

  I take a step back as the crowd swells, but people shove forward. The air grows too thick to breathe and just as I’m about to succumb to the panic, a hand wraps around my bicep. Josh pulls me from the crowd as if he’s plucking me from heavy surf.

  I’ll go back to hating him later, certainly, but in this moment, as he shepherds me all the way to the waiting van, I’ve never loved anyone more.

  The van door is flung open, and I dive inside. People already surround us, and are now filming the van itself. Like…who will ever want to watch that video? Did I show you the taxi Drew Wilson was in? they’ll ask their friends later. And those friends, if even vaguely rational, will say Why the fuck would we want to watch that? Why would you film the outside of a cab?

  I wind up shoved to the very back, which is less than ideal given I get carsick, but there’s not really time to reorganize everyone.

  With a lurch, the van accelerates away from the curb. Joshua’s broad, khaki-covered thigh presses against mine and he smells annoyingly good. Like soap and deliciously male skin. It’s clear I’ve gone too long without sex if the smell of Josh’s skin is doing it for me at a time like this. And he flew here all the way from Somalia. Shouldn’t he reek of airplane and sweat like I do?

  Beth starts reading to us from her guide book about Oahu. Can a human voice actually make you ill? Because I feel like hers is. And there is no air coming from the vent near me. I press my face to the window like a dog.

  “The medical care is apparently excellent,” she announces. “Some of the best in the country.” I can’t imagine why this is what she wants to read about. Sure, there are three doctors in here—Jim, Sloane and Josh—but I’d put that fact neck-and-neck with here’s the cab Drew Wilson was in on the interest scale.

  “Are you about to get sick?” Josh asks me, sounding pretty horrified for someone who is ostensibly a doctor. I have my doubts: he seems more like the guy you hire to wipe out a group of civilians by drone.

  I take shallow breaths through my nostrils. “I hope not.” My eyes fall to his laptop bag. “Open that up a bit more, just in case.”

  He manages to look even more disdainful, a feat I didn’t imagine possible.

  “You get carsick,” he says flatly. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I don’t know,” I reply. “Maybe it had to do with the swarm of teenage girls who were chasing me.”

  “She’s just like you, Josh,” Beth says, turning to beam at her son as if either of us will take that as a compliment. “She does what needs to be done.”

  His eyes sweep over me with disdain. “Practically twins,” he says, lip curling. Then he adds, under his breath, “Except I don’t twerk for a living.”

  “And I’m not a jerk to people I just met,” I hiss.

  “Apparently,” he mutters, “you don’t remember the day we met all that clearly.”

  My jaw tightens. I didn’t ask him if he’d finished high school. I didn’t suggest to my mother that he might steal the silver.

  “Put your head between your legs,” he says. “And don’t throw up on my pants.”

  I bend my body over and put my head down, just as Dr. Bedside Manner suggested.

  So far, Hawaii is proving more exhausting than my real life.

  2

  JOSH

  It’s a lesson I should have learned from children’s television programming: every lie, even lies of omission, even lies meant to spare someone, will come back to bite you in the ass eventually. I just never thought they’d all bite me in the ass at the same time.

  Mere hours ago, I was at the end of a very long flight, looking forward to some time with my family in Hawaii. Well, looking forward to time with my mother, anyway. I expected to find her with her health restored—that last round of chemo behind her—and my father by her side, pretending to be a decent human being, while my brother drank too much and acted like the selfish prick he is.

  But only my father is living up to expectations so far, because my mother is clearly not well and my brother couldn’t even bother to show up. I’m starting to wish I’d never stepped off the plane.

  The van arrives at the hotel at last. By some small miracle, my brother’s diva girlfriend has managed not to vomit, but I climb out as fast as possible anyway and head to the Halekulani’s open-air lobby.

  The place radiates serenity, all bleached stone and quiet elegance, the kind of hotel where no one speaks loudly and it’s as if you’re the only guest. There are no lines at check-in, no nonsense. In under a minute, we are being led (quietly) through a maze of well-kept gardens and gently gurgling fountains to the elevator in our wing of the hotel. My mother has reserved us three rooms, side by side, on the fifth floor. She wants maximum togetherness at all times.

  “Let’s meet down by the bar at six,” she says when we reach our respective rooms. “They do a sunset show.”

  I open the door to our suite, which consists of a bedroom with a plush king-sized bed, a living room spacious enough for a table, a desk and a couch, and a long balcony overlooking Diamond Head. In Dooha, I sleep in a tent barely tall enough to stand in. Simply having a bathroom nearby would be a luxury…and here there are two, complete with Japanese toilets that do everything but pull your pants down for you.

  I can’t begrudge my mother a single thing. She wanted this trip to be perfect and I suspect I know why. I just wish it wasn’t…so much. There are kids at the refugee camp using wheelchairs constructed of bike tires and hospital chairs. How much equipment could we have purchased with the money this is costing? How much food?

  “You really had no idea,” Sloane says. She isn’t talking about the room. She’s not even noticing the room. She’s only thinking of this—us, when “us” wasn’t even a thing until two hours ago.

  I run a hand through my hair. Jesus, what a fucking mess. “No,” I say, forcing my mouth to move into a smile. “But it’s great to see you.”

  It’s not all that great, really.

  My mother’s decision to surprise me by inviting her was…definitely a surprise. Sloane and I were a fling, nothing more, and then she left Somalia, which fortuitously brought things to an end. Now I’ve got to pretend I wasn’t relieved, on top of everything else I’m pretending.

  She folds her arms across her chest. Somewhere between the airport and here, she’s put together what’s happened. “Why did you let your mother think we weren’t over,” she asks coolly, “if you thought we were?”

  I shove my hands in my pockets. It’s hard to explain how hung up my mother is on the idea of Joel or me settling down. I think she blames her screwed-up marriage for our aversion to relationships, and she isn’t entirely wrong. “I didn’t want to upset her right before she went through chemo,” I reply. I thought I’d gracefully exited the thing with Sloane, gracefully sidestepped the conversation with my mother. And now I’m back in
the middle of both.

  The bellman enters and we fall silent while he sets each suitcase on the bench at the foot of the bed. When he leaves, she crosses the room and unzips it, saying nothing. The inside of her bag looks like it’s been styled for a photo shoot. Everything is pressed, perfectly folded. That’s Sloane to a T. Neat, precise, methodical.

  By contrast, Drew’s bag is probably bursting at the seams. I picture frilly panties and bras and negligees exploding like confetti from a cannon when she opens it. I have no clue why I’m picturing Drew’s panties, or why I picture them all being sheer and extremely non-functional, but it’s a troubling development.

  Sloane opens a drawer and then closes it. “Is this going to be okay? That I’m here?”

  No, I think. There is so much that is not okay at this moment that I feel like I can barely take a deep breath. “Of course,” I tell her, because the only option is to say Hey, not really, would you mind flying back to Atlanta instead?

  Her lips press tight. “Then do me a favor: please don’t spend the entire trip fawning over your brother’s girlfriend.”

  I give a startled laugh. “Fawning?”

  “You talked to her more than you did me at the airport,” she replies. “And then you rushed into doctor mode in the van.”

  “I asked her not to throw up on my pants. It was hardly the height of medical care.”

  Her lips press again, as if she doesn’t agree but knows further argument is pointless, and I step onto the balcony. There is no longer enough air in this oversized room. I suspect it’s going to feel that way until we leave.