by Louise Hall
Zev wraps my hand up in his, “I want to meet them, Lola.” It’s so weird hearing him call me that for the first time.
Mum and Sierra are halfway up the stairs when I open my bedroom door. “There you are,” Mum gives me a big hug and I try really hard not to cry because I’ve missed her so much.
Sierra is more focused on Zev. “Is that your boyfriend?”
“Oh,” Mum gets a bit flustered, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you there. I’m Cate, Lola’s mum.” She offers her hand and Zev shakes it like a gentleman.
“Hi, I’m Zev, Lola’s boyfriend.”
I don’t even get to enjoy the fact that Zev said he was my boyfriend because I hear somebody loudly clear their throat and when I look down at the bottom of the stairs, Dad and Mats are there. I glare at my brother before looking over at Dad. You know how when cats gets freaked out all their fur stands on end, making them appear like double their normal size. I swear that’s what’s just happened to my dad. He definitely heard Zev just introduce himself as my boyfriend.
It might seem strange given that he and Mum suggested that I move to Hawaii but they are crazy-protective and I know that Dad’s going to have a really hard time with me having a boyfriend. He used to joke when I was younger that I wasn’t allowed to date until I was at least thirty-five, which seems like a really arbitrary number but anyway. It was bad enough when I was dating Noah, who he’d known since he was a baby but now I’m dating a total stranger, his craziness is going to be off the charts.
“It’s good to meet you, Mr Warner,” Zev offers his hand to my dad. “I’m Zev.”
Dad shakes his hand because he’s not rude but I can tell he’s suspicious about Zev.
Dinner isn’t as awkward as it could have been, perhaps because Sierra’s tired from the long flight and so she’s being a brat which draws some of the attention away from me and Zev. Mum’s being awesome and trying to get to know Zev without making him feel uncomfortable while I make it perfectly clear to my traitor of a brother that we will definitely be having words about his part in this sneak family attack.
After we’ve finished eating, I walk Zev outside. “Why did you let me call you Jane all those months? I feel like a fool.” I hate seeing him look so unhappy.
“You’re not,” I reach up and stroke my hand down his stubbly cheek. “Jane is who I am now. Lola was a girl with dreams of becoming a footballer. Jane is a blank space that I’m still trying to figure out.” Although that’s a lie because these last few months with Zev, I’ve started to feel less and less like a blank space. I’ve built a great life here in Hawaii, I’ve got friends and a job and my body isn’t just defined by my lack of toes and calf muscle anymore, It’s alive with ink and metal.
“I guess I can understand that. I don’t know what I should call you now?”
I give him a playful wink, “I kind of like hot stuff.”
Zev chuckles, “perhaps not around your parents though?” He looks behind me and I can tell that at least one member of my family is probably spying on us.
“Yeah, maybe not.” I know if my dad’s watching us right now, it’s probably going to make his head explode but I can’t not kiss Zev.
LOLA
Later that night, I’m upstairs in my bedroom but it’s not the biggest house in the world and so I can still hear Mum and Dad talking downstairs in the kitchen.
“Are you going to tell Lo?” Dad asks. My ears prick up at the sound of my name.
“I don’t know,” Mum sighs. I forget my curiosity about whatever it is they’re trying to decide whether or not to tell me for a second because I really hate hearing her sound so upset. It’s one of the reasons why I agreed to come to Hawaii in the first place so she wouldn’t have to watch me try and figure things out. “I don’t like keeping secrets from her, Kian. Zev seems like a decent guy. He’s turned his life around after what happened but there’s definitely something shady about the fact that he hasn’t told Lola or Mats about it.”
“Do you want me to have a word with him?” Dad asks.
“No,” Mum says. “I can’t say anything tomorrow anyway, I don’t want to ruin Lola’s birthday.”
In that moment, I realise how little I really know about Zev. I feel foolish and I don’t like it. I mean, if they hadn’t turned up when they did, Zev might still be here in my bed and things would be a thousand times more complicated. Why does this always happen? I swear it’s like the universe is hell-bent on stopping me losing my v-card. I suppose I should be thankful that at least this time I didn’t lose any body parts.
I try to go to sleep but whatever it is that Mum knows about Zev is keeping me awake. It must be having the same effect on her because when I go downstairs, I see that she’s sat out on the front porch. I quietly open the screen door so as not to startle her or wake up Mats who’s asleep on the couch. I take a moment to gloat about the fact that the little traitor is going to be so sore when he wakes up tomorrow morning.
“Hey, baby girl,” she beams at me and I might be a grown up but all I really want is my mum.
I take a big gulp of air. “I heard you and Dad talking before. You said you know something about Zev…?”
To her credit, Mum doesn’t even try to lie to me. She turns to face me and brushes my fringe out of my eyes. “Are you sure you want to hear this from me? It seems like it’s the kind of thing Zev should tell you himself. I’ve only got the facts but he can provide you with the context.”
“Mum?”
This time it’s Mum that takes a big gulp of breath. “I take it Zev’s told you how he lost his leg?” she asks.
“He said he was in a car accident. Is that not true?” I ask hesitantly.
“No, it’s true. Did he say anything else?”
“He doesn’t like to talk about it.” I completely understand because I’m lucky that the last thing I remember before my accident was walking back from the pharmacy with Noah after we’d said goodbye to our parents. The next thing I woke up in a hospital bed minus the toes on my right foot and a good chunk of my calf muscle. I have nightmares based on what I’ve been told happened, screeching brakes and all that jazz but I don’t have flashbacks.
Mum closes her eyes and I can tell it’s going to be bad even before she says anything. “The night of his accident… He was driving and he was three times over the legal limit.”
My first thought after she’s dropped that bombshell is that I want to bust out laughing because in all the time we’ve spent together, I’ve never seen him take even a sip of alcohol. He told me when we played mini-golf with Mats and Vada that he gave up drinking when he left L.A. Maybe I should have thought more of it but Mats and I don’t drink so it didn’t seem like a big deal.
An awful thought crosses my mind. “Did he... was anybody else hurt?”
Mum shakes her head.
At first I’m relieved and but then very quickly I get angry.
Why wouldn’t he tell me?
It’s the deception that really claws at me. He was so annoyed that I didn’t tell him it was my birthday and I’d given him my middle name and yet all this time he’s been keeping something so fundamentally important from me. I lost my dreams and half my toes because of a drunk driver and now I’ve almost lost my heart to another?
Mum puts her hand over the top of mine and gives it a squeeze. “You need to talk to him, Lola.”
I know I need to talk to him but I also know that I’m way too angry to do it tonight.
Dad appears in the doorway, “is everything OK?” I’m not surprised that he’s still awake. He and Mum have this weird bond like they can’t sleep properly if they’re not with each other. I can see from the way his fists are clenched that he knows Mum’s just told me about Zev’s drink-driving.
“I’m going inside. I’ve got a lot to think about.” I kiss Mum’s cheek and pat Dad’s shoulder as I walk past. When I turn around again, Dad’s taken my place on the chair next to Mum and has lifted her up into his lap.
I
have to walk past Mats to get to the stairs and it might be childish but I can’t help thinking that a bad back in the morning isn’t a hefty enough price to pay for not letting me know that our parents were planning on coming to Oahu to surprise me for my birthday so I reach over and gently lift his wrist up from on top of the duvet. I love my parents but if they were still back where they belong in Seattle, I wouldn’t have to deal with the truth about Zev so I dip Mats’ finger in the two-thirds full glass of water he’s left on the coffee table. Ha, it’ll serve him right if he’s peed himself when he wakes up tomorrow.
ZEV
Rusty insists that Lola shouldn’t have to work on her birthday, especially since her parents and younger sister are only in Oahu for a couple of days because her sister is in her last year of high school. I’ve switched shifts with Shanks so I can finish up at a reasonable hour and I’ve just finished cleaning up after my last customer when there’s a knock at the door.
I spin around; ready to growl at whomever it is that I’m busy. Lola’s leaning on the doorframe. I don’t like it that I can’t read the expression on her face. “Can we talk?”
“Happy birthday,” I smile. I still think it’s a good thing that she’s stopped by to see me on her birthday.
She closes the door behind her but doesn’t move much further into the room. It’s like she wants to stay as close to her escape route as possible.
“I heard something last night and I figured that after everything, I owe you the chance to explain.”
My stomach plummets to the floor. “Lola…?” I reach out to try and touch her but she dodges out of the way. I’ve known her as Jane for so long that her real name still feels like a marble rattling around inside my mouth.
She looks up at me and I can’t miss the hurt in her big, black eyes. “Is it true?”
I don’t need to ask what she’s heard. “Yes.”
“You lost your leg because you were driving drunk?”
I nod.
She reaches up and slaps me hard across the face. The harsh sound reverberates around the small room.
She looks down at her hand which must be stinging because she gave me quite a belt. She’s shocked by what she’s just done.
“I’m sorry.”
“What for?” she challenges, “the fact that you got behind the wheel of a car when you were three times over the legal limit or that you’ve lied to me about it this whole time?”
“Both.”
I desperately need to hold her but she dodges out of my way again. “Please,” I beg, “I made a mistake and I know it could have been a thousand times worse but I’ve paid for that mistake every single day, I promise you.”
“No,” Lola shakes her head, “you haven’t paid for anything. You might have lost your leg but you’ve got an amazing life here in Hawaii, surrounded by your friends and family and with your dream job as a tattoo artist. You might think you feel guilty but it’s people like me that pay the real price for your crime. I didn’t do anything wrong that night, Zev. I didn’t get drunk and think that it was a good idea to get behind the wheel of a car. I didn’t do anything wrong and yet… Noah wasn’t just my boyfriend, he was also one of my best friends and I haven’t talked to him since I woke up in the hospital, I moved thousands of miles away from most of my family so they wouldn’t have to watch me struggle and I lost the one thing I’d always wanted which was to be a footballer.”
I try one last time and she isn’t quick enough so I haul her against me. She’s so familiar to me now, her gentle curves fit perfectly against my hard planes and I wish more than anything that I could take away her pain. Her fists pound at my chest but I don’t flinch, I’ll take it.
“You were the only person in my life that didn’t pity me, that didn’t define me by what I used to be, what I used to have. You made me feel like I could transform all of the ugliness into beauty.” She gestures to the ink, my ink, which marks her skin. “But it was all a lie, you pitied me more than any of them. The only reason you wanted to even know me was because of the accident, because of what I’d lost, because you felt guilty that you could have done it to somebody else. That’s all I am to you, isn’t it? A chance for you to make amends.”
“No,” I bury my fingers in her black hair, tilting her head back. “No, please, I swear I don’t pity you. You are one of the strongest people I’ve ever met, Lola.”
“For a cripple, you mean,” she laughs bitterly.
“Don’t say that.” She struggles free of my grasp and I desperately sink to my knees, my hands gripping her hips, “you’re smart, funny and incredibly sexy.”
“Oh my goodness, I’m such an idiot,” Lola gasps. “That’s why you wouldn’t take things further, isn’t it? Because it’s one thing to make the deformed girl feel beautiful but it’s quite another to actually have sex with her, isn’t it?”
She turns and runs out of the door but I sprint after her. I don’t want her to leave when she’s so upset.
There’s nobody waiting for her so she walks towards the road. No way in hell I’m letting her walk home alone.
“Leave me alone, Zev,” Lola snarls as I pull up alongside her in my car. “Go and find another charity case.”
“Get in the car,” I growl. The sidewalks are patchy in this part of Oahu. If she wasn’t so consumed with her anger for me, she’d be freaking out.
“Ha,” she scoffs, “the very last thing I’m ever going to do is get in a car with you, Mr Drunk Driver.”
That stings but I refuse to let her push me away. “Fine,” I slam on the brakes and get out of the car. I can tell that her foot’s already hurting by the way she’s limping so I lift her up and throw her stubborn ass over my shoulder.
“Put me down,” she yells, thumping my back hard enough to leave bruises.
“I’ll put you down,” I yell right back as I dump her on the passenger seat, “when I get you home.”
“How do I know you haven’t been drinking?” Lola folds her arms across her chest.
“Have you ever seen me with a drink, hot stuff?”
“Don’t you dare call me that?” Lola narrows her eyes at me. “Besides, I’m not with you twenty four seven, maybe you’re one of those drunks that keeps bottles of vodka in their underwear drawer.”
“The only thing I keep in my underwear drawer is underwear.” I know Lola is too angry to hear me right now but I need her to know one thing. “I haven’t had even a sip of alcohol since the accident, I swear on Louis’s life.”
At least she knows me well enough to know I would never lie to her in my nephew’s name.
I haven’t slept all night and when I get to the Ink the next morning, Rusty tells me that Lola is flying back to Seattle with her family this morning. She called him late last night and asked for a week’s leave so she could figure things out.
I’ve got this really bad feeling in my gut that if she gets on that plane – despite the fact that her brother’s here and she’s only asked for a week’s leave – she won’t come back to Oahu and we’ll be kaput so I race out of the Ink and am halfway to my car when the second biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my life decides to reappear.
I wouldn’t have even acknowledged Sam except for the fact that she’s stood right in front of my car door.
She’s gotten thinner since I last saw her, too thin except for the fake boobs plastered to her chest. She’s wearing a white vest and a pair of coochie-cutter denim shorts. I can tell she’s not wearing a bra because I can see her nipples. I smile for a moment thinking that if Lola heard me describe her like that, she’d tell me off for slut-shaming. But I’m not judging Sam, in the industry that she’s in; her look right now is probably akin to a uniform.
When we first got together, in high school, she was a sweetheart, blonde hair, blue eyes, cute butt and the huskiest laugh I’d ever heard but then she got a part in a low budget film that was shooting here in Oahu. The film did way better than expected at the box office. It even won a couple of minor awar
ds. She signed with an agent and persuaded me to move to L.A. with her after we graduated. I didn’t mind too much because I’d managed to finagle an apprenticeship at a tattoo shop in L.A. so it wasn’t like I’d just be hanging around waiting for her to come home every night.
Away from Hawaii and the risk of my parents’ disapproval, I got really into tattoos. Her agents might have been marketing her as a girl next door type but she loved my bad-boy image, begging me to come to all these Hollywood parties with her so she could network. She’d be all over me on the red carpets for the photographers and then she’d ditch me as soon as we got inside. I knew she was losing weight but she was too tired for sex so I didn’t know how bad it was until I came home and caught her snorting cocaine with a few of her friends right off our coffee table.
I might be covered in tattoos but I don’t do drugs, never have, never will so I packed up most of my stuff and left that night. I spent the next couple of weeks crashing on the sofa of one of the guys who worked at the tattoo shop with me. I only went back to our rented house in Venice Beach to pick up the last of my stuff. Her agent was there but he persuaded me to stay for one last drink with them – I realised later that he must have spiked my drink because it wasn’t enough to put me three times over the limit. He’d always thought that I was a good influence on Sam and I think he hoped that if she and I had sex again, I’d agree to move back in and keep an eye on her. It didn’t work; all that happened was that I got in a car accident, lost my leg. Sam used it to her advantage though – she sobbed to reporters that the reason she’d been so erratic on set recently wasn’t because she was coked up to the eyeballs but because she’d been trying to help me with my drink problem. If I hadn’t been in so much pain, I’d have laughed out loud when I read that b-s.