by Eden Butler
“Look who’s talking,” Zinnia said through a laugh, dragging the back of her hand against her wet face. “I know for a fact there are lakes and rivers in Louisiana and here you are looking like Casper.” She watched Lily closely then, her gaze shifting over her face as though she didn’t quite believe she was really there, standing in front of her. “Oh, hell, I don’t care if you’re all pasty and white. You’re here! God, you’re here.”
“I am,” Lily said, unable to keep herself from hugging Zinnia again; not caring that they stood in the middle of all that medical bedlam hugging and crying like idiots. “God, I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you, too.” Zee broke away from Lily, keeping hold of her hands as she tilted her head, eyes sharp and curious. “Did I freak you out? With my message, I mean? Is that why you’re here?”
Lily wanted to tell her everything, right then and there. She wanted to warn her that she’d hopped a plane with the hope of talking some sense into her niece. She wanted to explain why she’d been asked to take a vacation from the firm, but didn’t think it was the time or place for that.
“I’m here to see you,” Lily answered Zee, squeezing her hand back. “When do you get off? I want to take you out for dinner if I can.”
“Another hour, but Lil, I’m exhausted. I’m off tomorrow though, and Ano and I were going to go check out some spots on Mokuleia Beach for the wedding.” When Lily only nodded, a small gesture that was barely a movement at all, Zinnia lowered her shoulders, as though she knew Lily didn’t approve. “What?” She stepped back, dropping her aunt’s hand. “Shit, Lily, please don’t tell me you came all the way here just to try to convince me not to get married.”
“I…I didn’t.”
Her niece folded her arms, head tilting to the side as though she needed a minute to examine Lily’s posture and what it said about the things she kept to herself. “Bullshit.”
The curse word came out loud enough that a few of the nurses and doctors stopped their conversations to stare at Lily and Zinnia. The attention was unwelcomed and Lily cleared her throat, masking her irritation with her best lawyer’s impassive veneer. The smile was forced, a little unfriendly, and Lily knew Zee would know it meant they should table the impending argument.
“I’d like to have a discussion with you, if you don’t mind. Tonight, if you can stay awake long enough and in the morning, you and your boyfriend…”
“Fiancé.”
“Fine. You and your fiancé, can come by and pick me up at my hotel and we’ll have breakfast.”
Something changed in Zinnia’s expression then and it shifted her mild irritation immediately. “You’re staying at a hotel?”
“Of course I am…why?” Lily didn’t like the feeling she had just then, exposed a little and something else. Something that was off, a little warning that prickled the hairs on the back of her neck.
Zinnia didn’t notice and seemed, in fact, to forget her minor irritation at her aunt, moving closer enough to pull Lily out of the way when two interns shoved by pushing a patient on a gurney. She took to fiddling with Lily’s collar, brushing the braid of hair off her shoulder. “I just figured you’d stay with me…with us.”
That hair-prickling feeling stopped, replaced by something that made Lily’s stomach tense. “Us? You’re…you’re living together?”
“Lil, please.” The eye roll was exaggerated and reminded Lily of a younger Zinnia, one that was convinced her aunt hadn’t a single brain cell in her head. “I’m not a teenager anymore and I’m engaged. Ano and I—”
“Is he loaded?”
“What?”
Lily shrugged, leaning against the counter as the manic activity around them continued. “Honolulu is expensive. Only very old families and rich tourists can afford property here. Unless he’s in Kaimuki or one of the other suburbs. So either your man is loaded, he lives in our hometown, or you live in a tent on state lands.” Lily waited, watching her niece for a reaction. She knew Zee was too much of a princess to sleep on the ground or in a makeshift hovel because she couldn’t afford rent. Lily also knew Zinnia’s type. She’d never put up with a man that expected her to live out in the wilds of Hawaii. “In either case, I wouldn’t want to get in anyone’s way or take up too much space.”
“He’s not loaded, but we don’t live in a tent.” She shook her head, smiling when Lily grinned at her. Lily knew Zee better than anyone. She knew her mind, but this? Being so consumed so quickly? That she didn’t understand. “He used to do security at the airport, but started his own auto body shop last year. He’s a mechanic, he does custom work, and we live at one of his family’s cottages in Kaimuki. They own several. His older cousin offered it up to him a few years back, and I moved in a month ago. It’s small but there’s plenty of room for you.”
“Cousin?” Lily teased, waggling her eyebrows. “So he’s not loaded but his family is?”
“Very funny. Actually, his uncle is the one that introduced us. Dr. K. He’s a cardio attending here.”
They moved away from the crowd, near the end of the receptionist desk and Lily let Zinnia link her arm, directing her toward a large door with “Attendings Only” in heavy silver letters emblazoned above a large handle. The crowd was thinner here, with only a few nurses paying any attention to the women as they talked.
“Ano got into a wreck and I was wrapping up my ER service for the month. I took care of him. He had a busted ankle and needed stitches above his eyebrow. I gave them to him.”
When she spoke, a slow, happy grin moved across Zinnia’s face. It made her look younger, her face lighter, and Lily couldn’t help but tease her niece. “How romantic.”
A quick jab of her finger in Lily’s side and the girl continued. “Then Dr. K, comes jogging in, acting like a boy, cracking jokes and then I guess he saw something in Ano’s eyes. He went out of his way to make sure we both knew each of us was single.” Zee stood in front of Lily, leaning a shoulder on the wall as she spoke. “When Ano kept coming by to ‘see his cousin,’ and Dr. K kept pestering me about how interested in me Ano was, well, I decided to let him take me out.”
Lily pushed a mock frown onto her mouth, tisking a little to keep the mood light. “Because he’s related to your boss?” Mainly she wanted to distract herself from her own worry and the things that had urged her back to the island.
“Because,” Zinnia said, emphasizing the word with a tilt of her head, “he’s funny and very sweet and kind and ridiculously gorgeous and related to my boss, who is also kind and funny and sweet.”
“But not gorgeous?” Lily said, laughing at her niece’s frown.
“See for yourself.” Zee nodded to something over Lily’s shoulder and those odd prickles returned, shooting an unusual warmth through her limbs.
Lily hadn’t worried about who her niece mentioned or why he hovered next to them, but when Lily shot a quick glance over her shoulder to follow Zinnia’s gaze, something sharp and heavy seemed to crash into the center of her chest.
She reverted just then, blocking out the noise of the room and the activity that surrounded her. Zinnia’s presence got forgotten and the weary fatigued Lily had spent an hour ignoring melted away when she caught sight of the man standing behind her.
He was still tall and broad. That dark skin was still line-free and his hair was shorter, cropped around his ears and a little long on top. Lily wondered, fleetingly, as she watched recognition shift his features, drop his mouth open, if he still tasted sweet. She moved the thought from her mind almost as quickly as it had been born. And when he came closer, Lily forgot how to form words and make them move off her tongue.
“Lily.”
It wasn’t a question. The name sounded, in fact, like a long-held answer, something sweet, something he’d put in the back of his mind but was happy to find again.
He stood in front of her, arms at his side, expression sharp, but his eyes widened and his mouth closed, twisted up into a sweet smile. Lily couldn’t do more than watch h
im, wondering what he’d say, wondering if after all this time, that look, the stretching grin was just common courtesy.
Before he could say another word, Lily exhaled, turning around fully to face him, wishing she could remember how to breathe. Wishing she understood why her heart felt like it might leap from her chest.
“Hello, Keilen.”
Chapter Seven
Sometimes history got repeated. Lily saw that in her niece. There had been so much of Liam and Ellen in the things Zinnia did over the years. The way she didn’t hold back when something struck her as funny. Zee laughed without care, without the worry that someone would think she was too loud, her voice too high pitched. Just like her mother. That chirpy little laugh of Ellen’s got passed down same as Zee’s full mouth with a prominent bottom lip. That was a Campbell gift, something Lily had always envied about her brother’s features. She’d have killed for his perfect lips. But there was more, something more significant that Lily noticed had reappeared—it was in each step Zinnia made with Ano as they danced just outside the restaurant patio, twenty feet from the table where Lily sat in horrendous awkwardness. Zinnia had found someone special.
The way her niece moved with her man, the same look she got back from him, Lily had seen a million times passing between her brother and sister-in-law. They were a little lost in each other, like no one else in the world existed. It was in passing glances and mooning little gazes. As a kid, Lily had always rolled her eyes, thinking her brother and Ellen, with all their long looks and longer kisses, were stupid and embarrassing. Watching Zee and Ano now, Lily realized she was happy, if not a little surprised to see that look again.
She felt seventeen again, with that persistent, needy gaze of hers rushing over Keilen from across the rugby pitch. That had been the night he’d saved her. It was that rescue she’d relived a thousand times over the years. Even after her family was devastated by the fire and Lily and Zee escaped to the mainland, random memories came to her; things she could not remember with perfect clarity—the smell of her brother’s cologne or the joke Ellen used to tell when she was drunk, but one memory remained pristine in Lily’s mind—Keilen and the night he’d saved her. She’d kissed him at twenty-two, out on the Tiki Tommy’s patio, away from the crowd. But there was something sweeter about the rugby pitch rescue. Something that seemed more significant to her than the minutes she danced and made out with him.
“You want another?” The old woman in front of her had a tight smile as she held the pitcher of Mai Tais in front of Lily’s empty glass. Ano’s grandmother was a courteous hostess, and her small restaurant sold the most perfect poke bowls Lily’d ever had. In fact, she had never tasted food so good or been in such a friendly atmosphere in any other eatery on Oahu. But Lily got the feeling that this was a woman in control of her family. Leanni, she’d told Lily to call her, and it was a request made without any hesitation—as though she expected no refusals.
“Yes, please,” Lily answered the old woman returning the tight smile with one of her own. The smile didn’t lower as she filled Lily’s glass, but her eyes remained sharp, appraising as she watched the younger woman.
In return, Lily watched the old woman’s face and at the sight of her thick white hair gathered in a tight bun and the overlarge hibiscus she wore behind her left ear, she was reminded of her own grandmother. Lily’s family had come to Oahu some sixty years before, her great grandparents buying up a large parcel of land on the outskirts of Kaimuki. Their roots in the island ran deep and had for some time. But they had been considered haoles for decades. Outsiders to the locals until the years passed and the Campbell family became a fixture.
Lily and Liam played pee wee volleyball alongside local kids, and Lily had taken hula lessons for ten years as a girl. Their grandmother, the elder Lily Campbell, even took to wearing her thin, gray hair in a tight bun or loose down her back, flower always behind one ear. The vivid memories of her grandmother brought on a sudden rush of heartsickness.
Despite Leanni’s forced friendliness and appraising stare, the awkwardness suffocating Lily at that moment had nothing to do with critical old women.
“Good Mai Tai?” Keilen said, bringing Lily’s focus back to the present.
Yes, she thought to herself. It was very good. Everything here is good and sweet and a little overwhelming. But the drink was sweet too, with the smallest aftertaste she barely noticed. Why was he asking?
“Ano’s granny is my mother’s sister,” Keilen said over the hum of music and the mild crowd in the restaurant. “The recipe was my mom’s actually.”
Keilen acted as though it was perfectly normal, the height of sanity to be sitting next to Lily, his shoulder touching hers, that sweet, rich scent of his skin perfuming the air around them. The surprise that relaxed his features at the hospital when he saw her had instantly transformed the moment Zee went to him, nudging him closer to Lily, not the least subtle.
“Dr. K, you remember my Aunt Lily,” she’d said, tugging on Lily’s hand. Lily had barely noticed her niece’s smile and the obvious teasing tone in her voice. Lily’s body had shaken when Zinnia pulled her to stand directly in front of Keilen. “She looks good, right?”
Lily had planned on telling her niece to stop embarrassing her—that seemed to have been another of Liam’s traits passed down to Zee—but Keilen’s smile had stopped her. There’d been a look on his features that quelled some of the butterflies swarming in her stomach.
“She looks beautiful,” he’d said, seeming unable to keep the compliment back.
“Well,” Lily had replied, fiddling with the ends of her braid to distract herself from their stares and the rush of color that warmed over her cheeks. “So, are you hungry?” she’d asked Zee. “Can we grab dinner?”
“Sure. You hungry, Dr. K?”
He had been, apparently, and as Zee pulled Lily along into Keilen’s black Mercedes, filling the cab with her insistent questions and explanations on the neuro service she’d landed that month—Lily learned way more about how the attending cracked open his morning patient’s skull than she ever thought she’d need to know—Keilen’s attention got split between her niece’s endless explanation and his quiet focus on Lily as he kept shooting glances at her through the rearview mirror.
Now Keilen went on about his family’s Mai Tai recipe and how his auntie had managed to get the restaurant up and running.
“She worked nights for years. House keeper at Turtle Bay.” He moved a hand around, motioning first at the table, to the foot stretched out around it, then to the room. “She started selling meat pies and poke bowls out of a cooler she took to job sites. Then…she ended up here.”
Lily wasn’t interested in what he said, just that he spoke with his mouth near the curve of her earlobe with that rich, deep boom in his voice vibrating so close that she found it hard to listen to him and keep from spilling her drink down her front at the same time. It fascinated her, how time hadn’t quelled his pull. There were still strong emotions attached to him, most of it the small disappointment that their night together never really happened. For the most part, Lily thought on the reaction her body had at that moment—just being near him and how after all these years, how Keilen could make her feel awkward and smitten.
“Ano, come here. You too, Zinnia…” Leanni yelled, drawing Lily’s attention away from the smell of Keilen’s cologne and how warm he felt sitting next to her. At Leanni’s request, her niece and Ano broke apart, dutifully following the old woman.
Lily watched them as she fussed, pointing toward a closed off section of the restaurant. After a few moments, Zee deflated and Ano argued back with his grandmother. She didn’t like seeing her niece go still like that, or how her body language shifted—shoulders lowering and her eyes cast down as though she didn’t have anything to say to the old woman at all.
“What’s that about?” she asked Keilen, nodding toward them on the other side of their table.
“I’m not sure,” he answered, stretching an arm
along the back of Lily’s chair to lean in for a better look. When Zinnia looked near to crying and Ano pulled her to his side, Keilen released a breath, leaning back against his chair. “Auntie Leanni can be a demanding.” He moved again, picking up his glass to take a sip, and Lily was distracted from her niece’s obvious discomfort. Keilen smelled good, like cologne, clean soap and something that reminded her of the beach. The smell made her mouth water.
Ano said something to his grandmother that made her shake her head, and he managed to distract Zee enough that they escaped Leanni and returned to the dance floor.
Lily understood what her niece saw in Ano. It was hard to miss the symmetrical features of his face, those sharp, knife-edge cheekbones, that angled jaw; even the long scar that ran through one eyebrow gave him a hint of danger, ruggedness that added to his appeal. One quick introduction, the briefest greeting of his kiss on Lily’s cheek had given her first glance at his eyes, how light they were, almost hazel and his complexion, not as dark as Keilen or Leanni, but a hint of something other than Polynesian in the shape of his face.
But it wasn’t his features and the attractiveness of his body that Lily guessed made Zee eager to stick around. It was the slow smile he gave her, if Lily had to guess. It was the way he watched Zinnia’s mouth when she spoke, how he moved his gaze to hers, following each movement like he wanted to commit it to memory; how he seemed to act as though he couldn’t believe his luck, that this beautiful woman wanted him.
Lily got it, saw it just then when Ano kissed Zinnia’s forehead and took her in his arms, away from the music, from the slow-moving crowd to dance in the seclusion of a dark corner in the restaurant.