by Laura Carter
He wraps his hand around the nape of my neck and shakes me once, hard. He points at me, the joint between his fingers. “Not a word.”
“My lips are sealed.” Drew passes the joint to Brooks and sits back in his wicker chair. I sit down on the deck, then pull my knees up and put my hands behind my head as I lie back, staring up at the star-studded sky. “So, when’s the big moment?”
“I don’t know yet. But Millie and Mom would kill me if I didn’t let them celebrate with us, and they’re coming here on Saturday night, which means…”
“You better get a fucking move on,” Brooks finishes, handing the weed down to me.
As we pass the joint and Brooks lights another, I can feel myself slipping into peace. I feel my body sinking into the deck. The sky and the stars seem to move closer. “Emily fucked Brandon.” The words leave me on a sigh.
“Yeah, I figured as much when they walked into the bar together tonight,” Drew says. “Who are you pissed at, him or her?”
“Both. Him for knowing how I felt about her and doing it anyway. Her for… Hell, I don’t even fucking know.” I close my eyes and feel myself drift more as the weed keeps moving through my system. “They were at it for months and neither one of them told me. Regardless of anything I felt about her, or that I thought she felt about me, it’s the lies that I can’t stand. She was my best friend and I thought Brandon was a good guy.” I open my eyes to take the joint from Brooks. “I think I’m pissed at myself too, for not seeing it. For not… for not doing anything about Emily sooner.”
“Ever wondered why you didn’t?” Brooks asks.
I turn my head to the side and look at him. “What do you mean?”
“You loved Emily—everyone knew that. But you never went for anything more. Maybe work out why you didn’t. You need to figure out why you decided something had changed. Maybe once you’ve done that you’ll be able to put this mess to bed and get your friend back.”
“Brooks, I swear to God, you’re the Dalai Lama,” Drew says, and we all laugh.
“When the hell did you turn into a shrink?” I ask.
“I’m no shrink, man. I just had to pull my head out of my ass younger than most people. Now I have a teenage daughter to contend with and need to be both Dad and counselor.”
“Yeah, that’s what you get when you knock your girlfriend up at sixteen,” I say.
Silence falls between us for seconds, before Brooks laughs, hard, throwing his head back. Then Drew and I are laughing with him. We laugh for so long, I can’t even remember what was funny.
When we calm, Brooks picks up his guitar. I close my eyes as he starts to strum, then sings a Brantley Gilbert track. The natural huskiness he’s always had in his voice, even when he and Drew had their high-school band and Brooks sang lead, is still there. But with age, his voice has deepened, and whether it’s the weed, the stars, the light breeze coming off the ocean, or being in the company of two men I love and respect, I drift as he sings, until my entire body is weightless.
When the song comes to an end, Brooks strums slowly and softly, to no particular tune. “God, I’ve missed New York and being close to you guys,” I confess, as much to myself as them.
“You can always come home, Jake,” Drew says.
I could. But home is also England, with Jess. “I couldn’t leave her.”
Neither one of them responds and I’m left to think about how much I mean those words as Brooks starts singing again. I couldn’t leave her. I’d never want to. Fuck, she’s only yards away from me and I miss her. Is that possible?
When Brooks kicks into the chorus of Blake Shelton’s “Mine Would Be You,” I join in, without conscious thought. Drew does too. And we’re all singing until I start to laugh. “I’m finally part of the band. It only took sixteen years.”
“And you’re still not cool enough,” Brooks says, breaking the song.
Hell, we’re at it again, laughing through the start of a third joint. “Why is everything hilarious when you add weed to the equation?”
My question goes unanswered because Brooks suddenly switches his beat and all three of us are screaming out the word’s to Wheatus’s “Teenage Dirtbag.” We sound like cats in heat but, damn, we’re having a good time.
“This is possibly the worst thing we’ve ever heard!”
I open my eyes and look at the upstairs window of the house to find the source of those words. Sarah, Izzy, Becky and Jess are leaning out of one of the bedroom windows.
“Get your ass down here,” Brooks shouts.
We next see them as they come onto the deck, all in some variation of lounge wear. Jess is still in her tiny denim shorts but now she has one of my hoodies on, drowning her slim frame.
“Can I smell weed?” Sarah asks, standing in bed shorts and furry booties, her hands on her hips.
“It’s even harder than usual to take you seriously,” I tell her from the ground beneath her.
“Shut up, you. And you!” She points to Drew. “Pass that thing over here.”
Sarah pulls on the joint and starts passing it around. Becky and Izzy refuse but Jess holds out her hand, “Hell, yes. I haven’t smoked weed since… Ha, since I got ditched at the altar.”
She sits on the decking next to me, her legs crossed beneath her. Her bare thigh is too much temptation. As I take her in, her long soft hair, my clothes on her, I rest a hand on her thigh.
Sarah reaches out to take the joint from Jess as Jess exhales. I don’t know what it is about her leaning back, the skin of her neck stretched taut as she blows out smoke, that is sexy as hell. The ultimate temptation. Jesus, as if I wasn’t horny enough earlier.
“No way,” Sarah says. “You were ditched at the altar?”
Jess nods. “Yep. I was already in the dress, my hair was done. My aunt and I were waiting for my uncle to come get me. He knocked on my bedroom door but as soon as I opened it, I knew something wasn’t right. He looked at me like…” She shakes her head and I tighten my grip on her thigh. She never talks about this. I know she’ll be reliving it and hurting. I know she’s never gotten over it. This, her parents, it’s all part of the cage she’s built around her heart. “He had this look, like he thought he was about to break my heart. He stepped into the room and instead of linking my arm through his and leading me toward my husband-to-be, he pulled me into his chest and said, ‘Jess, my gorgeous girl, one day there’s going to be a man who deserves all of you.’ And I never saw my fiancé again.”
Everything stops. Brooks even stops playing. Then Sarah stands up and hands Jess the joint. “Here, you need this more than I do.” Jess laughs.
“It was my fault really. I knew I wasn’t…that I could never…ah, never mind.”
“Good fucking riddance,” Sarah adds, making Jess’s body shudder with humor again.
“Thanks, Sarah.”
“So, he drove you to weed, huh?”
“Possibly,” Jess says, studying the joint. “It might have been my aunt who gave me the idea. She smoked medicinally.”
“Oh, gosh, Jess, that’s awful,” Sarah says. “What was wrong with her?”
“She was addicted to weed.”
We all laugh, hard, even though I know Jess well enough to appreciate she covered her hurt with humor. Brooks starts playing again, something cheerier this time. I sit up enough to pull Jess down to the ground, so she’s lying on my chest. I press my lips to her head. “He must have been fucking crazy, babe. If I ever got you in a white dress, I’d be there at the altar and every other day for the rest of my life.” I’m trying to comfort her—she’ll know it. But as I lie here, stroking her hair, feeling her press against me, I mean every single word. Any man would be lucky to have Jess. She’s been through so much, and I don’t know a stronger, more independent woman, even if she has had to build walls to protect herself. I swallow the lump that forms in my throat at the
thought of any other man managing to break down those walls. Do the thing I haven’t been able to do.
Before I can consider how hard I’ve really tried, Izzy and Becky start to shout about The Beatles and Brooks starts to play “Let it Be.”
I pin Jess to my chest as we all get stoned and sing into the darkness of the early morning.
Chapter 12
Jess
You’ve probably gathered by now that I believe in signs. No, not signs, but something. Some kind of power. That belief has certainly been heightened by my aunt and uncle, and the time they’ve made me spend trying to ‘find myself.’ But it started before then. It started with my parents and my understanding of why one of them couldn’t exist without the other. But how’s this for an invisible form, or a sign, if you prefer…
It had been years since I had met Danny Dukkha—that’s what I decided to call him after our first meeting the morning of the Alm giving ceremony in Laos. I was nineteen and celebrating my birthday at a beach shack bar in Bali. I wasn’t alone because I was in a bar full of backpackers who were willing to take tequila shots with me. But in terms of having anyone close to me, anyone who actually knew it was my birthday and that was why I was feeling the light buzz of my first four shots, I was on my own.
Ruth and John were on a trek in the mountains somewhere, and I’m fairly certain they had forgotten it was my birthday in any event. I was sitting on a wood swing, in place of a bar stool, turning my empty glass in my fingers on the bar top. The sun had long since gone down and fire candles lit the beach out front of the bar, but I was still wearing the kaftan I’d made myself and had been wearing all afternoon. I was still wearing the cowboy hat some guy I had a fling with gave me when he went off to his next destination a few weeks back—Australia, I think he was headed to.
I must have looked quite sad. I was. I remember I was contemplating whether I should be celebrating that I had managed to live another year, or whether I should be mourning the fact I was one year closer to the young age my parents were when they died. That’s when it happened.
“Dukkha.” A voice came from over my shoulder, close to my ear, making me jump. Yet I didn’t turn because I thought I recognized that voice. And it made me freeze.
For years, I had contemplated the words Danny Dukkha had said to me in Laos. I had come to understand what he meant by being in a constant state of suffering in the cycle of the Buddhist interpretation of karma. He didn’t know me, yet that day, he knew I was clinging to something I could never hold on to, and he was telling me that it would lead to me suffering until I was reborn.
I had thought about Danny a lot since that day in Laos. So tell me it wasn’t some kind of sign that he had found me in Bali, after no connection since Laos, and he was whispering into my ear as I celebrated my birthday alone.
He pulled out my swing an inch and I rocked forward. I was so busy trying to get my head around what was happening, I was surprised by the smile that took over my lips.
“You got more beautiful, if it’s possible,” he said, and my lips spread wider still.
He signaled to the barman, holding up two fingers, as he straddled a wooden swing next to me, one leg either side, and sat down facing me.
“Danny Dukkha,” I eventually said. His name left me as part of an exhale.
“You remember.”
Remember? He’d been in my thoughts so many times. “Yeah, I remember. What on earth are you doing here?”
“Same as you, I suspect.” He took one of the shot glasses filled with tequila that the bartender set down. “What are we drinking to?”
I don’t know why I told him, when I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone else, but I said, “It’s my birthday.”
He nodded and handed me the second glass. We took the shot, laughing as we winced through the burn of the cheap beachside tequila. “Happy birthday,” he said, his face contorted as he spoke, then he shook his head.
I laughed, a little deliriously, and I still don’t know why his presence made me so happy that night. The coincidence? Having company when I had been feeling alone? That he stopped me from pondering life and death and made me smile? Or that I had possibly been waiting to confront him about his thoughts on karma from years before.
But that night, it didn’t matter. We talked and laughed. He told me everywhere he had been in the world since we’d last met and I told him where I had been dragged. Between us, we had covered six continents, forty countries and five near-death experiences.
After a few more tequilas, Danny ordered two bottles of water and we walked on the beach. Under the firelights, we drank our water and talked more. He asked questions about me. About my thoughts and feelings. About the clothes I made. And it was a revelation. Someone wanted to know about me and seemed to give a shit about the answers. And he was fascinating. The guy who seemed to have no troubles and wanted to travel the world, not interested in growing roots anywhere. He was my polar opposite, and it was refreshing.
Age had changed him, made him broader, taller. His arms and legs were more tanned under his short-sleeved shirt and board shorts. There was more character about his face. Being in his twenties suits him, I thought. He was more attractive than I remembered. But more than anything, I liked the combination of youth and worldliness about his eyes. He had bright irises that seemed incredibly alive, but he had an abundance of knowledge and wisdom for a young guy.
“The wisdom comes from being an explorer,” he said.
I was sitting next to him in the sand, my knees pulled in to my chest, my hair blowing in the warm Balinese wind. I laughed. “An explorer? You make yourself sound like Gulliver.”
He smiled but he said, “That’s what I am. And, you know something? I don’t ever want to be anything else.”
“You don’t? Truthfully? I mean, don’t you ever think about what you’re going to do with your life?”
He chuckled then and lay back in the sand with his hands behind his head. “I am doing with my life, Jess. I write travel articles and sell them. I work bar jobs here and there. People would kill to see the world the way we do.”
I stared out to sea and sighed. I knew that, of course. I knew in many ways I was insanely lucky to see and experience the things I did. “But don’t you ever feel nomadic? You think of yourself as an explorer and I…I can’t help but think of myself as homeless.”
“The world is your home, Jess.”
I stared at him then, the firelight flickering across his face, and I wished I could be like him. I wished in some ways that I had never seen the perfect home life; then I might not crave it. But I had and I did. I craved the bond my parents had shared. I wanted to feel the unconditional love of family. I craved the way my parents had loyal friends who would always help them out when they needed it and laugh and joke with them when they needed to be picked up. I longed for that kind of happiness and I feared it.
As I stared at Danny, I started to think if I could only be more like him, I might be happier. That night, Danny and I made love quietly in his hostel bed. For four weeks, we were inseparable. We made love, we took treks in the Balinese jungle. We ate like the Balinese. We explored the islands, truly. We meditated with my aunt and uncle. The four of us did yoga at sunset. It was the first time since my mum had died that I felt like I had a someone. It was nice waking up with him in the morning, even in sleeping bags and old tents. It was nice to hold someone’s hand. I enjoyed not making every decision about where to visit each day by myself.
Danny was confident and worldly. He found me a market stall where I sold my clothes one day, which was the first time I had actually made money from anything I had made. He convinced me I should try to write a travel, fashion and food blog. That might not seem edgy to you right now but eleven years ago, it was seriously new age and something I never would have thought about doing if it weren’t for Danny.
He was great for me. He brought me
out of my turtle shell, as he called it. And even though I would never give up the dream of having roots one day, he made colors seem brighter, sounds sharper, and every experience somehow felt more alive. I felt like I understood the world more and life. There was a part of me that was almost happy.
“He makes you smile,” Aunt Ruth said one day when we were taking a dip in the pool of waterfalls. “I like him.”
It was the same day that Danny told me he was moving on soon. I dove under the water to wet my hair and kicked back up to the surface. “He’s leaving,” I told her. I shouldn’t have let it upset me; I knew that. People leave. Bad things happen. I knew as much. But I couldn’t change the fact that I felt it in my heart. The heart I had thought solely existed to pump oxygen around my body. The heart I thought was otherwise redundant.
I saw concern in Ruth’s face. A rare thing, which told me she knew how much I had enjoyed having Danny around while we were here. “Where is he going?” she asked.
“New Zealand. He’s taking a campervan from Christchurch and driving around for a few months, or until he gets bored. He has lined up some farm work for a few weeks, which should pay for the van.”
Ruth nodded, contemplatively. “You could go.”
I felt my brows scrunch. “Go?” Leave the only people in the world I knew and run off with a man I’d known for four weeks and one day? “You mean to New Zealand?”
She shrugged. “You’re nineteen. You can fend for yourself. And Danny is very well-traveled.”
“But…it would just be us. We’d be, like, together.” I could feel panic whirring in my chest. Not wanting it to show, I slipped under the water and held my breath. Keep control, Jess. Stop panicking. You’re fine. I heard my mum’s voice then. It carried through the water and hit my ears. “Just breathe, angel. Breathe.” I breeched the surface and took an enormous breath, as if I were being born from the water. My heart rate calmed and for the rest of the day, I contemplated going to New Zealand with Danny. I had never been with anyone since my parents. Sure, I was dragged from place to place by Ruth and John but I was always my own person, left to my own devices. Being with Danny would be very different.