He came over, sliding me a vodka soda. “Is this still your drink? I know you don’t like the fruity stuff,” he said with a grin.
“This is great. Thanks. How are you doing?”
“Good. How are you? I didn’t see you at the luau again; did you leave early?”
“Yeah. I wasn’t feeling too hot that night.”
“Abby was worried about you.”
“She was?” I asked. She had asked about me?
“I heard her talking about you that night with her manager,” he said.
“Are the two of you friends?” I asked.
“Oh yeah. She’s a great girl,” he said fondly. Huh. How great was great? Had they dated? Was that how great? I felt a little jealous thinking that might have been what he was talking about.
“You two used to be together?” I asked, trying to make it sound casual.
“No. Just friends. I went out with Makani for a while, but we broke up. Abby works here every summer. This is her fourth one, I think. We used to be a lot closer, but since the breakup, she keeps her distance for Makani’s sake.”
“You went out with her friend?”
“Yeah, but she bailed. I don’t know what happened.” Keno was hitting that? Well done, I thought. Makani was hot.
“Did she cheat or something?”
“Nah. She just left. We weren’t fighting or drifting apart. Nothing. She just said she didn’t want to be in a relationship anymore, and that was that.”
“That’s rough,” I said.
“It’s awkward for Abby now being stuck in between the two of us, so I just back off.”
“What about her? Abby? Is she seeing anybody?”
“I’ve never seen her with anyone… No. She’s single. She’s been single since I met her, in fact.” Really, I thought. How? She was gorgeous. Nice, too. I was going to bet she wasn’t crazy, either.
“She’s not from here, though, right? She’s from the mainland? Maybe she has a boyfriend there?”
“If she does, he hasn’t seen her in almost four years,” Keno scoffed.
He told me about himself as I finished my drink, just the one today; I wasn’t trying to get hammered. We got into Kirsten a little since he brought up Makani again. He sure talked about her a lot for someone who was no longer in a relationship with her. By the time I was leaving, I still felt pretty good.
I wanted to keep it up. I spent my time sober more scared of when I was going to feel sick again than actually enjoying feeling normal. This was nice, but maybe checking into rehab would have been a better way to spend my money. Heroin wasn’t cigarettes; I didn’t think people could just quit without checking in somewhere.
I wasn’t here to quit, really, but if I ended up being able to do it, then I wasn’t going to complain. If talking to Keno and Abby and going to places like the Garden of the Gods replaced heroin for me, at least half of my problems would disappear, just like that.
I got back to my suite and sat at the piano. I was feeling inspired. It had become hard to feel that way anymore. It had been a weird, shitty, but also good few weeks since I’d landed in Lanai, and I felt sort of renewed. Like I’d gotten all that LA smog out of my lungs and was breathing clean air for the first time in years.
I started playing through something I’d written years ago for Remus that we hadn’t ended up using. I had tons of stuff in the vault that I had written and never used for anything. Besides my housekeeper hearing me play when she happened to be in the house, nobody had heard it. I had a home studio, but that was something else that I had used less and less as my life fell apart.
I’ve spent so much time being a loser, I thought. I’d gotten really great at heroin and booze, but had literally put the brakes on every other thing I used to do. Fuck that. That was the stuff that made me feel like myself. The drugs made me a zombie. Between the two of them,
I had chosen the wrong thing. I wasn’t going to be able to make that choice forever. I had to wake up.
My phone started vibrating in my pocket where it still was from my trip downstairs. I stopped playing to see who it was. Kirsten. I rolled my eyes and put the phone on the piano, ignoring it. It rang a couple more times until she finally went back to enjoying my money, or whatever the hell it was she did in her free time. I played a little while longer before I figured it was time to order something to eat.
My phone was still sitting on the piano. I picked it up thinking I’d see a text from Kirsten or something. She wasn’t the type to let sleeping dogs lie. It wasn’t a text, but she had left another voicemail. I hesitated before listening to it.