12 Hours In Paradise (9 page)

“I’m as blind as a bat, so please guard these with your life,” he said.

I was glad that close up, my eyesight was perfect.

He was gorgeous. His eyes soaked up the entire night sky, so black and so deep. Tiny, bright lights reflected from their surface like miniature stars. How had I ever lusted after Harrison in the cookie store? How had I not noticed Arash back then? Shouldn’t he have shone like the brightest star in the sky? Had something happened between then and now? A mask he had removed? A veil whisked from the front of my eyes?

His smile was slightly crooked, but his teeth were perfect, white, and straight. He stood before me completely unguarded. Vulnerable in his near-nakedness, but as unaffected and natural as he had been before. Could I stand before him the same way? With such confidence?

I doubted it.

“Good-bye, Dorothy. If I don’t return, please see yourself back to the hotel with apologies to your family on my behalf.”

“Shall I let Mrs. Coburn know what happened to you?”

“That would be nice.”

He walked to the edge of the pool and executed a perfect dive off the side. He glided what seemed like a long way underwater before surfacing with the paper triumphantly grasped in his upturned arm. He made his way back to the side of the pool using a clumsy one-armed stroke, the precious questions held safely out of the water in his other hand.

Once he reached the side, he spread the paper carefully on the ledge.

“You may want to avert your eyes, Dorothy.” He grinned up at me. “The material…well, let’s just say it’s a bit flimsy.”

“And what if I don’t?” I taunted him. He was my prisoner in the pool for the moment, and I was enjoying it.

“Please avert your eyes, Dorothy. To save me from complete humiliation.”

I smirked back at him.

“Oh, screw it,” he blustered. “Just give me my shirt, please.”

I couldn’t torment him any longer, so I set his shirt and shorts on the side of the pool and picked up the soggy questions, then retreated to our lounge chair. Before I knew it, he was out of the pool, drying off with his shirt and zipping up his shorts, not having revealed a thing to me.

The questions? They were sodden. Mush. Nothing but ink-smeared pulp. I wadded them up into a ball.

“My glasses?” He stood before me, still bare-chested. His hair was swept off his face. It hung down the back of his neck. Soaking wet and with all the curl removed, it was much longer than I realized.

I placed the glasses carefully over his ears, adjusting the part on his nose that was always just slightly off balance.

“Now you look like Arash again. Sort of. Except for your hair.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“A very good thing.” I blushed. “But I have bad news.”

I held out my hand, palm up, the ball of wet paper balanced sadly in the middle.

“What…have…you…done?” He grasped me by the shoulders and pulled me close. My lips brushed his bare chest. I could have kissed him then. But I didn’t.

“What did
I
do? You’re blaming
me
? I tried my best to save it, but it was hopeless.”

“Never mind,” Arash said. “We’ll survive this tragedy just like we’ve survived everything up until now…your blister, for instance.”

“How?”

And then I had one of those
duh
moments.

“I’m sure we can find it online.” I held up my phone. The screen was black. The battery dead. I’d only just begun to recharge it when I left my hotel room.

“Mine’s good.” Arash picked up his phone, his thumb gliding across the screen. His face lit up. “There’s an app. There’s an actual app for what we’re doing. Hold on, I’m getting it.”

“An app for falling in love?”

I guessed that was okay although not quite as romantic as our crumpled treasure map. At least it wasn’t likely to be blown away by the wind.

We heard footsteps and looked up to see a man with leathery, tanned skin and spiky, gray-tinged hair making his way toward us.

“Hey, what are you kids doing out here? The pool closes at ten. You’re not allowed to be swimming now.”

“
Kids?
” Arash murmured under his breath, and I got a brief glimpse of something I hadn’t seen in him before. Something I couldn’t identify, but I knew it mirrored the same thing in me.

Embarrassment? Powerlessness in the face of authority?

But he recovered quickly. Smoothly. Arash style.

“Begging your pardon, sir. But my friend, Dorothy whom you see here, Dorothy and I were just relaxing poolside admiring the view from your lovely hotel when a capricious…no, a
malicious
zephyr snatched something from us. An item near and dear to our hearts.”

Arash’s nose wrinkled as though to emphasize the grave danger we were facing. The man folded his arms across his chest and regarded us with a baffled smile.

“Naturally, I couldn’t disappoint the lady, you understand. Nor did I want the object in question to be sucked into your pool pump, possibly causing serious damage and, who knows, maybe even a pool closure tomorrow for thousands of disappointed hotel guests. So I dove in to retrieve it.”

“Go on, get out of here. No more swimming, you hear?”

“We leave even as you speak.” Arash took my hand and led me toward the gate, which marked the exit to the beach. “Have a pleasant evening.”

“You two be careful, okay? The crazies come out this late at night. Just keep an eye out for them.”

We walked along the path that spilled us out onto the sand. Huge spotlights lit up the waves.

“Crazies?” I said. “Maybe we should go back on the street where there are more people.”

“The only crazies on this beach are you and me. He’s just trying to scare us. We’re fine.”

I did want to go to the beach with Arash and I didn’t see anyone who fit that description.

Probably he was just trying to scare us
,
I thought.

***

But on the beach all worries about crazies disappeared. This was where I had imagined myself with Arash all along. This was our certain destination, as if we were helpless to combat the forces bringing us to this spot.

I kicked off the flip-flop on my good foot so I could feel the sand beneath my feet one last time. Sand instead of snow. It was delicious, and I was going to miss it terribly. For the first time that night, I reached for Arash’s hand on my own. We existed, just the two of us, on that tiny blip of land—volcanic residue, really. Out in the middle of the world’s largest body of water. Nothingness surrounding us. Nothingness above us. How had two people so different found each other on this night in this place?

“Let’s sit,” he suggested, and we sat just above the line that marked the division between wet and dry.

The dimpled water cradled the lights of the city and sky. I wriggled my fingers and toes into the still-warm sand. Arash looked at his phone and read the next question.

“‘If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future, or anything else, what would you want to know?’”

“That’s pretty broad,” I said. “A crystal ball that could tell you anything. Remember, you already consulted your crystal ball with the other question. The one about the perfect day.”

“Fortunately, my crystal ball takes unlimited questions,” he said. “So I’d like to ask my crystal ball what lies beyond this life. When I die, does everything just fade to black, or is there more? And if there’s more, how much more? A repetition of my life here on earth except with all the people who died before me? Or an altered reality where perhaps I’m a spiritual force floating through the universe looking for a new body to inhabit? That’s what I really want to know. I hope my crystal ball is up to the task of answering.”

“Would you really want to know? What if the crystal ball tells you that’s it, there’s nothing else? Would you be bummed out? Wouldn’t it be like having the doctor tell you that in one year you’re going to die of cancer? I don’t want to know. I want to be able to hope this isn’t the end.”

“It wouldn’t bother me a bit, because I’m going on the assumption that all we have is the life we’ve been given. So anything else would be a bonus. In any case, I want to live my life like there’s no hereafter. I can’t imagine anything as beautiful as what we have here, even with all the pain that comes with it. Look around you. This is already heaven. This is paradise.”

He leaned forward, toward the ocean, elbows propped against knees. I shifted to tuck my dress underneath me, anchoring it against the ocean breeze.

“Okay, it’s your turn,” he said after a while.

I guess somewhere in the back of my mind I’d been thinking about my answer since we’d begun to share serious issues. Since I started to trust him. I probably knew all along I was going to bring it up somehow before the night was over. Here was my chance.

“Mine is kind of personal, and I’ve never told anyone about it before. Or at least about what I’ve been wondering since it happened.”

Arash looked at me kind of surprised but interested at the same time. It was a confession I knew might test the opinion he had of me. But it was also an opportunity to unload something that had been bothering me for a few years. It was the first time I’d felt comfortable enough with someone to bring it up. I hoped he’d still like me after he heard what I had to say.

“You can tell the crystal ball anything,” he said. “The crystal ball never judges. It just delivers facts.”

“A while back…when I was a freshman, there was an incident.”

Why am I admitting this?

“An
incident
?”

No choice but to go on. I’m committed.

“It was sort of a scandal in our school. Or at least among the freshman class.”

“Oooh. A
scandal
.”

“A few of the students got ahold of an advance copy of the Biology midterm. It was on the teacher’s desk, and some girls leaving class saw it sitting there. The teacher was out in the hall and nobody else was in the classroom, so nobody saw when one of the girls picked it up and…shoved it into her coat pocket.”

“Uh-oh,” Arash said. “I don’t like where this is going.”

Had I just foolishly ended this night? This romance or whatever it was? I couldn’t bear the thought of what would come next, but I had to go on. I stared straight ahead at the waves, their profile lit by the floodlights. The waves didn’t stop even when my heart felt like it did. They just kept coming. They nudged me forward.

“I was the girl who picked up the test.”

I shoved my legs straight out in front of me, digging my heels into the wet part of the sand.

“And?”

“And we got caught, of course. Someone told on us anonymously. It was the four of us who’ve been friends forever who were in on it, even though I was the one who actually stole it.”

“Why did you steal it, Dorothy?” His voice was soft, kind…but insistent.

“I’ve actually thought about that question a lot, as you can probably imagine. And my honest answer after a few years of beating myself up over it…I wanted to be cool. I wanted to make an impression. I’d never been the daring one in our group. I’d always been the one who follows. So that was my way of changing the dynamic. Stupid, huh?”

“Very stupid. Did you use the test to study?”

“Oh, hell no. As soon as I pulled it out of my pocket, I walked over to the trash can to throw it away. It felt like a snake that was about to bite me. But one of my friends, Talia. She grabbed it from me. Then I said I had to go to the bathroom, and I threw up.”

“So you have a fairly active conscience, as it turns out.”

“Not active enough to take it away from Talia, who actually didn’t have any problem using it to study.”

“And the other two?”

“Sharene was horrified. She was almost as sick as me when she realized what I’d done. Of course she refused to even look at it. Jessica glanced at it. Maybe not enough to memorize everything, but probably enough to give her an advantage.”

“And how did you do on the test?”

“I got an A…ninety-eight percent. Because I studied hard.”

“What happened when you were reported?”

“We all got F’s on our midterms and received three-day suspensions. It was awful because Sharene didn’t have anything at all to do with it, and I told them I was the one who did it. I told them nobody else was involved. But whoever had reported us reported us as a group, so everyone got equal punishment.”

“And your father? I’m sure he was…disappointed.”

“Everyone was. My mom, my dad, my granny. We kept it from Chester because my parents didn’t want him to know since he kind of looks up to me. Or that was their logic.”

“Makes sense to me.”

“Me too, I guess. Anyway, my parents went through this whole period of self-examination and questioned whether they’d driven me to it by having too high of expectations of me. Pushing me too hard. Blah, blah, blah.”