When the door to Mollie’s suite shuts behind me, I let out a breath. There’s something about her that makes me nervous, and I don’t know what. Maybe I should just pin it on the trauma of saving a half-dead girl.

Down at the poolside bar, I nod at P.J. and Jake, stuck on this shift with me. They’re already swamped, so I grab an apron and jump in.

As much as I hate working at the resort, I actually like bartending. There’s something nice about compressed chaos: a few hours where you’re in the weeds, running on autopilot as you take orders, pour, mix, serve, and repeat. I don’t even mind the same old conversation with tourists about what it’s like to live and work in Hawaii, what’s in the Island Punch, do you have mainland beers, etc. The unending rush makes time nonexistent, until it’s suddenly over and you feel a weird calmness, like you just stepped out of a sauna.

The best part: you don’t have time or energy to think about anything else.

When the rush finally dies, I have about two hours left in the shift. P.J. is flirting with a tourist—not in the “good for business” way, but real—while Jake loads the dishwasher with Tetris-esque ability.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” he says, and I brace myself for the question I know is coming, “did you really save that guest down on the beach, yesterday?”

“Oh, God,” I mutter. I can’t get away from it.

Jake laughs. “Take that as a yes.”

“It’s not a big deal.”

“Hey, I was just gonna tell you nice job, man.” He kicks the dishwasher shut and wipes his hands on his apron. It’s streaked with every color of the rainbow. Jake’s got a generous pour, but a messy one, too. “Pretty heroic shit.”

“It was nothing. Anyone would’ve done the same, if they’d been out there.”

“Most people wouldn’t have been looking in the first place,” he says. His tone is more serious, now, and even I have to shrug in agreement. He’s probably right.

Bar traffic has thinned; the bulk of our orders come from the ticker, put in by servers that roam the pool deck and outdoor seating for the restaurant. They used to manually put in orders at the indoor bar, while we were for walk-up customers only. We now have twice the drinks to make on any given day—but it is a better arrangement, I’ll give it that.

“You like the new system?” Jake asks, tearing off another Drink of the Day ticket. “Luka thought it up.”

This surprises me. Luka isn’t usually one to show initiative. “He did?”

“Yeah. He pitched it to the guys upstairs and they went crazy. There’s a rumor they’re changing all the Paradise locations to it, pretty soon.” He shoots me a look. “He didn’t tell you?”

I shake my head, trying not to show that I’m kind of hurt. Maybe it’s my fault he didn’t tell me. Whenever anything to do with the resort expanding or improving comes up, I roll my eyes and tune it out.

“Do me a favor,” he says, as he counts the wine left in the fridge, “grab me another...four moscatos and...two noirs from the kitchen, would you? I’ll finish up those daiquiris.”

“You sure?” I ask, but I’m already letting go of the blender, all too happy to be sent on an errand. The second Jake nods, I’m gone.

The face of the resort is lit up like it’s early evening instead of midnight. Music pumps from the restaurant patio; people laugh and chat, cameras flashing like a storm.

I used to like being part of people’s vacations. When we were just half a mile of beach and cabanas with a big lodge, a little bar, and a couple hot tubs, it was fun. I saw customers propose, elope, renew their vows. We helped spring breakers and new grads have a good time. We toasted couples on their fiftieth wedding anniversaries, just as in love as ever.

For a week or two at a time, we were part of people’s families. A lot of customers came back yearly, in fact, and had seen us grow up, knew our names, and even brought us gifts from the mainland.

Back then, we didn’t have a PR department. We didn’t have an infinity pool, or a deejay, or a resort hashtag displayed at every table. We still had servers, payroll, all that: it wasn’t a small business. But it did feel like a family one, at least.

The restaurant kitchen bustles with closing tasks. No one notices me as I grab a wine box and fill it with bottles, then stroll out like I own the place. Which someday, unfortunately, I will.

Jake is talking to a guest when I approach, the wine tucked under my arm. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but Jake points at me. The girl turns.

It’s Mollie.

“Hey.” I’m surprised by how happy I am to see her, even though I have no idea why. At least, I’m happy until I see her face. It kind of looks like she’s been crying.

Even so, she smiles. “Hey. You want to go do something?”

Dinner started innocently enough.

Despite my apparent brush with death, I wasn’t feeling as bold as Tanya thought I should. When she motioned for me to sit near Damian, I ignored her and sat across the table, instead.

It was all girls on one side, with the twins, Damian, and James on the other. Naturally, Ted and Carrie were side-by-side, probably playing footsie—and a little more than that—under the table.

“Let’s get champagne,” Ian said, ordering a bottle before anyone could agree or disagree. When the tray arrived, I watched the liquid splash into my glass and fought my gag reflex. Alcohol hadn’t been kind to me in the last twenty-four hours.

“To Mollie,” Tanya smiled, nudging me as she raised her glass, “and Kai.”

“Here, here!” Carrie echoed, as everyone tapped their crystal together over the seashell centerpiece. I let the champagne graze my lips, but didn’t take a sip. No one noticed.

“Kai?” Ted asked.

“The guy who saved her,” Carrie explained. “He works here, actually. Right, Moll?”

“That’s what he said.” Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Damian staring at his silverware, silent.

I still couldn’t remember what happened between our walk on the beach, and waking up in the hospital. And with our entire friend group hell-bent on celebrating my survival—or, at least, using my survival as an excuse to get wasted—it looked like I would have to wait for some alone time with him to figure it out.

Halfway through dinner, I saw my window. Ted and Carrie snuck off to his room, James was smoking a cigarette with Ian, and Tanya, effortlessly understanding my eye contact, asked Macy to join her in the bathroom. Within seconds, our crowd had dwindled to two.

Damian bit his lip. “So,” he said.

I nodded. “So.”

He got up and took the chair beside me. Our hands brushed, but it was strange: I didn’t feel a jolt of nervousness, like I normally would.

“We need to talk about what happened last night,” he said, voice low. “I feel really bad about it.”

“Why? It was my own stupid fault.”

“I should have gone after you. It wasn’t right, letting you run off when I knew you were upset, and you’d been drinking....” He paused, looking at me from under those blond curls. It was a move that usually made me weak, even when it wasn’t directed at me. But right then, I was too confused to swoon.

“Upset? Why was I upset?”

Damian tilted his head, like he wasn’t sure if I was tricking him or not. “You don’t remember?”

“No. We were drinking at the bar here, then we walked on the beach, then...that’s it.”

“So our conversation,” he said, squinting at me, “the one we had before you ran off, you don’t remember that at all.”

How many times did I have to say it? “No,” I repeated firmly. “Why? What happened?”

He sat back in his chair and sighed, blowing his hair off his forehead. I watched his fingers pull at a thread in the tablecloth; he was trying not to look at me. “You, uh...you kind of...kissed me.”

My brain reeled through about a thousand curse words, but none left my mouth. I was speechless, because it didn’t sound like something I would do. Then again, neither did diving into the ocean in the middle of the night. Thanks a lot, Drunk Mollie.

“Oh,” I said finally. “I’m...sorry?”

He gave a breathy laugh, so I did, too. “It’s okay. I shouldn’t have gone down to the beach with you. I mean, I know how you feel about me.”

“You....” My face stung. I was probably as pink as those watermelon shooters Tanya kept slinging back. “You know?”

Damian nodded and stared into his lap. “Yeah.”

We were quiet for too long. I grabbed my champagne, now flat, and drank. “So I’m guessing,” I said slowly, “that means you don’t feel the same way.”

He shifted in his chair. “It does…but not because of you. God, I hate having to do this again.”

There was something really odd about this moment. I should have felt destroyed, having just heard the biggest crush of my life tell me he didn’t like me back.

But I wasn’t. It hurt, but not nearly as much as it should have.

“I’m gay,” he blurted, pulling me from my thoughts. When I locked my eyes on his, he glanced over at the crowd by the pool, instead. “And when I told you that the first time, it didn’t exactly go over well.”

Finally, I could piece something together, here. As soon as he said it, my mind synced it up with last night, the same words.

“You’re gay,” I repeated.

He hesitated. “Yes.”

“But....” I shook my head. “But I know you liked me back. I mean, at least once.”

He let me take the untouched vodka and soda in front of him, its ice melted. “Not like that, Mollie. I like you as a friend, but...but I can’t like you back the way you like me.”

“Right, gay, I get it.” My head was pounding after only two drinks, anger building up behind the bridge of my nose, out to my temples. I felt cheated, embarrassed.

“Mollie, it’s—”

“So I ran away,” I clarified, “because I was...upset that you’re gay?” Again, I shook my head. Okay, so my crush on Damian was all-consuming. And I could be a bit pathetic, when things with him didn’t go as planned...which was always. But running away, all because he came out? That didn’t sound right.

“No,” I said softly. I wasn’t buying it. “Something else happened.” Now, I remembered the kiss: how the first time, I faltered and landed against his chest. He asked me if I remembered....

“Homecoming.”

“What?”

“Homecoming. You asked me if I remembered that night, sophomore year. We were at the game, and you came up to me, and we....” I paused, sure he could recall the rest. No need to fill him in there. “And after you asked me if I remembered, I said yes...and that’s when I kissed you.”

Damian waited. After a beat, he nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, that, uh...that sounds about right.”

“And then I ran off?”

“Way I remember it. Yeah.”

“I was in a phase.”

It hit me like a train, the rest of the memory. “I was drunk.... You were there....”

“I knew you would let me.”

“Oh, my God,” I gasped. My hand covered my mouth and everything, like the big reveals they do in soap operas. Suddenly, those cheesy reactions didn’t seem so overblown. My brain kept sewing the pieces until I was left with the memory, crystal-clear and whole.

“That’s why I ran away,” I managed. “I didn’t get upset and leave because you came out to me. I did it because...because you told me that. That you only hooked up with me because you knew I’d let you. Because you knew I liked you. You knew I had this huge, stupid crush.”

Damian tongued his cheek for a few seconds. “I promise, Mollie, if I’d known it was going to affect you like that.... I had no idea you liked me that much. You know, where you would—” He stopped.

“Where I would what?”

“You know,” he whispered. “That you would...try to kill yourself.”

“Kill myself?” I didn’t mean to be as loud as I was—but what in the actual hell? “Are you serious?”

“That’s what it seems like,” he said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I know you aren’t suicidal. It’s just, it was really sudden news, you were drunk....”

“Oh, for the love of God. I wasn’t trying to kill myself over you being gay!”

“Whoa, whoa—Damian, you’re gay?”

Both of us turned at the same time. There was Tanya, another drink in hand—both hands, actually—and Macy, right behind her. They looked between us, waiting for one of us to answer.

“Fuck,” Damian spat. He threw his hands up in the air, then let them land on the table, rattling our arsenal of glasses. “Yeah, I’m gay. Whole world knows, now. Great.”

They were both silent, staring at me while I tried to act like I couldn’t care less. I wasn’t sure how well I was doing, not that it mattered. They knew how I felt about him. Apparently, everyone knew.

“Whoa,” someone said again, but it wasn’t Tanya; it came from behind us. The four of us looked just in time to see Ian and James coming up the deck stairs.

“For real, man?” Ian asked. I saw him glance at me.

Great, so everyone did know about my crush. For all I knew, the entire campus talked about it whenever I wasn’t around.

Damian gritted his teeth. “Can we drop the subject, please?”

“Well...how’d it even get brought up?” James asked quietly. He took his seat. One by one, the rest of them followed suit.

Damian and I looked at each other. I couldn’t tell if he wanted me to take over and explain, or if he was asking me not to say anything.

Either way, I didn’t owe him shit.

I stayed silent but raised my eyebrows, making it clear I expected him to start.

“Mollie and I were talking about last night,” he said, after a while. “She didn’t remember our conversation, which...yeah. Included me coming out to her.”

“And Damian,” I added, making sure my voice dripped with venom, “thinks I was so heartbroken over him being gay, I decided to throw myself into the fucking ocean.”

Tanya snorted. The rest of the group looked at Damian again.

“That’s what it seemed like,” he muttered, adjusting his watch. “I mean, we all know you’re obsessed with me, so.”

Macy and Tanya gasped, also of soap-opera proportions. Ian took a long drink, while James picked his lip and stared at the decking underneath us.

Ever since I started to remember that night, something had been building in me, winding tighter and tighter like a rubber band. And looking at Damian right then, hearing him say that, made it snap.

“You’re right, Damian.” I threw down my napkin. It almost hit the candles, which Tanya deftly slid out of the way. “I was just so heartbroken I could never have you, I decided to kill myself. Sure. It wasn’t the fact you admitted to me that the night we hooked up—” I made sure to emphasize these words, so everyone would finally know the score: I wasn’t some hopeless, formerly fat girl with a crush for no reason, “— you were only doing it to try and stop being gay. I wasn’t just drunk and upset that someone I thought was my friend had used me. It must have been a cry for attention.”

“I didn’t use you,” he protested, standing. I stood, too. “I hadn’t figured it out yet.”

“Don’t give me that. You knew—you told me you were going through a ‘phase,’ trying to get with enough girls to talk yourself out of it. And you said you picked me because you knew I’d let you. You knew I had a crush on you. Regardless of why you did it, you still used me.”

I grabbed my purse off the back of my chair, never breaking eye contact with him. “So yeah, I was upset. But not why you think. And not enough to do something like that. Get over yourself.”

I tried my hardest not to cry, but by the time I was down to the lower deck, I could already feel it happening: that bubble in my chest bursting, sending a burn through my throat that I couldn’t control. When Tanya caught up to me, I had my face buried in my palms, my body propped against the banister.

“Hey,” she whispered, putting her arm around me. “You okay?”

“No, I’m not okay!” I kicked my purse over; we watched it tumble down the steps. “Not only do I have zero chance with Damian, a fact he had to tell me twice—”

“You almost drowned, Moll. They said a little memory loss is normal. It isn’t your fault.”

“—but then on top of that, I find out everyone and their mother has known about my crush, all this time?” I wiped my eyes furiously, just as angry that I was crying as I was about anything else. “The worst part is, I thought Damian was my friend. You know? Friends wouldn’t do what he did.”

“I know,” she said softly. I couldn’t tell if she actually agreed with me or not, but like best friends do, she pretended she did. At least for now.

When I calmed down, Tanya helped me to my feet and handed me one of her cocktails. I winced at the strength and the thought of germs, but still drank.

“You know what you need?” she asked.

“Please don’t say, ‘A good fuck.’”

“Fine, I won’t say it.”

“Tan.” I took another sip, talking around the straw. “That’s not going to help me.”

“Couldn’t hurt.” She laughed and brushed my hair out of my eyes. Fishing an ice cube from her drink, she pressed it against my temples, then under my eyes, and wiped my makeup smears away with her thumb.

“On a serious note,” she added, “you can finally move on from Damian, right? I mean, that’s what you wanted: to just know if he liked you or not. Now you know.”

I nodded, but felt even sorrier for myself than before. “I just wish it hadn’t happened like this.”

“I know.” She finished her repair work on my face, then hugged me. “It’ll be okay. There are plenty of good guys out there. Straight ones.”

Reluctantly, I smiled.

“And who knows, maybe you and Damian can work this out and still be friends.”

“Maybe.” The truth was, I didn’t want to think about Damian at all right then. Tanya might have been right about one thing, though.

“I think,” I said, drawing in a long, slow breath, “I want to go find Kai.”

Tanya grinned. “That’s my girl.”