“What do you think?” I asked as we stood in line at the bank ATM. Neither of us had very many Peruvian Sols, so we both had to pull out some cash. “Do you think they’re going to get the bathroom fixed tonight? Or should we just cut our losses and go try to find somewhere else to stay?”

He lifted one shoulder, having not bothered to do up all the buttons on his baby blue linen shirt. His chest was exposed, and I found it sexy as hell. “We’ll see what they say when we get back in an hour or so, and if they’re not overly confident, or make us go and use one of the communal bathrooms, then we’ll leave. But I’m starving, so let’s find a grocery store and grab some food.”

I grinned up at him, and then took another leap, one of my many leaps for the day, and linked my fingers with his. He smiled down at me, pulled me close and kissed the top of my head. I untangled our hands and wrapped my arm around his waist. What the heck was going on? I’d just met this man, yet I’d already had sex with him, and we were already acting like boyfriend and girlfriend. It was so weird, and yet it felt good.

He let me go first, and I went and pulled out three hundred dollars’ worth of Sols, preferring to take out larger sums of money and just split it up between my bags and on my person, rather than do multiple small transactions. The international banking fees and currency exchange were atrocious, so the less often I had to pay the charges, the better. I still had four hundred U.S. stashed back in my backpack inside the locked valuables cabinet in our room, but that was emergency money in case I lost my debit or credit card, and I wouldn’t touch it unless I absolutely had to.

I waited for Derrick to do the same, and then he grabbed my hand again, and the two of us took off back outside, wandering around beautiful, modern, clean Miraflores.

“Stop here.” His voice was commanding as he let go of my hand and took a step back, reaching into his shoulder bag and bringing out his camera.

“Why?”

He quirked an eyebrow at me. Was the man not accustomed to being questioned? A wry smile tugged at his lips. “Because this view is beautiful, and it’s even more beautiful with you in front of it. Smile.”

We’d managed to find ourselves down along the water. Throngs of locals and tourists alike lined the path that ran along the edge of a giant cliff. Surfers and paragliders dotted the glittering water against the pale blue sky and children ran around half-naked on the sand down below. It was a stunning setting, welcoming and relaxing, and for the first time in my trip, I was happy I had someone to share the moment with. I had been content traveling alone this far, knowing that the only person I should have been experiencing it all with was no longer here and feeling that if I couldn’t share it with him, I shouldn’t share it with anyone.

I wasn’t paying attention to Derrick, but he was busy snapping photos, some of me, some of the brick-colored statues in the giant circular courtyard where we’d stopped, some of children and families playing and chatting. The sun was hot; the breeze was mighty, and when a sudden gust picked up the end of my dress and my hair, sending it into a maelstrom around me, I couldn’t help but burst out laughing.

I turned back to face him, and his nose was back in the book.

“It says here, the Miraflores central plaza has flea markets and art exhibitions. Those could be cool.”

I nodded, stopping next to a small bronze plaque and reading it. We were on the Costa Verde (green coast), and it was positively breathtaking. I inhaled the freshness of the sea air and let my shoulders relax. Even if this was just a one-time, or maybe two-times (hopefully) fling, it was freeing, and I felt the heavy weight that had been stacked on my shoulders since Ray’s death finally start to slide off. I’d always love him, always mourn him and think of him, and even though the book my mother had given me was loaded with complete bullshit, it was right about one thing, I needed to heal and move on. Ray would want me to be happy.

“Piper?”

I shook my head, joining reality once again.

Derrick stared at me. He cocked his head like a curious but menacingly sexy puppy. “You okay?”

I nodded and brushed my hair from my eyes. “Just peachy. You got all the photos you wanted to take?”

“Come on.” There it was again, that authoritative tone. But just like before, there was a hint of a smile in his voice and a sparkle of amusement in his eyes. He stowed his camera and reached for my hand again, pulling me close and planting another affectionate kiss on my forehead. “Let’s go buy some food, head back and see how our bathroom is doing and whether it’s still a pool or not.”

I beamed up at him. “Okay.”

* * *

“I’m going to run up and check on our room; you want to put the food in the communal fridge?” he asked as we made our way back through the hostel doors, saying a quick hello to Gladys at the front and accepting our key back from her.

They had a weird policy where we relinquished our room key to the front desk before we left, and then they’d give it back to us when we returned. I understood why, so that we didn’t lose it out in the city, but it’d still sent a giant ice pick down my spine when I’d had to turn the key over. I felt like I was handing over my privacy. But then again, the maintenance guy was going to be going in and out of there, so I had to suck it up and secure all my valuables in the small lockable chest inside the room.

Derrick took off upstairs, making the four-story climb, while I wiped my wrist across my brow, nodded shyly at the two guys playing pool in the lounge room and opened the fridge. We hadn’t bought much — some apples and oranges, a small block of cheese and some bread, and a container of yogurt.

The hostel advertised a free breakfast, but after having traveled through Central America, staying only in hostels, the term “complimentary breakfast” was really open to interpretation by each hostel. Some places put out big spreads with toast and eggs, sausages and pancakes, whereas others gave each person a child-size box of Frosted Flakes, a cafeteria-size carton of milk, and a couple of slices of pineapple. I wasn’t nearly as big as Derrick, but even I needed a bigger meal than that to get me through to lunch.

“Piper!” He came back down the stairs in a red-faced panic. “It’s gone!”

I shut the fridge. “What’s gone?”

“Everything! It’s all gone. We’ve been robbed. Everything, your camera, my laptop, all my money, your money, my passport. Everything that we’d put in the cabinet. They busted off the lock.”

If I hadn’t already experienced extreme devastation in my short adult life, I would have thought I was having a heart attack. The whole world became very fuzzy, color dulled, all the sound in the place quickly morphed into a harsh and unidentifiable buzzing sound, and my entire body began to shake.

I took the stairs two—sometimes three—at a time and was in our room in seconds. The place looked like it had been ransacked. Clothes everywhere. The entire contents of our backpacks strewn about, my toiletries bag opened and dumped all over the bed, while my bras and underwear, clean and dirty, lay in a heap on the floor. The combination lock I’d used on the cabinet had been cut with a bolt cutter and hung off the loop like a defeated soldier.

With a small shred of hope, I fell to my knees and peered beneath the bed. Maybe something of value had fallen and rolled underneath. Derrick was behind me in the doorway, along with Gladys, who just stood there with a stupid and surprised look on her face.

I rounded on her. “You did this!”

She shook her head vehemently. “No, Senora, no not me.”

“You had our key. You let maintenance into our room. It had to have been them. Where are they now?”

She shook her head again, pure fear on her face. I probably looked like I was going to kill her. “Gone, Miss. They gone.”

Derrick had started packing. “We need to leave.”

“No fuck!” I snapped, but instead of packing I took off back downstairs. Gladys followed me. “You need to call the police.”

“N-no…no policia,” she stammered.

“Why?”

“N-no policia.” All of a sudden, the woman had lost her grasp of the English language. How convenient.

I grabbed her by the lapel of her peach blouse. “Fucking call the police.” And then without looking back, I took off out of the hostel and started running. Within two minutes I was bursting through the doors of the police station. I doubled over and put my hands on my thighs, my chest heaving from having sprinted the entire way, while warm tears stung the corner of my eyes. A hand fell on my back, and shiny black dress shoes came into view.

“Senora?”

“Help!” Was all I could say. Tasting vomit at the back of my throat and doing everything I could to push it back down. “Help.”

Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, given that I knew all of twenty words in Spanish, and ten of those were numbers, but I managed to get the gist of my point across to the seven police officers whose attention I managed to attract. In another five minutes three of them, all dressed in tan pants and navy shirts, were accompanying me back down the road to the hostel.

We burst through the door, and Gladys’ face fell the moment she saw them. Her eyes went wide while I just gave her a smug smile. Fuck you, bitch. If you’re not going to call the cops, I’ll get them myself.

She started prattling to them in Spanish, wringing her hands together in worry, while the older and more authoritative-looking officer whipped out a pencil and a pad of paper and began furiously scribbling notes. I just stood there glaring at her.

“No, no.” Gladys kept saying, shaking her head while her eyes flew to mine, pleading with me. For what? Compassion? Help? Ha! Fat chance of that, sister.

She led them upstairs, and I followed, where we ran into Derrick. He was just finishing up packing both of our bags and was getting ready to sling both his bag and mine on to his body to head downstairs. But the man was going to trip and fall to his death if he did. I took my backpack from him, waiting for him to pass me my camera bag, but a sob caught in my throat at the realization that I no longer had a camera bag. I no longer had a camera. What else did I no longer have?

“Piper, we’re leaving. Let’s go.”

“No!” I threw my hands on my hips. “I went and got the police. They can help.”

He shook his head and reached for my elbow to turn me around. “No, they can’t. The police here are corrupt. They won’t help. They came because you’re white and a woman. They followed you, not your problem. They don’t care. Let’s go.”

I dug in my heels. “No. They might be able to find the maintenance guys.”

He rolled his eyes in impatience. “Even if they do, we’re not going to get our stuff back. We’re white. To them, we are millionaires, even if we’re not. They think that what they took is just a drop in the bucket to us. The maintenance guys don’t care. Gladys doesn’t care, and the police don’t care. We need to get out of here before they decide to hold us and demand a bribe for us to leave.”

I gawked at him. What the hell was he talking about?

He swallowed and pulled me to a corner, his eyes quickly flying to the two police officers who were “investigating” the crime scene. The more I watched them, the more I realized they were just acting. Boredom paraded across both their faces while their eyes kept drifting back to me and my chest.

When I’d given a quick account at the police station of what had been taken, all the cops had gone walleyed, practically licking their lips at the sound of such wealth. But I wasn’t rich. The camera had been a graduation present from my parents, and all the other things they’d taken — my underwater camera, my phone, my makeup, my credit cards, my money — they only really added up to a little over a thousand dollars. And I’d cancel my credit cards immediately. But Derrick, they’d taken his laptop, his money, his passport. How was he not more furious?

“We need to be very careful here. We’ll go to the embassy tomorrow. But we can’t make a scene. Any opportunity to demand a bribe, and they’ll take it. We need to get out of here before the police get any ideas and don’t let us leave.” He grabbed me by the bicep and began to usher me down the stairs.

We walked aimlessly down the road, loaded down with backpacks and bags, no idea where we were headed but desperate to get away as fast as we could. Derrick’s grip on my arm was still tight, as though he was worried I might run back there and start kicking ass and taking names. Because, Lord knows, I wanted to.

We came to a building marked “Tourist Police,” and he ushered me inside.

“We’d like to report a robbery, please,” he said to the military attire-clad man behind the desk. The guy looked no older than eighteen, while a patchy scruff speckled his jaw and upper lip, making him look like he’d washed his face with coffee grounds and hadn’t quite wiped it all off.

We sat there for nearly two hours waiting to give our statement, and even then, all we’d done was sit at a computer and report the incident. The tourist police officer we’d been issued spoke about as much English as I knew Spanish. What kind of tourist officer doesn’t speak English?

“So…now what?” I asked, passing the keyboard to Derrick so he could type up a list of everything he’d lost.

The officer just shrugged, her bun so tight on the back of her head that it pulled at the corner of her eyes and made her whole face look stretched. “Nothing,” she said blandly. Once again, I was met with boredom.

“Nothing?”

“She’s useless,” came a voice from behind us. A guy and girl around our age or perhaps a tad younger were sitting in chairs next to the door. “She doesn’t care about you or your problem.”

His friend, a pretty blonde with a lace crop top and high-waisted shorts, nodded. “We’ve been here three hours, and it’s just to report a lost passport. They literally don’t care.”

I shook my head, a nauseating wave of fatigue swamping me like a sudden tsunami. “Then what’s the point of all of this? Why do they even exist?”

They both shrugged. “No clue,” he said. “But the embassy told us to come here before we went back to them to get issued a new passport. Where are you guys from?”

“Victoria in British Columbia…Canada.” I smiled, suddenly wishing I was back home and away from this godforsaken place.

“Calgary,” Derrick muttered. He’d been rather surly since we’d left the hostel, mostly quiet, but grunting orders at me when he had to talk. For the most part, I’d just kept my mouth shut and did as he said.

“Hey, cool! We’re from Vancouver.” The girl grinned. “Though I grew up in Victoria. Matt’s kind of lived all over.”

“I was born just outside of Calgary though,” he said with a nod.

She rolled her eyes and got up and extended her hand. “I’m Elissa, and this is Matt.”

I took her hand, the immediate relief of finding more of Canada, more of home, my people, my kin, filling my heart and easing the pain of the day just a little.

“Piper.” I smiled. “And this is Derrick.”

“So,” Elissa started with a grin, encouraging me to come and sit next to her, while Matt was finally called up to the counter and Derrick continued to fuss around on the computer. “What happened?”

* * *

After I spilled my guts and caught Elissa up to speed, she just sat there, eyes wide and mouth open. And then, in true Canadian fashion, she hugged me. It didn’t matter that I’d met this woman less than ten minutes ago; we were friends. Just like that. Such was the life of a backpacker.

“Well, we’re staying in a dorm room at our hostel, but there is an empty bunk bed. You guys are welcome to follow us back and stay there.”

I swallowed, suddenly loving the idea of being surrounded by more people from home. I’d traveled abroad to experience other cultures and meet people from all over the world, but all I wanted to do right now was go home. But because I couldn’t just hop on the next plane bound for Vancouver International, being in a room chock-full of fellow Canadians was probably the next best thing.

A scowl-faced Derrick came and joined me on the chairs. “Let’s go. We need to find a new hostel.”

I nodded. “Yeah…uh. Elissa invited us to join them back at their hostel. They have a spare bunk bed in their room.”

He nodded. “Sure, whatever.” Matt joined us, and then the four of us hailed a cab.

We loaded our backpacks into the trunk, and then everybody piled in. My eyes went wide at the sight of the bulletproof Plexiglass bubble the cab driver had encased himself in. What fresh hell had I just flown into? A country where their cabbies didn’t feel safe unless they drove around town like a beta-fish.

“I know, eh? Freaky. Doesn’t exactly make you feel safe.” Matt snorted, turning around from the front passenger seat and taking in my shocked eyes. “They’re all like this. Armed robbery is huge here. And because cabbies deal so much in cash and carry it all on them, they’re big targets.”

I shook my head. “That’s insane.”

“We’re here!” Elissa cheered, bailing out and knocking on the trunk so that the cab driver could open it from the inside. He popped it, and she and Matt helped us with our backpacks.

“It’s a party hostel,” she warned as we made our way up to the front door, a camera tucked discreetly at the corner blinking red. They flashed wristbands, and then the door clicked open, and we followed through a series of doors the same as the front. Each door opened only once their wristbands had been made visible.

Finally, after about the fourth door, we emerged into what I can only describe as an international 4 p.m. rave. People from every corner of the world danced to some techno-pop song in a room down the hall, while strobe lights flashed and black lights illuminated everything and anything into a Day-Glo hue.

We walked up to the front desk, heavy-hearted and unsure of what we’d just gotten ourselves into (once again), and to the heavy bass of David Guetta, whoops and hollers, and the chanting of “chug, chug, chug” followed by “yeahhhh.” We got our wristbands and then entered the world of Hostel Travesura International.

“This is it!” Elissa announced, unlocking the door and letting Derrick and I walk in first. “It’s not much. But it’s home for now.” Her mouth drew down in disappointment. “We’d planned to go to Mancora, but Matt lost his passport, so we have to stick around.”

The room was L-shaped, with three sets of bunk beds. Two sets were tucked around a corner, while the third bed, the empty one, was the first thing you saw when you walked in.

“Is there a safe or a cabinet we can lock?” Derrick asked. His cantankerous demeanor still not having seemed to dissolve.

Matt nodded and then walked over to the far wall. “Everyone gets a locker. You can put your own lock on it, or rent one from the front desk.”

Derrick nodded and then went to work unloading his bag.

“We’ll leave you two to unpack,” Elissa said softly, coming up behind me and resting a hand on my back. “But come meet us downstairs in a bit. It’s Music Bingo night in the bar, and the food at this place is actually pretty good.”

We didn’t talk much as we unpacked. In fact, we hardly said two words to one another the entire night. We unpacked in silence, we ate dinner in silence and then we got drunk off our faces and won prizes in music bingo, all without conversing at all. He just sat there with a pissed-off scowl on his face, his eyes like two gray thunderclouds of rage.

* * *

It was nearly two thirty in the morning when we finally staggered up the stairs to our room. Elissa, Matt, and their friends Rita and Karina were all still downstairs dancing on tables and doing shots with a group of Argentinian soccer players.

I stumbled into the bathroom and started to brush my teeth, hating going to bed without minty fresh breath and hating even more when I woke up with the taste of my last drink in my mouth the next morning. The door to the bathroom opened up, and Derrick stalked in. His brows pinched while he opened up his toiletries bag and squeezed toothpaste out onto his brush. We stood there, eyes locked in the mirror, both of us foaming at the mouth like rabid mongoose, rhythmically brushing our teeth.

I spit and rinsed and then wiped my mouth. “You’re being an asshole,” I said, with a slightly drunken slur to my speech.

He spat and rinsed. “Excuse me?”

“This isn’t my fault, you know?” My hands on my hips, I snagged his eyes in the mirror.

“Are you saying it’s mine?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Then why am I an asshole?”

“Because you’re treating everyone like garbage. You’re angry.”

He shot me a look and then went to the task of removing his contacts. I turned away. I just couldn’t handle watching someone jam their finger into their eye. Ray had worn glasses and contacts as well, and it freaked me out to watch him put them in and take them out. I was equally disturbed by the site of blood. Med school, no matter how well I had scored on the MCAT, had never been in my future. And I had deliberately avoided any form of criminal law as well, just in case I had to look at images of gruesome murder scenes, instead sticking to corporate law. And look how well that had turned out!

“And you’re not angry?” That chip was still there on his shoulder, and his tone was proof of it.

I snorted. “Of course, I am. I’d like to find the fuckers and castrate them and their first-born sons myself. But I don’t shut people out when I’m angry.”

He flicked the contacts into the garbage and then turned to face me. His hard, shirtless body was big and menacing in front of me. I swallowed and took a step back. “Well, I do. Give me some time, okay?”

I couldn’t handle how intense his stare was, and I let my eyes fly to his big, sexy bare feet. “Okay…you’re not mad at me, though?” I don’t know why I felt the need to ask. I’d done absolutely nothing wrong.

A knuckle came up under my chin, and he tilted my head up until I was forced to look back into his eyes. “No. I’m not mad at you.” He dropped his hand and then turned around to leave the bathroom, I followed him.

“Okay.”

“You take the top bunk.” He ordered. “They look sturdy enough, but if for whatever reason they collapse, you’ll be less hurt, because having me fall on you could be really dangerous.”

I shrugged again and started to climb the ladder. “Okay.”

He flicked the light out and climbed into bed. “Goodnight, Piper.”

I pulled the sheet up to my chin, the need to cry suddenly grabbing hold of my chest and throat so fiercely I could hardly breathe. I squeezed my eyes shut. Hot tears trickled down onto my pillow, and the vice around my ribs began to squeeze.

I felt him shift in the bed below and then heard the strained squeak of the metal frame. “Piper.”

I opened my eyes. He stood in front of me, but all I could see was his head. The moon was peeking out from behind the drawn blind and was casting beautiful shadows across his stubbly face.

I fought to control my breath as it came out in staggered gasps.

“Piper.”

“It’s nothing.” My voice caught in my throat. “Goodnight.”

“Piper.”

“Go to sleep, Derrick.”

“Piper.” Then he reached for me. I was drawn to him, drawn to his kindness, his charisma, the quiet power and confidence that seemed to percolate around him like an invisible ball of energy. I scrambled over the small bed rail, and he caught me, cradling my body against his. He tucked us both into his tiny twin bed, spooning me, protecting me with his warmth. I was asleep in seconds.