Chapter 28 #3
“The Fighting Roosters’ twentieth reunion is on its way!
” she announces, beaming, like it’s the best news anyone’s ever delivered.
“Prince Kuhio Preparatory Academy, class of you know when. Can you believe it’s been twenty years?
I’m chairing the whole thing, right here at this so-so resort.
Just you, me, and the entire class, all week.
” She steps in close to Koa, ignoring me as best as she can.
It’s a theme I sense will be repeating itself soon and often.
She curls her finger around his collar. “You and I have so much history to relive, don’t we? The bonfires. Prom. That whole last summer we spent locked in one another’s arms.” Her smile turns devilish. “Some things deserve a proper ending, don’t they?”
And just like that, my blood pressure spikes to dangerous levels. Spam growls in solidarity. Come to think of it, Spam Musubi is growling too. It’s good to know I’ve got the animal kingdom on my side.
Something flickers across Koa’s face. Just for a second. There and gone, but I saw it, and it’s not the look of a man remembering prom.
Birdie sheds a dark smile. “Just think of all the secrets we can explore.” There’s a daring gleam in her eye, and he flinches because of it.
“That was a long time ago,” he says as he frowns her way.
“You’re right about that,” Birdie says lightly. “Amazing what twenty years can’t bury. I guess we can all get back to some unfinished business.” She gives him one last lingering look. She gives me a lethal smile, sweet as arsenic, and sweeps off the way she came. “See you both very soon!”
I watch her go. Then look at Koa, who’s staring after her with his new puppy in his arms and an expression I have never once seen on him in all the murderous months I’ve known him.
He sets Spam Musubi down, and the second her paws hit the beach, my Spam hops down as well.
The flirty pooch lets out a delighted bark before giving chase, and the one-eared ginger menace launches off with a yowl of pure betrayal and tears down the beach with a smitten Shiba in joyful pursuit, the two of them kicking up sand all the way to the water.
Ruby and Lani have made their way down the beach too, abandoning us the instant Shaka and Loco peeled off their shirts to dismantle the runway. And now the two of them are stationed at the waterline with shave ice and zero shame, deeply invested in the demolition.
Which leaves me and Koa alone on the sand.
He pulls me in against his chest, bandaged arm and all, and rests his cheek next to mine, and for a moment neither of us says anything, watching a cat and a dog tear figure-eights across paradise.
“So,” I say. “Your high school reunion. At my resort. With your old flame chairing it and a dark secret hanging over the whole thing.”
“Don’t,” he murmurs.
“Last time you said don’t in that voice, I found two bodies.”
“Jinx.”
“I’m just saying. Statistically, the odds favor the morgue.”
He sighs into my hair, and his arms tighten, and out on the water the sun is starting its long golden slide toward the sea, and somewhere up the beach a rooster crows like it knows something.
“Stop trying to solve every mystery in the world,” Koa murmurs as he pulls me close.
“Make me.”
He tips my chin up and does exactly that, slow and easy, the way he does everything, and for a few perfect seconds there’s no secret and no reunion and no annoying birds in the vicinity, just Koa and me and all of Hanalei Bay holding still around us as we kiss to our heart’s content.
Then he pulls back, rests his forehead against mine, and I can feel his entire body exhale. “It’s going to be a long week,” he says.
“They always are.”
For months now, the murders have always hinged on someone else’s secret. Someone else’s past, someone else’s reckoning, with Koa standing calm in the middle of it with his badge and his statistics.
Not next week.
Next week the secret is his.
And I have a sinking feeling that this time, when the body drops, it’s going to land a lot closer to home.
Welcome to paradise.
Thank you for reading!