What Happens in Paradise(56)

Leon finally gives Ayers a wave. “I see you, darling. Just gonna be a minute.”

“That’s okay, Leon,” Ayers says. “I’m not staying.” She steps back out onto the sand. She’ll head down to One Love, she decides, and get some jerk pork.

At a quarter after two, Ayers is feeling a little better. She has eaten and taken a ten-minute chair nap, and now she combs the beach for her guests, urging everyone to head back to the boat. If they get out of here at two thirty, there will be less of a line at customs.

Ayers has never so badly wanted a charter to end.

Coming toward her down the beach are Cash and Max. Max is stumbling and bent over; she’s so drunk she can barely walk. Cash has to take her by the hand once they’re wading back to the boat. If she fell over, she would drown in only two feet of water. Ayers wants to say something to Cash, something like Why did you let her get so drunk? She wants to point to Max and say to James, We should have cut her off after snorkeling! But instead, Ayers helps Cash get Max up the three-step ladder and onto the boat. Max heads toward starboard and Ayers thinks maybe she’s going to the bar for another drink, but she bypasses the cabin, pushes little Dougie Dressler out of the way, and starts puking over the side of the boat.

Ayers bows her head. It would be very unprofessional to let the others see her smirking.





Cash




He’s not sure how he got saddled with the drunk, and now crying, young woman named Maxwell—well, yes, he does know, he enabled her drinking and indulged her little crush on him because she’s attractive and flirtatious, and both of these things seemed to bother Ayers, which was, he thought, a very good sign—but now he’s responsible for making sure she gets home safely.

“Find her friend, her people, whoever,” Ayers says. “I’ll clean the boat by myself.”

“But—”

“And, please, Cash, don’t let this happen again. These are our guests, not our friends.”

“You’re right,” he says. “It won’t happen again.”

He half leads, half carries Max off the dock and into the streets of St. John. As they pulled into port, he’d asked Max the name of her friend from high school, but all she’d said was I dunno, and then she groaned and started vomiting again.

It hadn’t been a good look for her, for him, or for Treasure Island, though everyone else on the boat seemed to take it in stride. The parents of the six boys used it as a cautionary tale. “That,” Cash overheard the father whisper to the Stanford-bound DJ, “is what happens when you decide three shots of tequila sound good after midnight.”

There was a couple on the boat, keen snorkelers who’d brought a checklist of fish they were hoping to see, and the man said, “I could have told you how this was going to end up, but she was having so much fun, I hated to put a damper on it.”

“We’ve all been there,” his wife said. “For me, it was the Sig Ep house at West Virginia University in 1996.”

Cash tended to agree; many people at some point in their lives had overdone it like Max. Cash had sampled his father’s scotch and smoked one of his cigars when he was a week away from graduating high school, and that had ended badly. And he had taken care of Claire Bellows after she drank J?germeister from a flask in the bathroom during their junior prom.

The town is teeming with people. All of the tour boats have just disgorged their passengers and it’s happy hour at nearly every bar in Cruz Bay. Cash has no leads on who he should hand this chick off to. No one seems to be waiting for her. Cash then tries to imagine bringing Max home to the villa, where Baker, Floyd, and his mother will all be waiting.

Nope. No chance.

“Cash!”

Cash cranes his neck, trying to figure out who’s calling his name. Then someone appears under his nose.

It’s Maia. With a boy in tow—a handsome young man with dark hair that has been highlighted in the front. He’s a couple inches taller than Maia.

“Hey,” Cash says. He’s more than a little uncomfortable bumping into…well, his little sister…with Max draped over him like a fur coat. “What are you doing?”

Maia shrugs. “Hanging out.” She nods at the boy next to her. “This is my friend Shane. He goes to Antilles.”

“Hey, Shane,” Cash says. Shane is the kid that Maia has a crush on; Cash remembers this much. It’s nice that they’re hanging out together—alone, from the looks of it; is that okay?—and Cash feels honored to be introduced, but he really wishes it wasn’t under these circumstances. Any minute, Max might projectile-vomit onto Shane’s shoes.

“What are you doing?” Maia asks, taking an appraising look at Max.

“I’m…well, this woman was a guest on the boat and I’m trying to find her friend. She has a friend who lives here, she said, but I have no idea who it is or what to do.”

“Is it Tilda?” Maia asks. “She was just here, looking for her friend who was visiting…from Chicago.” Maia turns to Shane. “Did she say Chicago?”

Shane nods. “Definitely Chicago,” he says. “But I thought her friend was a boy.”

“Was she looking for a Max?” Cash asks. “Maxwell?”

“Yes!” Maia says.