The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (The Devils #2)(13)

I snort laugh. That’s always been the issue with Six. He’s too damn charming to stay mad at, even when he’s, you know, awaiting trial.

And this is why he’s perfect for me: he’s just enough fun without ever being someone I might let myself trust.





9





JOSH





January 24th





I wake the next morning on the couch, realizing I’ve just heard the slam of her door. She’s so loud normally I can’t imagine how she made it that far without waking me. There’s always a thud or a squeak or a muted Oh, fuck from her room if she’s up, which I find both amusing and irritating. I dress and brush my teeth, planning to catch up with her on the road, which isn’t exactly difficult. She’s ridiculously slow.

I get downstairs and find, to my surprise, that she’s still here, stretching against a pillar near the lobby.

“Were you waiting for me?” I ask.

She jumps in shock and I place a palm on her bicep to steady her.

“Of course I wasn’t waiting,” she sniffs. She turns back to the pillar and continues to stretch. “Sometimes I like to warm up.”

She’s full of shit. She was totally waiting for me. I hate that I’m pleased by that. I’m doing this out of duty and nothing more, and she’s putting up with it because I won’t give her another option. It’s not as if we are going to be friends when this trip is over.

We run the same route as before, down past the shops and the park and on toward Diamond Head. I know she ran farther and faster the first day just to spite me, but she’s got to be the only female I know who would just keep doing it, day after day.

When we’re done, we go to the chairs by the pool again. I have no idea why she’s coming along, but hopefully she can refrain from discussing sex robots, which I’d never heard of and now can’t stop picturing.

I get her warm towels because she’s incapable of remembering to bring a sweatshirt, and soon she’s wrapped up, sipping a cappuccino and watching the sunrise beside me.

“Do you think anyone lives up there?” she asks, nodding at Diamond Head. “There’s probably palms, a pineapple tree. You could build yourself some kind of hut, live off fruit.”

I glance over at her. “Why you’d want to is the bigger question.”

She frowns before she turns back to stare at the mountain. “It would just be nice to have no one talking about you,” she says. “I get tired of having to be nice all the time.”

“All the time?” I ask. “Is that what we’re going with?”

She laughs. “Almost all the time. Just not to you. Trolls don’t deserve kindness.”

I follow her gaze to the hills, thinking of the unhappy woman who waits in my room, the issues with my mom. “I guess I can see the appeal,” I admit quietly. “Probably not a lot of Sour Patch Kids up there.” I still can’t believe she brought candy on that hike instead of water.

She makes a face at me. “Of course there are. Those hills are full of Sour Patch Trees. It’s like you know nothing about Hawaiian agriculture. You’ll see.”

And just like that, she’s included me in her imagined life, living in the hills. I don’t know if she even realized she did it, but I wish the idea appealed to me a little less than it does.





When I return to the room, Sloane is up and dressed.

“You were gone for a long time,” she says. I can’t tell if she’s insinuating something or if I just feel guilty for avoiding her.

“I was worried I’d wake you if I came back too early.”

She doesn’t react at all, emotionless as ever. Her seeming apathy is what led me to think the fling in Somalia was meaningless, and I’m still not sure it wasn’t. Her interest in me seems driven more by my lack of interest than anything else.

“Do you know when your brother’s going to be here?” she asks.

In theory, he should get his passport back any day now, though the truth is you never know with Joel. It would not surprise me to discover he wasn’t in Japan at all, that he’d actually been on a bender, one hotel over, the entire time. “Possibly tomorrow.”

“Good,” she says, and then she brushes her hands against each other, as if she’s successfully solved a thorny problem.

I’m pretty sure the problem is me, and I’m pretty sure having Joel here isn’t going to fix a goddamn thing.





10





DREW





I wonder how little I would actually do on this trip if I wasn’t competing with someone.

My morning run? It would be three miles long at most, were it not for Josh. My breakfasts? Half their current size if I weren’t trying to be as excessively American as possible for Sloane’s benefit. And when Beth says she’s arranged for us all to surf—she’s rented a board for Josh, gotten an instructor for me and Sloane—the only thing that has me agreeing is Sloane saying I think I’ll pass in that snooty way of hers.

To be honest, I can kind of understand Sloane’s apprehension over this whole surfing thing. The ocean is mostly something you attempt to survive, not master, and here, where the surf break appears to be a mile from shore, it feels almost suicidal. I only want to be that far from dry land if there’s a champagne-stocked yacht involved. But I hate the way Beth deflates a little when Sloane says no, and I want to feel cooler than Sloane, though it’s hardly a competition. She’s currently wearing a shin-length linen dress and heels for breakfast on vacation. If she has a stylist, her only instructions must be “boring” and “no, more boring than that.”