Page 25 of All That We Are Together
“I need to stay in touch.” I shrugged.
I didn’t add that since the day Leah had written her number down on a napkin, I’d turned into one of those people who never puts their phone away. Why? She never called. She hadn’t even answered the email I sent her with the new contract.
“You’re like a fifteen-year-old boy who just met a girl,” Justin said in a stern voice that jarred me when I was trying to joke around. I couldn’t help laughing, because he was right, even if I’d never admit it aloud. “She hasn’t answered you?”
“No. Nobody wants to call me, you know?”
“It’s because you’re unbearable.”
I punched him on the shoulder and he moaned ridiculously and finally we cracked up laughing. And we went on laughing all night, and every time Justin was about to go, I ordered another round and convinced him to stay a while longer. I didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t want to go home, because when I was there I thought, and thinking made me remember, and with all that silence, I started slowly dying inside.
I looked down glumly and he nudged me.
“Cheer up! We’re supposed to be celebrating you signing her.” Justin’s eyes were glassy and his face slack, and he’d clearly had too much to drink.
“Yeah. I guess that’s something.”
“She’s not going to hate you forever, Axel.”
That was easy to say if you didn’t know Leah like I did. And I was the person who knew her best. That way she had of opening herself up and revealing everything, or the opposite, locking up and staring you down so coldly that your hair stood on end… Leah couldn’t take half measures. She was emotional, impulsive, one of those people who fight tooth and nail when they really want something. Special. Not at all like me…
“Wait here, I’ll be right back.”
I got up and walked across the bar to the bathroom. The main room was full of people chatting and drinking under the garlands of colored lights. Chill-out music was playing in the background, same as at almost all the bars lining the beach.
When I got back, Justin wasn’t there.
I rolled my eyes, grabbed my mojito, which was still sitting on the bar top, and turned around to try and find him. I waved to a few friends and helped out some tourists who seemed interested in something more than the sights of Byron Bay: I had to grab the hand of one of them to keep her from undoing the remaining buttons on my half-open shirt. As I walked away from them, I found my brother on the patio. I could see he was stumbling a bit as I came over, and talking to some young guy.
“What kind of chocolate’s in them?” he asked.
I couldn’t believe it. The guy was trying to sell him marijuana brownies. It was all I could do not to burst out laughing. I wrapped an arm around my brother’s neck.
“Justin, that’s not what you think it is.”
“I’ve got a café, we make pastries.”
The guy frowned, a little confused. “I mean if you want chocolate instead of weed, I know this dude who…”
I was surprised and did nothing while he paid for the brownie, bit into it, and chewed with his mouth open. The guy left in search of new clients, and I suppressed a smile, drinking my mojito and leaning back against one of the outdoor columns.
“It’s weewy good,” Justin mumbled.
“What the hell did you do when you were younger?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what the hell were you doing when you were young that you never got around to trying one of these?”
It was no secret that marijuana in all its forms was widely consumed in Byron Bay. Sometimes I had the feeling my brother was living on an entirely different planet from mine. I clapped him on the back as he swallowed.
“You know, man. Going out with Emily.”
I envied him briefly. If Leah and I had been the same age and met when I was sixteen, I probably wouldn’t have been interested in that shit either, or in staying out till the crack of dawn. I’d have been too busy gawking at her and having sex with her every night.
“You’re going to start feeling weird in a few minutes,” I told him. “So, for your sake and the sake of your sex life, I’m going tocall your wife and tell her you don’t feel good and you’re going to stay over tonight.”
He ignored me and started dancing to a song with his hands raised in the air. A couple of girls played along with him as though nothing could be more amusing than watching a guy who probably ironed his underwear acting like an idiot.