Page 37 of Here for a Good Time

THIRTEEN

It feels as though I blinked and woke up in a new place. As I slowly reenter the world of the conscious, my only recurring thought is that the strange throbbing in my head is starting to amplify by the second.

When I remember what happened, I try to gather my bearings despite the hazy state I’m still in. I blink several times as my vision comes into focus. Zwe’s several feet away, tied to a chair facing me.

“Leila,” I say, not recognizing my hoarse voice, unsure if I’m whispering or yelling. “Tattoo.”

His mouth moves in a “What?” but it sounds mumbled, like he’s talking underwater.

“Wait,” I mumble, and take a deep breath. I close my eyes, and immediately realize it’s a bad idea because I want to drift back off. I reopen my eyes and blink rapidly, willing myself to stay awake.

We’re in one of the resort’s rooms, one that’s smaller than our suite, and, I presume, much closer to the reception area where everyone’s still gathered.

Even though the lights are off, there’s enough moonlight and artificial light from outside streaming in that I can see the whole room and our general states of being.

“We’re so stupid,” I say. “Of course it was a trap the whole time.”

“You know what they say about twenty-twenty hindsight,” Zwe says. “I can’t believe we didn’t see it. She was… convincing.”

“Leila has the tattoo.”

He cocks his head. “What tattoo?”

“ The tattoo. Their tattoo,” I say tiredly.

Confusion etches ridges onto his forehead. “You’re concussed, aren’t you?” he asks, although it’s more of a statement.

“No,” I say, then consider. “Maybe. Probably. But I’m making sense. The tattoo. They all have the same tattoo. I noticed it on two of them before. But Leila’s was hidden on her ankle. I only saw it because she was barefoot and I was eye level with it when I—” I stop, unable to finish the sentence.

The unspoken words make Zwe shift in his chair.

“I’m sorry,” I sigh.

At the same time, he says quietly, “I didn’t mean what I said.”

I don’t know if this new, sharp pang in my right temple is a reverberating remnant of getting hit in the head, or because my body physically cannot take reliving that conversation. “Thanks,” I say, and he nods.

“We’ll be okay,” he says. He smiles at me, and even though I don’t fully believe him, the sight of those dimples eases my queasiness a little, like someone’s spread a very thin layer of Tiger Balm over the knot in my neck—not enough to undo it completely, but enough that exhaling becomes easier.

“What do we—”

“What was the tattoo?” he asks.

“It was the island,” I say, the island’s silhouette on his map coming back to me.

“The… island?” he asks. The way his face is scrunched, I can tell he’s wondering again just how concussed I am.

“I’m not concussed. Or it’s not the concussion talking,” I say briskly. When his mouth quirks in amusement, I can’t help but smile back, even if the act of doing so sets off a short stab in my cheeks. “You had the map laid out on the floor. That was it. That was the tattoo. It’s the island.”

“Why does Leila have a tattoo of the island?”

“Because it’s her home,” I say. “That must be it.”

He nods. “That tracks. But what about the rest of them? Why do they —”

“Because it’s… their home, too.” I gasp as it dawns on me. “Remember when we came this close to getting ‘101’ tattooed after I bought the apartment? To commemorate our first place? Together? ”

“Um, yeah? But what does that—”

“That’s why they all have that tattoo! They all have a connection to the island. They know each other. Clearly, she’s an inside man. Sorry, woman.”

“Ohhh-kayyyy,” Zwe says slowly. “But I’m… still not seeing the whole picture.”

“It’s right there,” I say. “We have all the puzzle pieces.” Mentally, I take each metaphorical piece, turning it this way and that to figure out how they slot together.

“You’re plotting.”

“What?” I look up to find Zwe with an amused expression. “Why are you smiling?”

He shrugs. “Is it cheesy if I say that I was smiling because you’re plotting? You’ve got your plotting face.”

I arch a puzzled brow. “What’s my plotting face?”

“This,” he says, and he turns sideways to stare at a spot on the wall.

The muscles in his face relax as he zones out like he’s going on a shrooms trip.

“And then when you’ve thought of something very specific, you do this.

” His brows scrunch together, and his front teeth bite into his bottom lip.

I snort, and he turns back to me, returning to his normal state.

“That’s my plotting face?” I ask, unable to stop giggling.

“Yep.”

“Oh my god, I write in public all the time,” I say, equal parts mockingly and genuinely mortified. “You let me make that face in public? People must have thought I was seeing a ghost. Or on drugs in the middle of the day. Or both.”

“Oh, absolutely. You’ve scared more than one customer while you were sneaking in some writing behind the cash register,” he says. “You can tell because they immediately scan the store for an employee who doesn’t look like the drugs just kicked in and it’s a particularly bad trip.”

“If we were closer, I’d kick you.”

“I know.”

Reset .

And just like that, it feels like we’re us again.

There’s a small voice in the back of my head saying we’re not, that even if Zwe says he didn’t mean everything he said, we both know he did, at least a little.

That our relationship will never be able to go back to how it was.

That the conversation we’re going to have “later” will traverse new grounds that we haven’t covered before.

But that’s all later.

For now, it’s us. Him and me.

“What did you figure out?” he asks.

“I think… okay, so this might be a bit bonkers—”

“Poe, look around.” He makes a circular motion with his head. “All of this is bonkers.”

I make a finger gun, only to remember that he can’t see it. “Good point,” I say. “So I think Leila and those women are… friends? Maybe they’ve been plotting this whole attack for a long time, and the last missing piece was an inside person. Enter Leila.”

“But the tattoos. You don’t get matching tattoos with a random accomplice.”

We’ve been keeping our voices down in case someone is stationed out the door, but I unintentionally yell it once the light bulb goes off. “They’re her cousins!”

Zwe goes silent. “Her… cousins,” he says, stretching each syllable.

“Holy shit, it’s been in front of us all along.” I race through my thoughts, more pieces sliding into place, the puzzle’s vague patches of color turning into real scenes. “Of course they have matching tattoos of the island. It’s their home. They’re family.”

A roller coaster of emotions plays out on Zwe’s face. His “Fuck” is drawn out on a breath.

I can’t believe we didn’t see this earlier. “She’s been talking about her cousins this whole time. What was it she said about that wedding? Nobody gets away with pissing off her and her cousins.”

“So who pissed her off? The resort management? But she said she got a good salary.”

“Maybe it’s someone she works with?” I venture. “She’s been talking a lot about guests being rude. Maybe there was a guest who was really shitty to her and her bosses didn’t back her up.”

“Fuck, and the thing with Antonio earlier.”

My insides feel like there’s an avalanche happening. “That’s why she volunteered to be the distraction first. She must’ve whispered something to them while her back was to us, and then when the supply boat came—”

“Which her cousins would’ve known was coming because she’d have given them a heads-up—”

“And while we were distracted by the boat, she made it look like she lost control of the situation and basically handed Antonio over.”

Zwe’s shaking his head, as furious as I am that we didn’t figure this out before. “The trail,” he says hoarsely. “She intentionally made us go in circles.”

We need to bring you back in one piece, she had said.

“She was right when she said she knows those trails blindfolded. Knows them so well in fact that she can lead us as far away as possible even in the dark,” I say. “And she brought up the supply boat so she could make us do a U-turn. She was never going to let us get to that village.”

“The zip-line tower was a trap.” Zwe scoffs in disbelief, looking like he could kill someone. “This whole time. Even if you hadn’t seen her ankle, we were trapped up there. Her cousins must’ve been on their way. You just figured it out before they arrived.”

“She shut me down when I was trying to figure it out earlier,” I say. Heat coils through me to the point where I’m on the verge of tears. “She gaslit me. I wouldn’t have made sense of it all perfectly, but if we’d kept talking about it, maybe I could’ve worked out some of the parts.”

“You were right. Fuck, you were right, and I—” He lets out a bitter laugh. “I should’ve believed you.”

Zwe’s figure starts to get blurry, and unable to covertly wipe them away, I blink off the tears. “You should’ve,” I say, not realizing until now that I’ve been carrying around the sting of that moment like a sharp splinter in the sole of my foot.

He opens his mouth, closes it without a sound. The air in the room somehow gets colder, goose bumps bristling the hairs on my arms and legs.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“I know,” I tell him, my voice cracking as the full weight of the situation hits, an icy lake finally giving way. “Zwe… what if this is it? What if there’s no way out of this? Like, what if we’re all out of lives?”

“It’s not,” he says firmly, but I see the way he swallows an invisible lump.

“I want to see my parents again.” It sounds like a hollow prayer.

“I want to go home and see my parents, and I want you to go home and see your parents, too. And…” I weigh whether or not to say it.

Will uttering it be taken as a peace offering, a sign that we’re good, or stir the pot further?

“And Julia,” I finish so softly that part of me is hoping he misses it.

I can’t tell if he catches it, because all he replies is, “We will.”