Documentary (10 page)

Abel tore the woman off him, accepting the challenge with a sly grin. The boys arranged ten new red plasti
c cups into the perfect triangular formation on each side and poured fresh beer in them. Abel tossed Dylan a small white ball.

She caught
it, and he almost looked surprised that she had. She smiled smugly at him. “Are we re-racking?” she asked, referring to the method of re-shaping the formation of the cups so that they stayed close together even after cups were removed.

“You can do whateve
r you want with your
rack
,” Wes taunted, letting his smile spread slowly. Dylan only aimed a confident smirk at him in return.

“Watch yourself, Wes.” Kai hissed the threat with clenched teeth. Men always talked shit when she played beer pong, and she never sweated it. She shrugged her hair off her shoulders and pulled her hand back to throw when Kai elbowed her, looking playfully disgruntled. “No team powwow? No plan? No motivational cheer?” He was squinting and frowning, doing his best to look pissed.

“Team name?” she asked, tossing the ball between her palms.

“Kai-Lan?” he offe
red. “Team Dyl-Kai… Team Deh…K—”

“Team Dick?” she said, giggling. She raised her hand for a high-five.

Kai laughed heartily, and he clapped his palm against hers. “We’re Team Dick.” He winked, making her heart cinch, and she started to ask if he was on the opposing team because his methods of distraction were pretty effective.

“Come on, ladies. We don’t have all night,” Wes whined impatiently.
After he counted to three, Abel and Dylan looked each other in the eyes, in a standoff, and simultaneously chucked their respective balls over to the other side. Hers landed in the cup at the top point of the triangle, and his bounced off the edge of one and flew into the air.

“Lucky break,” Abel muttered, but f
rom the looks on their faces, the Elliott boys immediately knew they were in trouble.

The game lasted almost an hour due much to the obligatory trash talk, and everyone stood silent when Dylan hit the last cup on the Elliot
ts’ side until the ball plopped over the rim. Then, they went crazy. Dylan had drunk the least out of everyone, managing to distract and swat away balls when she could. She was disgusted the times she had to drink, but after the game she felt much more welcome within their club. She was so thrilled, she leaped into Kai’s arms upon the victory, and he spun her around, pressing his face to her bare shoulder. She gasped as the contact injected her with an acute awareness of how sensual the hug was. Her breasts were pressed against his chest, his arms locked firm against the small of her back and his warm lips sunk into her skin, right at the bend of her neck. She was embarrassed by the lustful moan she let out before he put her down. His face flushed red.

But he licked his lips like he liked the taste of her skin.

Like he still wanted to taste it.

God knows she wanted him to.

The deejay transitioned the music to a hip-hop and electronica mix, and most people abandoned the beer pong table for the middle of the room. Leko appeared and offered his hands, suggesting that they dance.

“Was it my amazing beer pong skills?” Dylan asked as she allowed him to lead her away. She wanted to ask Kai if he would dance with her afterward, but they were separated when one of the Lava guys summoned him to a chair in the corner. Leko wasn’t a bad dancer, though a little offbeat because he was wasted. She was certain that if she licked the side of his face, she would get alcohol poisoning. Liquor was wafting out through his pores. He held her hips and pulled her in closer to him, and she threw her arms around his neck as they rocked. She kept peeking over at Kai, looking for a moment to signal him to take Leko’s place, but he was deeply involved in a conversation.

“When you’re in Lahaina, if you need anything, anything… you tell me,” Leko slurred, unable to focus on her face. Dylan bit her lip to control her smile, but he was being serious. “You say, ‘Lek, I need something,’ and I’m there. Anything, ever. Someone fucks with you, tell them you know me. Say ‘I know fucking Meleko,’ and I’ll take care of it—”

“Just ‘fucking Meleko’ and they’ll know?” she asked, and he nodded.

“‘Muthafuckin’ Meleko’ works too.”

“Thank you,” she said, hugging him. She already liked him.

The music kept getting louder, trilling against her eardrums, pumping through her like a second flow of blood. Being able to let loose for a few hours was definitely worth the inevitable exhaustion to come in the next few days. Leko spun her around and snuggled up against her back as she swung her hips to the rhythm. Wes was just off to the side, eyeing her. It wasn’t predatory, but he was clearly fascinated. Being an ace female beer pong player had an effect on guys, she guessed.

As the beat surged on with a song transition, Dylan shut her eyes and just let the sound envelop her, dancing with her arms in the air even when Leko’s hands slipped off her. She hoped he wasn’t passed out on the ground. When she re-opened her eyes, Kai immediately snagged her gaze. The angle of his chair was significantly different than it had been before. He was still talking to the Lava guy, but his stare didn’t leave her. It was so fixated and penetrative that her breath staggered out. An unexpected feeling rolled through her with the force of an avalanche.

She wanted to kiss him. And it was no fleeting thought.

“Dance?” Dylan spun in the other direction until she was staring right at Wes Ellio
tt, immediately inhaling the beer fumes rolling off him. His blue eyes held her in a confident stare. Slowly, his hands climbed, from the small of her back to her waist. He never broke eye contact, never seemed unsure. In purely superficial human sexual instinct terms, she understood his appeal, but Wes also looked like a bad habit and a heartbreak. And then the single sleeve of intertwining dark-inked tattoos that weaved up his arm did lend to curiosity about where she would end up if she followed the trail, but her interests only went as far as the thought—and they were already directed elsewhere.

Suddenly, Kai leaned down right next to her ear. “
Can’t
,” Kai said to Wes with emphasis as he shook his head, a hint of frustration in his voice. Wes furrowed his brow and smirked, and Dylan knew immediately they were having some silent conversation that they were both well versed in.

Wes laughed, but when Kai didn’t, Wes went silent. “You’re serious…”

“Yup. Later, Wes.” Wes didn’t resist and soon the swaying, shadowed crowd devoured him. But he re-emerged, before she could blink, caught in a tangle of limbs with some other girl.

“You wanna dance?” Kai asked. She swiveled around, listening to the sound of her own quaking heartbeat when they were finally face-to-face. The problem was obvious. This was dangerous, their being so close, but Dylan looped her arms around Kai’s neck when he pulled her against him. The way his blue eyes drew her in scattered all her thoughts, like the cue ball smashing into the other ones. Her mind had been full before when she watched him in the chair, but now she couldn’t gather a single concrete idea and shape it into something worth saying. She relied on her senses. Skin? Warm. View? Perfect. Smell? Intoxicating. Taste? Hmmm.

“Sorry, I hope that wasn’t awkward. We weren’t fighting over you like you were some prize or something.”

“Am I not?” she teased.
“It was weird, but I don’t think there will ever come a day where I figure guys out, anyway.”

Kai smiled, looking relieved. “I think you have achieved something I thought was impossible. Wes Elliott might be in love with you
… well,
love
for Wes Elliott, which usually lasts about seven minutes, if I had to guess. No one beats him in beer pong.”

“It’s not exactly something that’ll land me the Nobel Prize but I enjoy it,” she said after a chuckle. She dropped her head to his chest and heard him breathe out hard through his nose as his hand glided up her back. Continuing to get personal with the guy she was working with was a terrible idea, but they were only dancing in a room full of other people dancing, who worked together. She hadn’t crossed any lines.
Yet.

“Team Dick will live on in our memories,” he whispered. When she started laughing, he did too. It was nice to know that they had the same kind of humor. “I think tonight makes me officially excited about this project now. You don’t seem out of place or uncomfortable, which is good. This is my life, a small fraction of it—it’s far busier and crazier and more exhausting—but you seem like you’re okay so far.”

“I think when you want to be in documentary filming, you kind of have to adjust to what’s going on around you really quickly,” she said. They danced several songs together with only minor interruptions from people coming up to speak to him.

During a deejay change, Kai said, “I
wanna show you something…” He slipped out of her arms and took one of her hands.

“Like Wes Elliott probably wanted to show me somethi
ng?” she joked as he led her back upstairs.

“Haha.
It’s for work, actually. You don’t have to though. And we’ll be back,” he said, looking back at her with a smile. They went straight to the top floor this time, bypassing a bouncer on the staircase meant to keep certain people from going any farther. When they reached the landing, Caroline and a few others turned briefly to watch them walk by from a large office. He waved at them before leading Dylan to a set of double doors, which opened up to the most magnificent bedroom she had ever seen. It was modern like the rest of the house but the décor still had rustic elements with unfinished wood in the picture frames, bedposts and floor. She went straight for the balcony’s sliding glass door for a stunning view of the Pacific. “It’s yours for the night if you don’t want to go to the hotel room I booked for you. It locks, and security will kick everyone out eventually. You’ll be fine. Whatever you want to do,” Kai said behind her.

“How do you get to stay here?”

“I’ve known Ken, her dad, and Caroline for a long time, since Evernight days. Ken sort of became a mentor for me. I don’t want to be a performer forever, so he’s been helping me focus on the business and corporate side of things. We’ve become friends, too. Caroline invited me and a bunch of people to this party, and said some of us could crash here, too. Just a few of us. Told her I was inviting someone, and she said you could have my room, if you wanted. I can stay at the hotel, or vice versa.” After he grabbed a laptop from the desk, she followed him out to a large open den on the same floor, right past the bedroom.

He sat on a loveseat with the MacBook on his lap and his feet up on the coffee table. “Come check out the website.”

Dylan sat next to him and leaned in, and he glanced over once when their shoulders grazed. She got a flashback of the sensation of his lips stamping her skin, causing the spot to flare up as if from the heat of his mouth. She was in danger of combusting just from the proximity.

Kai suddenly touched the inside of her wrist. “McCartney A. Carroll. Your brother, right?” He rubbed his thumb over the small black cursive lettering. The tattoo artist had used Mac’s actual handwriting for the sketch.

Dylan was surprised that he remembered as she looked up from his thumb to his face. “Yeah. And the number five is for the last five things he didn’t get to do before he died. We made this list of twenty-five things. It’s to remind me to live everyday to the fullest.”

Mac was born after a few years of frustrating attempts at conception, her parents had told them. And then their parents had been in so much new parent bliss after his birth that Dylan had come along by accident
barely two years later. They had wanted more children but had wanted a bigger age gap between them, but Dylan loved that they were so close in age, and they had grown up together as best friends. The year Mac turned ten, his health made a permanent shift for the worst. It was non-Hodgkin lymphoma followed by a too short reprieve from the cancer before it returned. Mac beat it the second time for many years, but it was as though that period was just conspiratorial time his cells took to devise a better way to try to kill him, and about seven months ago, the non-Hodgkin lymphoma had finally figured out how to do it on the third try.

Kai stared at her without a hint of pity in his eyes, but she couldn’t actually read what it was, and it gave her a chill. “How’d you get into film? I don’t think I ever asked.” Kai moved from her wrist to her palm and drew big, i
nvisible circles with his fingers. It felt good. Really good.

Dylan slammed her hand shut. “You already had your chance to interview me,” she said with a hearty laugh. “No backsies.”

“Tell me.” Kai pulled his hand out of hers but went back to tickling her palm.

“It sort of found me.” She shrugged. “I got lucky that way. It just felt right.  Singing’s in your blood, right? Your dad sang?”

Kai nodded. “For a guy who hit like a Mack truck, he had a really beautiful voice. When sobriety was a somewhat regular part of his life, we lived on the road for a while just outside of Nashville before we moved to Oahu. I must’ve been like six or seven…it was a couple years before he died. He would open for small acts and perform in really nasty bars. His name would be way at the bottom of the concert bills. I don’t think they paid well. I just remember being mesmerized when he would be up there with his guitar. My mom would have to beg for them to let me into the places because she loved the way he sang, and they didn’t have anyone to watch me.” Kai threaded a few of his fingers through hers when he got silent. Dylan’s cheeks pumped red, and he must’ve noticed because he immediately touched her face. “Really glad you came tonight, Bob Dylan Carroll.”