Cut Off (24 page)

Besides, even she wasn't so hard-nosed to be immune to the lure of a secret beach.

Alden and Robi spent most of the ride talking about old movies and TV shows they'd seen, a conversation that consisted mostly of "Remember when?", followed by a recap of events that didn't always match Tristan's memory of the show in question. The plots sounded both melodramatic and trivial in comparison to the last six-plus years of their lives. In general, Tristan tried not to reminisce—it was pointless yet painful—but she found their talk strangely enjoyable.

Early that afternoon, after at least twenty miles of highway, Ke led them from the highway to a shaded parking lot overlooking a decline to the sea.

Tristan eyed the bathrooms and tourist station on the former park grounds. "Some secret."

"Secret to
you
," Ke said. "Or did you take the scenic route before settling down?"

"We missed it," she admitted.

He crunched through the gravel to a dirt trail. It was a warm day and the air was heavy with the sick-sweet smell of the decaying seed pods the trees dropped in profusion. Below, a shoal of black rock thrust from the waves, a natural arch cut through its side. They followed the trail onto a pure black beach.

"Whoa," Alden said.

They all stopped, even Ke. The upper beach was a jumble of fist-sized stones fallen from the lava formations behind it, but the composition grew finer the nearer it ran to the waves, first as smooth round pebbles, then as coarse sand. Heat radiated from it as if it had a fever. By the time Tristan stepped on the pebbles, her whole body was sweating.

"I retract all my complaints about the length of the trip," she said.

Ke crunched onto the rocks beside her. "It's nice, right?"

"Only in the sense the sun is bright."

To the left, a short bluff carpeted in ivy and undergrowth sheltered the beach, dampening the waves. Tristan yanked off her shoes and peeled down to her swimsuit. Ke gave her a glance, but nothing lingering. She wasn't vain enough to think that every man who saw her would swoon to the ground, yet he hadn't favored her with so much as the male's habitual, semi-conscious assessment of
any
young woman in a bikini. The scars around her eyes and mouth had mostly faded. She was missing two knuckles of one finger, but was otherwise young, intact, and healthy.

She watched him dive into the water and crawl stroke through the low waves. He had good angles to his face. Stern-looking. Turned out he was thoughtful, though, while at the same time—assuming his stories were true—being unafraid to take action. She hadn't given it any conscious thought until then, but it added up to something attractive.

On top of
that
, she had been rendered celibate for so long she probably qualified as a born-again virgin. There were mornings she woke from such intense dreams she had no choice but to take care of her business before getting up.

Beside her, Alden and Robi ran delicately over the hot sand and splashed into the water. When Alden hesitated, Robi went back to him, face etched with concern, then leapt on him, wrapping her legs around his and toppling him into the ocean. He surfaced, wiping water from his eyes, then grinned and lunged at Robi.

Tristan waded into the water. After the oven-like sand, it felt toe-curlingly cold, but that felt pretty good. She swam out until she could no longer feel the bottom, then treaded water, staring at the blue of the horizon, suddenly curious what the rest of the world was doing.

They swam a while, then returned to the beach to dry off and take in the sun. Soon, she was voraciously hungry, as she always was after swimming. They climbed the trail to the park to sit at a picnic table and eat poi and fruit and spicy roast chicken Ke said he'd cooked the day before. Tristan was suspicious of its provenance, but it smelled un-rotten, and she found herself powerless not to eat her share.

"Want to stay the night?" Ke said as they ate. "If not, we better get going soon."

Tristan nodded at her feet. "My blisters vote we stay."

"I thought I was the only one," Robi laughed.

They scouted out a place to sleep, settling on the back deck of the park building. Overwhelmed by sudden weariness, Tristan snapped out her towel and napped. The others did, too. As she drifted out of it, Tristan realized it was the first time she had slept in the company of others besides Alden in years. Against all odds, she found herself feeling accepted. In Hana, at last, she'd found home.

When she got up later that afternoon, she joined the others for another swim, then wandered around to watch the waves bashing the outcrops. There were a number of caves worn into the rocks around the shore, including on the black beach. She poked inside one of them, but it terminated in a scree of rock a few feet inside.

The sun faded behind the volcano. They were on the eastern side of the island and she missed being able to watch it sink into the ocean. When they went to bed on the deck, Tristan lay with her eyes open, listening for Alden and Robi to get up and sneak off. When they began snoring instead, she found herself—to her considerable surprise—disappointed in them. After a while, unable to sleep, she quietly got up and walked down to the beach. It wasn't as striking by night, but the starlight gleamed on the black pebbles.

After a minute, feet scuffed on the path. Ke raised a hand and met her on the beach. "Everything cool?"

"Couldn't sleep."

"Hard to believe after the day we've had. Think they had fun?"

"Definitely," she said. "Thanks for bringing us here."

"Well, I thought they'd like it." He scooped up pebbles and began plinking them into the sea. "It's funny. At first, I didn't want anything to do with you guys. But after seeing how happy Robi's been..."

"I know the feeling."

"It's made me rethink a few things. You seen how young they act together? They act like they were home-schooled. I think I've been too good at keeping her away from people."

"Could be."

"What else
could
it be? Robi ain't dumb. You throw her on an island by herself, a month later, she'll have built two houses, three farms, and a swimming pool. But you put her in a room with a
boy
? I don't know if she'd know what goes where."

She eyed him. "Ours aren't any more complicated than yours. Press the button and it turns right on."

He laughed and gazed off to sea. "I don't recall it being
that
easy. Although I wouldn't mind reconfirming that some day."

With her heart going as if she were staring down the scope of a rifle, she moved beside him, rocks clacking under her feet. "It's been so long, it might take even less."

She pressed herself against him, found his mouth.

He put his hand to her hip and pushed her back. "Whoa. What's going on here?"

"What does it look like?"

"Kissing. Each other."

Heat surged into her face. "You were just saying..."

He was leaning back from her, blinking quickly. "You're hot, okay? That's not the problem."

"It's Alden and Robi, isn't it?"

Ke nodded at the waves. "Feels weird. Almost...incesty."

"It does, doesn't it?"

"We could close our eyes and pretend we're other people."

She glanced over to gauge if he were joking. "Remind me again why you haven't been laid in years?"

"I'm
brainstorming
here," he said. "At least give me credit for trying."

"Is the problem with the full enchilada?" she said, annoyed with herself for being unable to speak clearly. She steeled her will. "Would oral be less weird?"

"Jesus," he laughed.

"You know, forget it. Please."

"Hey, I get it. I
way
get it. Last time I did the math on this—I mean literally sat down with a piece of paper and tallied it up—I counted 37 people in Hana. Exclude me and Robi, that puts you at 35. But only 14 are women. Of
those
, I pegged just six between the ages of sixteen and 45."

Tristan raised one eyebrow. "
Sixteen?
"

"Don't be throwing judgment. This was all hypothetical. Can I continue?"

"Please. This is very enlightening."

"Four of those six are spoken for. Of the two left, Nikki's cool, but she's gay. And when I tried to make a play at Sam, she pulled a knife on me."

She shook her head, laughing. "Sounds like you need to go older."

"Any older and I'll be tapping the nursing home. Let me think about it, okay?" He tipped back his head and sighed at the stars. "Robi's been my only worry for so long I don't even know what I want."

She smiled. He headed back to the park station. She dawdled on the beach, trying to rationalize away her embarrassment. She had sex on the brain lately, that was all. Anyway, she should be proud of herself for having had the balls to make a move.

Even so, it was hard to meet his eyes in the morning. She'd come on too fast, let her atrophied social skills be trampled by her six-year itch. Then Ke joked and she saw that everything was the same. They went for a final swim, then started the long bike ride home.

The day after they returned, she had a brief, excruciating, yet highly necessary talk with Alden about the virtues of pulling out.

They continued work on the house, scrubbing the interior clean and repainting it with cans supplied by Robi. Papa Ohe'o dropped by to check on them and seemed impressed with Tristan's thoroughness. Once they had living space cleared out, she diverted some of her time to clearing the yard and planting more orderly crops, particularly taro, which they could probably survive on by itself if forced to.

Alden and Robi began to spend less time on the house, leaving regularly to (as they claimed) take walks, swim in the pools, and explore the beaches. Tristan resented their absence, yet she knew she couldn't expect them to devote every waking minute to the property. Particularly Robi, who had a house of her own to help maintain.

Days bled into weeks. They found furniture, built storage for food and goods, scavenged the neighbors of everything useful. Within a month, they had a functional, livable house, but often, Tristan was the only one there to make use of it. She saw Ke a few times a week but didn't try to force things again. Ke needed time, and time, as always, was one of the few things she had in abundance.

A month after the trip to the black sands, and four days since she'd last seen him, Ke came to the house. "Kids around?"

Tristan tossed aside a handful of weeds. "Swimming."

"Think they'd be up for another trip?"

"Where to this time? A chartreuse sand beach?"

"I thought we'd revisit the black one." He watched her from the corner of his eye. "And your proposal."

Half her mouth twitched into an involuntary smile. "Getting itchy?"

"As long as I wasn't thinking about it, I was fine. Ever since you brought it up, though? Wakes me up five times a night. It's worse than having a new puppy."

She laughed. "When do we leave?"

"Soon as we find the kids."

"You want to bring them with us?"

"Like it'll be hard to slip away? They only have eyes for each other." He smiled cunningly. "Anyway, what better cover than to pose as
their
chaperones?"

It was a little paranoid, but she wouldn't have felt comfortable being separated from them by so many miles, either. And if a return to the beach was what Ke needed to feel okay about it, she wasn't going to complain. Alden and Robi walked into the yard not five minutes later. They strolled hand in hand, the dreamy looks on their faces spelling out the events of their morning as well as any video recording could have.

An acidic emotion uncurled in her gut. Unbelievably, she was jealous of her younger brother's sex life. She took advantage of their momentary agreeability to get them to commit to another trip to the beach two days hence.

In the meantime, Tristan went about her work in the gardens. When the day came, with Robi and Ke having stayed the night, they awoke before dawn to get on the road, meaning to have the full afternoon at the beach. Tristan spent much of the bike ride in a state of amused anticipation. Would he be timid? Or was his caution nothing more than a byproduct of his guardianship of Robi, and once that door was kicked down, so to speak, he would be with her with strength and temper? For that matter, how would
she
act? Once upon a time, she'd been on the demure side—happy to be there, but more happy to let her partner take the lead—but she hadn't been laid since the plague. Her self had changed as drastically as the world at large. For all she knew, once they finished, she'd bite off his head.

They got to the park without any trouble and descended the trail to the beach. It was warmer than their last visit and Tristan wasted no time getting down to her swimsuit and charging across the hot black pebbles to the temperate sea. Ke splashed in beside her. When she paused waist-deep to acclimate, he gave her a playful shove on the shoulder. She wouldn't go so far as to say it was electric, but the touch of his hand on her skin felt good. Alden and Robi were too busy with each other to notice.

After the four of them had worn themselves out in the water, they trudged past the rocks to the patch of dirt beside the trail to dry in the sun. When Tristan began to get too warm, she got up to comb the beach along the short black cliffs fronting the beach. Next to one of the ivy-hung depressions in the cliffs, she was stopped by the smell of something aquatic. Not unusual, given that she was on a beach. But the particular note of the scent struck something deep in her gut.

The cave appeared no more than a few feet deep, but as she stepped in to find the source of the smell, she saw it turned abruptly near its entrance, leading further into darkness. An old lava tube, perhaps. The others were still lying on their towels, arms thrown over their eyes to shield them from the sun. She went back to her pack for her pen light, the one that ran on the little nickel batteries that seemed to last forever, and returned to the cave.

As soon as she stepped inside the tube, the smell intensified. On the cusp of offensive, yet also appealing, like a sack of uncooked shrimp. She recognized it for what it was at the same instant her light played over the orange mat growing further within the tube.