Beach Cute, page 21
The four of us will have a brilliant time, totally free of awful ex-boyfriends and degrees we don’t want to do and everything we came here to get away from in the first place. We’ll have some drinks and dance and laugh, and maybe there’ll be another guy just as cute as Gabriel I can kiss to take my mind off him, and we’ll all have such a great night that it won’t even matter anyway.
I can’t remember the last time I went out out. Definitely not since before exams. I am desperate for this in a way I hadn’t expected. Gran’s always telling me I should be going out and enjoying myself more, and Mum has tried more than once to drag me to a pub quiz when I go home for the weekend—something that always felt even sadder than not going out at all.
“Jodie!”
I can’t ignore it anymore. I turn, and I swear my heart actually skips a beat when I spot Gabriel just behind me, skirting around the tortolitos, who actually look like they are lovebirds tonight. They’re dancing. And Linda is smiling for once. This digital detox is doing someone some good, at least.
My heart plummets, landing like a stone in the pit of my stomach.
Who was I kidding? This isn’t some epic whirlwind romance that might lead somewhere.
Gabriel pushes his hair back from his face. There’s a cloth slung over his shoulder. His sleeves are rolled up to just above his elbows, and I decide he must do it on purpose—must know how good that looks on him. His eyes dart from my face to the bottles of wine in my hand. “You’re…staying in tonight?”
Not that I owe him an explanation, but there’s a tiny part of me that’s vindicated by how let down he looks. Good, that makes two of us. I stick my chin out and announce, “They’re predrinks. We’re going out. To a club.”
“Ah,” he says, eyebrows rising and lips quirking up. “This must be the ladies’ night Zoe mentioned? You’re going to Alto, ¿sí? I think you’ll like it there. It’s always popular with the turistas.”
My chest clenches, and I can’t help but wonder—
“Oh really? Is that where you go to pick up other sad, lonely girls looking for some fun?”
Shit. Shit, I did not mean to say that out loud. Not at all.
Gabriel recoils, those brown eyes I thought were so lovely turning wide and guilty, and I don’t even try to take it back. It’s a look that tells me Rory’s vivid recollection of everything she overheard is bang on the money.
“I know I said I was looking for some fun,” I tell him, “but that doesn’t mean I want somebody to treat me like shit. It doesn’t mean you get to swagger around and make it so fucking obvious I’m just another notch on your bedpost.”
“Jodie…”
But that’s it. That’s all he says. There’s no, “Sorry, querida, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” or, “No, you misunderstood, I wasn’t talking about you and me at all.” He just trails off, defenseless, speechless.
Swallowing down the lump in the back of my throat, I haul together the scraps of my dignity and tell him, “For the record, you didn’t mean anything to me, either. Maybe I’ll find another guy tonight who can see if I’m worth it.”
Gabriel cringes and says again, “Jodie, querida…”
But the endearment only makes me balk, skin crawling. I can’t believe I fell for this—especially when he told me, outright, he had a history of breaking hearts…
God, I was such an idiot.
He reaches for me and I snatch my arms away, avoiding that touch I’d started to crave so badly. I give him the most disdainful look I can muster—which is not exactly difficult when I’m so disappointed in myself right now—and walk away without another word.
* * *
—
We’re on our last glasses of wine, pleasantly tipsy and dressed, ready to go. After a quick debrief with the girls, I’m ready to shove Gabriel to the very back of my mind and focus solely on having fun.
My black dress is shorter and tighter than I remember, but I find I don’t really care.
Rory, of course, looks effortlessly glamorous, with her beachy blond waves loose down her back, a strappy white camisole and high-waisted black shorts with four bright gold buttons. Her outfit would look casual but for the chunky wooden bangle, the long pendant around her neck and some dangerously high heels. She towers over us. Luna looks positively minuscule beside her.
Luna took longest to get ready, critical of every outfit even after her first glass of wine. We finally convinced her to settle on a buttercup-yellow ditsy floral sundress she brought with her, and Rory helps her accessorize by picking jewelry for her and pinning some of her ink-black hair back in cute twists to frame her face.
Rory tries to improve my ponytail by fluffing it out and softening it around the front, but I bat her away, feeling too much like a twelve-year-old playing dress-up. I’m not confident about my body as it is, but I am confident in my dress; I don’t need to feel more insecure by worrying over my hair or makeup.
The only thing that could make our evening better is some music. A cheesy Spotify playlist or even a NOW CD, like my mum keeps in her car. But on the other hand, who needs our phones and Spotify for some music? We’ve basically turned into Donna and the Dynamos from Mamma Mia! all on our own.
Luna, now three glasses of wine into the night, is jumping between the kitchen and the lounge area, arms above her head and her head thrashing as she screams the lyrics to a Dua Lipa song. I can’t guess which one it is—Luna sings tunelessly and improvises half the lyrics when she can’t remember the right words, but her enthusiasm more than makes up for it.
Rory forgets she’s holding a glass as she throws her arms up and starts to wiggle her hips, sending a splash of wine across the floorboards.
“Oh bugger!” Luna says, bursting into giggles. “Good job it’s only white wine or I bet Esteban would be sending you a cleaning bill!”
“Please, don’t even,” Rory whines, shaking her head and holding her hands near her ears like she can block out even thinking about it. “No Esteban, no Larry the Lobster, no flooded rooms, none of that stuff. Tonight, we’re gonna let loose! You know why?”
And she launches into an off-key, screechy rendition of Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger.”
As perfect as Rory looks, she can’t sing for toffee.
Not that it matters, but I’m easily the most tuneful out of all of us.
When it’s time to go, our mood is high and we’re giggling and grinning in a way that has more to do with the new friendship we’ve forged than how much we’ve had to drink. We gather our bags, put our shoes back on and teeter toward the front of the hotel arm in arm.
Rory stumbles almost immediately out of the door. She nearly takes me down with her like a set of dominoes, and I shriek.
Even a bit drunk, Luna is in full mother hen mode when she asks Rory, “Are you sure you can walk in those?”
“It’s the sand,” she whines, and slips her shoes off, slinging them over a finger to carry until we’re on even ground.
As we make our way through reception, I feel Luna tense up next to me.
“Here we go,” she mutters through her teeth, the words strained like she’s bracing herself to get whacked in the face with a frying pan.
I follow her gaze to realize she might as well be—our dear friend, the one and only Esteban Alejandro Álvarez, is hopping out from behind the desk to block us off, his twirly mustache twitching.
“Ah, ladies, buenas tardes. Miss Rory, I wonder if I might have a word…”
Rory freezes beside me, but there’s no way I’m letting Esteban ruin tonight. I need this too badly.
“Not now, Esteban,” I sing, tightening my hold on the girls’ arms and sticking my chin out. “Places to go, people to see! Have a muy bueno evening!”
He calls after us, but I tug the two others along. Rory is only too eager to get away from him before she’s slammed with blame for scuffing up his reception floor with her heels or something equally ridiculous, but I can feel Luna hesitating.
The girl from Kids’ Club at the pool earlier, obviously Zoe, is waiting for us by a taxi out on the drive where the shuttle bus first dropped us off. She’s wearing a pair of denim dungarees, a white T-shirt and well-worn sneakers, looking more casual than any of us. She bounces on the balls of her feet and waves us over, a beaming smile on her round face.
“You guys ready?”
“So ready,” Rory says.
We climb into the taxi. Zoe sits in the front and I end up in the middle of the back seat. The seat belts are broken. Rory’s window is down and when she tries to roll it back up, it sticks. The cab smells of smoke—and not the kind from regular cigarettes.
Luna must notice because her face scrunches up. I decide not to say anything.
As the taxi lurches off, Zoe twists around, and Rory leans forward and waves a hand at us. “This is Jodie and that’s Luna. Guys, this is Zoe.”
“Yeah, we sort of met at the pool earlier,” Luna says. She sounds funny.
Maybe she’s not feeling very well. Maybe she drank too much. Or maybe it was the shrimp she ate at dinner. Maybe it’s the smell of weed. Maybe it’s just that we blew off Esteban, and she’s such a stickler for the rules.
Whatever it is, I make a mental note to get her some water when we reach the club.
Zoe is chatting away to Rory already. “Are you okay? After what happened at the pool? Did you hurt yourself?”
“Not a scratch on me,” Rory says, blasé in a way she definitely wasn’t earlier. I smirk to myself, but don’t call her out on it. “I’m fine. I mean, completely humiliated, but fine.”
Zoe gives a hum of sympathy and then says to me, “And you’re the one who fancies Gabe, right?”
I feel a prickle somewhere in my gut because she called him Gabe, which is so silly, and I wonder if he told her all about the drab, awkward girl throwing herself at him. However nice Rory made Zoe sound, I don’t really want to rehash the whole thing with her right now, so I try to keep my voice light and casual when I reply, “Sounds like Rory’s been gossiping about me, which she totally swore she didn’t do. But sure, I guess that’s me.”
Zoe’s smile falters a bit, but then she starts talking animatedly, mostly to Rory, about the rest of the morning with the kids and how she’d told Esteban all about it. She says he was so sorry to hear what happened, and that some of the kids were so upset about the whole thing…
By the time we get to the club, the buzz of our predrinks is wearing off a bit and I’m pretty sure Luna is sulking. But when I nudge her and mouth, You okay? she just whispers, “What do you think Esteban wanted to talk to her about?”
“Don’t know, don’t care,” I whisper back, not wanting Rory to overhear and spiral into a panic; she’s kind of a messy drunk as it is. I do care, but whatever it is we can deal with it tomorrow. Hopefully he just wants to apologize to Rory, not terrorize her further, the poor thing. Luna pouts, but doesn’t push it.
Tonight is meant to be fun. And I’m determined to make sure it is.
25 Luna
I’m either high from the stench of weed in the taxi or else I’m actually losing it, because I’m sure Zoe looks exactly like the girl in Liam’s Instagram photo that I caught a glimpse of on Gabriel’s phone the other night (and whose old Instagram photo I accidentally liked). It’s not like the woman I saw by the pool earlier or that guy who had the same build and same hair color as Liam. From what I can recall of that photo, the resemblance is uncanny.
I know Liam has a type: short and curvy. Like me. Like Zoe.
And he came to Majorca on a boys’ getaway last year. I don’t remember the name of the hotel, but I think it was near here. I remember seeing some girls who worked at the hotel in their vacation photos. I’m racking my brain, trying to remember if Zoe looks like one of those girls.
She’s chattering away to Jodie about Gabriel, unaware of the mess she’s wading into, but Jodie tells her that she was only after a bit of fun when she asked him on a date. She acts like she’s above it all, totally unbothered. I wonder if she is and if it was more the shock of hearing the things Gabriel had said that made her look so hurt earlier.
Zoe winks at her. “Can’t say I blame you. Nothing like a little vacation romance, is there? Although long distance can be so cute. There’s someone back home I’ve just started a bit of a thing with, but I don’t know. It’s early days! We’ll see how it goes. He’s barely out of a long-term relationship, but it sounds like they were really over ages ago.”
The words feel like a slap in the face. I’m dying to grill her about this guy and his ex, to see if it really could be Liam, but maybe it’s better to tread carefully. If she is the girl from the photo, if her “someone back home” is him…I don’t want her thinking of me as a jealous maniac of an ex and that getting back to Liam.
“So how long have you been working as a vacation rep?” I ask Zoe as we walk to the club from the strip where the taxi dropped us off.
“The last couple of summers,” she says.
“Did you work somewhere else here before Casa Dorada?”
She laughs. “How do you think I got into this?”
“Where are you from?”
I sound like I’m interrogating her, but I can’t make myself stop. It’s as if I’ve lost the ability to hold an actual conversation—and, apparently, the ability to pretend to have one. If Zoe thinks I sound like I’ve lost the plot, she just writes it off as how I am when I’m drunk.
“Manchester. I go to uni there, too.”
“I’m from Manchester.”
“Are you?” She perks up and starts chattering away about the city, leaving me struggling to keep up with the conversation while still busy trying to think of a way to ask her about Liam. (If only I could remember the name of the hotel he stayed in on his boys’ getaway…)
But even quite drunk, I know there is no way in hell to ask that without sounding like some stalker who’s obsessed with her ex and jealous of his potential new girlfriend.
Which I’m absolutely not, I tell myself, but the thought doesn’t stick like I need it to.
Oh, who am I kidding? I am jealous—but not of Zoe. Or whoever the girl is Liam had his arm around in the photo. I’m jealous of him for moving on so quickly.
I’m jealous because it feels like his life is still together somehow and I’m clinging on to what’s left of mine, and the more I think about it, the less it feels like there’s anything to hold on to, and I just want back what I had. Because if I’ve lost Liam—lost that future together I thought we both dreamed about—I’ve lost so much more than just my boyfriend. I’ve lost the friends we shared and an entire year at uni trying to please other people who didn’t even want me around, and more than a little bit of dignity.
I just have to hope tonight’s not a repeat of that.
Before long we come to a stop by an old neon sign that says ALTO. Loud music spills out of a set of dark doors. Our conversation halts while we dig through our purses for some euros to pay the entry fee, and I fall to the back of the group as Zoe leads the way to the bar.
Rory buys us a round of shots. They’re bright green.
“Salud, bitches!” she shouts above the music, and we down the shots.
* * *
—
It’s not exactly packed, but it is busy. Alto is long and narrow with a DJ booth at the far end and an upper floor that’s more glorified balcony than anything else, lined with booths overlooking the ground floor.
At least it’s not a completely desperate scene; I’d had visions of us arriving at some empty dive, like something out of The Inbetweeners Movie. My brother loves that film.
Zoe promises us it’ll get better later. I don’t mind the quieter atmosphere so much—it’s more my speed for a night out.
Jodie said that Gabriel mentioned this place was popular with tourists, and it looks like he was right. There’s a hen do in a booth in a corner that has spilled out onto the dance floor, feather boas and cheap pink beaded necklaces flying around. There are groups of school-leavers in matching T-shirts who look positively tame compared to the hen do, and half a dozen guys in suits who are chugging pint after pint and egging each other on. I guess there are some locals here too, but they must be completely outnumbered by the tourist types.
I’m drinking my vodka lemonade way too quickly, sipping constantly through the straw while the others chat animatedly. I’m waiting for Zoe to say something that either completely confirms or denies my suspicions, or for me to come up with a good question.
I mean, she can’t be the girl from the photo. She can’t be. And if she is…
I finish my drink first, but Rory isn’t far behind.
“Another?” I ask her.
She nods, and we cast a look at the other two. They’re barely halfway through theirs and wave us away. Jodie is talking loudly and brusquely about how she’s out on the pull tonight and doesn’t Zoe think that guy over there in the khaki-colored shorts is cute?
“What about Gabriel? I thought you guys were…” Zoe says.
“So did I. So should I go and talk to him, d’you think?”
We leave them to it. Jodie shut me down when I tried earlier tonight to talk to her about the whole thing with Gabriel, and Rory looks eager to get away from the conversation, probably still feeling guilty for her part in it.
Not that it’s her fault Gabriel said those things. And if Zoe is the girl from Liam’s photo, that’s not Rory’s fault, either.
“You all right?” Rory asks me at the bar. She has to shout over the music.
I should tell her that of course I’m fine.
But everything is a little out of focus and a little too bright and it’s very noisy, and I’m too hot from the buzz of it all, so I yell back, “I think Zoe is seeing Liam!”
