Before He Was Gone: Starstruck Book 2 (22 page)

Southeast Oklahoma seemed like the best place. Not too many people know me. I landed some work out at a ranch called The Pioneer, building a storm shelter and taking tourists out on rides.

Telling my employer - the gap-toothed, overweight forty-something woman called Carol - that I know full well when a blackout’s coming on by now was the only way I got the job. I had to thank my lucky stars she wasn’t too concerned. I think the way her teenage daughter looked at me like I was some sort of celebrity who just stepped out of the TV had a lot to do with her hiring decision, but either way I’m grateful.

I was told to buy a freezer, as well as enough groceries for a month before I got here. There’s not much around outside of Beavers Bend State Park, which suits me just fine. They pay good money. I get a tent space, water and electricity, some meals too, so all up it’s perfect. As perfect as it can get.

I have four women, all in their forties with me right now, chattering among themselves on four horses. It’s fifty degrees and we’re all in sweaters and I still can’t remember ever being this cold. I’m keeping quiet between pointing out whatever birds and trees I can remember along the Mountain Fork River, though one woman recognizes me from
Deserted
and keeps asking questions.

‘What was it really like out there?’ she’s saying now, trotting up beside me in her red jodhpurs and matching red hat. She irritates me instantly. ‘Did they give you protein bars off camera and massages every night? I mean, you didn’t really have to sleep in that shelter, did you?’

‘No massages. Only protein was the fish,’ I tell her, looking straight ahead at the path.

‘And the goat,’ she says with a laugh. ‘Looked like fun from where I was sitting. I wouldn’t mind being out there with nothing much to do; no responsibilities. You’ve sure got a great tan for the winter, too, huh?’

I don’t even respond. She knows nothing. She hasn’t had to fight the ocean in a thunderstorm for food, or sleep with sand flies eating her face. She hasn’t had to climb a palm tree thirty meters in the air just to get a drink. And she hasn’t had to smell Punk’s feral sweater after thirty days of sweating in it with no laundry detergent. There was nothing fun about it. Other than Alyssa.

I canter on ahead, motioning for them to follow me. I’m miles from the ocean - a notion that throws me when I wake up in the mornings and stick my head outside. In the moments before I open my eyes I’m back in that cave with her under my chin, my arm around her, listening to the waterfall. I saw a few episodes of the show with Evan when I went to collect my car. Watching them back was weird. The close ups of the crabs scuttling along the shore, the long-shots of our camp from the helicopter; endless turquoise shallows spilling out into blackness, showing just how deserted we really were.

‘I can’t believe you were there. I bet you can’t either,’ Evan said as we sat on his couch and I struggled with a slice of pizza my stomach wasn’t quite ready for. ‘That water is so blue. Is that real, or is that special effects?’

I had to laugh, but as I watched myself diving with the spear, slamming it into snapper after snapper like some madman on a mission, I felt a kind of pain; a loss I couldn’t even convey. It rips through me now, again, a million light years from it all with the saddle beneath me and no sand for miles. For all the things I caught in that ocean, all I can think about is the one that got away.

I slow the horse, run my hand along its mane as the women catch me up. I can hear them whispering and giggling behind me. I curb my irritation. ‘Time for tea?’ I say, jumping down and reaching for the flask in the saddlebag. I tie the chestnut mare to a maple tree and it starts to chomp on the thinning grass.

‘Are there any coconuts,
animal?
’ the woman who knows me quips.

‘Not unless you can find a palm tree around here,’ I say, helping her down and handing her a sheet of tarpaulin to spread on the grass by the river. You never know when the rains might come. I sit down with them, help myself to the sweet, hot tea, hand out the cookies. I still can’t eat them. They’re not even real food.

‘Where’s Alyssa?’ the woman asks suddenly, biting into one. The question; her name makes me swallow my tea too fast and I burn the back of my throat. I put the cup down and lie back on the sheet heavily. ‘I thought you looked cute together,’ she carries on and it’s all I can do not to get up, mount the horse and gallop away without them. She puts a hand on my arm and I turn my head. Her brown eyes are kind and more than a few crinkles line the edges. ‘Is it really something they can’t cure?’ she asks.

I search her face as I struggle for the right words. I should’ve known there was no escape. I double-doomed myself, going on that show and losing.

‘What are you doing out here, honey?’ she presses. ‘Does anyone know where you are?’

This time I do stand up. I walk to the edge of the river, letting my eyes train a scissor-tailed flycatcher skirting over the water. Why does my brain forget the things my father said and did, the games I played with Evan growing up; yet it lingers on the curves of her body, the feel of her tongue sweeping through my mouth, every word she said about her dreams of opening a restaurant? Even her goddam baklava recipe. It’s all there. I want it to go, but it won’t. She’ll be the last thing to leave me.

‘Why do you torture yourself?’ Evan asked me as I walked to the car with my tent and my backpack back in Austin. ‘You want to be with this girl, don’t you? Alyssa?’

‘I got sidetracked,’ I snapped back. 

'You're running away again, Joshua,' he said. He was right. But I have to keep moving. I have to let her go. Maybe I'll leave a part of her in each new place and eventually it won't hurt anymore. Either that, or she'll just be everywhere.

No.

Kiss or no kiss with her ex in front of the goddam nation, I was insane for thinking I could be with Alyssa. I can’t bring anyone into this. My mind was screwed even more than usual, being out there with nothing else to think about. Alyssa shouldn’t be with that rock star asshole, but she sure as hell shouldn’t be with me. She has a life to live.

I turn round, gather up the tarpaulin and cookies, help the women back onto their horses and guide us slowly back along the river. I manage to avoid all conversation, except for a friendly goodbye, but Carol wanders up to me as I’m brushing down the chestnut and the dusty twilight is closing in.

‘Someone called Evan just called for you,’ she says, leaning her bulky arms over the stable door in the barn. ‘He says you need to check your email.’ 

She watches as I put the brush with the tack on the shelf and shut the latch after me. I follow her across the campsite, where my one lonely tent and cooking station is sitting out of the way of the trees. The house is a good ten minute walk away and we do it all in silence.

When we reach the brick house, Carol points to an old PC surrounded by piles of cookery books on a desk in the cluttered kitchen. Her chubby daughter watches me from the wooden dining table in the middle and I catch the way her forkful of some kind of pie hovers above her plate in star-struck fashion. I also notice she’s wearing a Noah Lockton fan shirt. Of course she is.

I nod at her, take a seat in the uncomfortable wooden chair, bring up Hotmail. The keyboard is full of dirt, like my fingernails. I haven’t checked my email at all since I left for the island. Nobody ever emails me anyway, but there’s a forwarded message from Evan at the top of my inbox. ‘Watch this,’ is written in the subject line.

I click the message. It’s a link to a video. Blood heats in my veins as I press play. What I see makes me freeze.

It’s Alyssa, crossing the sand on the island; Sebastian running after her, grabbing her, kissing her. My fingers curl into my palms. I don’t want to see this again - is he kidding me?

But there’s more. She’s pulling away from him. He’s gripping her shoulders and she’s still pulling away.

‘Alyssa, you have no future with him.’

‘I have now. Now is all that matters.’

‘You won’t be saying that when he doesn’t know who you are.’

‘You don’t know who I am!’
She’s staring at him now, swiping at her mouth.
‘I wish you hadn’t told me what you just told me,’
she tells him.
‘But it doesn’t change how I feel. It doesn’t make me not want to be with him!’

‘Oh my god,’ the girl screeches behind me. I swing around suddenly. I didn’t even hear her leave the table. ‘I love Alyssa,’ she tells me, grinning. ‘You need to bring her here! Will you bring her here?’

I realize I’m shaking. I can’t even talk. But she’s pointing at the screen again, eyes wide. I turn back. It’s Alyssa with another girl. Her friend Chloe, maybe? I've seen her before.

‘Joshua,’ she’s saying to the camera now. She looks clean; her hair’s brushed and styled around her beautiful face. My heart pangs and I realize I’m fighting for breath. Damn, I miss her, more than I even thought. Her scent comes back to me, just looking at her; the feel of her skin, the sound of her laughing as she danced on the sand.

Chloe gets up, walks out of the shot. ‘I don’t know where you are,’ Alyssa says, leaning forward. Her eyes are bigger, lined with black kohl, imploring. ‘But I found your cousin Evan and I know there’s a treatment, and I’m going to make sure you get it.’ 

She sits up straighter. The fierce look I know too well is back in her eyes. ‘No more secrets, no more lies,' she says. 'We’re the island now, Joshua, they can’t touch us anymore. You don’t have to hide away, from anything… you don’t have to run, OK? Just come back to me, please. You’re my reality.’ She sighs, looks straight at the lens. ‘Everything else is just projections.’

The video ends and I hear the girl behind me sniff loudly. ‘Oh my god,’ she says again. ‘I
love
Alyssa.’

I shut the email with trembling hands. I’m about to shut the entire window down when I see another email from the bank underneath it. I never get emails from my bank. My heart’s thumping like a beat box as I open it and I already know what she’s done.

The wind is howling. The snow came last night like it always does in Denver – sudden, covering the city in white and rendering it silent, like some old movie. Driving here from Boulder this morning took ninety minutes. Not that I minded. Time has actually had far less significance since I left that island.

‘Alyssa?’ I turn from the office window. Megan’s standing here, looking at the collection of heels and clothes I’ve boxed up; the ones I kept in my desk drawers in the name of being prepared for any situation. She’s sad that I’m leaving, but how could I have come back?

She walks over to me, stands next to me in the window and follows my gaze over the snow. ‘Where are you going first?’ she says, looping her arm through mine.

I shrug. ‘My friend Shan is taking a cruise this summer, from Barcelona,’ I say. ‘It’s not really my thing but I may go to Europe, meet him after that. He wants to visit Greece with me.’

‘I love Shan,’ she says, and for a weird second I wonder how the hell she knows him. Then I remember she watched the show and that my world is warped beyond belief. I don’t know why I forget sometimes. One of the reasons I want to leave so soon is because it’s all
everyone
wants to talk about. I’ve watched and relived each episode on phones, televisions, blogs… more than I ever wanted to.

What surprises me most, aside from feeling my heart crumble every single time I see Joshua’s face on a screen, is how Stephanie and Jaxx were portrayed. They got just as much screen time; flirting, talking, making out in secret once or twice. And then there was Stephanie on her own, telling the world via camera how she found the immunity charm as soon as Jaxx found it and was planning on playing him till she got it. All in the name of Nashville, and her brothers.

Journey
was
a plant, as the guys suspected. She’s never spent a day in Nepal in her life. She’s an actress from Los Angeles called Annabel Kline and she’s fully booked for the rest of the year, according to
People
.

Punk too, spent most of his time talking to the camera near the well, telling stories, battling his demons out loud about heading into the water long before we found out what happened to his friend on the jet ski. Everyone at home fell in love with the honesty he hid from us; the same way they fell for my sense of humor, my positivity and I quote: ‘that body in that bikini.’ I cringe when I think about it. The shot of my ass halfway up a palm tree made the cover of
U.S Weekly
. I had to rip it off the bulletin board in the kitchen as soon as I got here.

‘It’s a long time till summer,’ Megan says, gesturing to the snow. ‘What’re you going to do till then? Hang out with orphans in Cambodia?’

‘Probably,’ I say, smiling. The truth is, I don’t really have a plan and I kind of like it. I want to meet new people and explore new cultures, and eat food from different places. I want to learn how to cook that way. I don’t want to be in some school learning someone else’s rules until I absolutely need that certificate.

The floorboard creaks behind us. We both turn around.

‘Alyssa, don’t forget to send me the spreadsheet, please,’ K-Lame says.

‘The low hanging fruit?’ I say, as my eyes are drawn straight to a coffee stain.

‘Yes. The users we
all
need to target now you’re leaving us,’ he replies, without a hint of recognition or heart. ‘Come see me before you go?’

‘Yes sir.’ I struggle to hide my smile as he strides off into his corner office and shuts the door.

‘Who’s that?’ Megan says, squinting back out into the snow. I follow her eyes downwards. The snow’s coming down in thick, white balls now but I can just make out a figure standing below on the street. There’s no one else outside.

It’s a guy, wearing a thick, black winter coat. He’s holding a cell phone and appears to be looking in all directions, then back to the phone in confusion. He looks up suddenly and all the breath leaves my body. I stumble backwards and Megan grips my arm.

‘What’s wrong?’ she says, but I’m already halfway out the door. I slam my hand against the elevator button. It takes forever to arrive. The doors open and close behind me and every second feels like a month.

Eventually I’m deposited in the lobby. I run across the marble, throw myself into the revolving doors. The cold smacks me like a boxing glove as soon as I step outside. I’m wearing a thin blue dress and winter boots. My coat is upstairs. I don’t care. 
‘Joshua,’ I breathe.

He’s facing towards the street now, looking at the phone. He turns around when he hears me. Something in me breaks but I’m fixed to the spot. My eyes take in his familiar face and body in a whole new world; a whole new context. His stubble’s thicker around his jaw line. His eyes look darker in the gray. The snow is building on his shoulders and hood.

‘You got a phone,’ I say stupidly and he half smiles, holding it up.

‘I thought I should probably get with the twenty-first century. But I can’t figure out Google Maps. Why can it not just say
Alyssa is here, you asshole
with a big red arrow?’

He looks at me almost nervously for a moment as my teeth chatter. I’m freezing. The snow between us is almost a wall. He pushes his hood back and steps closer, searching my face now, lowering the phone. I close the gap before I pass out and I can’t even stop my tears now. His arms are around me in an instant. I throw my own around his snowy coat as he finds my lips and kisses me till I’m crying into his mouth. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says now, holding onto me, ‘I’m an asshole.’

‘You’re not,’ I say, kissing him, holding him even tighter. ‘You’re not, you’re summer, so you’d better warm me up.’

He kisses me again, lifts me into his arms, pulls me back into the double doors and pins me against the glass as it spins us. ‘Alyssa,’ he says, pulling away and meeting my eyes. The flecks of brown and green I know so well are watery and his words make me cry even harder. ‘What you’ve done for me, for my life…’

‘I want you to get better, whatever chance there is,’ I tell him, putting a finger to his lips, ‘nothing else matters, Joshua. Besides, I want these moments. I want to keep on getting to know you.’

‘What about your culinary course? Your restaurant?’

‘I can always cook snakes. Life's for living!’ I pull him back into the lobby out of the snow. He takes my face in his hands, then rubs my freezing, bare arms. I notice the snow on his black boots where his bare, tanned feet should be in the sand. So surreal. ‘Where’ve you been?’ I say. 

‘Wondering how to live without you.’ He presses his forehead to mine, draws my mouth to his. ‘I don’t think I can,’ he says against my lips. ‘You’re kind of hard to get over.’

I stifle a sob. ‘Good!’

The security guard coughs in his corner at the desk and I realize we’re clinging to each other and making out like we’re back on the island and not standing in a building in Denver, dripping snow all over a floor. ‘How did you find me?’ I say, straightening up and pulling him towards the elevator. I hit the button.

‘You’re not exactly off the grid,
M-lister
,’ he says. Our skin is cold, hand in hand. The cave rushes back to me; the heat, the friction. His eyes turn serious as he tilts my chin. ‘Alyssa, seriously, I can’t thank you enough for what you did. You didn’t stop fighting for me, even when I was a selfish asshole. Seriously, I don’t deserve you.’

‘You need to learn that you’re deserving,’ I tell him. ‘And you weren’t an asshole, ever; you were confused and you were scared. Joshua, just ‘cause you’re a survivor doesn’t mean you have to face the world on your own.’

He half smiles. ‘I didn’t think about that before.’

‘Well, start thinking about it,’ I say, swiping at my eyes. 'People can help you if you let them.'

‘You’re amazing,’ he whispers, reaching a hand to the back of my neck and wiping my tears with his other hand. ‘But your prize money, Alyssa, are you sure…’

‘I’m so sure,’ I say, as the doors fly open and I pull him inside with me. He kisses me again against the wall; deep, passionate - the kind of kiss I know means that the next time I’m naked in his presence, things could get hotter than they ever did in that suffocating cave. There are way too many clothes between us.

‘Listen,’ he says now, releasing me as the elevator stops, dropping a kiss on my cold nose. ‘I have to go to California in two weeks to start the treatment. They need to monitor it for a while but after that I can go anywhere, as long as I check in. It’ll have to be regularly at first…’

‘We’ll deal with it. However long it takes,’ I say. ‘But where do you want to go, emotional drifter?’ I lead him out and onto my floor. ‘I'm fine with no plan but I just packed a big old box of clothes in here and I have nowhere in particular to wear them… oh, except one gay cruise in Barcelona.’ 

I loop my arms around his neck again. He smells like soap and clean laundry and it’s weird; not quite right, but I’ll get used to it.

‘Well,’ he says, shaking melting snow out of what now must be an inch of hair, ‘until all that, I happen to have a tent in a field in Oklahoma. There are a few cows in it, and some horses. You won’t need the clothes.’ He grins now, tilting my chin to him.

‘Sounds great,’ I say. ‘We don’t have to kill the horses for food, do we?’

‘You can if you like,’ he says, ‘if you do it naked.’

I meet his lips again, pulling him against me by the front of his coat. ‘Deal,’ I say. ‘Let me just go talk to a man about some fruit, and then I think we should go find a new cave somewhere in Denver.’

‘Are you still going native?’ he asks, smiling mischievously.

‘You’ll have to wait and see!’ I say, smacking his snowy arm.