Page 71 of The Paradise Problem

His eyes search mine.

“Even if you told me the offer was all fake, and you don’t actually have two nickels to rub together,” I tell him, “I’d still stay and help you pull this off. I’m your ride-or-die, West Weston.”

West’s expression crashes, features going slack, and I quickly amend with a laugh, “Oh my God, I’m not saying you’re lying about being loaded! It is very obvious to me that you are superrich, West. What I mean—”

“Anna.” His voice is low and emotionless.

“—is that I’m here for you,” I babble, even as he’s shifting me off his lap. “I’m saying I like you. Kissing or no kissing.” Why am I still talking? He’s standing up and tightening his robe around his hips. He’s moving toward the door.

He’s leaving?

“West?”

Stopping, he turns and looks in my direction, his gaze landing somewhere just past my shoulder.

I open my mouth, but at first nothing comes out. Finally: “Are you mad that I implied you don’t have money?”

He gusts out a disbelieving laugh. “No, Green.”

“Then what?” I ask. “What did I do wrong?”

He swallows thickly. “Nothing.”

But he turns anyway and disappears down the hall.

Twenty-Two

LIAM

My longest relationship, with a woman named Chiara, was in college. She was raised in Italy by her two psychologist parents and moved to the states to attend UC Berkeley, where we met. She was perceptive but bossy and in hindsight the relationship was fairly miserable, but something she said, near the end, always stuck with me: “Liam!” she’d yelled in exasperation. “Why don’t you ever know how you feel?”

In truth, Chiara got me at my worst—from ages eighteen to twenty-one, privileged beyond belief and totally unaware, several years pre-therapy. Tragically, our relationship spanned the years where I was utterly destroyed by my father—so she was right, I hardly ever knew what I was feeling. It’s not that I was apathetic, but I hadn’t yet learned how to give names to the tension inside me.

I have now. A decade after my breakup with Chiara, I know when I’m happy, when I’m angry, when I’m frustrated, anxious, lonely, hurt, embarrassed, elated. I let myself feel things; I don’t shy away from big, consuming emotions.

So it’s bewildering now to be unable to identify this churning, rioting feeling in my gut.

Given what just happened between me and Anna, and the way all my previous hesitations about physical intimacy seemed to simply evaporate the minute she was on my lap, I would expect to be on a high from her proximity and the way she so frankly confessed that I have someone in my corner. I have never, not once in my life, had someone show up for me so deliberately and unreservedly without wanting anything in return.

But instead of feeling awash with gratitude, I feel the vague and disconcerting tendrils of anger.

So I bolt. I shower quickly, get dressed, and then leave before she can find me. I walk until I run out of beach, and then I sit on the sand and stare out at the unending ocean, trying to understand why my heart is pounding like something’s wrong with it, why the last thing I can make my body do is go back to the bungalow.

I prod at the feeling, trying to determine whether it’s related to the fight with my father, the awareness that I’m stuck on an island with him for another long stretch of days. But when I look at it, really inspect it, I realize that this simmering panic isn’t currently linked to Ray Weston. That I hate him is a fact unchanging.

And it isn’t linked to the loophole in the family trust, that terrifying pitfall I’m avoiding every step of this trip.

It’s the idea of seeing Anna again tonight that makes my stomach feel hot and uneasy. It’s the echo of her words that turn my gut into a bubbling cauldron of anxiety.

I want to be on your team.

I’m here for you.

I’m your ride-or-die, West Weston.

This feels like anger. Or dread. Or fear.

And that’s when I force myself to stop, because what I’m truly afraid of is giving this fear a name.

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