starting to stare. Jackson still snoozed away in his little carrier, so I didn’t bother lowering my voice.
“I didn’t tell Carl anything, Joel. I swear.”
“You’re lying,” I growled. “I just pulled the article up on the internet. I’d think you’d be a better liar since you’ve had so much practice at it, like saying you were a nanny, that Carl was your uncle, and apparently that you love me. None of is true. Anything else you want to lie to me about? Do you even have a sick mother in the hospital or was that just something you said to make me feel sorry for you?”
Nicole had looked on the verge of tears until that last sentence, when she slapped me hard across the face. “I’d never lie about my mum. That’s sick.”
My face throbbed where she had slapped it and it felt good to have a pain that wasn’t my heart or my confidence. I moved closer to her and finally dropped the volume of my voice. “You have ten minutes to get all your shit out of my hut and take your big fat check and buy a plane ticket home. When I get back to Sydney tomorrow, if your stuff isn’t out of my house, it will be on the street with the garbage.”
She leaned down and looked like she might try to say a final goodbye to Jackson, but I snatched up his carrier and put it behind me before she could touch him. “I could almost forgive you for betraying me, but the way you made me sound like a playboy and a barely reformed man-whore in that article just might put Jackson’s adoption in jeopardy. No matter how much you hate me, how could you have done that to him?”
I walked away with him before Nicole could answer. I stormed through the open doors of the lobby as people around me whispered and tried to figure out if I was the man who had just blown this competition. I ordered two shots of whiskey from the bar and threw them back to drown my pain.
It didn’t work. I’d never felt so low in my life.
Nicole
I tried to pull my clothes out of the dresser drawer and shove them in my little suitcase, but I was crying so hard that I could hardly see what I was doing. My fingers shook so hard that I was barely able to punch in the combination to the safe where I’d put my laptop. Had Joel opened my laptop and read the story thinking I had sent it? But it was right where I left it and the last log on had been from me.
I jumped when I heard the knock on the door, wondering if it was Joel coming to yell at me again. I wouldn’t blame him, but I wouldn’t take back the slap either. I jumped up from my knees by the bed and ran to the door, ready for a fight or apology or whatever accusations he had.
Instead, it was Donk. “Hello, pretty lady. Annnisa said you might need a ride to the airport?”
He stood there stinking of pot, but I didn’t care if he was too high to drive, as long as he got me the hell away from here. I quickly grabbed the rest of my stuff, handed him my suitcase and slung my purse over my shoulder before following him to a VW bus in the parking lot.
“Aren’t you driving me?” I asked him when he loaded my suitcase in the back as another man got in the driver’s seat.
“Oh no, pretty lady. I only travel on my own two feet. Andika will drive you now along with the lovely American couple in the back.”
He smiled at me and slid the door closed on the side of the van. I didn’t even look at the American couple, hiding my red, wet eyes behind my large pair of sunglasses. This time, the ride back to the Indonesian mainland wasn’t on a private speedboat but on a slow-moving ferry, crowded with locals and tourists.
I was sweaty and sunburned when I got back to the airport, but I still didn’t have a flight booked. I looked up the cheapest economy prices on my phone and I didn’t have nearly enough money for a ticket.
My phone beeped and I looked down at the message from Rachel.
Rachel: I saw the surfing results. What happened? JS must be devastated.
Me: Can you call me? 911.
The phone rang ten