LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER TEN

      It took another forty-five minutes of primping before Paige could be persuaded to leave for the luau. I had traded my heels for my brown leather flip-flops but kept my jeans and T-shirt. The night air had cooled slightly, but I was still really too warm. I was also incredibly conscious of the swathes of black eyeliner Paige had insisted I wear. To be fair to her, she didn’t do a horrible job, but it was just too hot for so much make-up and I wasn’t used to looking like a sexy panda. If there was such a thing. There was a reason pandas didn’t do it all that often, and I strongly suspected it had something to do with their amateur smokey-eye look in the Chinese humidity. Eventually, with Paige in her expensive toddleresque ensemble and me in my stolen clothes and borrowed make-up, we found Kekipi’s luau. And it was full of gays.

      ‘You came!’ Kekipi dashed up to me with a coconut that was not full of coconut water and gave me a huge hug. ‘I told missy to bring you. It’s not a real luau, just a bit of a boys’ get-together, but we do have tiki torches, dancing and a disgusting amount of pig.’

      ‘You had me at pig,’ I promised.

      Kekipi laughed and clapped. He was my favourite. ‘Since Mr Bennett stopped giving his parties, we’ve made it a tradition to invite fabulous women to our own whenever there are fabulous women to invite.’

      ‘I believe Paige definitely falls into the fabulous category,’ I said, accepting a coconut cocktail of my own as well as a hot-pink lei made of delicious-smelling flowers. Across the way, Paige was trying to negotiate with a half-naked man for a baby-blue garland as the pink was ‘too matchy matchy’ for her outfit. ‘I think I’m just filler.’

      ‘Fabulous filler.’ Kekipi slipped his arm through mine and walked me over to an empty table. ‘So I have to ask you, have you seen Mr Twenty Questions today?’

      ‘I have,’ I confirmed and swiftly changed the subject. ‘But I have to ask you, what’s going on with Bertie Bennett? How come he keeps cancelling things?’

      ‘Oh, don’t,’ Kekipi said, waving his hand in my face. ‘I haven’t seen him in days. I don’t know where he’s hiding. I just find notes dotted around the house. It’s family business issues – don’t concern yourself with it.’

      ‘Not the best time to invite journalists over, then.’ I found the straw in my cocktail and took a sip. It was so wonderful, I feared I might never drink any other type of drink as long as I lived. ‘Interesting.’

      ‘Hmm.’ Kekipi clearly didn’t want to talk about it. ‘But it does seem a little silly to invite a group of people over to interview you and take pictures then decide that’s the week you want to do a Dietrich.’

      ‘It does a bit,’ I agreed, finding the bottom of my drink far too quickly. Maybe it had only been half full. Maybe I was a complete lush. ‘These are really good.’

      ‘They are almost as delicious as Mr Miller.’ He took my empty coconut from me and set it on a table. ‘I’m not refilling until you tell me what he said to you today. Was it saucers of milk at table two? Did you scratch each other’s eyes out?’

      ‘Not exactly.’ I really wanted that coconut back. ‘Not yet, anyway.’

      ‘Oh, amazing.’ Kekipi clapped and an obscenely fit young man with long black curtains of hair parted in the centre appeared with two more drinks. I imagined that being in charge of hiring and firing had its perks when you were Bertie Bennett’s estate manager. ‘Did you hate-fuck him? You hate-fucked him, didn’t you?’

      ‘No!’ I tried to look scandalized. I had awkward issues with people using the eff-word to mean, well, effing. I failed. ‘I absolutely didn’t.’

      ‘But you wanted to.’ He pushed my new drink across the table towards me. ‘Don’t worry, I get it. He’s hot, he’s an asshole, you’re in Hawaii. It happens.’

      I forced a stray strand of hair back into the kirby grips at the back of my head and gave one firm, decisive nod. ‘Maybe so, but it’s not going to happen to me.’

      ‘I guess we’ll find out about that later, won’t we?’ Kekipi stood up and backed away, wiggling his eyebrows at me.

      I sat alone at my table, happily watching Paige and what I assumed to be the rest of Bennett’s staff dancing to the sounds of someone’s iPod under several strings of perfectly hung fairy lights. Tiki torches marked out the dance floor and someone had wrapped spare leis around the palm trees. It looked like we were in an all-gay, Hawaii-based remake of Dirty Dancing. If I tuned out the music, which was always difficult when someone was playing Beyoncé at full blast, I could hear the sea lapping against the shore and everything smelled sweet. Not least my delicious cocktail. I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply. I should have started making stupid decisions years ago. I really wished Amy was here. Not Charlie, though. Because I wasn’t thinking about Charlie.

      I continued to not think about Charlie for two more drinks and almost an hour of the Beyoncé, Rihanna and Robyn megamix. I’d almost got to my feet for that ‘Call Me Maybe’ song, but Kekipi dashed over to stop me, declaring the song ‘so last year’, apologizing for its inclusion and refreshing my drink. I knew putting away so many cocktails on a school night was a bad idea, but since all my bad ideas had been going so well, I figured I might as well keep up the good work. Plus it made the music so much more bearable. After a rousing group rendition of ‘Single Ladies’, Paige wandered over, zigzagging across the sand, and sat down in the chair beside me with a sloppy smile.

      ‘I think I’m jet-lagged,’ she sighed, head tilted up towards the stars. ‘I feel a bit weird.’

      ‘Do you want to go back?’ I asked, not really wanting to head home, but Tess the Martyr was always lurking in the subconscious background. ‘We can go back.’

      ‘No, no, I’m fine.’ She patted my hand and leaned over to my straw to take a sip of my drink. ‘That helps.’

      ‘I don’t think it does,’ I said, passing her a skewer of barbecued chicken and a can of Diet Coke.

      She held up her hand and made a pukey face which I took to mean she didn’t want them. Just as well, because I really did.

      ‘Shouldn’t we talk about the photo shoot?’ I asked, watching her mouth the words to whatever Lady Gaga song was playing with a glazed expression. ‘Like, what you want me to actually do.’

      ‘I have it all planned.’ Paige closed her eyes and piled her hair up on top of her head and then let it fall down her back. ‘It’s just an amazing concept. The portrait we’re going to do at the house, and then, for the fashion shoot, we’re going to Iolani Palace. It’s this amazing old palace where the kings of Hawaii used

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