The Difference Between Getting and Needing

t h i r t y - o n e

once upon a time, it was made for us
woke up one day, it had turned to d u s t . . .

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"Open up, jackass!"

My fist hit the door to Keone's room at 5:50 the next morning in a constant stream of impatient knocks that I didn't plan on stopping until he was awake.

I needed answers. As much as it killed me to willingly take time out of my day to talk to him – especially at such an early hour at the tail end of my vacation – I needed to clear some things up. Like why he was the sole witness at my "wedding", why of all people he was the one I went to for help in this situation, or why he let us go through with it in the first place. Afterwards, he could happily go back to LA where I'd never see him and I could go back to my life in Philly.

He was missing in action from dinner last night and if he had been there, I wouldn't be at his room right now, ten minutes before I was supposed to be on my way to the airport. If I wasn't in the lobby at six o'clock sharp, I knew my mother would hunt me down and throw me into a taxicab herself. Until then, I had just enough time to interrogate a very hungover Keone about what happened this weekend.

"Fuckin' stop. Christ, I'm coming." His grating voice weighted with fatigue came from the other side of the door. I kept pounding on it like he never even answered, purely just to keep aggravating him.

Seconds later, the door swung open. There, stood the shirtless heartthrob, with one hand on the wall for support and the other cupping his forehead in agony. Whether he was actually in pain or just acting, I couldn't tell. There was a towel slung around his hips, but his shaggy mop of bleached hair wasn't wet in the slightest. The only assumption I had was he slept naked, and that was a mental image I could've gone my whole life without seeing.

He perked up when he recognized it was me, a satirical smirk twisting at the corners of his lips as he belted, "Oh, hey! It's the new Mrs."

"Shut up."

"Yikes," he grimaced. "Married life not treating you well?"

"I don't have time for your banter," I said blandly, glancing down at my phone to double check the time. "You have eight minutes to explain to me why you took me to get eloped on Friday night. I don't remember anything, but I do know you were there. Spill."

He made a show of yawning and stretching his arms like he was shooting a hot-guy-wakes-up scene for his soap opera. It was his way of working at my nerves because he knew that I found him to be the most intolerable person on the planet. I couldn't let him see me crack, so I gave him a blank stare while he wasted one whole minute. He realized I wasn't falling for it and hummed.

"Well from what I remember, I was working on getting one of the bridesmaids to come up to my room after the reception and I ran into you and Gus at the bar. You were talking about getting married, so I just said 'hey, I know a guy'. Then you literally begged me to take you to him, so we went. That's pretty much it," he told me with a halfhearted shrug and bored look on his face. "Nothin' too crazy, but I did get it all on video."

"There's a video?" I hissed through my teeth. He just crookedly smiled in response. "Okay, I need you to send it to me. Right fucking now."

As if my blood pressure hadn't been unstable enough on this trip, the fact that Keone had recorded probably one of the most important moments in my life that I had zero recollection of made my brain spin inside my head. If it wasn't so damn early and I wasn't already miserable for having to leave this beautiful island, I probably would've had him in a chokehold. I didn't have the energy for that, so I settled on using my words instead.