Colby wished he could enjoy the journey, but the truth was, he felt like he was getting farther and farther away from their plans. Their good plans. The ones that included snorkeling in a great spot he’d found on TripAdvisor. He’d looked at so many photos of the place, he felt empty not seeing it live in person.
Instead, he was stuck in the back of an old Porsche van, listening to some lady who wouldn’t stop talking about random, boring stuff; Trey, who, even though he was their age, dressed like he’d stepped out of a vintage stag film; and Nate, who kept egging Georgia on with his endless questions.
They should’ve been exploring, just the four of them, feeling free to yell if they so chose, being their goofy selves. Instead, Colby felt like he’d been taken prisoner by his parents for a visit to Grandma’s house. Now he’d be made to eat dry cookies and look at old photos while being on his best behavior with Trey’s grandmother.
Colby leaned his head against the window. At least the scenery was nice. He kept telling himself to appreciate nature, be grateful for his life. Not everybody got to visit Hawaii, and now he’d been twice. Be glad they’d be seeing the Na Pali Coast. But after the snorkel shop lady told them that only twenty visitors had been allowed on this part of the island the whole year, he doubted they’d be seeing the coastline with its rocky peaks overlooking the Pacific like Trey had promised. More than likely, he’d just said that to get them to come.
“So, how did you two meet?” Nate asked Georgia and Trey. At least he was handling the talking part, whereas strangers had to earn Colby’s trust first before he could handle a conversation.
Meet? Colby sat up, craning his ear to hear better. He’d assumed Georgia was a family member of Trey’s, but now he was curious to hear the answer.
“Oh, now, that’s a funny story.” Georgia threw her head back and laughed. “Well, it goes like this… A couple years ago, I was on a cruise ship with my girlfriends. We booked the cruise after I had an odd dream telling me I should get out of Kauai for a while, go do something new.”
Colby swapped glances with Sam. It’s Kooky Lady Story Hour!
“So, we did. We took a friends’ cruise together. It left from San Diego and went to Cabo San Lucas, Puerto Vallarta, and Mazatlán. It was November 11, the third night of the cruise. There we were, in the disco, dancing, having a fabulous time…” She gave them a knowing look over her shoulder from the passenger seat. “Drinking wine…”
She said it in the way older ladies sometimes did whenever they discussed alcohol or weed use, as if there were something super-secretly naughty about it. Colby imagined a bunch of fifty-year-old friends all getting drunk together. It was funny and weird to imagine at the same time.
“So, while dancing, my eye caught this handsome guy…” Georgia gestured to Trey in the driver’s seat, quietly nodding with the oddest smile on his face in the rearview mirror.
Colby froze. So…they were a couple?
“And his eye caught mine. And wouldn’t you know it? As he approached me to talk to me, one of my friends who was dancing, bumped into him by accident, which in turn made him bump into me, and then my red wine went flying all over my white dress. Not his button-down linen shirt. No—my dress!” She laughed. “It was just a comedy of errors, at that point, really.”
Colby tried to imagine the scene. He pictured Trey wearing a button-down linen shirt about to hit on a lady who seemed older than his mom. It was laughable and totally in line with the guy who’d tried to teach him a life lesson back in L.A. but really had no clue.
“Oh, my goodness! He felt so terrible!” Georgia laughed.
Colby waited for Trey to chime in and agree it’d been an uncomfortable moment for him, but he remained quiet. Nate, Alex, and Sam all chuckled politely, but Colby could only stare at Georgia openmouthed. Did people really meet like that, by bumping into each other and spilling wine as a conversation icebreaker? He felt like he was listening to the plot of an old romance movie, the kind his parents watched on Sunday afternoons.
“So, then…” Georgia continued with a blush.
The more she talked, the more Colby got the sense that she was maybe even older than fifty. Maybe sixty. Maybe grandma-age.
“He wouldn’t stop apologizing and offered to pay for dry cleaning. I said no worries, it was just an old dress, nothing to cry over. He insisted, said that he was an off-duty waiter who’d taken a side job on the ship to make a little extra money to pay for college. It just so happened it was his night off, and he was relaxing in the disco.”
Even her repeated use of the word “disco” irritated Colby. It was a club, lady—a club. But more importantly, Trey had been working on a cruise ship? The guy who’d tried to make him feel like crap for being a YouTuber?
Pfft, Colby laughed to himself.
“He was worried he’d get fired for spilling a drink on me. When I heard that, I, of course, went looking for a cruise ship officer, so I could explain what happened, tell them it was just an accident, so Trey wouldn’t get in trouble. He thanked me—profusely, I might add—and the rest is history.”
She winked at Trey, whose gaze turned immediately back on the road.
When she said “thanked me profusely,” all Colby could do was imagine the two of them stripped naked in bed, a thought he quickly wished he could shutter. And not with the flimsy white shutters of island cabanas but with steel-grade hurricane shutters, the kind that didn’t let in any light, wind, or icky thoughts.
But the sparkle in Georgia’s eye was going nowhere. “We ended up spending the entire rest of the cruise together. A few months later, after we said goodbye, I contacted him, inviting him to come see my estate here on the island, and he’s been living with me ever since! It’s been two years!”
Holy shit. So it was true. Trey was living with an older woman. The estate wasn’t his own. He wasn’t a self-made billionaire. Something about that made Colby feel vindicated. But dating Georgia? Sure, older women could be attractive, but Trey had to be what—twenty-one, twenty-two? At least a forty-year difference existed between them. Why would Trey commit to life on a remote part of Kauai with a much older woman, isolated from people his age?
Even Sam was looking at Colby in the back seat like all of this was rather odd.
As if to make clear that she was no longer married, Georgia added, “My late husband used to write movie scripts. Well, not as his profession—he was in real estate—but for fun, as a hobby. I shouldn’t say that either. He wanted to get them produced into movies. He loved films, actors, the whole Hollywood vibe. After he died, I was left with all these unfinished scripts, so Trey has been helping me finish them, one by one. Pretty amazing, huh?”
Wait.
So Trey, Nate’s cousin’s roommate’s former best friend’s babysitter’s Instacart shopper’s Lyft driver was also a writer? Not once during the L.A. party had Trey mentioned this. He’d talked endlessly about his girlfriend who’d broken up with him, how he’d messed things up with her, the college vs. real world education thing, but not once had the guy ever mentioned a love of writing.
Then again, anyone and everyone who’d ever lived in L.A. for two seconds had written or attempted writing a script before.
“He has to pay his dues somehow,” Georgia laughed, softly punching Trey in the shoulder. Alex laughed, Nate laughed, Sam laughed, and even Colby threw a fake laugh in there just to be polite, but all of them in the back two rows looked at each other like what the fuck is happening?
Georgia pointed out suspicious road workers who stared at them as they drove by. “See? You couldn’t see any of that road before. It was completely covered in trees…”
Colby shuddered at the mistrustful glares from the highway repairmen. He shifted his focus to Trey instead, driving in silence, adding nothing to Georgia’s stories, completely overshadowed by his woman’s dialogue, whereas that night, at the party, he hadn’t stopped giving Colby unsolicited advice. Where was his voice now? What was he thinking?
Colby had to know and resolved to ask him later if they were ever alone.
After forty minutes, he felt like he was venturing further and further into Jurassic Park. Giant palm fronds the size of prehistoric flowers jutted off the sides of the roads, the street got narrower, the terrain bumpier, and up ahead, he could see the landscape getting more and more mountainous.
Where was this super-famous Belle Estate?
On the side of a mountain? On the beach?
He was sure they’d end up at a half-dilapidated old house that had maybe once been significant for two seconds in the past. Colby checked his cell phone signal. One bar. When he tried to Google Belle Estate in Kauai, the little wheel spun and spun. Disconcerting, but at the same time—liberating. The idea of leaving social media and digital connection behind appealed to him, but there was something also oddly terrifying about it. Would they spend the day being forced to listen to ukulele music and Georgia’s stories about how she and Trey became a couple?
Colby let out a slow breath.
It just didn’t matter. He didn’t want to feel trapped, forced, or resentful of Trey anymore. He tried to appreciate his surroundings. The flowers, the blue skies, the vibrant neon green foliage, the fact that he was in Kauai with his friends. So what if they’d broken some plans? Maybe the new ones would be just as fun. Maybe this would be the most Georgia would take of their time, and the rest of the day, they’d spend hiking the famous coastline.
Go with the flow, Colby reminded himself.
He sat back and gave Sam an easygoing smile. They passed by a helicopter landing area (reminding Colby that they had a reservation for one in two days), a private beach, and a trail leading into the mountains. Maybe, if they were lucky, they’d run into a hidden waterfall, unlike the crowded ones they’d seen the last two days.
“Just down that road, down yonder, there used to be a hippie camp in the 1970s,” Georgia narrated more information. “I’ll tell you guys about that one later. But for now…” She widened her arms, one of them extending out the window, as the van came to a stop outside a tall, black metal gate. “Welcome home!”
They’d arrived.
Colby sat up and took in the details.
They could’ve been at the gate to a rebellion base nestled deep in the jungle, with all the trees and bushes on either side of the van and only the wrought-iron gate in front of them. As the gates swung open, Trey drove through them slowly down a long, bumpy path flanked by hundreds of white and purple orchids. Briefly, Colby thought of his mother, who loved orchids. She would die of happiness if she saw this.
When the bushes cleared, Colby could see the house in the distance slowly roll into view. It was old, but modern style architecture, from the seventies or eighties but still beautiful with an A-frame roof, dark wood paneling, rock siding, tall glass walls and windows, and lots and lots of lush greenery. His first thought was “in harmony with nature.” Hibiscus surrounded the entire property in the most random patterns of growth. No straight lines, no clipped, trimmed landscaping, just nature in all her glory, overgrowing wild abandon.
Gorgeous.
Everything about the property was wild, including a mini waterfall that dripped down a formation of rocks into a stream that disappeared somewhere behind the house. Trey pulled around the circular driveway featuring a tall, stone water fountain in the center beside a metal grate—Colby had no idea what it was for—and parked in front of the house set against the cobalt sky.
“We have a garage, but we want you to see it from here,” Trey spoke for the first time since their road trip began. He unlocked the sliding side doors of the van, as everyone bowed their heads and stepped out.
“Whoa…” Sam and Nate said at the same time.
They weren’t wrong.
The first thing to hit Colby were the scents—salty ocean mixed with the cleanest air he’d ever smelled, even cleaner than the east side of the island. Everything had a floral, minty scent. Crisp and clear. No people, no cars, no car exhaust, no BBQ smells, nothing that indicated civilization on this side of paradise. Nothing but flowery scents, the dry smell of baked sand, mountains, sweet, misty waterfalls, and South Pacific breezes. Plus, he could hear huge waves crashing in the not-too-far distance.
It was so peaceful, so surreal, like they’d entered the portal to a new, vivid planet. All six of them stood there admiring the house and surroundings. Even Georgia and Trey, as though seeing it for the first time, marveled at their home. His resentment melting away, Colby felt a dreamlike lull fall over him, like a magic spell. Without even going inside, he already knew the Belle Estate was truly the most incredible place he’d ever seen in his life—hands down.
Nothing compared.
And suddenly, he forgave the change in plans.
Because this—this was true paradise.