Looking For Trouble(ON HOLD)

Chapter 8: Sooner or later

CHAPTER 8

Arya Crawford

A creak nearby stirred me from my hangover coma.

I glanced towards the source of the noise to see that Megan had walked out onto the patio and had seated herself on the empty beach chair a few feet away from where I was sitting. She reclined on the chair and stretched out her long legs, crossing them at the ankles.

She had one manicured hand held out over her eyes to shield her against the harsh late afternoon sun. Her hair fell past her shoulders in perfect blonde beach waves, her face looked fresh and devoid of any signs of dehydration, and she didn't look like she wanted to shrivel up and die. In fact, she looked flawless. And she was wearing the hell out of a hot pink bikini. She looked like Beach Barbie. The only difference was that her eyes were brown, not blue.

But from the way her lips were ever so slightly pursed, I could tell she was fighting a hangover just as bad as mine, if not worse. But to the untrained eye, she looked refreshed after a night of celebration.

Nobody did hangover quiet as well as Megan Sanders.

I, on the other hand, looked like I had just crawled out of a grave. My skin was pallid, my hair was a tangled mess, and my eyes were bloodshot. And though I was wearing a black triangle top bikini, I had layered Aaron's faded oversized Beatles t-shirt over it. I had accessorized my 'straight out of hell' look with my pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, my dad's old baseball cap that proudly declared the wearer a 'hot dad', and an ice-cold bottle of Sprite to nurse my hangover.

Staring at Megan's perfect legs made me conscious of my own, so I pulled my knees up to my chest and pulled the edge of my t-shirt down over my legs to cover them.

Megan adjusted the strap of her hot pink bikini top and stared out at my immediate and extended family enjoying the beach, clearing her throat meaningfully in the silence between us.

I caught on instantly, and kept my eyes fixed forward too. We were going to play the Gravitas Game.

The rules of the Gravitas Game were that either or both of us would make a statement revealing or confessing something that would otherwise be too embarrassing to mention in an ordinary conversation, and the other person was not allowed to react. You weren't allowed to express any emotion; judgement, shock, anger, hysteria – none of it. You had to respond to the revelation with as much gravitas as you could muster. The first person to react and show emotion would lose. It was a trick rather than a game, we played on ourselves. Because being told you aren't allowed to laugh makes you want to laugh even more. And in times when the confessions would not warrant laughs in normal circumstances, it was always best to play the game and find the humour in otherwise embarrassing and cringe-worthy confessions and revelations. It was stupid but it was something we'd always done.

Looking shifty in my 'hot dad' baseball cap and dark sunglasses, I dropped my voice a couple octaves to get Megan to laugh and crack first, and spoke like I was part of some shady back alley transaction.

"I know what you did last night, Megan."

"I know what you did last night, Arya."

And that's all it took for Megan to win the game.

"What did I do? What do you know?" I asked worried, breaking character immediately.

"That you got drunk?" Megan furrowed her eyebrows. "What's up with you?"

I huffed out a small breath and shook my head to dispel my worry.

"I heard you went looking for Nick. Please tell me Jackson was able to stop you."