Last Light (Novella) Read Free Page A

taught by
her
mother, Grandma Kolokea. Now Makani could respond to Rainer’s admiration only with gentle sarcasm: “What—were you blind until that day?”
    “Well, I’m not blind now,” he said, compounding the flattery and her embarrassment.
    To gain time to catch her breath, she said, “You were in Oahu on business that day? What business are you in?”
    “I’m a facilitator,” he said, and sipped his beer, as if that one word should say it all.
    “Facilitator? What do you facilitate?”
    “Negotiations, transactions, financial arrangements.”
    “Sounds important. You were doing all that when you were just twenty?”
    He shrugged. “I like people. I’ve always had this ability to, you know, bring them together when all they want is to be arguing with each other. I can’t stand people fighting, always looking for a reason to be at each other’s throats.” A solemnity overcame him. An underlying pallor seemed to leach some of the glow out of his tan. He looked down at the table. “When I was a little kid, I saw enough of that. My old man, my mom. Too much drinking, so much anger. I couldn’t do a thing about…the brutality.” He looked up with repressed tears in his eyes. “We get only one life. We shouldn’t waste a day of it in anger.”
    Because Makani knew too well the darker corners of the human heart, she sympathized with his childhood trauma and hoped that things might develop between them in such a way that she could be a comfort to him.
    “You facilitate between businesses?” she asked. “In the surfing world?”
    “Yeah, exactly. I did what every surf mongrel dreams of doing—found a way to make a living out of living the waves.”
    She didn’t know the rules of poker, didn’t know how to read another player’s tells, but suddenly something about his smile or maybe a certain glint in his eyes, or the faintest hint of arrogance in the slight lifting of his chin, suggested to her that he might be lying about his work.
    She must be wrong. He was such a big strong man, yet he didn’t use his size to intimidate. There he sat in his surfing-penguins shirt, like an overgrown boy, as sweet as anything. Her suspicion no doubt resulted from the uncounted times that her paranormal talent had revealed to her someone’s well-concealed deceit.
    If she allowed unalloyed cynicism to settle in her heart, she would never trust anyone again. She’d have no hope of friendship, and certainly no chance of ever sharing her life with a man. The possibility of a life alone already gave her sleepless nights; the certainty of it would bring a depression that not even the consoling sea, with all its power and beauty, could relieve.
    Pushing aside his half-finished beer, folding his hands on the table, leaning forward, Rainer said, “This is all a little awkward for me. I mean, I’ve thought about you for ten years, and never for a minute imagined I’d ever see you again. But here you are.”
    “For real, now—you can’t have been thinking of me for ten years,” she said, though she wanted to believe that what he’d said was more true than not.
    “Not every minute, ’course not. More often than you’d believe. When the waves were big and glassy and offshore and pumping, when it was a perfect day, then you kind of walked out of the back of my mind, as vivid as when I first saw you, as if you had to be there for it to
really
be a perfect day. Is it too much to believe that a man could see a woman across a crowded room or on the beach and be so drawn to her that he feels everything is about to change? But then, for whatever reason, he never has the chance to meet her, and so he’s haunted by that lost opportunity, by
her,
for years after? Do you think that sort of thing only happens in novels?”
    Makani smiled knowingly, pushed her beer aside, folded her hands on the table, leaned forward as he had done, and took refuge in defensive sarcasm. “Haunted? Rainer, you seem to be a dear man, you really