The Trap

Reluctantly, David tugged up his bag and ascended the steps as if he were climbing to the hangman’s noose. At the top, he put his hand to the latch and breathed a silent prayer.

Please have gone away, Ethan. Please have had the sensitivity to go wait quietly in your suite or Quonset hut or whatever until you’re sure I’m gone.

He pushed the door open.

Ethan stood in the center of the room exactly where he’d left him, arms crossed and still looking cool.

Shoulders sagging, David closed the door. He did not meet the other man’s eyes.

“I’m sorry. I’ll just ask the staff to buzz the pilot back, and then I’ll be out of your hair.”

“Oh? Good luck with that.” Ethan’s lips twitched into a familiar half-smile, and he shrugged. “Good luck, in fact, getting the staff here to do much of anything you want.”

David blinked. Why would it be difficult to secure cooperation from the staff of a five-star, exclusive, private-island resort hideaway? One so expensive that Fodor’s had actually had to add a symbol with two additional dollar signs to include it in their online hotel listings?

“Sorry?”

“That’s three,” Ethan said cryptically, falling back onto the leather sofa and picking up a magazine. The slick pages made a fwip-ping sound as they turned. David recognized the magazine as the latest issue of The Economist. He remembered there was an article about Ethan on page eleven and wondered if Ethan even knew it was there.

Probably not. He knew from bitter personal experience that it was infinitely harder to find a substantive American magazine that didn’t mention Ethan Locke somewhere in its glossy pages than to find one that did. The man’s name had become as synonymous with the high-tech age as those of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Over the years, David had grown all too accustomed to stubbing his emotional toes on such reminders of his former roommate. In the beginning, he’d tried to blot out Ethan’s growing media meteor shower by holding a metaphorical thumb closer and closer to his eye. He’d cancelled subscriptions to magazines. He’d stopped watching the news and limited his television viewing to movie channels.

But he’d chafed at feeling disconnected from the world. And he’d still stumbled regularly over snaps of Ethan (and whatever actress the paparazzi had spotted him with most recently) on the covers of tabloids at the supermarket checkout.

Finally, he’d realized that trying to shield himself from the media’s ongoing love-fest with handsome Internet wunderkind Ethan Locke was like trying to navigate a roomful of unsprung mouse traps in bare feet. While blindfolded. And drunk. He’d settled instead for minimizing the duration of each unwelcome shock. When it came to slamming magazines shut or jabbing the “off” button on TV remotes, he could set Olympic speed records.

If only becoming an expert in making two-dimensional images of Ethan disappear had done something to prepare him for dispatching a three-dimensional version. Especially one that seemed determined to stretch out this awkward encounter by refusing to go politely away and wait in his room.

David perched on the edge of the chair farthest from Ethan.

“Three what?” His gaze crawled the room, vainly seeking a circumspect call button, a discreetly placed bell, a white telephone handset…anything he could use to send out an SOS.

“Three sorrys.” Ethan lowered the magazine and stared directly at him. “But then, I guess that did kind of turn out to be your go-to word, didn’t it, David? When push came to shove?”

David’s cheeks flamed. He tried to keep his voice calm. “Please. Let’s not do this. I said I would go, and I will. This isn’t the time or place to…to get into anything.”

“No.” Ethan gave a humorless laugh. “That would have been three years ago, in New Mexico.”

David squirmed. His knuckles were turning white on the grip of his carry-all. He forced himself to relax his hands and meet Ethan’s eyes.

“Three years is a long time to nurse a grudge, Ethan.”

“Oh, I assure you, there’s been no nursing required. My grudge is fully recovered. Completely autonomous. Ready for action.”

Were the words deliberately suggestive?

Did he really want to know?

“Petty grievances aside, I’d say everything worked out for you in the end, didn’t it?”

“Well, now, I couldn’t say.” Ethan’s drawl was silky. “I haven’t gotten to the end. Not yet.”

His stare was open and challenging.

David looked away first.

Minutes stretched by. Ethan fwipped through his magazine. David gripped his knees and stared unseeingly at the bookshelves along the far wall, waiting with increasing desperation for someone—desk clerk, pool boy, palm tree mascot in full costume, he didn’t care, anyone, anyone at all—to get off his or her ass and come rescue him from this hell.

God, what was taking them so long? What if he had a panic attack or something, right here in their precious lobby? What if he keeled over and died because his throat swelled up and he couldn’t breathe? What if they came at long last to check him in and they found a stiffening corpse on their beautiful wood floors? That’d be pretty goddamn inconvenient for them, wouldn’t it? That would teach them to leave a guest cooling his heels through their entire Bach audio library.

On the CD, the cellist transitioned smoothly from the third suite to the fourth.

Fwip. Fwip.

When the fifth suite started, David couldn’t suppress his outburst for another second. “God, where are they?”

Ethan looked up. “Where are who?”

“Everyone.” David gestured helplessly at the empty room. “Receptionist. Bellhop. Concierge.”

“Oh, them.” Ethan looked back down at his magazine. Fwip. “We don’t have any of them.”

“I’m sor—what?”

“No receptionist.” Ethan spoke with exaggerated care, as if he were talking to a particularly slow child. “No bellhop. No concierge.” He rolled his eyes up to consult a mental list. “No masseuse, cabana boy, valet, bartender, room service waiters, or laundry attendants. Oh, and no chambermaids.”

David gawked. “But that’s…that’s not possible. How could they run a successful world-class resort without any kind of staff?”

“By ‘they’, do you mean the nonexistent people I just told you about, or their nonexistent employers? Either way, to answer your question, they couldn’t.” Ethan pulled the magazine closer, apparently to squint at a photo caption. “Fortunately for them, not to mention their equally nonexistent shareholders, this is a nonexistent resort.”

David felt as if he’d tumbled down the rabbit hole. Or maybe, he thought with a sudden rush of hope, he was still asleep on the plane and just having a dream.

Another of his many unsettling dreams about Ethan.

“What do you mean, a ‘nonexistent resort’? The brochure says…” He yanked open his carry-all and dug out the brochure, flipping pages frantically. Phrases he had all but memorized in the preceding weeks leapt up at him.

A private playground of the privileged few where every need is anticipated and every desire fulfilled…

…where windswept beaches and turquoise waters invite you to explore the corners of your very soul…

Let the magic of sun-kissed solitude tempt you to let go of your fears and reach for your dreams…

Relax, recover and rediscover the very best, suppressed part of yourself…come away to a place you’ve never been, and find yourself again.

“Here it is. Right here.” David tapped a page for emphasis. “‘Welcome to Cayo E’tan, an exclusive resort hideaway and private island spa unlike any other on earth.’”

“Oh, that.” Ethan glanced dismissively at the brochure. “Yes. Well. I wrote that. And now that you read it back to me, I do see that I may have exaggerated a little. I see, in retrospect, that my words imply a certain…resort-ness…to this place. When, in fact, it has none.”

“Imply… You wrote…” David’s voice failed. His eyes swung from Ethan to the brochure. With a jerk, he let it fall and drew back, as wary as if a scorpion had crawled from the glossy pages and tried to sting him.

Welcome to Cayo E’tan. He felt suddenly, unutterably stupid. E’tan. That’s not even a word, is it?

He tried to swallow back the rising tide of trepidation.

“For God’s sake, Ethan. Why on earth would you do such a thing?”

Ethan let the magazine fall to his lap and gazed directly into David’s eyes.

“To con you into coming here, of course. To lull you into packing a bag and walking, of your own free will and on your own two feet, onto an airplane…and then a boat…and then a helicopter…and then this island. In short, David, to get you to stop running—at long, final, overdue last—and come to me.”

David gaped at Ethan like a paralyzed rodent staring into the opening maw of a hungry snake.

“If it makes you feel any better…” Ethan shrugged, “…I wasn’t entirely sure it would work.”