Thankfully, I kept my head above water.
“Jackson,” I tried to stand, but his hands shoved my shoulders back down at the same time that a wave crested against my back.
The bathing suit slipped out of my hand, and when I tried to reach down and grab it back, I came back with only water.
“Uh-oh,” I said.
“What does that mean? Are you okay? Did you get stung or cut yourself?”
I held off answering for a moment, hoping his fear for my safety would soften his reaction to the fact that I now had no way of covering myself up.
“This is your fault,” I prefaced.
“Kelsey, just tell me what happened,” he yelled.
“I might have lost my bathing suit.”
His lips pulled into a thin, angry line.
I smiled.” Adventure?”
He shook his head, and exhaled through his nose.
I swam backward a ways, and he followed. Then I lay back and let my body float up, my chest rising above the water. “Adventure,” I teased again. I waited for him to say something, but I seemed to have distracted him from his anger.
His eyes were glued to my chest, and I smiled in victory.
“You could join me, you know.”
He was still almost fully clothed since he hadn’t bothered to take off his shirt or shoes before dragging me into the water.
He looked tempted, so I added, “We could swim out a little farther.” I pointed to an outcropping of rocks on the side of a cliff that was far enough away from the beach for us not to attract too much attention. “You could put your clothes there until we’re ready to go back.”
It was remarkably easy to get him to agree with me while I wasn’t wearing a top.
Once we reached the rocks, I slipped off my bathing suit bottoms and the now ruined sandals that I’d been wearing when he tossed me in. He followed suit, shedding his shirt, shorts, and shoes.
Then we were nak*d and somewhat alone in a blue green ocean.
Treading water, we moved closer to each other, until our knees bumped.
“It’s later,” he said. “You did tell me later.”
I swallowed. I could do this. It was a matter of will power. Of control. I wanted this.
He touched a strand of my wet hair, and I wrapped my arms around his neck. My wet br**sts smashed into his chest, and he said, “All right, maybe I’m a little okay with nude beaches.”
Shivers chased across my skin. I pressed my cheek to his, concentrating on breathing. His tongue tasted the salt on my shoulder, and I dug my fingernails into his back, not because of desire, but because of fear.
I wanted his touch to heal the hurt. I wanted to lose myself in his kiss, so that I could forget. But he didn’t heal or eclipse, he illuminated. Every single second I spent with him was perfect, which somehow only seemed to excavate more pain.
I pulled his head away from my shoulder, needing a break. His eyes locked onto mine, deep and warm. I wasn’t sure exactly what I saw in his gaze, but it felt too big to fathom, like explaining the unexplainable. Like seeing the light of a star and knowing that light is billions of years old. Like the way time slows near a black hole.
And as we stared, unnamed truths passing between us, Hunt’s kicking feet weren’t enough to keep us afloat. The water moved from my chest to my shoulders, from my shoulders to my neck.
And I thought drowning was the perfect word for the way he made me feel. Drowning after a life of drought.
He laughed and said something about deep water not really being the ideal place for the kind of exploring he wanted to do. I might have laughed. Sound was muted, like we’d slipped below the water, and I was still trapped there beneath the surface.
We slipped our clothes back on, and Hunt tried to make me take his shirt.
“I’ll just have to take it off when we get up there. I’m not wearing your soaking wet shirt when I could put my sundress back on.”
Reluctantly, he agreed.
He didn’t put his shirt back on. And when we were close enough to shore that our feet could touch, I climbed onto Hunt’s back, and he carried me out of the water, my bare chest hidden against his back.
He found a small, rocky alcove and he tried to block me from view as I changed, even though no one on the beach was even paying attention to us. Then together we headed back for the tunnel.
I stopped him and unzipped one of the pockets on his bag.
“Let me get your phone.”
“Kelsey, wait—”
I’d already grabbed the phone and swiped my finger across the screen.
He had seventeen voice mail messages.
My brows furrowed, and I looked up at him. “I thought you said this phone was just for emergencies. Why haven’t you listened to your voice mails?”
“Because they’re not emergencies. I’m sure of it.”
I asked, “Who are they from?”
“Nobody important. We should hurry through the tunnel. We’ve got to head back to Riomaggiore for the night.”
I should have pushed. I should have dug my feet in and refused to move until he told me the truth. That’s what I should have done.
I didn’t.
I let him take the phone, and I followed him into that pitch-black tunnel without saying a word.
He kept my hand clasped loosely in his, and I began to consider what I really knew about him. Which was not a hell of a lot. And the more I thought about that, the more I was certain that he was hiding something from me, something that would break apart our already fragile relationship.
Still, I didn’t ask. Not even in the tunnel where he couldn’t see my face, and I couldn’t see those eyes.
Because there was a part of me, small but not silent, that saw this as an escape. It was the same broken part of me that preferred the dark to the light. If I didn’t know his secret, he never had to know mine.
24
We didn’t sleep together that night. Not because either of us made an excuse, but just because. When our backs hit the mattress, both of us were so in our own worlds that the thought of closing the distance between us never occurred. At least not for me.
The room was pitch-black. The village was so untouched by society that they didn’t even have street lamps. The occasional house would have a light out front, but not ours.
The darkness was filled with silence covered in stillness, and when I listened for Jackson’s steady breathing, I couldn’t hear it.
I wondered what kept him awake. Could he tell I’d been off? Could he feel the way I recoiled when he kissed me? Or was it his own secrets that kept his brain moving, unable to rest.
I’d thought I was exploring the world, but maybe I’d been running. Maybe I’d been running for a very long time, and perhaps he was, too. And whatever he was running from—a girlfriend, family, a mistake—it wasn’t giving him up easily.
The silence grew a heartbeat, and I listened to the rhythm to pass the time, until finally Hunt’s slow breaths joined the symphony, and I could relax. I slipped off the bed, not to go anywhere, but just because I needed to be on my feet.
I shuffled slowly, my hands outstretched until I found the wall, then I sunk into it, pressed my cheek against it and tried to breathe.
You’re overreacting.
The thought came automatically, like a song on repeat, and it nearly swept my feet out from under me.
Those words had been thrown at me too much, and I’d taken them up like armor, and I’d used them to close off all the ugly emotions inside of me. I guess I’d had to sacrifice some of the good ones, too. Because now that those were back, all the ugly ones were, too.
The effort of pretending all day today had worn on me like sandpaper, and my skin felt raw. There was a truth that I needed to face. It screamed from the back of my mind, and I didn’t think I could survive listening to it.
I needed something to drown it out.
I didn’t think as I fled that tiny apartment. I pulled on a pair of shorts and some sandals. I told myself that my nightgown top could pass for a blouse, and I descended the rickety stairs slowly, ignoring the impulse in my blood that told me to run. Far and fast.
Riomaggiore wasn’t exactly the picture of nightlife, but I found a bar by looking for lights and listening for people,
It was filled with mostly tourists, and I took an empty seat at the front. I told the bartender to bring me anything, anything at all.
He started telling me about a special lemon liqueur called limoncello that was homemade from the lemons his family grew. I tuned him out and reached for the small glass he held, and tipped it back in one go.
I’d expected it to be sour, but it was bittersweet. It tasted like lemon drops with just a hint of Pledge, but I didn’t care.
“Sip!” The bartender mimed sipping, like maybe I was misunderstanding his broken English. I understood it perfectly.
I held up a finger and said, “Another. Wait, no. Bring me the bottle.”
His brows furrowed, and I said louder, “The whole bottle. All of it.”
I laid a few of my largest bills on the counter, probably twice as much as the bottle was worth, but I didn’t care. I took the neck of the bottle when he handed it over, and I tipped it straight back.
It burned, but not enough.
Alcohol was supposed to sterilize, right? Because I needed that. I needed to burn out the infection and numb my wounds.
A guy came up to talk to me, and I was so at a loss for what to do that I felt the tears collecting like rain at the back of my throat. In the end, I sent him away, even as I thought about following him.
I’d come here with every intention of losing myself the way I used to. I just wanted it to stop hurting, and it hadn’t hurt so badly when I’d spent every night in a bar with a different guy. It had been a different kind of pain then. Hollow, almost. The pain of absence. Like missing someone you haven’t seen in a long time. That, at least, was the kind of ache you could learn to live with.
This current pain was sharp. Unexpected. And I couldn’t control it. Sometimes it happened when Jackson would touch me, but often it didn’t even take that. Just a thought or a feeling or a memory could conjure it. And each time I felt like my lungs had been punctured and I was drowning without any water.
I took another swig from the bottle, and it was too damn sweet for a moment this sour.
The only thing I could think of was that this was the price of trying to be whole again. I’d turned myself off all those years ago, so that I wouldn’t have to feel the things I’d lost. And unbeknownst to me, I was losing more of myself every single day. The universe wouldn’t let me move on without feeling those things.
But maybe I could get stuck again. Maybe I could find my way back to that stagnant life where nothing ever changed, and things were never very bright, but they weren’t too dark either.
I could find my way back there. I could. And it would be better when I did.
“Kelsey?”
No. No, please, no.
I took a bigger gulp, hoping it would transport me out of this moment. I was like a child wishing for Narnia in a coat closet, but I wasn’t so naive to believe I would get what I wished for.
“Kelsey, what are you doing here?”
God, I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t know whether to be cold and push him away or to fall into his arms. Either option would hurt, and that’s what I was trying to avoid.