75. Lily
LILY
The water was a shade of turquoise so outlandish that she laughed when she saw it.
It felt like a prank, but here she was, up to her ankles, then her knees, in a surf so gentle it might have been sleeping.
When she turned back to Sebastian to confirm he was still there, he beamed at her from beneath three-hundred-dollar sunglasses.
He was wearing an outfit she would have made fun of if she hadn’t been so cartwheelingly in love, if he hadn’t looked so damn good.
He’d traded out his dress shirts and sweaters for a white linen shirt bedecked in tiny embroidered sharks and a pair of coral-pink shorts.
Somehow his hair, instead of being flattened and greasy from the international flight like hers was, was already sun-blown and salt-tousled.
Two weeks. They had two weeks to do nothing but lie in the sun and swim and drink and admire each other’s nearly naked—or maybe all the way naked—bodies.
Tori had rented a yacht on a remote island in the Caribbean.
They’d flown into St. Thomas and then taken a charter plane so small that it left Lily gripping Sebastian’s arm tightly enough that it was still red.
The yacht’s chef met them with the dinghy that would take them to the boat.
From there the whole ocean, the whole world, it seemed, was theirs for the taking.
Lily was intoxicated. Money—the doors it could open—was intoxicating.
It was a wonder that all three of them were anything as close to approaching normal as they were.
No wonder rich people were such bastards; they occupied an entirely different world on the same blue planet. And how blue!
That first afternoon and evening they sunned on the deck of the yacht, diving over the edge into the weightless ocean when they got too hot, letting their limbs sprawl long and lazy over each other’s laps.
They drank rosé, which Lily would have liked automatically for its pinkness, but which she loved for the way it tasted like a meadow in summer with nowhere to be.
They ate ceviche made with freshly caught fish, and Lily didn’t understand how something so simple could be so perfect.
As the sun went down behind the island, turning the sky blushing orange and the water purple, Asher pulled out his guitar, tipped his head against the railing, and began to pluck out a song.
Lily snuggled down in Sebastian’s arms, his skin still hot from the sun, and let her eyes drift closed. Two weeks, she had two whole weeks of this. You could live a lifetime in two weeks.
It can’t get more perfect than this.
But when they stumbled into their tiny cabin with the boat rocking gently beneath them and fell into the bed barely big enough for one of them—as his weight pressed into her hips and he slid his hands up her bare, salt-crusted stomach and under the cups of her new bikini, pushing them aside so that he could kiss her, she found out she’d been wrong.
It did get better.