Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
The supply boat had been gone for seventeen minutes.
Alex knew this because he'd counted every single one of them, standing on the dock like a complete idiot while the boat carrying Lily St. John shrank to a speck on the horizon and then disappeared entirely.
Move, he told himself. Go back to the cabin. Finish your research. Do literally anything besides stand here like a broken robot.
His legs refused to cooperate.
The morning sun beat down on his shoulders, indifferent to his crisis. Waves lapped against the dock pilings with the same rhythm they'd maintained for longer than he could count, unconcerned with the fact that Alex Carmichael had just made the biggest mistake of his life.
You let her go.
The thought circled his brain like a shark sensing blood.
She gave you a dozen chances, and you let her go.
Twenty-three minutes now. He was still counting.
Finally, his body remembered how to function.
He turned from the empty horizon and walked back toward the cabin, each step heavier than the last. The path through the jungle felt longer than usual, the familiar terrain somehow foreign without her voice filling the silence with observations and questions and terrible jokes that made him smile despite himself.
The cabin door creaked when he pushed it open, and the sound that used to feel familiar now felt like an accusation.
She was everywhere.
The indentation in the pillow where her head had rested. A hair tie on the small table—bright pink, of course, because Lily St. John didn't do anything subtly. The faint scent of her shampoo still lingering in the humid air, something floral that had no business smelling that good.
And there, on the chair by the window, her sunglasses. The oversized ones she'd worn the day they went foraging, the ones she'd pushed up on her head while squinting at him in the afternoon light and asking why he'd chosen marine biology.
She'd left them behind.
Alex picked them up carefully, like they might shatter. The plastic was warm from the sun streaming through the window—the same sun that was currently beating down on a boat carrying her further away with every passing second.
She left something behind. You let her leave everything behind.
He set the sunglasses on the table next to the pink hair tie, then sank onto the edge of the bed.
This is fine, he told himself. This is what you wanted. Peace and quiet. No distractions.
The words rang hollow even inside his own head.
He moved to the kitchen on autopilot, muscle memory taking over. Measured the grounds. Filled the reservoir. Hit the button. The familiar gurgle of the coffee maker filled the silence—the only sound in a cabin that had been full of her laughter just twelve hours ago.
It wasn't until the pot finished brewing that he realized he'd made enough for two.
Goddammit.
He poured a single cup and left the rest, unable to bring himself to dump it out. The carafe sat there, slowly cooling, a monument to habits formed in just two weeks.
Two weeks. That's all it had taken for Lily St. John to rewire his entire existence.
Alex carried his coffee to the small table and opened his laptop, pulling up the research document he'd been neglecting. The cursor blinked at him, patient and judgmental.
Coral spawning observations, he typed. Timing data suggests...
He stared at the words. They meant nothing. His brain refused to supply anything useful to follow them.
All he could see was Lily's face when she'd watched the coral release its clouds of life into the water. The wonder in her eyes. The way she'd looked at him afterward, like he'd given her something precious.
You made it matter, she'd said.
He deleted the sentence and tried again.
The spawning event occurred approximately...
Nothing.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard, and before he could stop himself, he'd opened a new document.
Lily—
He stared at her name for a full minute before continuing.
I know I don't have the right to contact you after how I handled things this morning. Or didn't handle them, more accurately.
Delete. Too formal. Too much like a business apology.
Lily—
I've been sitting here trying to figure out what to say, which is ironic given that I had plenty of time to figure that out while you were actually here and I wasted all of it being a coward.
Delete. Too self-flagellating. She'd roll her eyes.
Lily—
The cabin is too quiet without you.
He stopped typing. Read it back. Kept going.
I made coffee for two out of habit. Your sunglasses are sitting on my table like a rebuke. Everything smells like your shampoo and I can't decide if that's comforting or torturous.
I should have asked you to stay. I wanted to.
The words were right there every time I looked at you, but I couldn't make myself say them because I've spent my entire adult life convincing myself that wanting things leads to losing them, and it's easier to have nothing than to have something precious and watch it disappear.
That's not an excuse. It's barely even an explanation. It's just the truth.
I'm sorry.
He read it back, then highlighted the entire thing.
His finger hovered over the delete key.
What good would it do? Even if he could send it—which he couldn't, no Wi-Fi, no signal, because he'd specifically chosen this island for its isolation—words on a screen weren't the same as words spoken face-to-face.
And he'd had his chance for those.
He'd choked.
Delete.
The blank document stared back at him, somehow more accusatory than before.
By noon, the numbness had started to crack.
Alex stood in the middle of the cabin, fists clenched at his sides, his jaw so tight it ached. The anger had been building for hours—a slow simmer beneath the surface that he'd been trying to ignore with coffee and failed emails and the lie that everything was fine.
Everything was not fine.
"What is wrong with you?" The words came out loud, startling in the silence. He didn't care. There was no one to hear him anyway.
That was the point. That had always been the point.
He paced the small space like a caged animal, his thoughts spiraling.
She'd stood right there—right there by the door—and told him she'd miss him. She'd talked about California being accessible. She'd given him every possible opening, practically handed him a script, and he'd responded with platitudes about her video doing good work.
Good work. Like she was a colleague he'd collaborated with on a research paper. Like she hadn't spent two weeks breaking down every protective barrier he'd spent decades building.
The anger surged, hot and ugly, and before he knew what he was doing, his arm swept across the table. The coffee mug—his, not hers, he'd never touch hers—flew across the room and shattered against the wall.
The sound was satisfying for exactly half a second.
Then he was just standing in a cabin with coffee dripping down the wall and ceramic shards scattered across the floor, feeling like an idiot.
Congratulations, Carmichael. Very mature. Very adult of you.
He cleaned up the mess, his hands shaking with residual adrenaline. The anger hadn't dissipated—it had just turned inward, where it belonged.
Because the truth was, he wasn't angry at Lily for leaving. He wasn't even angry at the situation.
He was furious with himself.
Every moment played back in excruciating detail. Every time she'd been brave and he'd retreated. Every time she'd shown him something real and he'd responded with deflection.
"What happens after? When the boat comes."
"You'll have a lot to process when you get home."
She'd been asking if they had a future. He'd talked about her editing schedule.
"Ask me to stay."
She'd actually said the words. Out loud. Given him the clearest possible signal that she wanted this to be more than a two-week detour.
And he'd said I wish I could give you what you deserve like some tragic hero in a movie, when what he really meant was I'm too scared to try.
The cabin walls felt like they were closing in. He grabbed his field pack and headed for the door, desperate for air that didn't smell like her.
The tide pools were exactly as he'd left them.
Alex stood at the edge, staring down at the small ecosystem that had captivated Lily on her third day here. The blennies darted between rocks, fearless and resilient, completely indifferent to his crisis.
"So they're the tough guys of the fish world?" Her voice echoed in his memory. "The ones who laugh in the face of adversity?"
"They're remarkably resilient," he'd told her.
"I like them. Scrappy little survivors."
He hadn't realized, at the time, that she was describing herself.
Alex moved on, his feet carrying him toward the lagoon without conscious decision. He should turn back. Should go literally anywhere else. But his body seemed determined to catalog every place they'd been together, every location that would now be haunted by her absence.
The hidden pool glittered through the trees, and his chest constricted at the sight.
This was where everything changed.
He could still see her rising from the water, droplets catching the light, her wild curls slicked back from her face. Could still feel the electric shock of their first real kiss—not the desperate storm-driven collision, but the deliberate choice. The moment they'd both stopped pretending.
"This doesn't feel like killing time anymore," she'd said.
"No. It doesn't."
He'd known, even then. Known she was getting under his skin in ways that would leave marks. He'd kissed her anyway, let himself want her anyway, told himself he could handle the aftermath.
Turns out he couldn't even handle the goodbye.
The lagoon was beautiful and peaceful and completely unbearable. Alex turned away, taking the path toward the beach where they'd made love under the stars just last night.
The sand had been raked smooth by the morning tide, all evidence of their presence erased.