Chapter 7
Kostas was watching her eat and he couldn’t deny it was doing something to him.
What exactly he didn’t know, but something.
Usually he ate on dates and his date pretended to eat and took photographs of all the food she didn’t eat to post to Instagram.
He spent the whole of those evenings making sure his arm or his leg or even one of his fingernails never made it into any of the pictures.
What he was feeling now was maybe just the exact opposite to those times.
He had led them over to an outside table in the grounds, right next to the sea, no one else around given the lateness of the hour, and now he was watching her devour the stuffed pita like it was so divine, God had made it himself.
She ate as if food was one of the greatest creations and, apparently a woman in her late thirties, maybe early forties, eating tomatoes, red onion, chips and pork wrapped in bread and slathered with garlicky creamy tzatziki was a huge fascination for him tonight…
‘Do you still wish it was fruit?’ she asked him, pausing in her eating.
‘I am not going to admit anything else,’ he answered with a wry smile.
‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I know the answer because there’s no fruit on earth that could compare to a gyros from Dimitris.’
‘Hmm, I don’t know about that,’ he mused. ‘It makes me wonder if you have tasted a really good strawberry.’
‘Well, I have had the tiny ones here, ate them less than an hour after they were harvested,’ she told him.
‘You like small things?’
‘Well… not all the time,’ she answered. ‘But you know the saying about size not being everything.’
‘Yeah, that’s usually said by the people with small things.’
Fuck, what was he saying?
She laughed then. It was loud and warm and… sexy.
‘Or,’ she said, ‘it’s said by the people who know that everything in life is more to do with experience than size.’
‘Is that what you think?’ he asked her, pausing in his eating.
‘It’s what I know,’ she answered. ‘I mean, doesn’t everything start off small? Before it grows?’
She looked directly at him then and those eyes were holding him hostage. What was wrong with him tonight? It was being on this fucking island. The whole place screwed you up if you lost your control. He went to speak but she carried on.
‘Like… louloúdia – flowers, or óneira – dreams.’ She sighed. ‘Or my stomach now bloated after this meat feast.’ She screwed the paper up into a ball and put it on the table.
‘How long have you been here, Mrs Lawson? On Corfu.’
‘Well, I probably started coming here before you were born.’
‘Really? I am thirty-seven, you know.’
She laughed again. ‘I know that’s not true. My skin never looked that good at thirty-seven.’
‘How do you know?’ he asked. ‘Because surely you are not there yet.’
She laughed more and he enjoyed the sound all over again.
‘Corfu was my holiday destination for many years and it’s been my home for the last few.’
‘And you like it here?’
‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I love it here.’
‘Wow. OK.’ He put his pita wrapper on the table next to hers.
‘You sound surprised. But there must also be a reason why you chose here to have your holiday,’ she said to him.
He smiled. ‘I haven’t told you why I am here.’
‘OK, and that is your VIP right to have privacy while you are here at Hotel Margaritári.’
‘Spoken like someone who knows the company manual very well.’
‘Spoken like someone who helped to write the company manual actually. But I’m not one to boast. And I couldn’t get you a fruit basket so…’
He laughed then. ‘It is OK. You can bring me a fruit basket tomorrow night.’
‘I’m beginning to think you have a fruit habit and might, at any moment, go into withdrawal.’
He held out his hand towards her, making it shake a little. ‘I fear it has already started.’
This earned him another laugh and then a phone erupted. Hers, not his. He’d actually never met anyone whose phone went off as much as his – when he had notifications switched on. And she was already picking the phone up from the table.
He swallowed. ‘Boyfriend?’
‘Ha! No.’
‘Husband?’
‘It’s not him but he is still alive.’ She whispered. ‘Could never get him to take the poison.’ Then she answered the call, standing up and moving away from him, closer to the sea.
Spoken like someone who definitely wasn’t still involved.
He shrugged his shoulders. Why did he care?
He had been here a moment, hadn’t even opened Tinder in this new location, too busy and focussed for anything else right now.
Those feelings were always fleeting, paper-thin, a desire rather than anything with substance, not like building an empire…
God, he needed a drink. He looked behind him to the bar, closed for the night but nothing was inaccessible to him. He stood up.
He was halfway down his measure of brandy when Faye joined him.
‘How is your husband?’ he asked, taking a sip of the amber-coloured liquid.
‘Still breathing.’ She picked up the bottle he had got down from the shelf. ‘Unlike this almost expired Metaxa. I hope you donated to the honesty box.’
‘The what?’
‘When the bar isn’t open we have a policy for our guests to take drinks and leave money for them in the honesty box.’
‘Are you crazy?’ he asked, laughing.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Honesty? It is like something from Byzantine times.’
‘There is no honesty where you are from?’
‘I am from the same world as you. You tell me.’ He paused and then continued. ‘Do not tell me people here still do not lock their doors at night.’
‘Perhaps people here do not have much to lose compared to a VIP like you.’
‘Perhaps those with not as much would actually lose more.’ He slugged his drink down. ‘People just do not care about people.’
God, what was he saying? The answer was too much and he needed to stop drinking.
‘Maybe,’ Faye said, ‘you are hanging out with the wrong kind of people.’ She pushed the bottle towards him, the tiniest amount of liquor left in the bottom. ‘Kalinixta, Mr Petsas.’
‘Kalinixta, Mrs Lawson. Enjoy hanging out with all the good people.’
He poured the remainder of the brandy into his glass.
‘Please stop calling me Mrs Lawson. It makes me feel older than my not thirty-seven-year-old skin. My name is—’
‘Faye,’ Kostas said, turning a little on his chair. ‘Your bearer of the gyros basket told me. And you know my name is Kostas so…’
‘OK,’ Faye said. ‘Good.’ She nodded. ‘Well, goodnight, Kosta.’
‘Goodnight, Faye. And do not forget to lock your door.’
She smiled. ‘And do not forget what I said about the honesty box.’
And with that said, he watched her walk across the grass.