16. Taormina, Sicily
16
TAORMINA, SICILY
Now
“T his theater is a unique example of ancient architecture retaining its intended purpose in the modern era: once a hub of entertainment for ancient Grecians, it’s currently home to the Taormina film festival.” The dour tour guide spoke in a hypnotic tone, repeating words he had clearly said a thousand times before. “If you’d like to learn more about the festival, there are pamphlets at the exit that can tell you all about this year’s features.”
Their clustered group of twelve inched forward, stopping to take pictures and observe the stone in greater detail. The Greek Theater was undeniably gorgeous, with curved seating for thousands of spectators and half-crumbled columns overlooking the sea, flanked by ancient basilicas on either side of its stage. The weather was perfect, too, even for summer in Sicily: not too hot, with fluffy passing clouds providing intermittent shade while seabirds gently circled overhead. It should have been the perfect afternoon activity.
But today, Alex found herself wrestling with the rather bratty thought that living in Greece had numbed her to the splendor of Mediterranean ruins. And besides, the tour, which she’d signed up for well before the possibility of spending the day with Danial became reality, was now blocking her from the free-flowing, endless conversation she was craving. Without thinking, she pulled her phone from her bag to check how much time was left. A notification from her mother took up the screen, asking when she was going to FaceTime them so they could see the sights, too.
“On our phone again? This simply can’t be the Alex who graduated summa cum laude,” Danial whispered from just behind her. For his part, he had been taking a hearty interest in the tour, asking plenty of follow-up questions and demonstrating his knowledge of regional history.
Their guide flicked his eyes over at the two of them, not breaking his anecdote about the theatrical tastes of ancient Greek soldiers.
“This absolutely can be,” she whispered back, slipping her phone into her purse. “I’ve just seen a lot of Greek ruins in my time.”
“That’s like saying you’ve seen a lot of stars, Alex. There are always more to see.”
He picked up his pace slightly to walk beside her as their group crossed the main stage. The guide explained the many spectacles that took place in the theater’s heyday, and Alex made a point of listening performatively, craning her neck toward him as he spoke.
Danial caught her from the corner of his eye, laughing and shaking his head.
The tour guide continued on about Greek history in Sicily as she half-listened, now mostly electrified by the feeling of Danial’s hand at the small of her back, leading her forward. There was so much to love about him, so much to be impressed by. Even the ride up on the cable car had been a crash course on his life for the past ten years, which inevitably included the dizzying superlatives of his family back in Los Angeles. She vaguely remembered details of his cousins from college, but the updates came fast and furious once the wall between them had come down: this one was finishing up her residency in orthopedic surgery at UCLA, that one was passing the California bar, still another was joining an ascendent tech startup just before their series B. The warmth, and slight envy, she always felt at his expansive, brilliant family rose up again in her chest with a familiar immediacy.
But it occurred to her as an adult that her upbringing—one in which attending an Ivy League school was an unprecedented surprise—had its advantages. She pictured young Danial, whose accomplishments always seemed so inevitable, and realized the extraordinary effort it must have required to stand out in the sea of professional and academic triumph that was his family. Even this version of him today—the straight-A student of the tour group—was a callback to that younger self. And each time that image flashed in her mind, her heart swelled to such a painful size that she could only touch him, grounding herself in the physicality of him.
She stopped the both of them, letting the group walk ahead as they carved out a quiet spot for themselves. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she craned him down and kissed him with a desperate urgency. It was one of those kisses that seemed to silence the world around it, the kind usually reserved for ardent teenagers. And she could feel his smile against her mouth, the bag holding the enamel comb he’d bought for his mother bumping against her as their bodies pressed together.
“What was that for?” he asked when they broke apart, bringing a hand to his lips as if to verify their reality.
“I’m just happy to be here with you,” she said, simply. It wasn’t nearly as coy as what she had intended to say, but it was true.
A small breath escaped him. “We don’t have to finish the tour, you know. We can get lunch or something.”
“I’m happy to stay on the tour, really.” She nodded her head for emphasis. “I’m just feeling weirdly nostalgic today, I guess.”
“Nostalgic enough to play chess later?”
“Oh, god,” she laughed. “Maybe— maybe. One thing at a time.”
“You’re much better than you think, you know. Or, at least, you were.”
Her eyebrow raised involuntarily.
“Don’t explain my game to me, or I’ll start telling you about your performance on the pétanque court.”
“I’m great at pétanque.”
“You have never lost to me by less than a 30% margin.”
The rhythm of their voices had taken on that familiar and competitive pitter-patter, an almost piano-like staccato.
“But,” she continued, moving them out of the way slightly for a group taking a picture, “you play very graciously. Every throw has a nice measure to it.”
“Thank you. Am I allowed to compliment your chess game now?”
“Sure.”
He took a moment, considering the precise framing of his praise.
“You always balance development and early aggression, without blindly following opening lines.”
Her entire body warmed at this, at the almost somatic way she longed for his words of affirmation. “Well, thank you, but I was always just kind of along for the ride. I’ve never come close to winning unless you start with a massive handicap.”
There was a pause, a lingering in the mutual flattery that had been bordering on gratuitous since the night before.
“You really have changed since college.” He knitted his brow, appraising her.
“I have?” she asked, startled by his change in tone.
“College Alex would never tolerate such critical levels of sincerity from either of us.”
A small huff of laughter escaped her.
“Well, College Danial had a very high tolerance for sincerity, if I recall.” She leaned against the wall, crossing one leg in front of the other. “Didn’t he start a men’s-only feminist book club?”
“Joined. He joined a men’s-only feminist book club.”
“Where one of the books was She Comes First ?”
He rolled his eyes, and the sight of it was so beautiful Alex felt she might faint.
“First of all, I wasn’t picking the books. Second of all, if you want to talk about critical levels of anything, I was at terminal levels of virginity when I joined that club. Reading a book about the female orgasm seemed like the best possible use of my limited free time.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You can’t be serious.”
“About what?”
“About… being a virgin.” Her voice dropped at the end of her statement, only realizing mid-sentence how much she was revealing about her college perception of him.
“Alex,” he deadpanned, “come on. I was an enormous nerd. I didn’t even round third base until senior year.”
Instinctively, she did the mental math, confirming that Daphne was his first real sexual experience. Though it was slightly pathetic a full decade later, she still flushed with a bit of jealousy.
“I never would have guessed,” she answered. “You always seemed so cool to me.”
He observed her for a moment, the corner of his mouth flicking into a doubtful grin.
“ You were the one who went out with Paul on Friday nights and had grown men sending you bottles of champagne. I can guarantee your sex life was far more interesting than mine.”
She briefly weighed the pros and cons of being honest: confessing that she’d never slept with those men, that there was an entire two-year period where she couldn’t even conceive of a sexual act that didn’t involve him. But instead, she decided to return them to the present, to enjoy what they had now.
“So?” She smiled, feeling her legs grow heavy beneath her. “Did you learn anything useful from that book?”
His body language immediately responded to the playfulness of her words, extending an arm against the stone wall behind her to prop himself up. “I think you’ll have to be the judge of that.”
He took a moment to appraise her, and she realized that she had quickly developed a habit of working them into this position—her back to a wall, him leaning into her. It might have been subconscious, but she liked the feeling of being chased by him, leaving no doubt about the intensity of his longing. As much as she relished his affection, as much as she loved hearing about the everyday details of his life, she needed to feel that he wanted her. Perhaps it was the wounded twenty-two-year-old still somewhere inside of her, but physical evidence of his desire for her gave her a reassurance that cut straight to her core.
“When?” she asked, her tone more serious than she meant it to be.
“As soon as fucking possible,” he whispered, lips now to her ear, the endless depth of his voice rumbling against her. “Because I’m not going to be able to sleep again until I have you.”
“Ahem.”
Their tour guide was standing just a few feet away, clearing his throat in a way that felt vaguely managerial.
“Our group is heading to the basilica, if the two of you would like to join us.”
“Uh,” Danial cleared his throat and ran a hand through his hair, “Of course. Of course.”
“Yes, definitely,” Alex added.
The two of them assumed the stance of chastened middle schoolers, nodding in the general direction of the guide and walking sheepishly toward the rest of the tour group. Her legs still felt weak beneath her body as she moved, all the more so when Danial’s hand effortlessly found hers between them.
The first thing Alex heard was an angry knock at the door, tearing her out of her late-afternoon nap. She startled to sit on her bed—she’d fallen asleep before thinking to pull the sheets back—and looked out of an open porthole. They were moving along at a steady clip, somewhere between Sicily and Greece. The knock came again, louder this time. Bang, bang, bang against the heavy wooden door, the kind of knock usually followed by someone shouting the word police.
“I’m coming.” Her voice was thick with sleep, and she cleared it before speaking again. “One second.”
She roughly grabbed the terry cloth robe from its hanger, slipping her arms through it to cover the barely there satin nightgown she had been sleeping in. As soon as the tie was closed firmly around her waist, she moved to turn the knob, and the door practically pushed itself in her face with the force of the entry.
“You really had me going there for a second,” Danial whisper-shouted, chest ragged with anger, knuckles white around the phone in his hand.
“What?” she asked, moving around him to close the door. “What is going on?”
“I guess I should say congratulations, right?”
“Congratulations?”
“You won! You wanted to humiliate me, and I have to say, you couldn’t have planned this any better! Whatever they’re paying you, it isn’t enough.”
She shook her head in confusion, pushing the bed-mussed hair out of her face. “Danial, what the hell are you talking about?”
Wordlessly, he turned his phone to her face, the fully brightened blue light feeling particularly aggressive. On his screen was an all-caps, breaking-news headline:
WORKERS HORIZON PARTY COMES OUT SWINGING AGAINST HORACE CAPITAL PARTNERS: VIDEO
She took the phone from his hand, scanning the words a few times until they fully registered. Her heart sank through her chest, ill with recognition of what she had done. Even the write-up of the video contained multiple mentions of their work with Santander Bank. Her mind reeled, panicked beyond all ability to defend herself.
“I guess I should say thank you, too,” he continued, laughing with that same light madness she’d heard the night before, “for not letting me fuck you, knowing this was going to drop the next morning. That was pretty merciful!”
“Danial, I didn’t—”
“Stop it. You won, okay? You won. You finally fucking broke me. So you can stop now.”
With that, he tore the phone from her hand and turned to leave the room, slamming the door behind him. Her hand remained exactly where he left it: hanging in the air, gripping an invisible device. The clock ticked away on the wall and the floor rocked softly below her feet, everything looking as pristine and luxurious as it always had.
Only after a moment did she tear herself away from her spot in front of the door, cutting across the room to her nightstand and ripping the laptop from its charger. She flicked it open, the muscle memory of her fingers allowing her to pull up her work email without thinking.
There it was, a victim of their spotty internet: the email to Clara, lingering in her outbox.