17. Somewhere on the Mediterranean
17
SOMEWHERE ON THE MEDITERRANEAN
Now
B ecoming the kind of person who didn’t cry easily had been a point of pride for Alex, an accomplishment she’d use to reassure herself whenever her singleness or meager savings made her feel like she wasn’t really a grown-up. Now, though, she rocked back and forth in her bed, tears streaming down her cheeks like a child. She was still in her plush terry cloth robe, its shawl collar balled up in her fists and pulled to her face to absorb everything. Her usual anti-anxiety mantra— Breathe in, breathe out. That’s all you have to do.— was useless against the intensity of her sadness, only making her feel more ridiculous when she tried to repeat it. Besides, breathing in mostly just resulted in catching on her own inhale, setting off another wail she had to muffle with her robe.
From outside her door, she could hear the usual predinner noises. Paul’s loud getting-ready music flowed all the way into her cabin, blending with the sounds of Sophie and Bee in the hallway, passing off hair tools and requesting feedback on their outfits. The normalcy of it made her bite her tongue with remorse, so close to the version of herself who would have been happily joining them. She didn’t even get one dinner with Danial, didn’t get to enjoy this trip as one of them for even a full day. From her position on the bed, she looked up just enough to catch a glimpse of herself in the cheval mirror, so swollen and red from crying that her lips looked like a drop of cherry jam against her skin. A bitter laugh escaped her as she noticed how, even in this state, she still looked much better than usual. The tan, the lashes, the brows, all of the aesthetic interventions she’d wasted so much money on now felt like a mockery: he didn’t even get to enjoy her overpriced bikini wax.
She concentrated on that person in the mirror, an attempt to distance herself from her own emotions by studying her appearance. Slowly, she rose from the bed and walked over to face herself, sitting cross-legged in front of her reflection. Her curls had mostly escaped from their elastic band, falling chaotically around her face. How could she have not checked the email? She knew it was no use explaining what happened, that her attempt to spare him the harshest embarrassment was only a result of her spitefully including his work with Santander in the first place. She would have to explain her obsession with his work, her resentment for this life path he chose, everything that led up to the video’s publication. And he would be right to hate her for it.
Every time she remembered how good she’d felt with him just hours ago, the peaceful joy of his affection, a river of fresh tears poured down her cheeks. None of it felt real: not their passion the night before, or their perfect day together, or him standing in her room, full of rage and betrayal. It was humiliating: not only had she lost him again, but there was no pretending she hadn’t wanted him, no pretending that she had ever moved on.
The idea of them seeing her like this, of him seeing her like this, was out of the question. She would text Paul that she was sick, excuse herself from dinner, and pack her bags. She would take a shower, clean up her room, and book a hotel at the next port. They would arrive in Corfu just before dawn; she could stay there until she had to make her way to Cyprus for the wedding—which she would attend for as long as it took to not destroy her relationship with her best friend and not a minute longer. Then she would fly home to Philadelphia and forget this trip had ever happened. It felt pathetic, but necessary, and the only way to keep from falling apart completely.
A rapping knock came at her door. It would have been funny, if she weren’t so distraught: Paul was still her mind-reader, even in moments like this.
“Come in,” she sniffed, quietly.
“Hey babe, do you like this shirt with—” he looked over to her, face falling as his eyes landed on her reddened cheeks. “Oh my god, are you okay?”
“Close the door,” she answered, keeping her voice low.
He pressed the door into its frame, careful to keep the sound to a minimal click. From her seated position in front of the mirror, she looked up at him, gesturing for him to sit down on the bed.
“What happened?” he asked, suddenly drained of his usual impish energy.
“I need to leave,” she started, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her robe and clearing her throat. “It has nothing to do with you and Guy, and I will meet you at the wedding. I just can’t spend another four days on this boat.”
“What?” He ran a hand through his hair, genuinely struggling to understand her words.
“I’m going to book a hotel in Corfu, just for a few nights. I’ll probably fly out of Athens.”
“Lex, can you afford—”
“I don’t want to talk about my finances. I’m fine.”
“Okay, but…” His voice sounded weak, almost childlike. “Why?”
For a moment, she thought of lying, of making up some family crisis or professional emergency that would justify her chaotic behavior. But that was one relic of her former self that she had the strength to move past: she could be honest about her reasons for fleeing the scene this time, at least with Paul.
“The video went live. About Horace Capital Partners.”
“What is Horace—”
“Jesus Christ, Paul, do you pay attention to anything besides what restaurant we’re going to next?” She shout-whispered, struggling to feel righteous in the terry cloth robe he was paying for. “It’s Danial’s firm. The one we produced a video about. You know, my job, making videos for political candidates.” She allowed her confused anger at the privilege she’d been surrounded by for days to point itself like a laser at her best friend. “Those guys in suits that people vote for.”
“Hey, what the fuck?” he countered, leaning away from her harshness. “Why are you mad at me ?”
“Because…” The tears had slipped from her eyes again, forming little rivers down her face and betraying the depth of her fury. “Because I was doing so well. And you did everything in your power to make us hook up because you find us so fucking entertaining, and now look.”
“Hey,” he started, sliding down to the foot of the bed to sit cross-legged in front of her, “I hear you, but why didn’t you tell me you were planning to make a video about his company?”
She heard a laugh escape her, manic with frustration.
“I did tell you, when we jumped off the boat. You just weren’t listening.”
“Well, no, I was—I just didn’t understand how serious it was. Clearly.”
“Because nothing is serious to you.”
“Alex,” he snapped back, “I want to talk to you, but I’m not going to let you sit here and insult me.”
She had never heard this tone from him before, not even the night of their breakup sophomore year.
“And this is my bachelor party,” he continued, dropping his voice at the sound of people outside the door. “I’m allowed to have fun. I thought you were having fun, too. Your mom even sent me a text about how happy you seemed.”
“I was,” she sniffed, bringing her hand to her exposed collarbone at the thought of her mother.
The necklace.
“I’m sorry to bother you.” Forty-five minutes later and as composed as she could make herself, Alex stood at Danial’s door. She pushed out her words quickly and quietly, almost recoiling at the darkness in his expression. “I just need my necklace.”
“You need your necklace,” he repeated, dryly. He had just showered for dinner, ink-black hair freshly combed behind his ears. The fine angles of his face looked like wet stone under his moisturizer.
“Yes, you took it last night.”
“You gave it to me.”
“I did.” He stood in the doorway, appraising her momentarily. She chose her words carefully, focusing on the abstract ethics beyond her personal betrayal. “ And, I’m sorry. The party has been working on a video about Horace for a while, and I tried to edit—”
“It’s fine.” He moved out of the way, gesturing with his arm to allow her into the room and closing the door behind her.
“What are you doing?” she asked, nervously standing by the door as he moved toward an ornate lacquered closet.
“Unlike you,” he sighed, opening the door and kneeling to open his safe, “I believe you deserve privacy.”
She bit the inside of her cheek, freshly embarrassed. It wasn’t just that she had blown things up so spectacularly, it was that she had spent ten years building this power that she was so eager to give away for a moment under his touch—and now, here he was, holding all the cards again.
“You didn’t need to put it in the safe, it’s not real,” she muttered.
“That’s not why I put it there.” His long fingers turned the dial, back still facing her as he spoke. “I wanted to protect it because it’s important to you.”
At his final turn, the metal door popped open, and he reached inside to remove the necklace from a tufted jewelry tray. “You might want to try doing that sometime.”
“We get it.” She sighed, too exhausted to fight. “You’re a much better person than I am.”
“That’s rich.” He laughed, examining the small stone pendant in his palm. “Coming from the woman who’s been getting off on feeling superior to me for ten years straight.”
She swallowed hard, fighting her instinctual attraction to any provocation from him. “Superior to you?”
“Yes.” He kept his eyes fixed on the necklace. “Because of your big, important work and your modest salary and all your good-girl decisions.”
His words felt like a quiver of arrows, hitting so many exposed areas of her at once that she could only challenge the most inconsequential blows: “Right. I’m making great decisions, obviously,” she muttered, eager to change the subject, “like following you in here last night.”
His eyes flit up to meet hers as her heart leapt into her throat.
“You’re going to hold that against me, too?”
“I’m not holding anything against you,” she replied, matching the intentionality of his phrasing. “Including your job.”
He looked behind her, to the door he’d pinned her against not twelve hours earlier, and placed his free hand on the back of his neck, stretching slightly as he considered his next words. She could see him bringing himself to focus in real time, returning to the heart of the matter. “Yes, you are. You’ve always looked down on me for my career choices. You think I want to work twelve hours a day, wasting the best years of my life?”
“Yes, actually,” she snapped, thoughtlessly. “I think you have a work addiction.”
“My mother has Parkinson’s, Alex.”
She inhaled sharply. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know that.”
She hadn’t known, but it made perfect sense: his constant centering of her, Elena asking after her, even the charity races Dev posted about running with him on Instagram. Of course.
He ran a finger along the delicate gold chain, taking on an almost pedantic tone. “My dad is gone, my mother is sick, and I am their only son. Do you know what that means?”
He continued in a slightly softer voice: “She fled a revolution, then spent her life giving herself arthritis doing hair ten hours a day so I could go to the best schools. I’m not going to let her spend her last years in some disgusting care center where they abuse the residents, okay?” He looked at Alex as if he expected an answer, but she only nodded, mesmerized by his unexpected honesty. “My mother lives in a palace in Westwood with a full staff, and I visit her every single month.”
“That’s”—she inhaled—“very lovely of you.”
He looked at her with great consideration, judging how much moral high ground to claim, as they so often did with each other. “And I know your dad is sick, too, by the way.”
“He has a back injury,” she clarified, tentatively.
“And your mom is still pulling double shifts running a daycare out of your house, right?”
“What does that mean?”
He stepped toward her again, looking her squarely in the eyes. “It means that you get to choose the career you love, and that makes you feel like a good person. Because you don’t support them.”
“Wait.” Her voice had dropped in an involuntary anger. “So I’m the bad guy because I’m not paying for my parents to live in a palace?”
“You’re not the bad guy. You’re just a different guy, making different choices, and I’m sick of you treating me like a monster because mine are what they are.”
“I don’t treat you like a monster.”
A burst of derisive laughter erupted from his chest. “Oh, yes, you do. You tell yourself that I’m a monster because it makes you feel better about punishing me.”
“I—”
“And you’re punishing me because of what happened that night.”
Her entire body recoiled at the mere mention of it, desperate to pivot to something that would destroy her less to acknowledge.
“What night?” she feigned, rather unconvincingly.
“You know exactly what night.” His eyes bore into hers, full of anger and regret. “Because I do, too. And I have spent the last ten years of my life beating myself up for it, but I’m done! I don’t owe you anything, including letting you humiliate me with that fucking video.”
She felt glued in place by her conflicting instincts: to run from the room and to run into his arms, begging for forgiveness. But that same cowardice gnawed at her, telling her denial was her only escape hatch if she were going to avoid any more reckless vulnerability.
“I barely had anything to do with that video,” she weaseled, grateful she hadn’t appeared on camera for it.
“Right. And the fact that our exact conversation about my work with Santander made its way into it was a total coincidence.”
Her heart raced like a cornered animal as his eyes searched for the honesty she couldn’t give him. She allowed the self-defensive autopilot of her anxiety to take over, speaking like a disembodied voice from somewhere in her lower brain.
“I know this is hard for you to believe, Danial, but we didn’t make a video about the atrocious things Horace is doing in Pennsylvania because of some stupid party a decade ago. I actually developed political consciousness outside of you, if you can believe it.” She willed herself to keep the tone she used in her videos, self-assured and competent when she had never felt less so. “And your firm is actually making the world we live in markedly worse.”
“Markedly worse,” he imitated under his breath, shaking his head. “I’ll have to write that one down.”
He paused, and she took the opportunity to use some of her old anxiety regulating techniques, breathing in and out in a square pattern until her heart rate began to slow and she could think more clearly.
“Yes,” she continued, relaxing her cadence to something more human. “My work fighting against industries like yours is not a personal attack on you. Like, when I make videos about for-profit healthcare, you don’t work for those companies, right? Maybe I actually care about it. Maybe I watched my father’s back get worse for years because he couldn’t afford basic preventative care with no insurance.” She felt the pendulum swinging back in her direction and capitalized on it. “And you could still take care of your mother while doing something less harmful, by the way.”
At the mention of his mother, his fingers closed around the pendant. He shut his eyes for a moment before opening them again to meet her gaze with something more painful. “Okay. Maybe you singled us out because of the campaign, even though I don’t even work in the same department that Stephens is going after. Let’s pretend that’s true. But not telling me? Letting me walk around here like a fool for a week, knowing that I would be going into a woodchipper at work on Monday morning? Don’t tell me that’s about the campaign.”
There was nothing she could say, so he continued.
“And listen, maybe that was the big one you got on me. Now we’re even. But I’ll say it again: I’m done. ” He sounded ragged, close to tears. “I’m giving myself a full fucking presidential pardon for something that happened when I was twenty-two years old, okay? Because I can’t live like this.”
The word done rang in her head like a deafening bell, filling her with shame. In ten years, she had managed to find herself in exactly the same place, sabotaging her chance at happiness with the only man she had ever loved. She felt heavy and slack with embarrassment, truly humbled for the first time since their car ride. “Fine.” She breathed, extending her open hand for the necklace. “You’re right.”
In her spiraling, she hadn’t noticed him get close enough that he could reach out and touch her, knuckles white around the necklace he still had gripped in his fist. “I was doing really well for ten years, you know? Pretending I never knew you. And I need to go back to doing that.” He paused, considering. “For my own health.”
She knew exactly what he meant—and that it would likely take her another ten to feel close to normal again.
“Okay.” When he didn’t move, she continued, hand still outstretched: “I’m getting a hotel in Corfu, by the way. I’ll meet everyone at the wedding.”
He was still for a moment, wordless, a wave of inscrutable emotion flashing behind his eyes as his jaw tensed. “Why are you telling me that?”
His words were sparse, but she knew him well enough to understand. She could feel him giving her one last opportunity for honesty, to meet him with any kind of tenderness before leaving. But that night, and the ten years in between, felt like a barbed wire fence around her heart. He was done with her—at least, in any way that mattered—and the risks were too great. She could deal with the despair of losing him again if it meant keeping her dignity.
She cleared her throat, willing the heat of her face to subside as tears stung the corners of her eyes. “I just wanted you to know that I’m not going to be your problem anymore. You can enjoy the rest of the trip without me.” She nodded to emphasize her words as he searched her gaze with his own.
“Unbelievable.” His voice was barely audible, and the tears were pressing hot against her face, begging to escape. Please let me go, she thought, so intensely she feared she might have spoken aloud. She returned her hand to her side, clenching her first and digging into her palm with her nails to stop herself from weeping.
His eyes flitted down to the single tear that had slipped free, streaming down her cheek before disappearing under her chin. His hand rose toward her face, seeming to operate free of his will, and hovered just an inch from her skin. He took a deep breath before lowering it, a long sigh escaping his lips.
“I wish things could have been different,” he whispered. His long, dark eyelashes fluttered as he cleared his throat, steadying himself before his voice returned to a normal volume. “Goodbye, Alex.”
Unable to speak, she swallowed hard and nodded one last time before turning to open the door.