Chapter 37
Sophia
Our week of a Mustique lifestyle is quite the antidote to the bleak midwinter of London.
We cover the bare minimum of work—Ethan was definitely lying when he proposed working from here—but it doesn’t feel so bad when ‘work’ involves swimming costumes and bare feet and a cup of Irving’s excellent coffee as we check our laptops on the veranda each morning after breakfast.
We swim in the sea. We stroll down to Basil’s Bar most evenings and work our way systematically through the excellent cocktail list. After an indulgent first night dining at the Cotton House, we tend to come home for dinner.
It’s more chilled out here, and I want Ethan all to myself. He seems to feel the same.
And we talk. God, do we talk. Here, in his safe, happy place, his tongue is loosened.
We lie in a large hammock in a shady area of the garden, top-and-tailing as he haltingly tells me about his first few sessions with Philip, opening up about his fucking father, and his fucking investment club, and his fucking Father’s Day celebration no-show, and I’m so furious that I cry helpless tears of rage.
Maybe I wouldn’t make such a good therapist after all, if I can’t hold space for Ethan without losing my shit.
He describes his younger self in the most starkly beautiful language, and I’m incandescent with wonder that the emotionally walled-off man I met just a couple of months ago has already found the courage and open-heartedness to connect so deeply, so beautifully, with the burdened parts of himself who’ve been running his system for all these decades.
And we talk about me, too, because Ethan is worried that he’s making it all about him.
I laugh at that, because I suspect this man hasn’t dominated a conversation with his introspective observations probably ever.
And he doesn’t get this, but it makes me so happy to see him do that, not just because it means he trusts me, but because with every memory, every realisation shared, he’s processing his trauma in a way that’s manageable for his nervous system.
But he insists, so I tell him all about my family.
My upbringing. I tell him about Camille scouting me at Stanford and my decision to put pause on pursuing my clinical studies and instead follow an infamous, married fuckboy around the playgrounds of the Med for years and years while being handsomely rewarded.
I’m just glad he’s not familiar with the Enneagram, so he can’t laugh at how ridiculously Seven-ish I am.
I tell him, too, about my reasons for being so fascinated by IFS, for wanting to pursue it professionally.
I attempt to explain why I find it such an incredibly powerful, empowering modality, why I believe so wholeheartedly in the way it can change lives.
And, this time, rather than facing a wall of cynicism, I’m preaching to the choir.
This time, he gets it.
Because I’m me, and I have more Achiever parts than I’d like to admit to Athena, a clinical practice won’t be enough for me.
I have a dream to start an app while I continue my studies, an app that pulls together all sorts of therapeutic and coaching and somatic modalities into a trusted directory that hooks individuals up with professionals.
I even have a secret dream to include an optional personality profiling section for the ultimate in therapy matchmaking.
Take Athena, for example. She recently began working with a new coach, Amy, and she loves her.
The reason? Her coach is a raging Three, just like her.
Sometimes, it’s helpful and healthy to work with people who are your opposites, who have perspective into your blind spots.
But sometimes, we want someone who’ll get us.
Amy gets why Athena wants to work all day long and achieve more, more, more.
She understands the strength of the impulses that drive that relentless achievement, and she also understands the fears and the pain points that come alongside it. They’re kindred spirits.
I gloss over the personality profiling aspect a little with Ethan, except to explain that I’d use a variety of tools to triangulate people’s unique character (because triangulate sounds more professional and less creepy than obsessively psychoanalyse them from every angle).
Still, he seems impressed. More than impressed.
I’d go so far as to say he finds the entire concept inspiring.
‘If anyone can pull this off, you can,’ he tells me, his hand over mine as we lie on the gigantic white daybed next to his pool one afternoon. ‘It’s the perfect intersection for your skills, I can tell. And if you ever need a backer, you just let me know.’
And this is why I love holidays. Because you don’t talk about this kind of shit when you’re grabbing lunch from the cafeteria or having a quick bang on your boss’ desk.
That’s real life (though, admittedly, the desk-banging is a niche aspect of that), and when you’re living your real life you’re simply too stuck in your rut to think much about your dreams.
Somehow, lying on a soft white mattress under the Caribbean sun makes everything seem possible, whether it’s launching apps or reprioritising your life’s relationships.
Maybe not everything. One morning, I chuck my phone across the daybed with an angry growl. Ethan, who’s reading the paper, looks over, amused.
‘What’s up with you?’
‘Fucking Connections. I crapped out.’
He gets himself upright, a move that has his abs rippling in a deeply gratifying way, and picks up my phone so he can take a look at the screen.
‘Which one didn’t you get?’
‘I didn’t get purple or blue. But it was purple that fucked me up.’ I throw an arm over my face in self-disgust. ‘Give me a homophone any day of the week—I’m the queen of homophones, because I always read the clues out loud. But it’s that dratted kind that gets me. Every. Bloody. Time.
He reads aloud. ‘What “trip” might mean. Journey. Fall. Drug. Switch. Ha! Very clever.’
‘Yeah. Too clever for me.’ I remove my arm from my face and push myself up onto one elbow. ‘Do you know what I’d give a lot of money for? Like, a lot.’
‘Tell me.’ He puts down the phone and scoops me against him with an arm hooked around my waist.
‘I would kill to see their database.’
‘Who? The New York Times?’
‘Yup. Think about it. Think about the tagging system. Like this gigantic semantic web.’
‘She rhymes now.’
‘That’s how badly I want to see it. Imagine playing with it. Imagine building it. God, it blows my mind.’
Ethan’s looking at me as if I’ve lost my marbles and yet he’s quite fond of me, anyway. He probably has a point. My obsession with peeking under the hood of this game makes sense to me. After all, my entire brain is a giant meaning-making machine. But for normal people, it may be a little much.
‘Imagine the matrix, babe!’ I practically shout.
‘Okay, imagine in their matrix, they have the word bear. Like the animal. So that could also be tagged as a homophone for bare, like naked. Let’s see.
It could be a finance term—bear market. A verb—to bear.
It could even be in words that begin with conjugations of the verb to be.
They really like fucking around with prefixes and suffixes, you know.
‘Imagine seeing all those tags cross-referenced with thousands upon thousands of others. And don’t get me started on the red herring tags they must have. Honestly, it makes me horny just thinking about playing with it. I’m not kidding.’
He’s full-on laughing now, his fingers stroking my back. ‘You’ve thought about this a lot.’
‘I have. Have you never?’
‘Can’t say I have. I don’t play it much. I prefer Wordle.’
I stare at him, aghast. ‘You’re what they call a basic bitch. You know that? You’re not even living! What is this bleak, Connections-less existence you call a life?’
He laughs again and kisses me. ‘I’d better start playing, then, hadn’t I? Now, what shall we do about all this horniness you have going on?’
I awake one afternoon from my nap in our enchanting white bedroom to find Ethan gazing at me from his spot next to me on the bed, an experience that is altogether sexier and less creepy than it should be.
My nap was a just because I can kind of nap: the very best kind.
It was a floaty nap, the type where you’re not entirely sure how deeply you slept but you do know that you were all up in those delicious alpha brain waves.
He wasn’t here when I lay down. He had some calls to do. But he’s here now, and he’s so gorgeous. He’s wearing only a pair of board shorts, his already golden skin newly sun-kissed and hair tousled and face soft.
‘Did you sleep?’ I ask him, rolling onto my back so I can stretch. Above me, the ceiling fan whirrs lazily, framed by the sides of the teak four-poster.
‘Nah. Just came in. Sorry for waking you.’
‘That’s okay.’ I stretch again, feeling like a cat, and roll back to face him. I’m still in my bikini—coffee and white zebra stripe today, with gold hardware—and his eyes rove over my body once more. ‘So you just came in to perve?'
‘Something like that.’ He brushes his fingertips down my upper arm.
‘Well, perve away, mister. I like your eyes on me.’ I give him a lazy smile. ‘You’re so fucking hot.’
He smiles in return, but it’s not the smirk I’d expect. It’s more tremulous than that. I snuggle in closer, and he hooks a hairy leg over mine.
‘You alright?’
‘Can I ask you something?’ he says stiffly by way of answer.
‘Of course.’
He purses his lips like he’s thinking about what he’s going to say, then he speaks. ‘Do you think that if I wasn’t… if I wasn’t paying you, you’d still be here with me?’
‘What?’ I ask, stunned. A second later, it hits me: I shouldn’t be stunned, because this is the Eightest thing he could ask.
If an Eight’s biggest fear is being betrayed, then letting me get even this close to him is a huge step for Ethan.
I recover before I force the poor man to respond to my stupid question.
‘Babe, of course I’d be here. You can’t think for a second that I wouldn’t—can you? ’
I falter on that last part, because of course he can.
That’s what he does. That’s why he tests the important people in his life over and over.
I may have passed all his tests to date—I wouldn’t be here otherwise—but he’s still entitled to have his doubts.
And the very question he’s just posed is such an immense act of vulnerability for him.
Here’s the thing. It’s always the thing. Our nervous system doesn’t understand words—it’s hundreds of millions of years old in parts. It needs to feel to understand.
So I need to make him feel. And in order to do that I need to tamp down every Seven part of me that wants to make a joke, to grab his dick—anything to lighten the atmosphere, to move away from the discomfort that being vulnerable necessarily elicits.
First, I start by using my words, because I’m not about to leave him hanging.
‘Sorry,’ I amend. ‘I heard you the first time.’ I shimmy my body forward, wedging myself further under his leg, and I slide my top hand through his hair so I can cup his head. My bottom hand I place on his taut pec, right over his heart.
‘Listen to me,’ I whisper. ‘Nothing about us, here, is about what you pay me for. You hear me? Nothing.’
His beautiful grey eyes go hard and cold, and I know he’s already regretting flaying himself open. He removes his leg from mine, and I feel instantly bereft. ‘That’s not entirely true. I asked for exclusivity. We agreed I’d go bare when I fuck you.’
I keep my hands where they are, pressing my palm against his rapidly beating heart.
Grounding his body in safety. ‘You did. Both of those things are true. And if I’d wanted to keep things very boundaried within that arrangement, I would have fucked you on demand, sure, but I would also have requested my own room, or I might even have refused outright to come here on the basis that it would blur lines.
’ I slide my hand over his jaw, over the muscles tensing between his skin and his stubble.
‘But none of that is what’s happening here, and I know that, and I think you do, too. ’
I sigh, because his insecurities—and I mean that in the most literal sense that he has a perceived lack of safety—are prompting me to have to be very vulnerable too, in a way that I never was with Thad and had no intention of being with Ethan.
Not that I ever imagined I’d feel vulnerable to the feelings he’s evoking in me.
‘I’m here out of contractual obligation just as much as you’ve brought me here for a convenient fuck.
Both things may technically be true, but they’re not the reason for us being here.
’ My hand smooths over that tense jaw and down his neck.
Over the domed, muscular shoulder I love so much.
And, in response, his hand finds the crook of my waist and settles there.
‘I think we’re here together because we’re both deeply, ridiculously attracted to one another, and because, despite all initial signs to the contrary, we feel seen by each other, which makes us drawn to each other on a totally different level.
I’d say this is pretty special. What do you say to that? ’
His eyes flicker over my face, moving from my eyes to my mouth and back again as if he’s trying to perform a visual polygraph test. I’m walking a tightrope between reassuring him and freaking him out.
He may need to know that I’m here because I want to be, but who the fuck knows if he’s ready to admit to himself that this thing between us is escalating out of both of our control?
My guess would be that he’d like our dynamic contained in a Goldilocks space where he knows I won’t betray him but he also knows he can control his emotions—and mine.
Then again, he’s displayed a textbook disorganised attachment style to me throughout the past few weeks, so god knows where he’ll land on this.
‘Special,’ he repeats slowly, as if trying it on for size.
‘That’s right.’ Right now, his rock-hard dick is the only part of Ethan unafraid to state its agenda.
Slowly, as if he’s a skittish horse, I slide in more closely against him so our bodies are flush, my palm trapped between us.
‘I can lie here and psychoanalyse us until the cows come home if you want, babe. You know me. But I’d rather show you.
And I’d rather you show me what you’re thinking, too. What do you say?’
‘Show you? How?’ In spite of himself, his fingers flex on my waist.
With difficulty, I roll us so I’m on my back, his weight on top of me. ‘Like this.’