Chapter 18
SOPHIA
It starts, as most things with Ian do, with an argument.
“I'm sick of Paris,” he announces, standing in the kitchen in yesterday's clothes with the energy of a man who has already made a decision and is now informing the room of it.
“You love Paris.”
“I love Paris the way you love a dentist who's good at his job. Respectfully. From a distance. With the understanding that prolonged exposure is bad for everyone.” He pours coffee with the authority of someone who has rehearsed this. “We're going to Greece.”
“We're not going to Greece.”
“We are.”
“Ian—”
“Greece, Sophia. Actual sun.”
“We’ve got sun here in Paris,” I say pointing out the window. “See, blue skies.”
“I’d say it’s more of a gray with blue aspirations.”
“Ian—”
“I want blue. Real blue. And I want the kind of summer heat that's almost offensive.”
I snort.
He points at me with his mug. “We need the vitamin D. And you need to get out of this apartment for longer than a few hours.”
I glance around. At the kitchen counter where the muffins lived for eleven days before Ian threw them out while I was in the shower and pretended he hadn't. At the balcony where we've been eating dinner every night for weeks, watching Paris exist outside us like a film we've seen too many times.
“What if he comes?” I say.
Ian is quiet for a moment. “I don’t think—”
“I need to be right here when he comes.”
“Sophia.” His voice is gentle in the way it gets only when he's about to say something true that I don't want to hear. “I know you miss him. But you need this even more than I do. It’ll be good for you. Trust me.”
I stare at him.
“Greece,” he says again. “Three nights. Private villa. I've already booked it.”
“You already booked it?”
He shrugs. “Tuesday morning efficiency. It's a gift.”
I throw my head back, stare at the Parisian ceiling I have memorized from every angle. The thing about Ian is he's usually right. I just need a moment to be annoyed about it first.
The rest of the morning plays out like it always does. Us moving around each other in this kitchen like a system two people develop without deciding to.
He makes the coffee; I get the cups. He takes the left burner; I take the right. He opens the fridge; I step aside without being asked. It's the choreography of people who share space long enough that they stop thinking about it.
This morning, I stop thinking about it at the wrong moment.
I turn from the counter with my cup just as he turns from the fridge, and we collide—nothing dramatic, just a small collision of two people who forgot to account for each other for half a second.
Coffee sloshes. I freeze. His hand shoots out and catches my wrist before the cup tips, his other hand landing at my waist.
We both go still.
Something shifts from that easy thing we’ve had for months to something else. Something with a pulse.
For a fraction of a second, his palm rests against the curve of my waist. His face is close enough that I catch the faint scar I’ve never noticed before through his left eyebrow.
There are tiny flecks of amber in his green eyes, like God loaded a paintbrush and flicked it.
Eyes that hold mine a beat longer than they should.
There’s no familiar protective glint, no dry amusement or mischief in them. But something…naked. Vulnerable. With heat at the edges. Stirring a kind of awareness that feels disloyal the moment it registers.
He clears his throat and steps back, sliding his hand from my waist with deliberate care. His fingers linger a half-second on my wrist before releasing that too.
“Greece,” he says, voice rougher than usual. Like the word is the period at the end of a sentence that started somewhere else.
I look at my cup. At the coffee that didn't spill. “Fine. Greece it is.”
The plane door opens and the heat walks in like it owns the place.
Not Paris heat. Not the tentative, apologetic warmth of a northern city remembering it's summer.
This is the real thing—dense and immediate and completely unapologetic, wrapping around you before you've finished stepping onto the tarmac.
The air smells like salt and dry thyme and something older underneath it, the island's own perfume rising off the hills in the evening warmth.
Ian appears beside me and inhales deeply with the satisfaction of a man who has been proven right and intends to take his time enjoying it.
“Don't,” I say.
“I haven't said anything.”
“You were about to.”
“I was about to say the air here is extraordinary and you should breathe it.”
“It's warm.”
“It's perfect.”
“It's warm, Ian.”
A car is waiting at the bottom of the steps. Ian takes the keys from whoever left them there without breaking stride, throws our bags in the back, and gets behind the wheel with the ease of a man who has driven in worse places than a Greek island on a Wednesday evening.
I get in the passenger seat. “Where are we going?”
“The villa.”
“Where is the villa?”
“On the island.”
“Ian.”
“Sophia.”
“You’re incorrigible.” I look out the window.
Lemnos unfolds in the evening light—golden hills, dark cypress, the Aegean appearing in flashes between the rises.
Everything looks like it's been painted rather than built. It’s extraordinary, and I’m no longer annoyed with Ian for dragging my ass here.
I don't tell him that.
The drive starts with the usual bickering, but somewhere along the coast road, Ian goes quiet.
Not his usual quiet—not the comfortable silence we've built over months of shared space and balcony dinners. This is different. Deliberate. The quiet of someone managing something they haven't decided to share yet.
I glance at him. He keeps his eyes on the road. I look back out the window.
The Aegean flashes between the hills, darkening now as the sun drops, the water going from gold to deep blue to something almost black at the edges. Beautiful and indifferent and vast. While I take it all in, I feel something I haven’t in weeks. Months.
Something that isn't waiting.
Ian slows, and I notice his knuckles going white as he grips the steering wheel.
Ahead on the road, pulled to the side, there’s a black SUV. Just sitting there. No hazard lights. Nobody visible through the windows.
“What are you doing?”
Ian stops behind it, stares out in front of him.
“Ian. What's—”
He turns to me, and the expression on his face is one I’ve only seen in the middle of night when he comes into my room because he heard me cry.
“I, ah…” His gaze cuts to mine. “I told him you wouldn’t suspect a thing.”
The world stops.
I know before I finish processing it. The way you know things that bypass thought entirely and land straight in the body—warm and certain and completely without question.
The front door of the car in front of us opens.
A hooded figure. Masked. Broad shoulders and dark fabric and that specific unhurried way of moving that I would know in any crowd, in any dark, in any version of any life I could possibly live.
I’m out the car before I decided to move.
“Nazareth.”
My feet hit the road and I’m running and he’s turning and I crash into him so hard it should hurt. But it doesn’t. It’s the exact opposite of hurt. It’s every ache I’ve been carrying for weeks dissolving on contact the second his arms close around me.
I don't even make it to him properly before the tears are already happening, before my face is buried in his chest and his arms are closing around me and I'm making sounds I'll be embarrassed about later but don't care about right now.
His hand finds my hair. His other arm presses me into him so hard it should be uncomfortable but isn’t. For me, it’s not tight enough, not close enough.
My arms are around his neck before I register what I’m doing, and when the realization hits a second later, I instinctively pull back, only to have him lock me in place.
“Don’t let go,” he rasps against my ear, and I swear my heart beats one, three, seventeen times faster than normal. Everything in my chest rearranging to accommodate the message in those words.
I pull back just enough to find his face.
My hands go to the buff immediately—shaking, not quite coordinated, fingers fumbling with the fabric—and he lets me pull it down, lets me find his mouth, and I kiss him before I've finished finding it, before either of us is quite ready, and it doesn't matter because he's already kissing me back.
It's not soft.
It's not tender. It's weeks of absence compressed into a single point of contact—my hands fisting in his hair, his arms hauling me closer, his mouth on mine like he's reclaiming something that was always his and he's furious it was ever anywhere else.
I taste salt from my own tears and underneath it him, just him. Unchanged and present and real, and a sound rips out of me against his mouth that is equal parts grief and relief and something that has no category at all.
He swallows it. Kisses me harder. Our tongues expressing everything we can’t put into words.
His hands move—my hair, my face, my waist, like he can't decide where to put them because everywhere is somewhere he's been missing and nowhere is enough.
I cradle his face with both hands, fingertips tracing the scar, then fist his jacket and pull. He comes with it, bending into me, and we're standing on a Greek road in the dark with the Aegean somewhere close and weeks of longing finally, violently, collapsing between us.
When we finally break apart, we're both breathing like we've been running.
His forehead drops to mine.
His hands are shaking.
Mine are, too.
For a long moment, neither of us says anything. Just breathing. Just his hands on my face and mine on his chest and the warm Greek night around us.
His thumb traces my cheekbone. Catches a tear. Then another.
“Hi,” I manage. Barely a word. More breath than sound.
Something moves through his expression—the open version, the unguarded one.
“Hi,” he says.