Chapter 4 #2
I looked over, and Roman had drifted a few steps closer without either of us apparently deciding to close the gap, close enough that his shoulder nearly brushed mine, and I had, in fact, not noticed doing it either.
"It's habit," I said. "Building. For the wedding."
"Uh-huh," Renata said, in the exact tone she'd used on the phone, and I decided the conversation had officially become a liability and steered us both toward the bread stall instead, where the subject, mercifully, could not follow.
It was on the fifth day, when the wind had finally dropped and the whole coast exhaled at once, that things started blurring in a way I couldn't blame on the sirocco anymore.
We were down at the lower terrace, checking the trellis one final time — his excuse, not mine, though I'd stopped pretending I minded the excuse — and a lizard shot out from under the vines so fast it startled a very undignified yelp out of me, and I grabbed the nearest solid thing, which happened to be his arm, fingers digging in before my brain caught up with what my body had already decided.
"It's a lizard," he said, entirely too amused. "Isla."
"I know it's a lizard."
"You're still holding my arm."
I was. I let go, feeling my face heat in a way that had nothing to do with the July sun. "Reflexes."
"Uh-huh."
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You did the thing with your eyebrow. That's a whole sentence for you."
He laughed — actually laughed, not the small huff of amusement I'd gotten used to, but a real laugh, low and warm, and it did something unfair to my chest, hearing a sound I was starting to suspect he didn't let very many people earn.
Later, walking back up toward the villa, our hands brushed once, twice, entirely by accident, the path narrow enough that there wasn't really room to avoid it. The third time, neither of us moved away.
I didn't notice I was holding his hand until we were nearly at the terrace steps, and by then it felt less like a decision and more like something that had already been decided somewhere I hadn't been paying attention.
"This isn't for the performance," I said quietly. There was no one to see us. No Marta, no watching town, no reason at all except the reason that had apparently been building itself in the space between fixed trellises and honest questions for five straight days.
"I know," he said.
Neither of us let go.
We stood there a moment too long on the terrace steps, the last of the sirocco's heat still hanging in the air even though the wind itself had finally quieted, and I found myself doing the thing I'd told myself I wouldn't do — cataloguing details I had no business cataloguing.
The exact shade his eyes went in that particular slant of evening light.
The way his thumb moved, once, slow and almost unconscious, against the back of my hand.
"We should go over the guest list," I said, which was a lie, and we both knew it was a lie, and neither of us moved to actually do it.
"We should," he agreed, equally unconvincingly.
Neither of us moved at all, actually, for a long moment, standing there with the last of the wind sighing through the lemon trees and something unspoken sitting in the space between us that had nothing to do with contracts or exit clauses or the ninety days ticking steadily down toward a wedding neither of us had built to survive an ending like this.
Eventually he let go first, stepping back with the careful, deliberate motion of a man recalculating a plan mid-execution.
"I should go," he said.
"You should," I agreed, and neither of those sentences matched the reluctance actually sitting underneath them, and I suspected we both knew that too.
He left not long after, and I stood on the terrace a long time after his motorcycle had disappeared down the coast road, thinking about the specific, dangerous math of a contract with an exit clause that neither party had accounted for feelings ruining the equation before the deadline even arrived.
Renata called that night, predictably.
"You held his hand," she said, without preamble, which meant Marta had already spread the report through the harbor grapevine at a speed that would have impressed Ardente's entire legal team.
"For the performance."
"Isla."
"I know," I said, and this time I didn't argue with the tone in her voice at all, because for the first time since the lawyer's office, I genuinely didn't know how to.
"Okay," Renata said, softer now, the teasing edge dropping out of her voice entirely, which somehow made it worse. "Real question. Not a Marta-grapevine question. How do you feel about it?"
"About what?"
"Don't do that. You know about what."
I looked out the window at the dark shape of the vineyard, the lemon trees finally still after four days of fighting the wind, and tried to find an honest answer that didn't terrify me too much to say out loud.
"I feel like I signed a contract with an exit clause," I said slowly, "and I'm starting to be afraid I don't want to use it."
"Oh, Isla."
"Don't 'oh, Isla' me. It's a business arrangement. It's ninety days. It's a fake wedding to satisfy a will's condition and stop a developer from turning my grandmother's vineyard into an infinity pool."
"It's also a man who spent five days fixing a trellis that didn't need fixing," Renata said, "and made you laugh more this week than I've heard you laugh in a year, and you're currently on the phone with me instead of asleep because you can't stop thinking about a lizard, apparently."
"I'm thinking about the hand-holding. The lizard was incidental."
"Even worse."
I pressed the heel of my hand against my eyes, half laughing, half something closer to panic.
"I have ninety days, Ren. Eighty-something, now.
I can't afford to actually fall for the man I'm supposed to be pretending to fall for.
The whole plan collapses if this stops being fake for one of us and not the other. "
"What makes you so sure it's not fake for both of you?"
I didn't have an answer for that either, and Renata, mercifully, let the silence sit there instead of pushing, which was somehow the kindest thing she could have done.
"Get some sleep," she said finally. "Think about lizards. Or trellises. Or whatever you need to think about that isn't the actual question, if that's easier tonight."
"Thank you."
"Anytime. That's what best friends are for. Enabling denial on a schedule that works for you."
I laughed despite myself, said goodnight, and lay awake a long time after, listening to the villa settle into the quiet the wind had finally allowed it, thinking about a hand that hadn't let go on the terrace steps, and a contract that suddenly felt a great deal less airtight than it had two weeks ago.
Somewhere down the coast, I imagined, a very organized man was probably lying awake too, running the same impossible numbers, and coming up, for once in his life, with an answer he couldn't file neatly away no matter how many times he tried.
I fell asleep eventually, later than I should have, and dreamed — not of contracts or exit clauses, but of the terrace steps, his hand steady around mine, the wind finally quiet, both of us standing very still in the dark, neither one of us in any hurry at all to be the first to let go.
I woke the next morning to a text from him, short and characteristically dry: Trellis needs checking again.
Probably. I laughed out loud, alone in my kitchen, and typed back that I was starting to suspect the trellis had never needed checking at all, and he replied within seconds, Took you long enough, and I sat there grinning at my phone like a woman with far less sense than I usually credited myself with.