Chapter 5 #2
Then a fig fell out of the tree above the terrace and hit the table with a loud, ridiculous thud, scattering the seating chart across the stones, and we both jumped back like the fig had personally caught us doing something illegal.
"That," Isla said, breathless and laughing despite herself, staring at the offending fig like it had personally betrayed her, "is not how that was supposed to go."
"The fig has terrible timing."
"The fig has impeccable timing, unfortunately, which is somehow worse.
" She pressed both hands over her face for a second, composing herself, and I used the same moment to remind myself, with limited success, of every reason this was a very bad idea currently in progress.
"We should — we should probably talk about that. "
"Probably."
Neither of us talked about it. We gathered the scattered index cards instead, in a silence that had gone thick and strange, both of us moving carefully around a moment that had cracked something open neither of us was prepared to name yet.
She kept her eyes on the cards, sorting Marta's and Vitale's and Renata's names back into their piles with more focus than the task required, and I found myself watching her hands instead of helping, which she noticed, and which made the silence stretch even further.
"Table one," she said eventually, holding up a card like it was a peace offering. "Family and close friends. That's still where Marta goes, right? Despite the seating war risk?"
"Wherever you want her."
"That's not an answer, that's an abdication."
"It's strategic deference," I said, and got a small, surprised laugh out of her, the tension easing just slightly, though not entirely, not with the memory of her hand on my jaw still sitting there between every word we exchanged for the rest of the afternoon.
"Same time tomorrow?" she asked eventually, at the door, her voice deliberately light in a way that didn't match her expression at all.
"For the performance," I said, the old line, worn thin now from overuse, no longer doing the work it used to do.
"Right," she said. "For the performance."
I drove back down the coast road slower than usual, replaying the moment on a loop I couldn't seem to shut off — her hand on my jaw, the fig, the laugh that had followed the fright, the fact that neither of us had actually pulled away until the universe had physically intervened.
Pride and fear are a strange combination.
I'd built my whole reputation on being the one who didn't let either one drive.
And yet there I was, halfway down a coast road at midnight, entirely unable to file the last hour away as anything resembling the clean, contractual arrangement I'd designed three weeks ago with such confidence.
Reaper texted me again before I made it home. You good?
I looked at the message a long time before I answered.
Working on it, I typed back, which was, for the first time since this whole plan started, the truest thing I'd told him yet.
I didn't sleep much that night. I lay in the dark going over the contract in my head, line by line, the way I'd built it — clean terms, an exit clause, discretion, no complications — and tried to find the exact clause that covered what had happened on that terrace, and came up empty every single time.
I hadn't planned for a fig. I hadn't planned for the particular sound her breath made right before she closed the distance between us.
I hadn't planned, if I was being honest with myself in the specific brutal way three in the morning demands, for the fact that some part of me had wanted her to close it days before she actually did.
That was the part that unsettled me most. Not the moment itself, but the discovery that I'd been waiting for it without admitting the waiting to myself, running a private calculation underneath the public one, and somehow missing my own math entirely until a piece of fruit had forced the whole equation into daylight.
I thought about what Diesel had said at the bar — that sometimes the numbers guy gets to just like somebody, no math required — and found, uncomfortably, that I didn't know how to do that.
I'd spent so long being the one who planned five moves ahead that the idea of simply feeling something without first mapping out where it led felt less like freedom and more like standing at the edge of the cliff path with no survey done at all.
And yet.
And yet I kept coming back to the fact that when she'd reached for my jaw, I hadn't thought about the road, or the contract, or the ninety days, or any of the careful architecture I'd built this arrangement on.
I'd thought about nothing at all except her, which for a man who never stopped thinking, was either the most alarming thing that had happened to me in years, or the first genuinely honest moment I'd had in longer than that.
I got up before dawn, unable to lie there any longer pretending sleep was coming, and rode down to the harbor just to watch the fishing boats go out, because sometimes the only way I know how to think clearly is to put myself somewhere loud enough to drown out my own certainty.
The water was calm, the wind long gone, the whole coast settling back into its ordinary rhythm like the sirocco had never come through and rearranged everything it touched.
Except it had. It had rearranged something in me specifically, and I didn't yet know what I was going to do about it, only that pretending otherwise — to Reaper, to Diesel, to Isla, to myself — was rapidly becoming a plan with no math left to support it at all.
I watched the last boat clear the harbor mouth and turn north along the coast, small and steady against the brightening water, and thought about how easy it had once seemed, three weeks ago, to sit across a table from a stranger and call the whole thing a matter of clean terms and an exit clause.
I hadn't accounted for a laugh that caught me off guard every single time.
I hadn't accounted for the particular quiet of her kitchen in the evening, or the fact that I'd started looking forward to the drive up that coast road more than I looked forward to almost anything else in my week.
Somewhere in three weeks of fixing trellises that didn't need fixing, the numbers had stopped adding up the way I'd designed them to, and I was going to have to decide, soon, what I meant to do about an equation that no longer resolved to the answer I'd started with.
I rode back up the coast as the sun properly cleared the horizon, the whole sea turning gold behind me, and found myself, for once, not planning a single thing about what I'd say when I saw her next.
Just riding, and letting the morning settle whatever it was going to settle, one unplanned mile at a time.
By the time I reached the clubhouse, Reaper was already up, coffee in hand, watching me swing off the bike with an expression that said he already knew exactly where I'd spent the night, or at least exactly what state I'd spent it in.
"Well?" he said.
"Working on it," I said again, and this time he actually smiled, like a man watching a plan he'd set in motion finally start paying off in ways he hadn't fully predicted either.
"For what it's worth," he added, before heading back inside, "I think you finally found a variable worth losing an argument to."
I didn't answer that. I just swung off the bike properly, hung my helmet on the hook by the garage door, and let myself, for once, feel exactly as unsettled and exactly as certain as I actually was, instead of filing either feeling away for later analysis.