Chapter 18
ELLA
The path past the beach bar is crushed coral and tree roots, and I’m three steps ahead of Alec because I actually know where we’re going for once.
My hips are doing that loose, rolling thing they’ve been doing all day, memories of his hands and mouth on my body putting a definite spring in my step as I lead him toward the far end of the beach.
I keep catching myself smiling at nothing, which is the kind of behavior that gets you put on a watch list back home but feels perfectly reasonable when your whole body is still warm from a morning that started with breakfast in bed and ended with the breakfast tray on the floor.
“Where the hell are we going?”
“You’ll see.” I step over a root, then pause to make sure he sees it too. “Clive told me about this spot.”
“Clive.” The way he says the man’s name is low and kind of growly. “Who’s Clive?”
“He’s one of the gardeners. He says don’t bother snorkeling off the main beach. This spot is supposed to be better.”
Alec chuckles. “You’ve been here six days and you have a network of local informants.”
“What can I say? It’s a gift.”
He grunts behind me, then his hand finds my hip as he steps around the root I just cleared.
Whether he’s steadying himself or just wanting to touch me or both, I don’t know.
The contact is too brief but far from casual and my train of thought just..
. derails. For a second I’m back on the rumpled sheets with his mouth on my neck and his weight settling over me, and it takes my brain a moment to recalibrate.
Day six. We leave in two days. The awareness skims through me the way the check always comes at the end of any good time. I’m not ready for this week to end, but I let the reminder pass and keep walking.
We clear the trees and the cove opens up past the point and even I, a woman who has seen exactly one beach in her life before this week, can tell this spot is different.
The water here is so clear it almost hurts my eyes.
Turquoise shading into deep blue over the reef, soft white foam rolling up onto the sand.
And it’s quiet. No music from the beach bar.
No kids shrieking. Just the soft push of waves against the rocks and a silence that feels like something you’re allowed to borrow only for a brief moment.
Two sets of snorkel gear are waiting on the rocks where the activities desk said they’d leave them.
I grab a mask and hold it up to my face, which is immediately hilarious because the rubber seal smashes my cheeks into my eye sockets and the snorkel sticks up from the side of my head like a periscope on a very confused submarine.
I’ve never snorkeled. I’ve never even been in water I couldn’t see the bottom of. This was not in my personal skill set as of a week ago, right next to “flying first class” and “sleeping with grumpy, jaw-droppingly gorgeous men.”
I glance at Alec as he pulls his mask on, and my laugh bursts out before I can catch it.
This is a man who holds his coffee cup like it’s a contract he’s reviewing.
Who probably irons his casual shirts. Whose entire physical presence communicates that every molecule of his body has been placed exactly where he intended it.
And right now, he has a rubber mask bisecting his hair into two tufts, a snorkel clamped between his teeth, and swim fins on his feet that make him stand like a duck.
He looks like every other tourist who’s ever strapped on rental gear, which is to say, absurd.
Somehow that’s the funniest thing I’ve seen in six days.
“Don’t say it,” he mutters around the snorkel, reading my face.
I hold up my hands. “I’m just admiring how the mask really brings out your cheekbones.” I bat my eyelashes and nearly poke myself in the eye with my own mask strap. So much for looking cute.
He steps close and reaches behind my head to adjust the strap.
His fingers gather my hair, gently lifting it over the rubber band, then resettling it against my neck.
The touch is practical, just a man fixing a piece of equipment, except his fingertips drag across the skin below my ear as he pulls away, and my whole body flushes hot from a contact point no bigger than a quarter.
I’m glad the mask covers half my face because whatever expression I’m making right now is not casual.
He peers at me, looking blurry through my mask. “Too tight?”
I shake my head and give him a thumbs-up.
Together, we waddle to the water in our flippers and wade in up to our knees before sinking into the waves.
The sea takes my weight and the world changes.
The water wraps around me, warm and strange and closer than air, pressing against every inch of skin at once.
I gasp into the snorkel just from the newness of being held by something that big.
Then the sound, my own breathing amplified and strange, mechanical almost, like hearing myself from the inside.
I put my face under and the ocean opens before my eyes.
And oh… I wasn’t ready for this.
So much blue. Everywhere. A blue that doesn’t have a name in my vocabulary, deeper than anything I’ve seen on a screen or a postcard, and it’s moving, shifting, the light coming down in columns that waver and break apart and re-form.
A school of fish passes below me, tiny, electric blue and yellow.
They scatter like a handful of coins thrown into the air.
I slow my breathing, consciously telling myself not to hyperventilate.
The coral rises in domes and ridges, brain coral the color of sandstone, fan coral swaying in a current I can feel against my legs.
A parrotfish works at the reef below me, its beak scraping, unhurried, completely indifferent to the woman floating above it who has never seen anything like this in her entire twenty-seven years.
I can’t talk under here. Can’t spin any of this into a joke or a story to tell Lisa later.
The snorkel has done what six days of vacation couldn’t quite manage—it’s shut me up and forced me to simply exist. And with the talking gone, there’s just this.
Color and silence and my own heartbeat in my ears.
Alec taps my arm. I turn and he points to the right, toward a cluster of staghorn coral where something purple and alive is waving between the branches.
I swim closer. A sea fan, delicate as lace.
I reach toward it and his hand reaches too and our fingers brush underwater, both of us going for the same impossible thing.
The touch is light. My pulse isn’t. I pull my hand back and press it against my thigh, holding the feeling there.
We find a rhythm without discussing it. A tap means look.
A squeeze on the wrist means stay. I point out a starfish and he pulls me gently by the elbow toward a ledge where an eel is watching us from a crevice, just its face visible, profoundly unbothered.
I laugh into my snorkel and seawater sneaks in.
I choke a little and Alec’s hand closes on my shoulder, firm and immediate.
I wave him off. I’m fine. I just forgot that finding things delightful and breathing through a tube require different mouth positions.
Then I look over at him and pause for a moment, just watching him now.
He’s floating above the reef, face down, arms loose at his sides.
His shoulders have dropped. Gone is the careful, held-back posture I’ve been watching all week, the one that makes him look like he’s about to call a board meeting even in swim trunks.
His whole body has gone easy in the water, given over to it, and through the rippled surface I can see his long fingers trailing open, palms up, like he forgot they were his.
I have never seen his hands not doing something, keeping busy.
Now, his hands are just floating. Open and empty and still.
My throat tightens. My eyes sting behind the mask, which is absurd. I’m not going to cry into a snorkel over a man’s relaxed hands, but the feeling is there before I understand it, warm and spreading, lodged somewhere between my ribs and my breath.
I look away. Focusing on the reef. A school of sergeant majors drifts past, striped and purposeful, and I count them until the sting fades. Alec has drifted closer to me. His shin brushes mine in the current and I don’t pull away.
As we float above the coral, a larger animal emerges from deeper water. A sea turtle.
One moment the reef stretches out below us in its strange, living carpet.
Then there’s a shape. Slow and enormous and ancient, its shell mottled brown and gold, bigger than I expected, bigger than any nature documentary prepared me for because nothing prepares you for size when there’s no screen between you and an animal like this.
It heads directly toward us with calm indifference for the two humans in its path.
Alec’s hand closes around my wrist. Not a tap. A grab. His grip on my wrist says he reached for me even before his brain caught up to his hand. His startled expression looks even more hilarious behind the magnified screen of his mask.
His fingers tighten and when I look at him his eyes are wide behind the mask, his body still in a way that isn’t composure. It’s awe. It’s awe and a very human expression of “Oh God, that thing is enormous.”
And I laugh. Underwater. Into the snorkel. Which means I inhale roughly half the Caribbean Sea.
I surface in a sputtering, graceless, coughing rush.
Alec comes up right behind me. We spit out our snorkels and shove our masks up on foreheads.
Salt burns my sinuses. My laugh is still happening, tangled up with the coughing, and when I blink the water out of my eyes Alec is right there, chest heaving, his hair plastered flat, looking at me with an expression that’s half wonder and half something I want to photograph and keep.
Neither of us says anything about it. We don’t need to.
“Do you want to head back to shore?” he asks, after we’ve caught our breath.
“Are you kidding? I’m just getting started.”
He grins. “Good.”
The second dive is different. The wonder has settled into something quieter, a low hum instead of a shout, and what’s loud now is each other.
I’m aware of every place his body moves near mine.
His hand on my waist as we swim over a drop-off, his palm flat against my side, not guiding so much as choosing to keep me close.
My fingers trailing down his forearm because I want to feel the shift of muscle under wet skin.
Our legs tangling in the current, his calf against mine, and I don’t untangle.
When we surface near the rocks, I’m already kissing him.
Or he’s kissing me. The distinction doesn’t matter because his mouth is salty and hot against mine and my hands are in his wet hair.
We are technically supposed to be treading water right now, which is the kind of multitasking they should teach in school because it is not as easy as it sounds.
A wave pushes us together, chest to chest, and his arm wraps around my waist as my legs find his hips underwater.
Then a wave pulls and I slide sideways and my elbow catches the surface and we break apart, laughing again.
“The ocean,” I say, wiping salt from my eyes, “is the worst wingman.”
“Come here.” He pulls me back against him, taking my weight.
Another wave pushes and this time I’m pinned against him, my hands on his shoulders, his thigh between mine, and the pressure of his body against me through my wet bikini sends warmth flooding to every place we’re touching.
His mouth finds mine again and this kiss is deeper, slower, his tongue against my lower lip, and my fingers dig into his shoulders because I need to hold onto something that isn’t moving.
A wave hits us from the side and water goes up my nose and I snort into his mouth, which is not my sexiest moment.
He laughs against my lips. Pulls me closer.
Kisses the salt off my jaw, my neck, the spot below my ear where his fingers were when he fixed my mask.
I feel him hard against my hip in the water, the solid fact of his wanting me right here in the ocean in broad daylight, and the heat in my belly has nothing to do with the sun.
His hand shields the back of my head as a swell pushes us close again. Eventually the kissing slows and the water calms and we drift apart just enough to float on our backs, fingers laced between us, faces to the sky.
The silence is wide and blue and easy.
The peacefulness is almost more than I can bear.
I’m not used to this kind of feeling, this kind of unguarded bliss.
The instinct to fill the space with words, the itch to reach for a question or a joke or a fun fact about sea turtles, anything to wallpaper over the quiet before it turns into something I’m afraid of, rises up in me. My mouth opens.
Then closes.
Because the itch passed. It came, and it faded, and I’m still here, floating beside Alec. My jaw isn’t clenched. My hand is in his hand, just resting, like it belongs there. The silence between us isn’t empty at all. It’s full. It’s the fullest quiet I’ve ever been inside of.
Day six. The thought surfaces, turns over slowly.
Two days left before we return to reality—him in his world, and me in mine.
Thousands of miles between us. We haven’t talked about what comes after this.
My chest squeezes once, small, the way your hand tightens on something you don’t want to drop.
I let it pass. The sky is wide above us.
Alec’s thumb traces a slow pattern against my hand. The water holds us up.
Eventually, we swim to shore and head back to the resort with the sun lower and our bodies heavy in a good way. Salty skinned, sun-warmed, muscle-loose. The way that only happens after hours in the water. I’m carrying my fins and he’s carrying his along with both masks.
The light is golden on his shoulders. He’s just walking next to me, wet-haired and sun-tired, looking so beautiful it makes my chest ache.
As of today, I know the exact place on his ribs where he’s ticklish.
I know the rough sound he makes when he comes, and I know what his hands look like when they’re open and empty and not holding on to anything.
I know this man. Not all of him. Not yet. But enough to know I’m not bracing for the worst right now. Not with him. I feel safe, despite the fact that this might be a temporary happiness.
Alec makes me feel safe.
God, he makes me feel everything.
That should terrify me. Trusting someone this much, this fast, with no safety net and nothing but a gut feeling that says he’s worth it.
To be honest, I am terrified.
But I reach for his hand anyway.