Chapter 22
ELLA
Our last full day on the island starts slow, the way all our mornings have started since the night everything changed between us.
Coffee on the veranda, Alec’s leg pressed against mine, the ocean spread out below us like it goes on forever.
We don’t talk about tomorrow. We don’t talk about airports or time zones or the two thousand miles that will separate his life from mine in less than twenty-four hours.
We just sit in the sun and drink our coffee, and I let myself pretend that this is all I need.
By late afternoon, we’re in a shuttle van headed for Bridgetown, and I’ve made a deal with myself.
No brave speeches. No “so what are we to each other” conversations.
No ruining the most perfect week of my life by asking questions that may give me answers I’m not ready to hear.
Today I am going to be here, fully here, with this unexpected man, on this beautiful island, for however many hours we have left.
We pour off the shuttle along with a dozen other people from the resort. Music fills the air even before the vehicle doors open. The street is a wall of sound and color and moving bodies, soca music so loud it replaces my heartbeat.
“Come on.” I grab Alec’s hand and pull him into the middle of it.
Grand Kadooment is everything the resort brochure promised.
Feathered costumes in electric pinks and golds tower above the crowd on dancers who move like the music is running through their veins instead of speakers.
Steel drums punch through the bass line.
The air smells like jerk seasoning and rum punch and cocoa butter sunscreen.
Every direction I turn there’s someone laughing, someone dancing, someone handing me something fried on a paper plate.
The sun is a physical weight on my shoulders and the crowd is a tide I’m happy to be swept into.
This is my element. Give me a diner full of chaos and a hundred things happening at once and I can find the rhythm without thinking.
A street festival with ten thousand strangers and music I can feel in my teeth?
I was made for this. Alec, on the other hand, looks like a man who just walked into the world’s most colorful ambush.
“Dance with me!” I shout over the cacophony, tugging his hand.
He looks skeptical, his brow furrowed. “I don’t dance.”
“You didn’t think you do fun either, and look how that’s turned out.
” I’m already moving my hips to the soca beat, which is fast and rolling and requires a looseness in the lower body that Alec has probably never once in his life allowed himself to experience.
“Come on. It’s easy. Just feel the rhythm. ”
He tries. God help him, he tries. But watching him attempt Caribbean dance steps is like watching a man try to solve a math equation with his hips. Every movement is fractionally too precise, slightly behind the beat, his body analyzing the rhythm instead of surrendering to it.
He knows it, too. I can see the wry awareness on his face, the exasperated twist of his mouth that says he’s two seconds from giving up.
“You’re thinking too hard,” I tell him, stepping closer. “Stop counting and just move.”
“I’m not counting.”
“I can see it on your face. One-two-three, one-two-three.” I move so I’m standing in front of him, my back to his chest. “Hold on to me. I’ll show you how to do this.”
His hands settle on my waist. The contact sends a warm current straight through the thin cotton of my sundress and into my skin, a direct line from his fingertips to somewhere low in my belly.
My breath catches for half a second that I hope the music covered.
His thumbs find the curve above my hip bones.
His fingers press lightly into my lower back.
And just like that, his timing improves dramatically.
“Interesting,” I say, grinning over my shoulder at him. “You got about sixty percent better the second you put your hands on me.”
He pulls me closer. His mouth is near my ear because the music is deafening, and his breath is warm against my neck when he speaks. “Maybe I just needed the right motivation.”
The low rumble of his voice against the shell of my ear sends heat streaking through me.
My back presses against his chest as the crowd shifts around us and his grip tightens on my hips.
I feel the solid wall of him behind me, the heat of his body through his shirt.
The hard, distracting pressure against my lower back that tells me the dancing isn’t the only thing he’s feeling right now.
I turn to face him. Our bodies are close. The crowd keeps pushing us together, hemming in closer, making us hold each other tighter as we move. His face is flushed from the sun and heat, and more relaxed than I’ve ever seen it in public.
“You’re getting the hang of it now,” I tell him, swiveling my hips in his light grasp.
He smirks. “Don’t patronize me.”
“I would never.” I press my palms against his chest and feel his heartbeat, steady and strong beneath my hands. “I’m genuinely impressed. By the end of the night, you might even be mediocre.”
His laugh is low and real and I feel it vibrate through my palms. “High praise.”
The music shifts. The soca drops into a slower tempo, a brief valley between high-energy tracks, and the crowd around us eases back just enough that we’re standing in a small pocket of space.
My hair is sticking to my neck. I’m sweaty and laughing and probably look like a person who’s spent an hour in a sauna, but Alec’s intense gaze says he doesn’t mind at all.
He looks at me for the longest time. Then he leans down and kisses me.
Soft. Not urgent. Not hungry. Just his mouth on mine, warm and unrushed, like this is something he does every day. Like kissing me in the middle of a crowded Bridgetown street with countless strangers pressing in on every side is the most natural thing in the world.
He pulls back to look at me, but his hand stays on my waist.
For a second I hold the sweetness of that, the ease of it. The delicious feeling that we have all the time in the world.
But we don’t. Tomorrow we fly home. Him to New York. Me to Arizona. Thousands of miles of reality between us.
I push the thought down. Not today. Today, we have this.
“Ella! Alec!” Colette Tremblay shouts to us from a cluster of festival-goers near a food tent.
I glance her way and she waves us over with the enthusiasm of a woman three rum punches into her afternoon.
Her husband Pierre is beside her, wearing a festival hat woven from palm fronds that makes him look like a slightly sunburned garden gnome.
They’ve been at the resort as long as we have, and we’ve shared enough pool conversations and dining room run-ins during this last week that seeing them now feels like spotting friends at a block party back home.
Colette pulls me into a hug and within thirty seconds she’s steering me toward a stall specializing in saltfish cakes while Pierre falls into step beside Alec.
I catch fragments of their conversation under the music, something about the parade route, Pierre recommending a rum vendor two streets over.
Alec listens with the unhurried attention he gives to people he’s decided are worth his time, which is a short list that has grown considerably this week.
Colette breaks a saltfish cake in half and hands me the bigger piece. “Pierre is trying to get your man to try the pepper sauce. Don’t let him. It’s lethal.”
Your man. She says it casually, the way she’d casually refer to someone’s husband over lunch. No weight on it. No wink. Just the easy assumption after seeing us gravitate toward each other all week. She doesn’t seem remotely surprised to find Alec and me together now.
I bite into the saltfish cake as Alec reappears at my side with a small cup of pepper sauce he apparently accepted from Pierre against Colette’s advice.
He offers it to me, but I shake my head and before I can warn him, he tries a dip of it on a chip.
His expression doesn’t change, but a muscle near his eye twitches once, and I watch him swallow with the determined composure of a man who will die before admitting Pierre just destroyed him.
“Good?” I ask hesitantly.
“Fine.” His voice is half an octave higher than usual.
Colette and I exchange a look. Pierre grins.
We’re still laughing about it when Jess from limbo night finds us, weaving through the crowd with a festival flag knotted around her waist and glitter on her cheekbones.
Her husband Mike trails behind her, carrying two drinks and wearing the blissful, slightly dazed expression of a man who stopped keeping count of rum punches an hour ago.
“There you are!” Jess hooks her arm through mine like we planned this, and suddenly I’m listening raptly while she tells me about the costume band they followed for six blocks and the woman on stilts who almost took out Mike with a sequined wing.
Alec’s hand rests on my lower back through all of it.
Not pulling me toward him. Not marking territory.
Just there. A quiet point of contact that says I’m right here while I do my thing.
When Jess grabs my arm to point out a steel drum player, his hand shifts with me and resettles, and the absent ease of that adjustment, like his body already knows how mine moves, sends warmth pooling low in my stomach.
Mike says something to Alec that I miss under the pound of drums, and when I glance over, Alec is shaking his head with that reluctant half-smile that means someone just got a genuine reaction out of him.
I watch for a moment, enjoying just seeing him stand in a chaotic crowd, talking with our new friends as if we’ve known them for years instead of days.
The grump I met on the plane has somehow become this easy, relaxed man and there’s a part of me that takes some satisfaction in knowing I helped Alec find this looser side of him.