Chapter Ten
Elise lifted the glass of Ravello Bianco to her mouth and gulped back the entire thing.
The smug, citrusy, apple-laced wine barely had time to introduce itself before being hurled down her esophagus and, frankly, she didn’t care.
She topped up her glass once more and pretended not to notice Harper watching her like someone observing a slow-moving car crash, and knocked it back as well.
Better to be tipsy than as sober as a saint. Which she wasn’t far away from, considering she’d barely eaten a morsel of food today. Just a quick half of a ham-and-cheese sandwich, one of the PAs had practically shoved down her throat when Elise had been caught swaying dizzily over the monitor.
“Did you know the Mediterranean monk seal was spotted here again recently?” Harper asked. “There are fewer than seven hundred of them left.”
“No,” Elise said grumpily, adjusting a cushion behind her back. She didn’t want to say it, wasn’t going to, but this pillow fort Harper had conjured up on the balcony wasn’t uncomfortable. In fact, it was so cozy that Elise felt her bones unclench one vertebra at a time.
“Two years ago, I joined a conservation team in West Kalimantan. We were tracking Sunda pangolins in the lowland rainforest. They’re so endangered they’re basically ghosts.
Not to mention they’re extremely elusive.
We spent four nights hiking through air so humid it felt like I was inhaling someone else’s breath.
And then, at like two in the morning, we finally spotted one waddling between the roots of a strangler fig.
Nothing can beat witnessing something on the brink of disappearing forever and realizing it’s still fighting for a chance. ”
“Fascinating,” Elise said, putting on a bored voice when, in fact, that wasn’t boring at all.
Elise loved pangolins. They were painfully cute with their little cone-shaped heads and long tails, and the way they curled into tight balls in the face of danger was admirable.
They didn’t attack. They defended themselves by curling up and being cute. A worthy strategy.
“Are you seriously going to snap back one-word responses all night?” Harper asked, turning toward her.
Her brows were furrowed, her lips pressed tight together, and Elise could spot a twitch in her jaw.
Good. She was angry. Elise wanted her angry.
She wanted her to know how it felt. She wanted her to experience the same hot fuse that had coursed through Elise’s entire body when she’d seen those damned petals.
Elise was going to ask Harper where she got the petals but didn’t.
She had a feeling they were from the same bouquet of roses they were going to cold store for the next ceremony.
“Are you going to break into my house again?” Elise shot back like a woman with a loaded gun.
Harper ignored the question, exhaled hard, and let her head thump lightly against the glass door behind her.
“If I could go back in time, I would,” she said, staring out at the sea, at the moon spilling a silver highway across the water.
“I would’ve stayed in Namibia. In your tent.
I never would have left. Instead of running away, I would’ve waited until you woke up.
We should’ve talked about what happened. ”
“Have you never heard of the butterfly effect?” Elise asked, reaching for the bottle of wine again, even though she absolutely did not need any more.
“You know. Tweak one thing in the past and suddenly the whole world collapses in a flaming ball.” A bit dramatic, yes, but one never knew.
Maybe the world really would’ve come to a cataclysmic end if they’d woken up together in Sesriem the next morning.
“I have,” Harper said, looking somewhat bemused.
Which should’ve set Elise’s skin on fire, but it didn’t.
Instead, it made her feel a little unmoored.
At some point in those weeks that they’d spent together in Namibia, Elise had gotten so good at reading Harper she could practically tell what she was thinking.
But now she had no idea. She had no idea if Harper was just amusing Elise for her own benefit. If she found Elise funny.
Elise set the glass down before she could fill it back up. “I don’t want to change back time.”
“No?”
“No,” Elise replied, tugging a blanket over her lap so Harper wouldn’t see her knees shaking.
“Because if you changed anything, we might not be here. I might not be the executive producer of The Sapphic Match. I might not like doing morning yoga or going for walks in the park. I might not love adding spinach to my smoothies. I might never have reconnected with my mother or been at the hospital when my sister had her babies. I might not be me.”
Harper stroked her palm over the velvet blanket and watched the fabric shift and shimmer under her fingers. She didn’t look at Elise. Didn’t so much as glance up as she asked, “Do you like the person you’ve become?”
No one had ever asked Elise that question.
Not even her shrink, which was a little worrying considering how much she paid him by the hour.
Did she like herself? Would thirteen-year-old Elise, who watched the first season of Survivor religiously and always dreamed of being on a reality show production, be proud of her?
The answer wasn’t clear. Which was why she deflected. “Do you?”
Harper thought it through for a moment and then met Elise’s gaze again. “Is it possible to both love and hate yourself?”
“I think it’s impossible not to.”
Harper smiled. Elise did too. Her lips felt like they were cracking through years of dust. Then there were Harper’s eyes on her face, lingering for what felt like an eternity, and Elise cleared her throat because, for some reason, her cheeks were heating up.
Why were her cheeks heating up? It wasn’t even hot.
The ocean breeze had curled up the cliff and was nipping at her exposed neck.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Elise croaked.
“Like what?” Harper asked, her smile turning into a toothy grin. “I’m not looking at you differently than usual.”
Wait. Elise’s stomach dropped in that roller-coaster plunging kind of way. Hadn’t Harper said those exact same words ten years ago?
Yes. She had.
The memory hit Elise fast and bright, like someone had fired a flare gun straight into her temporal lobe.
Harper had said the exact same thing minutes before she had leaned in and kissed Elise.
Minutes before Elise had kissed her back.
Minutes before, they had made slow, passionate love on Larry’s green and cream tasseled blanket while the fire had crackled into barely there embers and the Namibian stars had hung impossibly close overhead.
Suddenly, a heat hummed between her legs.
The kind that made her acutely aware of every nerve ending south of her belly button.
Nope. Absolutely not, she thought, and slammed that feeling down.
She’d spent a decade repressing this nonsense.
Ten years of convincing herself she wasn’t attracted to women.
Ten years of telling herself that Harper was just a one-time thing.
And maybe she was.
Or maybe Harper was just the exception. The only one who could light up her match, so to speak. Ha. Now wouldn’t that be hilarious?
“Are you alright?” Harper asked, leaning in slightly. There was a soft frown on her face and her teeth grazed her bottom lip.
It lit a fire between Elise’s legs when Harper bit her lip like that.
Elise cleared her throat. “Perfect,” she said, fiddling with the blanket on her lap.
“Why don’t you tell me more about your expeditions.
I’ve seen some photos, but I’d like to know the stories behind them.
” A lie. She’d read all the articles on the National Geographic website and even once sat through a forty-minute interview Harper did with a wildlife podcast host. But she needed the distraction.
Badly. Before her body reacted in some other dangerous way.
“Oh, so you’ve followed my work?” Harper said.
“Only a little,” Elise replied fast, too fast. Then, because Harper’s smile was far too smug, she added, “Don’t go polishing your halo just yet.”
Harper barked a laugh. “My halo?”
“Yes,” Elise answered matter-of-factly before she realized only angels wore halos.
She hoped Harper didn’t think she was calling her one.
Because she wasn’t. Halo might’ve been a poor choice of words, though technically it was also a reference to Harper’s adopted last name so maybe she was in the clear.
“I’ve always been a National Geographic subscriber.
You know this about me. It’s almost like you decided to work for them just so you could show off. ”
Harper laughed again. Loud and full-bodied. The kind that shook her shoulders and made the few strands she had tugged behind her ear fall forward across her cheek. “Yes, that’s exactly why I did it.”
“So then tell me about it,” Elise said.
“Where would you like me to start?”
“From the beginning.”
And Harper did. She told her all about the jaguars in the Pantanal, which was the assignment that got her noticed.
She told Elise about how she’d spent weeks tracking them down through the wetlands.
Then she talked about the leatherback turtles nesting on Trinidad’s beaches, the consequences of human interference on the endangered species, and how patient she had to be to capture their slow crawl from sand to surf.
Next, Harper spoke about the dugongs off the coast of Palawan.
Elise had never even heard of them, let alone knew what they looked like.
And somewhere between dugongs and the salt flats of Atacama, Elise’s attention drifted…
To Harper’s mouth. To the way her lips shaped words. How she kept licking the corner of her bottom lip without noticing. How her voice went higher when she got excited.
And suddenly Elise wasn’t hearing the story at all.
She was watching. And Harper was too. In fact, she had stopped speaking altogether.
The only noises in the air were someone laughing nearby and the distant hum of cars.
But to Elise, the night was entirely silent.
She could only hear her breath, all ragged and wanting, and the tick, tick of Harper’s heartbeat, which she knew wasn’t real, but it felt real.
Before Elise could fully register what was happening, they were both leaning in.
Slowly. Carefully. Like they were testing the waters, and then suddenly the air turned magnetic, and Harper’s breath brushed against Elise’s mouth.
And then there was no stopping her. Elise’s hand found Harper’s wrist in a way that only muscle memory could explain.
Harper’s fingers slid to Elise’s jaw, and their mouths fit perfectly together, like the last ten years had been nothing more than a blink.
As if they were still in Sesriem, sitting by the fire, alone but together.
Harper slipped her tongue into Elise’s mouth. Elise slid her hand up Harper’s shoulder for leverage. And then just as she shifted her weight over her—wondering if anyone from the other crew houses could see them—reality set in like a bucket of ice water poured over her head.
Elise broke the kiss so fast that she snapped her head back and hit the base of her skull against the sidewall. “OW!” she shrieked, clutching her head.
Harper’s eyes went huge. She half raised her arms like she wanted to catch Elise’s head before it bounced against the bricks but couldn’t do it in time. “Shit, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Elise said quickly. But she wasn’t fine.
She was embarrassed. She was confused. She hadn’t felt anything that intoxicating, that electric, that bone-deep kind of undeniably fantastic in a long time.
Ten years to be exact. Which was exactly why Elise pushed herself up and gestured to the open sliding door. “I think you should go.”