Talon waves his hands again, but I’m looking past him to Sloan, where she sits on one of the lounge chairs. Her legs folded under her, arms wrapped around her chest, and her hooded sweater falling down over her knees. With her hair tied back into a ponytail, it gives me a clearer view of her mouth, lips just parted, the freckles on her cheek under her left eye that seemingly glow under the moon.
Fuck the endless, stretching ocean.
She’s the most beautiful thing out here.
I think she might feel my eyes on her, because hers flick to mine, and she swallows, blinking, before she looks away again.
She hardly spoke to me all afternoon, other than a quiet thank-you and soft smile when I made her pasta dough for her.
Tia folded her ravioli. I would have offered the second I saw her try—hands extended, prodding the dough, covered in white flour before she stretched out her fingers with a rough shake of her head.
But her best friend beat me to it.
I should probably be grateful for that—but the only thing it did was make me hate my useless fucking brain more.
It should have been me—standing beside her, close enough to bend down, brush my mouth across her temple, down to her ear where I could whisper to her about things that might make her smile. Like why Talon picked an Italian cooking class on a Spanish island, the rock formations we stood on, and the historical and cultural uses of flour.
She’d know more about those last ones than me, but I’d make something up, spin an entire story if it would make her smile.
But that’s for one of the Bohdans living out there in another universe. In this one, I was just the guy she hardly looked at all day.
“Why are we here, Talon?” Tia gestures to the stretching balcony. “I’m tired.”
“Seeing as no one bothered to read it, I’d like to discuss the itinerary.” Talon tips his bottle of beer towards his sister before he jerks his chin to the table closest to Sloan. “I had the suite concierge print off some physical copies. Sloany, if you’d be so kind as to distribute them.”
One brow arches, and she almost looks amused. But she grabs the stack of paper, and when she does, her sweater falls down her shoulder, and I can see it there under the thin strap of her tank top.
TheBfrom all those years ago when we were young and dumb and thought we were invincible.
It disappears again when the sweater shifts as she takes one sheet from the top and sets it beside her on the chair.
She stands, and I can’t help it, but I watch her. Every little movement. Her fingers tugging the hem of her sweater down, smoothing it out before she brushes her palm down her thigh. The way those same hands clutch either side of the stack of papers.
Ordinary movements I’ve missed out on over the last year and a half, and maybe longer because my brain was broken. Things I took for granted because I thought they were mine to catalogue forever.
She looks up at me through her lashes when she hands me my paper, careful our fingers don’t accidentally brush.
It doesn’t matter that our skin didn’t meet.
Sloan Joseph looked at me, my heart still stopped in my chest, and I might as well be dead.
The look lingers.
But this time, she breaks away first.
It feels a bit like a string pulled too taut in my heart and snapped. I roll my shoulders back, rub my hand across my chest and the phantom ache that lives there now because she doesn’t.
Jay’s eyes track the page before he looks up at Talon. “This feels like school.”
“Well, you weren’t very good at that, were you?” Talon leans back against the glass railing.
“Hey!” Jay throws his hands in the air, gold rings glinting under the starlight.
Talon shrugs, angling the bottle towards me and Sloan. “Not everyone can be Rock Boy and Mrs. Worldwide.”
It’s one of those things that happens when you’ve known someone the way we knew each other. When you’ve known so many different versions of each other, grown together andintertwined a bit like the roots of two trees that were planted too close together.
There’s this certain language you share. It can be words, it can be laughter, it can be just a look.
