“My therapist says ... reassurances aren’t always good. Because they can just be temporary, and then the obsession is going to chase the reassurance I get from the compulsion of asking ... and I don’t know. It’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid.” Bohdan moves his hand to my chin again, tipping it up. He looks at me in that way, stoic, serious about two things—and how lucky am I that one of them is me—and somehow, a man when he’s surrounded by twenty-one-year-old boys. “And I’m not temporary.”
I blink, and I tell him another fear. Maybe the biggest, scariest one I have. “You might be.”
Bohdan closes his eyes with a slow shake of his head. “I’m not.”
“You’re twenty-one.”
“You’re nineteen.”
“We aren’t just reciting facts, Bohdan,” I say softly.
Bohdan runs his thumb along my chin before moving it to my bottom lip. “Here’s a fact for you. I’ve only really loved one thing in my life, and then I met you. Now I love you more.”
“That’s a reassurance,” I whisper.
“No. It’s a fact.” Bohdan moves his thumb to my cheek. “Can I tell you three facts?”
I barely nod.
He presses his thumb to the first freckle. “Jedna. Your eyes go wider when you’re talking about archeology more than anything else.” He moves to the second. “Dve. You snore when you’re napping, but not when you’re sleeping through the night.” He smiles on the last one. “Tri. You’ve got terrible taste in television.”
His mouth replaces his thumb, a brush across each freckle, before his lips find mine with a whisper. “And they’re all things I love about you.”
“You love those boring facts about me?” I smile against his mouth. The questions and the noises are all still there, they’re just ... quieter. At least for now.
Bohdan slides his hand across the back of my neck, cradling my head. He nods, mouth shifting into a smile, too. “Next time you think someone hates you, or that they don’t love you, remember those three, boring facts about you that I love.”
“Not a reassurance?” I murmur.
He shakes his head. “Not a reassurance.”
“Can you tell me more tomorrow?”
“Every night before bed, for the rest of our lives. I’ll tell you three facts before you go to sleep.”
Sloan
Ropes of brown vine, weighed down by impossibly purple grapes weaving through stark green leaves in stepped rows, stretch across the shoreline, angling down towards the glittering ocean; the boats dotting the harbour look tiny from all the way up here.
I blink, watching the birds in the distance swoop low, close to the ocean and what might be fishing nets floating aimlessly behind all the boats, brightly coloured with peeling paint.
The sun warms my cheeks, down the sides of my neck, over my exposed shoulders, and a breeze lifts my hair, loose in an attempt to cover up theB, ink too stark now from the sun. I don’t think I packed a single T-shirt for this entire trip, and it feels a bit like an open wound on display.
“What are you staring at?” Tia drops her chin to my shoulder, arms wrapping around me, squeezing briefly.
I don’t tell her that I’m trying to take in as much of the view as I can. I stared at the headrest the entire drive from the port to the winery because I got stuck in the middle, and turning to look out the window would have meant looking at Bohdan.
I point towards the winery. To Talon doing push-ups off the edge of a wine barrel. “I think your brother’s already drunk.”
Tia cuts me a sideways look, adjusting the wide brim of her sun hat before she turns around to walk backward in front of me down the cobblestone path to the vineyard, the skirt of her floral-print dress dancing around her legs. “Well, four mimosas at breakfast will do that to a person.”
“He’s taking this retirement thing very seriously.” I nod.
He pushes up a final time, clapping his hands before they make contact with the iron rung around the edge of the barrel again.
She smiles again, fondly. She pretends she doesn’t, but she loves her brother more than anything. “He’s having fun. He deserves it. It looks, sort of, like they all are. And that’s hard to achieve. Bohdan takes everything too seriously to crack many smiles.”
