I keep my eyes on the cobblestones now, one at a time, and I try to ignore the sounds I hear with each step.
“What kind of rock is that?”
Bohdan looks over his shoulder, fingers stilling where they trail across the carved walls of the cellar.
“Provence is mostly limestone. The accumulation of marine sediments.” He knocks a fist against an outcropping of rock, edges worn down by time.
I nod, folding my arms across my chest, covering my exposed shoulder with one hand so he can’t see the tattoo, on display in this wine cellar we’re supposed to be touring, because he looks so much like the boy I fell in love with, eyes rapt with fascination while he looks at the different lines, colours, and mineral deposits of rocks.
We’re the only ones here. I went to the washroom when Tia, Talon, and Jay walked ahead to see the different types of barrels—mostly to tell myself I needed to stop thinking about Bohdan without clothes on—and when I came back, it was just him standing here: one hand in the pocket of his shorts, the other trailing across the walls, features lit by the swinging bulbs above him.
“Do you—” I start, a laugh catching in my throat. Tia was right. I don’t know how to pretend not to know him. “Do you ... study rocks for a living?”
His hand, wide with veins traipsing over the back, lies flat against the rock, and he gives me a sideways look. “No.”
“What do you do?” The words sound so stupid, even to me, that I clap my hand over my mouth.
That makes him smile, and he pushes off the wall, shoving his hand in the pocket of his linen shorts. “I used to chase a rubber puck. Now I watch people chase that same rubber puck and talk about it on TV.”
I blink. It’s not really funny anymore.
“Maybe you could integrate your love of rocks,” I say quietly, trying again.
“Yeah, well, rock facts don’t play well on television.” He gives me a wry shrug. “People are more interested in who’s making plays, not the fact that the studio in Secaucus sits on sedimentary rocks. Shale, sandstone, siltstone. All part of the Newark Basin.”
“I wouldn’t know.” I shrug.
A grin stretches across his face. “About the bedrock formation, or the kinds of things people like to hear during televised hockey broadcasts?”
“Either-or.”
“You don’t watch me on TV?” He angles his head.
“Sorry, no.” I snort. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do less than watch a pixelated version of a Bohdan I’d never get to have on my TV screen.
He cocks his head back, like he’s affronted.
“You’d watch me?” I ask flatly.
Bohdan stops, the bulbs hanging from the wires mounted across the stone ceiling swaying above him, shadows dancing across his face. He nods. “Probably until my eyes bled.”
I swallow, whispering, “That doesn’t seem safe.”
He shrugs, lips tugging to the side. “Can’t imagine it would be. Not for the faint of heart, having you and losing you.”
You didn’t lose me, I think. You gave me up.
You had me and you let me go.
I close my eyes—I can’t look at him anymore. Not when I still love him, even though I wish with my whole heart I didn’t, not when he looks like that: impossibly stunning, impossibly out of reach, and more lovely than anything in the world, even here in a dank, centuries-old wine cellar.
He might’ve read my mind because his voice drops, a low, rough whisper just for me and him here in the dark. “Would be a fitting punishment, to have to watch you every day.”
“Is that what it’s supposed to be for me?” I blink, and he’s just a silhouette while my eyes adjust. “Punishment?”
A fitting one, my brain whispers. It’s what we deserved, at the end of the day.
To be left alone with our love. Not enough, never enough.
