“Did you get . . . you know?”
He laughed. “You mean condoms?” He wrapped his arms round me rather suddenly, pulled me back towards him, and kissed the back of my neck.
“What was that for?” I asked.
“You make me laugh, and I just felt like doing that. I don’t laugh that often. It’s nice.”
I looked at him over my shoulder. “You don’t laugh that often?”
“Not really, but it’s not like my life has been particularly humorous, not lately and maybe not for a while, either.”
“Your mom?” I asked, feeling a knot in my stomach.
“My mom. My dad leaving, him cutting us out of his life, us ending too.” We were silent for a while. The only sounds were the soft lapping of water on the shore, birds singing, and the flap of the umbrella in the breeze.
“Just because I was the idiot who walked away, doesn’t mean I wasn’t heartbroken over it,” he said. “In fact, maybe I haven’t quite accurately conveyed to you how much that messed me up. You may be under the impression that everything was fine for me, that I had this great time traipsing around Europe. I didn’t. It was torture without you. Even though I was the one who walked away.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“I’m sorry too,” he said, and continued to put cream on my back, although I was pretty sure he was done.
“What do you think would have happened to us if . . .you know?” He teased me with my choice of words.
“What, if we’d had earth-shattering sex that night and made each other come like we did last night?” I said defiantly in the face of the “you know.”
“Exactly!”
“I don’t know. What do you think would have happened?” I asked, feeling a shift in the mood between us, which also might have had something to do with the fact that the sun-cream application had begun to feel more like a massage.
“I think we’d still be together.”
I spun round in shock. “Seriously?” My eyes connected with his icy-blue ones and I was immediately sucked in. They looked cooler and icier in this light.
“Seriously,” he said firmly.
I turned back round and looked out over the water. He’d been so absent from my life these past thirteen years it was hard to imagine an alternate reality that he was a part of, but still, in moments like this, it also felt like he might have actually been with me all along. He continued to rub my neck, and for a second it felt like nothing bad had ever happened between us. This was what our future was supposed to be: us sitting together on a beach, talking, laughing and then being so in lust that we couldn’t get enough of each other. I wanted to fight this feeling, because it also terrified me. But what terrified me more was that if I did fight it he would stop touching me. And being touched by him felt like coming home.
“How’s your neck?” he asked.
“Feels a million times better when you do that.”
He began to focus all his attention on my neck, his fingers rubbing up and down, kneading into my tense shoulders and back up again. He tilted my head forwards and ran his hands from the base of my neck all the way into my hair, squeezing my scalp as he went. I couldn’t help my relaxed, blissful moan.
“You carry a lot of tension in your neck. You should probably go for regular massages,” he said.
I moaned again as he began massaging my scalp. “You’re setting the bar pretty high here—not sure I’ve ever had a massage that compares to this one.”
“Well, then, why don’t you keep me around and I’ll do this regularly.”
I shot him an eye roll over my shoulder. “And keep you from all your other ladies?”
“I don’t have other ladies,” he said firmly, working his hands around my shoulder blades, kneading knots away.
“You have ladies,” I said nonchalantly. It was a fact, after all. He had them. Probably lots of them, probably multiple at the same time.
“It’s all meaningless, Ash. And maybe I don’t want them anymore.” His voice was softer. “Maybe I don’t want any of that anymore. Maybe I feel like making a change in my life.”
“Maybe that’s a good idea,” I said, still feeling blissfully relaxed from the massage. “Can I be honest with you?” I asked, and he released his hands from me. But I didn’t turn and look at him. “I kind of think you deserve more than that.”
