Page 61 of Waiting for You

Different was the only word.

I'd been searching my vocabulary for another one since the arm-wrestling match. Ever since that one-second peck on my cheek that left me unable to sit still in my own chair, different was still the only word that fit the wreckage. Andrew's phone had conveniently rung, pulling him away, and the second we were alone she'd stared me dead in the eye and confessed her body still remembered mine. Then she'd kissed my cheek and walked off, leaving me at that table robbed of my own sanity.

I had no idea what to do with that.

I'd been obsessing over it ever since. When my head hit the pillow, the second I woke up, through every quiet stretch of daylight in between. The problem wasn't that I couldn't understand the confession. I understood it better than I was comfortable admitting. The problem was that this whole trip was supposed to be harmless. Our conversations were supposed to be routinary and normal. We had explosive history, yes, but we'd agreed to lock it in a manageable box and survive one week on an island without a single incident. That was what this trip was supposed to be.

But every time I stood in her gravity, every defensive blueprint I'd drafted went straight out the goddamn window. I turned into someone else, a man who blurted out confessions I hadn't authorized, a man who kept ending up in isolated corridors, on rented boats, in terrace chairs I'd never planned to occupy.

The worst part wasn't the things I said. The worst part was that I wasn't surprised by my own betrayal. Some buried part of me had always known that whenever Sloane Ty was within a ten-mile radius, I couldn't manage my own impulses. That reckless part of me had been starved and quiet for eight years, and now it had woken up and was demanding to be felt.

That lack of control scared me more than anything.

The guilt was specific.

Eliza had boarded a plane expecting to be my partner and deserved a partner's attention.

I lay rigid in the dark, staring at the suite ceiling, and decided I needed to force myself to sleep.

I shut my eyes and waited for sleep to take me. When I woke hours later, Eliza was already up and dressed.

"We should head down for dinner," she suggested.

"Give me a minute," I mumbled, rubbing my eyes.

I dragged myself out of bed, changed, and walked her down to the dining pavilion. I pulled out a chair and sat. Less than a minute later, Sloane slid into the empty seat beside me. I turned my head toward her.

"This is turning into a statistical anomaly," I murmured.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"We keep sitting next to each other." I gestured at the table. "At every single meal since we landed."

She shot me a sideways glance. "Did I sit next to you at breakfast this morning?"

"You only didn't because you didn't get downstairs in time to claim the seat."

She smiled, a wicked curve of her lips, before turning her face away to hide it. A second later, Eliza and Andrew strolled in and claimed the two seats across from us. Eliza's eyes darted from Sloane to me, calculating the proximity, but she said nothing. Then Andrew launched into a story, Eliza engaged with him, and the table fell into conversation. I dropped my eyes to the white tablecloth. Sloane and I kept ending up side by side without either of us coordinating it.

Hours later, after dinner wrapped, Eliza sat at the vanity mirror, removing her makeup and unfastening her jewelry. Without turning around, she said, "Sloane is an eccentric girl, isn't she."

I stared at her reflection in the glass. "Why are you bringing up Sloane?"

She turned a diamond earring over in her fingers. "I was watching her during dinner. There are a lot of fascinating layers to her." She locked eyes with my reflection. "You think the same?"

"I haven't really thought about it," I lied.

She held my gaze in the mirror. "Sure you haven't," she said, dry.

She finished organizing her jewelry, we went to bed, and she murmured goodnight. Her loaded sentence was still echoing in the room when I woke the next morning with a skull-splitting headache.

I couldn't make it down to breakfast. I lay paralyzed in the darkened suite with my forearm thrown over my eyes, listening to Eliza move around the room until the door finally clicked shut behind her. She came back an hour later and sat on the edge of the mattress.

"Violet just announced we're doing a jungle hike today," she said.

"I can't go," I groaned, not moving my arm. "I'm staying in the room. My head's killing me."

"I know it is," she said, brushing a hand over my shoulder. "You want me to stay back and keep an eye on you?"