Page 75 of 32 Days in May

Marco pushes himself up suddenly, dusting the sand off his hands. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

I snap my eyes over to Marco. “What?”

“Nadia, you’re fucking brilliant—”

“You don’t have to say that. I’m not fishing—”

“Yes.” He laughs incredulously. “Yes, I do. I’ve been around you. Every day. For almost a month. You know so many things. You read constantly—more than Giorgio ever has. You remember details about people and places you hear one time. You’re basically a fucking botanist.”

“Please tell Soph that. They’ll laugh until they shit.”

“Seriously,” Marco says. “Why are you so hard on yourself?”

“Why are you so hard on yourself?” I counter. “You called yourself a user. If this is how you use people, sign me up for life.” The sentence flies out of my mouth before I can stop it, but I’m not embarrassed. It’s the truth.

“Because I am,” he replies quietly. “And I come from a long line of users. But I want to be different—”

“You.” I take hold of his face in my hands. “Are. You are different. You love me, Marco. And I don’t mean that in an emotional way, I mean that in an active verb kind of way. You love me down to my core. You fill me up with goodness, make me feel seen and safe and like I could just—”

My mouth stalls. Suddenly, my eyes prick with tears.

I feel the warm planes of his hands moving up and down my arms. “What?”

“I’ve been lying to you.” I suck down a shaky breath. “I’ve been lying about who I am, Marco. All of this. This person I’m being for May. It’s a lie. The real Nadia is fucking . . .”

I try. I really do. I try to force the word sick to my lips, but it just won’t come.

Instead I say: “Depressed. She lies in bed for weeks on end and eats too much candy and doesn’t brush her teeth. She reads books because they take her out of her body. I hate my body.”

“Hey—it’s okay.” He brings his hands to my cheeks, now slick with tears.

“The real Nadia is a runner. As soon as things get hard, she runs and hides and cowers.”

“Then I guess I’m a liar, too,” he says, his voice deep and catching. “I haven’t dated a woman for more than three dates in years. I’ve never lived with a woman, traveled with a woman, woken up next to a woman and not felt shame and anxiety. I’ve never been in love before. And worst of all, I lied to you to get you here—I told you it would only be for May and I knew I’d want more. I looked at you and I thought, I can be different. I can do this. And I feel like . . .” He pauses to let out a short, joyful laugh. “Like I am better with you. I don’t know what you were like before, but maybe we can keep going, you know? Beyond May.”

There is no before, I want to tell him. Instead, I press my forehead to his. “Maybe.”

He doesn’t push me any further. Instead, he holds me. We stay like this, bowed close together, reverent.

“Why did we do this to ourselves?” he whispers eventually.

“Chaos demons,” I reply. “We left our chaos demons chained up for too long.”

A chuckle thrums through his chest. I burrow my face into his neck and breathe in the scent of him as he says, “Let’s just stay here, then”

“Fine, I’ll run away to Italy with you.”

“Twist my damn arm, Nadia.”

Finally, we’re laughing again. He tightens his arms around me, then pulls us backward until we’re lying flat in the sand, his stubble grazing back and forth across my forehead.

I think back to the moment we first met—I’d been so afraid of becoming some sort of footnote or side quest in Marco’s long and fabulous life, discarded after three days like an old rag. Instead, I’d fallen into something bigger. What are we doing? I want to ask, desperately. Why are we doing this? If there’s one thing I know with total certainty, it’s that Marco and I seem obsessed with, alarmingly drawn to, hurting ourselves. Are we good for each other?

Instead, I ask, “Hey, why did you publish your photographs as Adam West?”

“Adam West’s the original Batman. He was a total stud.”

“Really?” I lean away to look up at him. “That’s why?”