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“I was really looking forward to eating outside tonight.” The scent of whatever they’re making in the kitchen wafts upstairs, making my mouth water.
“There’ll be other opportunities. Trust me.”
“What are we going to do now? I feel like we’ve been banished.”
He sniffs, half-annoyed, half-amused, I imagine.
“Seriously, though, what are we going to do? No TV upstairs . . . no internet . . . ,” I say. I packed eight books for this trip—one for every week. I finished the first in one day. At this rate, I’ll run out of reading material by next week unless there’s a library on Driftway he forgot to mention. “And you hate talking, so a robust conversation’s off the table.”
He crinkles his forehead. “I don’t hate talking.”
“Then you must hate talking to me because you never say more than you have to.” Unless he’s talking about Audrina, but I doubt he wants to spend a lot of time waxing poetic with me about his recent heartbreak. “I’m getting the bare minimum from you. Wasn’t going to take it personally before, but since you said you don’t hate talking . . .”
He snickers as we climb the stairs, head to our suite/prison, and wait for dinner to be delivered. Once back in the room, I head to the bathroom, strip out of my dress, and pull on some pajamas since we’re calling it a night.
When I emerge, I see he’s done the same thing.
Grabbing a decorative book off the dresser, I curl up at the foot of the bed and page through pictures upon pictures of lighthouses from all over the world.
“I’m getting the sense that if you’ve seen one lighthouse, you’ve probably seen them all.” I yawn, despite it being too early to be this tired. Then again, yesterday was a long day; sleep was scant last night thanks to Burke’s stomach bug, and I spent all day soaking up the sun. My fatigue is warranted and maybe a blessing in disguise given that we suddenly have all this time on our hands.
“There’s an abandoned lighthouse on the other side of the island. Think it was built in the late eighteen hundreds,” Burke says. “My great-aunt Tillie had it imported from Holland back in the seventies. She was going to restore it. Died before it could happen. It’s basically a time capsule now.”
I lift a brow. “I take back everything I said. Can we sneak over there tonight?”
My grandmother’s house was a time capsule—everything looking exactly as it did in the fifties when she and my grandfather first built the little midcentury modern split-level home. She still had plastic on the furniture and ashtrays on every tabletop (despite the fact that they both quit smoking in the eighties). Even the appliances were original and in perfect working order.
Years after my grandmother passed, some house flipper bought the place and completely gutted it.
To this day, my mother can’t drive down Adelaide Avenue without getting tears in her eyes.
“It’s not my kind of place,” he says with a wince. “Honestly don’t even know how to get there anymore. It’s kind of off the beaten path. Dorian used to go there all the time as a kid. He’d hide out and listen to his music, get away from everyone.”
Sounds like Dorian.
“Maybe he can take you up there this week,” Burke says, volunteering his brother, though I can’t imagine Dorian saying yes.
The mere mention of Dorian and me doing anything by ourselves turns my skin electric, but I redirect my thoughts before they get off track.
There’s a time and place for daydreams and wishful thinking, and this isn’t it.
Plus I’d only be torturing myself.
Dorian thinks I’m the worst kind of liar, and I’m legally prevented from telling him otherwise.
“Knock, knock,” Yvette calls from the hall.
Burke lets her in, holding the door open as she and another staffer haul in two loaded trays of food while a third follows with a beverage cart. I’m trying to figure out how he got that up all those stairs when it occurs to me that a place of this magnitude likely has an elevator.
“Where would you like everything?” Yvette asks.
“There is fine.” Burke points to the writing desk by the window on the other side of the room. “And you can leave the cart. We’ll sort everything out. Thank you.”
“The chef prepared some chicken bone broth for you, Burke. There’s also a Jell-O cup, white rice, and a banana. Just call down if you need anything else or if you decide you’d rather have what everyone else is having,” Yvette says before she and her assistants disappear.
Lifting the cloche on my tray, I’m met with a meal that looks like something out of one of those trendy NYC restaurants with the three-year waiting lists. I don’t know what I’m looking at, but it smells fantastic, and I’m going to devour every last bit of it, down to the decorative green drizzle.
