Chapter Eighteen

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Theo was slapped with a fine equivalent to something around six-thousand U.S. dollars.

It was enough to make my eyes pop out of my head, but so little for Theo that he almost laughed at it when the police officer had him sign the paperwork. Then, we were escorted back to the yacht, and warned that should we try to swim in the Grotto again, we would be thrown in jail.

Wayland was on the lower deck when we pulled the boat in.

He watched us both curiously, his eyes holding mine with about a dozen questions swimming in those warm brown irises. But he didn’t question either of us, just helped us secure the rowboat back on the yacht, and then Theo quietly wished for me to have a pleasant evening and I muttered something about needing a shower before we both disappeared — Theo going one way, me going the other, and Wayland pretending not to watch us leave.

When I rounded the corner on my way back to the cabin, I nearly ran over Ivy, who tilted her head with a satisfied smirk at the guilty look on my face.

“Have a nice swim?” she asked, eyeing my wet clothes. Her eyes flicked behind me to where Theo and I had just been with Wayland.

When I finally calmed down, the first thought I had was to smack that smirk off her stupid face. But the second thought I had was that she’d just seen me with Theo, and I didn’t know exactly how much she had seen.

“Don’t worry,” she said, not bothering to wait for me to answer her question. Instead, she brushed right past me, turning and walking away backwards with her finger pressed against puckered lips. “Your secret is safe with me.”

She laughed to herself as she turned, and I thought about stopping her, asking her what the hell was wrong with her, confronting her about the pool party.

But honestly?

I had more pressing things on my mind.

I rushed back to the stateroom, thankful to find it empty as I peeled off my wet clothes.

In the shower, I finally brought myself to climax.

I was so worked up from the evening — from my time alone in bed and then the cave with Theo — it only took about sixty seconds for me to fly apart.

So much for staying away from him , I thought, as I guiltily got dressed for bed. But the guilt was so overshadowed by want that I wondered if I really felt guilty at all.

Mostly, I just felt excited.

And desperate for more.

The next morning, I woke up in an empty bed. Joel clearly hadn’t slept beside me, and he either didn’t realize I’d been off the boat or didn’t care.

I reached for my phone, wondering if I’d have a missed text from him, but instead, there was one waiting from Theo.

Come to the top deck when you’re ready. I need you to “work” today.

There was a winking smiley face next to the text, and my stomach did a little flip as I stared at the words.

As I got dressed, thoughts of Joel hammered me with the annoyance of a dentist’s drill. I wondered what he’d done all night, where he’d been, who he was with. Then, I thought of our fight, of our string of fights lately, and how he seemed in no rush to make things right.

My eyes washed over the dresser, and sitting right there on top was the key to the storage under our bed.

And I didn’t care that he didn’t want me to find what he was hiding there.

I’d had enough of the lying, the avoiding, and if I couldn’t get answers from him, maybe I’d find them under our mattress.

But when I popped the compartment open, there was nothing to be found.

***

In the days that followed that evening in the Blue Grotto, I slipped into Wonderland.

It happened slowly and suddenly, as unseen as water shaping mountains into valleys and as obvious as a forest fire. In the tumble down that rabbit hole, I lost any semblance of who I was before, and I found myself only half-interested in finding out who I would be next.

I just wanted to be me.

Now.

And I wanted to be with Theo.

It was too easy to pretend like he was working on shore and just taking me along so I could work on my photography. Or that he needed me to take photographs of the boat or of him on the boat. We were in a place where time didn’t exist, where other people didn’t matter, where we could do what we wanted without repercussions.

No one questioned us, no one cared.

Well, except for maybe Wayland, who had pulled back from talking to me as much as he had before and often cautioned Theo and I both with a hard glance or two.

Emma would sometimes ask me why Theo needed so many photographs of himself on his giant yacht, but she’d make a joke of it and I’d laugh along, pretending like I was as clueless as she was on the matter.

I didn’t miss Ivy and Celeste murmuring under their breath every time I walked by. Our niceties had ended the night of the pool party. But where I used to cower away from them, duck my head down and scurry by, I now looked them head on with a smirk that I hoped told them I couldn’t care less what they thought of me.

Everyone else was caught up in their own jobs, or perhaps their own drama, and they didn’t seem to notice how much time I started spending with Theo.

Joel most of all.

I didn’t question him when I found the space beneath our bed to be empty after him making such a big deal of it. Maybe it was because deep down I knew I didn’t want to know, or because I simply didn’t care anymore. And he didn’t question where I went each day that I was gone, or why he would sometimes come back from partying with the crew before I came back from my adventures with Theo.

The communication between us was as broken down as an old highway billboard.

If anything, the only thing Joel seemed to care about was getting his next high.

He’d been a drinker ever since I met him, but I had a feeling there was more involved now. I saw it in the dilation of his eyes, in the graying of his skin, in the way he seemed to shake if he went even one day without partying.

We seemed to have both given up on trying to work through what had happened that night at the pool party. In his head, he didn’t have anything to apologize for. It was me who was being crazy.

And I was too caught up in Theo to care if Joel was right or not.

I avoided my sister’s texts and calls like the plague, as well as the gnawing pit in my stomach each time I skipped off with Theo.

I began to live for the moments we stole together.

Most of the time, Theo had to work and I had to keep myself busy to keep from wishing he didn’t have to work. But on the days when he could get away, we would walk the streets of Italy as I took photographs, talking about everything and nothing at all.

He would ask me about why I chose a certain subject, or what books I liked to read, or sometimes just be silent and watch me work. One day, as he drank a cold lemonade and watched me photographing a small child playing in the rocky pebbles that made up the beach, he asked me what I felt when I clicked the shutter button.

I’d frowned at first, glancing down at the photo I’d just taken before playing with a few settings and trying again. I was struggling to find the right words, searching through my vocabulary for something impressive, something with enough magnitude to capture the truth of my answer.

In the end, I simply said, “ I feel free. ”

Theo enjoyed taking me to restaurants with appetizers more expensive than a four-course meal at the places I went when I was back home. There was always some new place to go at the end of the days we did get to spend together. And while he drank his scotch or wine and chuckled as I tasted each foreign bite with either a grimace of disgust or a squeal of delight, he’d tell me about Envizion, and his beach house in Miami, and all the crazy things he did for fun like bungee jumping and sky diving and free solo climbing and skiing every black diamond slope he could find.

I teased him about being an adrenaline junky and he teased me about my love for the herbs I’d started growing in my dorm room and how brokenhearted I was to leave them in my sister’s hands while I was away.

Through all of this, to both my relief and my dismay, Theo kept our relationship completely PG-13.

Gone was the hunger in his eyes that night at the Grotto, as well as any attempt to kiss me. Sometimes, he would grab my hand from across the table at dinner, or sweep my hair behind my ear, or gently guide me with his palm at the small of my back when we weaved in and out of crowded alleyways. Each time he came even close to me, my body would tremble with delight, with anticipation, with hope and dread swirling inside me in equal measure.

Please, touch me.

Please, don’t touch me and make me tell you to stop.

Please, tell me again how crazy you are for me.

Please, let me pretend this is all innocent.

We lounged side by side on his friend’s private beach in Praiano, and as the waves crashed gently on the shore, Theo slid his sunglasses down and looked at me over the bridge of his nose. “ I have spent my whole life devoted to work,” he’d said. “It’s all I’ve known. But now that I know you, I wish to never work again.”

He would say things like this — the kind that shook the very foundations of which I was built on — in the most magical of times. The more it happened, the more I started thinking that I really was in Wonderland, in a place where dreams and reality dance together.

And if I was lucid dreaming, I would make the most of it.

Theo made me feel more confident in my own skin. Everywhere we stopped, he would take me into a new boutique and tell me to pick something out. And each time, I went for something new and exciting that I never would have tried before — thin straps, bright colors, silky fabrics and exotic patterns. He had awakened a side of me I didn’t even realize was asleep. I thought it didn’t exist at all .

But I found I rather loved putting on a pretty dress and seeing the way Theo smirked in approval.

I liked to think I brought out something new in him, too. Not that he was a stranger to adventure, but I wondered if his entire trip would have been filled with work if not for me. Instead, we hiked the breathtaking Path of the Gods trail near San Michele, lounging in a hammock under a shade tree at the top with the turquoise water spreading out beneath us. Theo fed me lemon cake after we toured a farm in Amalfi, and I photographed him among the ruins in Minori. Theo ignored his phone when it buzzed in his pocket and I left mine on the boat altogether.

And all the while, he was the perfect gentleman.

Until he could no longer stand it.

It was exactly one week since the night we’d escaped to the Grotto, and Theo had given the crew the night off. We were anchored in Salerno, and we needed provisions, so Theo instructed the crew to get everything on the boat taken care of and then they could reward themselves with an evening in the city.

And he instructed me not to go with them.

I sat in bed while Joel got dressed and ready, pretending to read my book and focusing hard on not bouncing my knee too much.

I couldn’t wait for him to leave.

I couldn’t wait to be with Theo.

I couldn’t wait to see what was in store for the night.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come with us to shore?” Joel asked, sitting on the edge of the bed beside me.

I was almost shocked that he’d addressed me at all after the last week. We’d been more like roommates than anything else, and with him staying out all night, even that title was a stretch.

“Mm-hmm,” I answered, not even looking away from my book.

Joel sighed, gently placing his fingertips on the top of the pages until I lowered the book into my lap. “Hey, I know we haven’t… I know things have been…”

He paused, his mouth pulling to one side. He couldn’t even find the words to explain what we were.

Or what we weren’t.

Joel shook his head. “I just… maybe we could use a night out. Me and you. Together.”

My heart stopped. “What?”

“I know you’ve been wanting to for a while, and I’ve been…” Again, he stopped, looking out the window of our cabin with a strange look in his eyes. His brows were pinned together, corner of his lips turned down in a frown.

I reached for his arm. “Are you okay?”

He didn’t look at me for a long while, and when he did, it was like staring into the eyes of a stranger. “Do you ever feel like you’ve lost your way?”

I swallowed.

“I know it sounds…” He waved his hand. “I don’t know. It’s just, we go along with all these things, and we think we know who we are and what we’re doing but then…”

He didn’t finish the thought, but my stomach was knotted up more and more with each word he spoke. Even when I was angry with him, I couldn’t help but love him — it was all I’d done since I was a freshman in college. For four years I’d loved that boy through every up and down life handed us. And in that moment, I saw Joel sitting on the edge of my bed in my college dorm. I saw the same worry in his face that I’d seen before a big final, or before we said goodbye to each other for a summer, or before he went home to visit his addict parents for a holiday.

Say something.

Hold him.

Tell him you understand.

Tell him you love him.

My heart screamed at me, but every time it did, my body would refuse the request. I was torn between seeing Joel as the boy I’d loved since I was nineteen and the man who had so casually tossed my feelings aside.

They were one in the same, and I couldn’t see one without the other.

“It sounds like you need the night out,” I said with a laugh, hoping the comment would lighten the mood. “Go have fun with your friends. Okay? I do understand what you’re saying,” I confessed, rubbing his arm. “And… I think we should talk. But not tonight. Tonight, I’ve got a date with a Duke,” I said, holding up my book. “And you should enjoy Italy with your friends.”

“But not with you,” he said dryly. “You’d rather sit here and read a book than spend a night in Italy with your boyfriend.”

My defenses rose at the accusation in his eyes. “You’ve had all summer to spend time with me, Joel. Why are you only now choosing to do so?”

At that, he scoffed, shaking his head as he stood abruptly and shook my grip off his arm. “Good question.”

He left me without another word.

For a while, I just sat there, staring at the door Joel had passed through and wondering what was wrong with me. Not because I had declined his offer to go ashore and spend the evening together, but because I didn’t feel bad about it.

In fact, I knew if I could rewind time, I would do it again.

Something about that killed me.