“Well, what do you think, Elsie? Is it really so bad?”

“No, I guess not so bad. That doesn’t mean I enjoy being bullied into doing things or going places though. Because just for the record, I don’t enjoy that at all.”

Caleb rolled his eyes and slung his arm lightheartedly around Elsie’s shoulders, pulling her in close to him, as if it were the most natural gesture in the world for the two of them to share. He felt a strange little zing of electricity run through his body at the contact and stumbled a bit over the cobblestones beneath his feet. When Elsie looked at him, her sharp eyes questioning, her shrugged his shoulders in a gesture that was meant to tell her he was just being stupid, not paying the attention he should be to where he was going or what he was doing. He didn’t think it would be that difficult an impression to pull off, not when it came to the way things were between the two of them. Caleb was a lot of things, but an idiot wasn’t one of them.

He knew the way she thought about him, the way she looked at him. Maybe he didn’t know with one-hundred-percent certainty, it wasn’t like she’d come right out and given him a complete laundry list of the many things about him she found distasteful, but he felt confident that he had a pretty good idea. She found him to be worthless and sort of ridiculous, a wealthy man who’d done nothing to deserve what he had and nothing to make the world around him a better place. He knew this because a lot of people had thought those things about him, including several of the women he’d dated and with whom things had ended poorly. The only difference here was that, for some reason he could not yet fully understand, he gave a shit about Elsie’s opinion. He gave a shit, and when he thought about what she must be thinking about him, he couldn’t help but see all of the ways in which she was one-hundred-percent correct. He hadn’t turned into the man he wanted to be, and there was no way around that.

The thing was, something about Elsie helped him feel like he could become that man. She had managed to make him want to become that man, and she had done it without having a clue of the effect she was having. And still she was affecting him, affecting him with those jolts of electricity and the boyish sense of exhilaration he had when she didn’t shrug his arm off the way he expected her to. He felt giddy, the way he’d felt with the first girl he’d ever really wanted to be with.

“Duly noted,” he laughed happily, feeling better than he’d felt in a long time, better than he’d felt in years, probably. “But fess up. This is pretty fucking amazing, right?”

“Ha! Well, if it’s fessing up time, then I’d have to say… yes, it’s pretty fucking amazing. How did you know?”

“How did I know what?”

“How did you know that this was my bucket list place? Seriously, I’ve always wanted to come to Cinque Terre, ever since I was a little girl. I don’t even remember why anymore. Some story somebody told me probably, maybe overhearing conversations I wasn’t supposed to hear. I was always doing that.”

“What, you?” Caleb interjected with mock surprise, earning him a quick jab to the ribs with Elsie’s elbow that only made him laugh again. “I don’t believe it!”

“Don’t interrupt,” she chastised, although she was laughing right along with him. “I was just a very curious child, that’s all. Anyway, for a really long time, this has been one of the places I wanted to come the most and out of everywhere, and this is where you chose to take us. So what I want to know is, how’d you know?”

“I didn’t,” he answered simply, humbly so that Elsie looked at him curiously with her head cocked to one side. “I didn’t have a clue. I’d love to say I had some kind of inside scoop or that I was smooth enough to find the people closest to you and get the information out of them, but that would be a lie. I took us here because it’s my favorite place in the whole world. Maybe it will turn out to be yours as well.”

He smiled at that thought, looking out at the spectacular view of Cinque Terre as he spoke. He had been all over the world; he had been lucky enough to go to every single place he caught a whim to go to, and this was still the loveliest place he’d ever seen. There was something about the five little Italian towns built into the face of rock that always gave him the impression of stepping back into time. When the weather was good, you could hear the whistle of the little train transporting people from town to town, blowing as it chugged along its tracks, going about its business just as it did every day for those who did not wish to take the walking paths. The walking paths were what he and Elsie had chosen to do, and as they had taken to them, Caleb had been filled with the kind of hopeful pride a boy felt when showing a cherished piece of art to an exceptionally critical parent. When she’d loved it, and it was clear to him that she really did and that she was in no way just going through the motions of loving it to be polite, his heart had really begun to sing. It had made all of the stress of getting there worth it, which was something he hadn’t been sure was possible.

Things had happened very quickly in order to get both him and Elsie to this place the way he intended, and looking back on it while sipping his delicious glass of wine, Caleb could hardly remember how exactly everything had gone down. The fight he’d been in the process of winning with Elsie had come to a complete standstill when Marlin had barged in, he could remember that much very clearly. His initial reaction had been to tell Marlin to fuck off until he was done with Elsie, but that was something he was unlikely to ever say to his brother any place outside of his head. Then he had seen the look on Marlin's face and the desire to tell his brother to go away and leave the two of them alone had died on his tongue. Marlin had been upset. He had been very upset, actually, which was sort of an anomaly all on its own. It had been a long time since Marlin had been anything but a very wealthy trust fund baby bum, one of the modern day Lost Boys in the flesh. Seeing him finally decide to take part it the company and take on the theoretical position Caleb had given him in the Grant Corporation for real was a proud moment for Caleb.

That pride made it a hell of a lot easier for him to listen to Marlin’s concerns than it had been to listen to his mother, and he’d heard everything his brother had to say about the way the wind was blowing for the family and the business. The information leaking out of the corporation, both of a personal nature and information about the corporation’s high-end clientele, had become something of a worldwide sensation. Add to that the gossip about Caleb and his girlfriend (here Marlin looked pointedly at Elsie for a moment before looking away), the talk about how out of control and drunk they were all of the time, and they were looking at a borderline crisis.

Caleb did his best to reassure his brother that he understood the stakes and that he had things pretty well under control, but Marlin made it very clear that he wasn’t buying it for one goddamn second. Things needed to change, Marlin insisted, and they needed to change quickly. He, Marlin, admitted that he hadn’t been there for Caleb in quite some time and that it was a shitty thing for him to have done, but he wanted to make it better now. He wanted to help Caleb, to help the family, so that they could all get themselves back on track. He’d given Caleb the impression that he was fixing to get really good and pissed off when Caleb had explained his plan to have him and Elsie do a little bit of traveling while things blew over. He caught Elsie’s look of surprise at that, which made sense seeing as he hadn’t quite gotten around to telling her that laying low and presenting a picture-perfect image was a big part of why they were going, but he’d made a point of ignoring it. There would be time to explain all of that to her, but not in that moment. That moment was about Marlin. About making him understand.

And miraculously, he’d seemed to understand perfectly. He’d appeared to perk right up, actually, and he’d told Caleb that he thought the two of them leaving was the perfect plan. It would allow them to have a bit more control over what the press saw of them. (There would be press there, just as there always was. Every place a person like Caleb had press waiting.) If they left, Marlin thought it might actually give everyone stateside a chance to calm the fuck down. All in all, it seemed like a win for everyone, and so Caleb had taken Elsie shopping (something she violently protested but couldn’t get her way about in the end), and then the two of them had gotten on his private plane and left. They had been in Cinque Terre now for five days, and each one of those days had gotten better. On this, the fifth day, the getting better was all he could seem to think about. There was nothing like travel to show you what a person was really like, and the things Caleb had seen of Elsie he had liked more and more. She was different in Cinque Terre, lighter somehow. She seemed to him to be the person she would have been if she hadn’t have led a life that weighed her down, and that version of Elsie was something he couldn’t get enough of. That version of Elsie was making his heart flutter faster every time he looked at her so that pretty soon he was sure he wouldn’t be able to speak to her without losing his shit entirely. As he thought this, he felt her hand slip unconsciously into his own, another one of those movements that was so natural that only couples engaged in it. He wasn’t sure why she had done it. He knew why he wanted her to do it, but wanting it and having it be true weren’t always the same thing. Just because he was starting to feel like this fake thing between the two of them was real, didn’t mean she was. Sometimes a hand was just a fucking hand.

“You did good, you know.”

“Hm?”

“You,” she laughed, tucking her feet up and underneath her in that way she had, a move that had begun to strike her as uniquely her own—whether or not it was done by other people as well. “You did good. I didn’t want to come. We both know this. I didn’t want to come, but now I’m here and I can’t think of any place I would rather be. This is my favorite place, the best place I could imagine. None of it matters. None of it is real, and I know that, but it’s pretty wonderful all the same. I think I’ll be better now.”

“Better?”

“Sure, better. Better at figuring out the things you need to know. Better at catching the bastards who are trying to pull you under so that your life can go back to being the way it’s supposed to be, without me hanging around  all of the time and  getting in the way of your fun.”

It felt like he’d taken a shot to the gut when she said those words, and he winced, then wondered if she could feel it in the hand she was still using to hold onto his. She must have because she let his hand go. That hurt too, and the dull ache of humiliation running through his muscles was another thorn in his side. What she was saying was technically right, and he knew it. Everything was moving along just the way it was supposed to. There were reporters around, but not a whole lot of them, nothing even close to the kind of numbers they would be looking at if they were still in New York. All of the pictures and words they had printed had been good for Caleb, too, little puff pieces that would only make him look more human and less like the fuck up everyone had come to think of him as. Things had been really quiet in terms of the company and the seemingly bottomless leak of information, and Caleb had no doubt that pretty soon Elsie would figure out what was going on with that front, too. Everything was starting to go the way he’d hoped it would from the very start, and instead of feeling good about it, he felt like shit. Because when Elsie figured out what was going on and put a stop to it, the job would be over. She had said it herself. The job would be over, and Elsie would go away without having a reason to ever come back. He couldn’t think about that; he didn’t want to think about it, and so he chose to pretend that it wasn’t a definite part of his future.

“Come on,” he said in a voice that was just a little bit too thick. He stood so suddenly that he came close to turning over his chair. “Let’s go.”

“Go where?” she asked, laughing like he was a lunatic or something but standing up anyway. “Where are we supposed to be going?”

“We’re not supposed to be going anywhere, but there’s this place. There’s this little place here that has the best food of any place I’ve ever been to.”

“Any place? That must be saying a lot, coming from you. Something tells me you’ve been to most of the best places in the world. Spare no expense, right?”

“I don’t know,” he answered uncomfortably, feeling a little bit ashamed of his wealth for the first time since his father had been alive. “I guess you could say that. Doesn’t really matter because this place is the best, and it’s only a couple of blocks away from the hotel. What do you say? Do you want to? Do you want to go?”

“No. No, I don’t think I do.”

“Oh. Oh, well, shit. That’s too bad. I guess I got a little bit too carried away. Sorry about that.”

“No,” she said softly, smiling a secret smile he hadn’t seen before on her or on anyone else, “you didn’t. You didn’t get carried away, that’s not what I mean.”

“Okay, then I think I’m confused. If you aren’t trying to tell me to back off, and I would totally understand if you were, then what are you doing?”

“I’m telling you that I would rather you order the food in, if that’s an option. I’m telling you that, tonight, I don’t want to leave the hotel. I want to stay here. I want to try all of those things you mentioned, the foods and the wine too, but I want to try them here. I’m telling you that I want to stay here in this hotel room, and I want to do it with you. Do you understand?”

She took a step towards him, closed the gap that still existed between the two of them, and placed her palms gently against his chest. Once she did that, he understood exactly what she was trying to say. The understanding hit him all at one time, and if he thought he felt small jolts of electricity moving through his limbs before, now he felt like he was being blasted with the force of a massive lightning storm. He shook his head quickly, moving it side to side to try and clear it so that he could take in what was happening fully and without the usual fog that accompanied the things a man really wanted to remember. She removed one hand from his chest, a look of puzzlement and maybe even embarrassment washing over her face. He was struck by a sudden certainty that she was going to run away from him then, and it terrified him. It made him feel like he was about to lose the only thing he’d ever really wanted. He grabbed her hand back, placed it over his heart in a gesture he knew full well was corny, but he didn’t care one bit.

“Do you feel that?” he asked in a voice that was so breathless he almost couldn’t recognize himself. “Do you feel how hard it’s beating?”

“I do,” she said in a voice that was every bit as breathless as his own. “I feel it. Mine is too.”

“That’s how much I don’t want you to go. That’s how not wrong you are. About me, about me wanting you. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, or what it is that’s making me feel this way. I don’t know if it’s just Cinque Terre, or if it’ll still be there when we get back to New York. This isn’t a fairytale. I know that much. This isn’t a story with some kind of guaranteed happy ending. I know all of that, and you know what? You want to know what?”

“What’s that, Caleb?”

“I don’t give a fuck. I want you. I want you now, and I want you more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. That’s the truth. I want you so badly it hurts. It hurts me everywhere, Elsie. It hurts—”

Elsie stopped his mouth, which never ever seemed to stop even when he wanted it to, and she stopped it with a kiss. She pressed her body fully against his now and what happened next happened with a force that for Caleb, and for Elsie as well, or at least he hoped, stopped the outside world. In a world that went by much too fast, these moments were the best thing a man could hope for. Caleb believed that, and in that moment, when Elsie kissed him, he saw that moments such as these were what he’d been chasing with all of his bullshit behavior. He’d been chasing this feeling of the extreme, and he’d been looking in all of the wrong places. His hands plunged into her hair, tugging her head back and relishing in the sound of her gasp, and he knew that he was exactly where he was supposed to be. Needless-to-say, they never got to the part where they ordered their dinner.