23
I WOKE, MY breaths pushing from my lungs like broken glass. Jackson wasn’t in bed beside me, and I curled into a ball, glad for his absence.
Pieces of my dream were slipping away, and I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to try to hold on to them to examine or to push them away so I wouldn’t have to.
I’d been twelve again, but in that way that dreams don’t make sense, I was also twenty-two. Mom and Dad were arguing in the kitchen, and Mr. Ames, Dad’s business partner, had come upstairs. He said he was looking for a bathroom, but there were two on the bottom floor. He touched my shoulder. He told me I was soft. And like those animated flip books I played with as a kid, the sheets of my dream began to fan, and it wasn’t Mr. Ames’s hand against me, but the boy I’d lost my virginity to just a year and a half later.
He trailed his fingers to my neck, and then down to my chest. The pages flipped. More hands, a different one on every page. Some looked familiar. Some didn’t. But with each page, the hands swept across my body. The pages flipped and the locations began to change along with the hands—the back of a pickup truck, my freshman dorm, my apartment, a few hostels.
The scene shifted, and it was me and Mr. Ames in all those places, and I screamed and cried long after the dream had shifted on to a new person, a new place. And each hand carved away a part of me, sanded and chiseled until I was hollowed out, a wisp of a girl.
I pulled away, crying, and stumbled from a hostel bed to my parents’ living room couch. This time I was just me, present day, but my parents looked down at me like I was still only four feet tall.
Dad was talking, saying I was blowing things out of proportion. He morphed into Mr. Ames for just as second as he said, “Quit playing the victim.”
Mom asked me questions, asked me how Mr. Ames touched me and where. When I showed them, when I put my hand to my chest … I knew what was coming next. I knew the words like they were carved into my skin, like the pulse of my heart beat them out in Morse code.
I waited for them, cringed for them, begged for them because I needed to hear that it didn’t count.
But instead, my world was filled with Hunt, with his all seeing eyes, with his blistering touch, with his consuming kiss and the words, “Tell me this counts.”
His hands, large and callused lay atop my chest where the heart beneath had been sanded down to a tiny thing. In my dream, he held my crumbling body, and he told me that it was okay. His touch was soft and perfect and exactly what I wanted, but I didn’t stop crumbling in his arms, no matter how gentle he was.
That was when the lies I’d built so high that they scraped the sky shattered. Every brick I’d laid between me and that day when I was twelve crumbled as if they were made of something less than sand.
Because it mattered.
Who touches you, whether it’s your skin or your soul, matters.
I sat, huddled alone in bed in that Italian apartment, shaking from a dream that I knew was nothing more than synapses firing in my brain, collecting recent thoughts and putting them together regardless of sense or order. I knew that’s all it was, but things didn’t always have to make sense to be true.
And I could feel every hand that ever touched me, the ones that I’d welcomed along with the one that I didn’t, as if they were bearing down on me, pushing me below the current until I had no choice but to breathe in that shattered glass of truth.
It all counted.
Hunt walked through the door of our poisoned oasis, held up a bag, and said, “I’ve got breakfast.”
It took everything in me not to cry. Because he was perfect. So goddamn perfect. And I was a mess.
“Thanks,” I shrugged, the corners of my lips jumping briefly in a similar motion. “I’m not hungry, though.”
He laid the bag, probably containing some kind of pastry on the bedside table, and toed off his shoes.
Lifting one knee up onto the bed, he smirked, before crawling toward me. “I can think of a few ways to work up your appetite.”
He pushed my tangled hair to the other side of my neck, and lowered his mouth to my shoulder. I closed my eyes thinking he might be just the thing to clear away the cobwebs from all those newly opened doors.
Instead, his kiss was like a puncture wound, and I couldn’t decide which part hurt worse—the beginning or the end, the knife going in or pulling out. His sweet kiss only made me think of all the other kisses I’d given away without a thought. It only made me think of how much I didn’t deserve him. Or rather … he didn’t deserve to get stuck with someone like me.
I moved away from him in the guise of facing him instead.
“How long have you been up?”
He settled back against the headboard. “A while.”
“Couldn’t sleep?”
I wished I had never gone to sleep.
“Something like that.”
“More nightmares?”
He took hold of my waist, and pulled me back between his thighs. My back rested against his chest, and he tucked his chin over my shoulder.
“Enough about that. Any thoughts on how you’d like to spend the day, princess?”
The scruff on his jaw grazed my neck, and I shivered. His hand smoothed up my thigh, and panicked, I said, “Let’s go out.”
He paused for a few seconds, and then wrapped his arms around me in a loose embrace.
“And do what?”
“I thought you were the one with all the plans.”
“Yes, well.” He pulled me close. “I’m easily distracted.”
God, first I can’t get him to make a move, and now he’s full of them.
“What about swimming? There was that swimming hole that the lady at the restaurant mentioned.”
“As if I could say no to you in a bathing suit.”
I donned the same swimsuit I’d worn that night in Buda-pest. His eyes went dark when he saw me, and he grasped one of the ties hanging off my hip, tugging me forward.
Against my better judgment, I melted into him. His touch was an addiction, and addictions don’t become any less desirable when they’re joined with pain. He kissed me, and his lips were an introduction to light after a life of darkness. The brightness hurt, but not nearly as bad as the thought of a life wasted in the black.
I made myself step away before I fell into pieces at his feet. I peeled his hands off my hips and said, “Later.”
Later, when I could get a grip. I just needed to shove all these emotions and memories into a box and pack them away into the back of my mind. Then things could go back to normal.
I saw his eyes drop to my lips, and I knew what he was considering, so I moved toward the door, putting several feet between us.
I said, “Absence makes the hard grow fonder.”
I turned the doorknob, and he embraced me from behind.
“I don’t think I could be any more fond of you.”
We followed the lover’s path once more toward Manarola. When we passed our lock at the mouth of the tunnel, he pulled me tight against his side and kissed my temple.
The easy path led us into the village within ten to fifteen minutes. Manarola sat perched on a rocky outcrop of land right on the coastline. It was even more colorful than Riomaggiore, and seemed to be more reliant on the sea than the first village. There were boats everywhere we turned, even if we weren’t down by the water.
We had some of the best gelato of our trip so far at 5 Terre Gelateria e Creperia. Another couple there directed us toward a swimming hole down by the rocks. The village streets declined steeply as we approached the harbor, and the swimming hole that the couple had mentioned was a natural pool encircled by rocks. Judging by the dark blue color in the center, I’d say it went fairly deep, too. We could climb down onto the rocks ourselves or there were some ladders that led down to the ocean. But it was a warm summer day and the water was already crowded with tourists. I saw a pasty, middle-aged, white man in his forties strip down right there on the rocks to change from his clothes into his swimsuit.
Hunt pressed his face into my hair, laughing.
We knew there were more places to swim in the other villages, so we decided to pass on that particular swimming hole and keep exploring.
The path that led from Manarola to Corniglia, the third village, couldn’t have been more different from the lover’s path. It was more of a true hike, winding upward away from the coast to the rocky hills. Eventually, the rocks gave way to green fields of lemon and olive trees, and grape vines and wildflowers. The smell of sea salt combined with the perfume of the flowers, and when Hunt caught me sniffing repeatedly at the air, he laughed.
I laughed too and shoved him. “What? It smells good.”
He dropped a kiss on my shoulder and said, “You smell good.”
Each time he said something like that, an ache formed in my chest. Not in my heart. Or my lungs. But in hollow places, in the gaps. Like a phantom limb, it ached in the places where I had lost a piece of myself along the way.
As we neared the village, we could see it set up above the rocks. As it turned out, there was a long flight of stairs at the end of the path that led up to the village. And based on our recent experience with the epic stairs in Heidelberg, I knew enough to know that getting up to the village was going to be a bitch.
I looked at Hunt.
“Don’t even think about pretending to sprain your ankle again. I’m on to you.”
I smiled. “I would never use the same con twice, sweetheart.”
Desperate to avoid the stairs, I started looking for another option to get up to the village. Maybe a train or a funicular. Instead, I stumbled upon some hand-drawn signs on a rock that said, “Guvano Beach” with an arrow. The word secret was scrawled above Guvano, and I was sold.
“Jackson!” I yelled. He followed, and together we took off in the direction of the arrow.
But it quickly became clear that an arrow was not going to suffice, and we had no clue where to head next. We walked down to a nearby house and an old woman stood hunched and sweeping on the porch.
Hunt tried to talk to her, but she didn’t speak English. I said, “Guvano.”
Her expression changed, her mouth making a small “o” and she nodded. She gestured for us to go around behind the houses and then mimed pushing a button.
We stood there unsure, and she gestured us away with her broom.
“Um … okay.”
Hunt took hold of my hand and together we walked behind a few houses down an ever-steepening slope until we found an old abandoned train tunnel. Another scrawled note said Guvano with an arrow through the tunnel. We found the button that the woman must have been referencing, and it said lights in both Italian and English above the button. Hunt pressed it, but nothing happened. He pressed again, still nothing.
“Let me try.”
Pitch-black.
We found a breaker box, and flipped every switch. Nothing.
“Are we doing this?” I asked, eyeing the dark path of doom ahead of us.
I mean, I wanted a beach, the more private the better. And since it seemed we had to travel to hell and back to get to this one, I was willing to bet it was pretty private.
Hunt shrugged his backpack off one shoulder, and pulled it around in front of him. “Hold on.” He rifled through his bag and came back with a cell phone.
“You have a cell phone with you? How did I not know you have a cell phone?”
He shrugged.
“I don’t really use it. For emergencies only, you know.”
I pulled mine out of my backpack and followed his lead. “Mine too.”
We passed through the entryway. The cell phone lights were feeble in the vast darkness of the tunnel, and it did little more than light up our arms and give us a vague, shadowy view of our feet.
I grasped Jackson’s elbow, and we shuffled slowly through the tunnel as it sloped downward. It was dank, and I could feel the grime settling on my feet as we walked, but I kept telling myself it would be worth it once we got to the beach.
We walked for a few minutes, and I kept expecting to see a light at the end, but there was nothing. The darkness stretched on forever and ever as we walked down and down, our footsteps echoing through the empty chamber around us.
When we were about ten minutes into the tunnel, a low rumbling began below my feet and then migrated to the walls. I heard the whisper of tiny pebbles falling and scattering to the ground. I looked at Hunt in horror, but it was too dark for me to see his face.
I clutched his waist and said, “Jackson. Train!”
The second word was drowned out by the roar of a train passing by. Not through. By. Still squeezing Hunt with all my might, I realized it was in the tunnel next to us. I breathed a sigh of relief that was swallowed by the noise of the train, and Jackson brushed a kiss across my forehead. I was too numb to react.
After that, we walked a little faster and within minutes we saw the light at the end of the tunnel.
We jogged the last one hundred yards or so, just ready to be back in the daylight. Here in this decrepit tunnel, I desperately missed the sweet air that I’d been enjoying earlier on our hike.
I tried not to think about how closely this resembled my earlier thoughts in the room. Thoughts about light and darkness. I was doing everything I could to not think about this morning and that stupid dream.
We emerged out into the sunlight, and it pierced our eyes at first. I squeezed my lids shut, and waited to adjust to the light. When I looked again, I saw a man waiting at the end of the tunnel, and we had to pay him five euro for the use of the passage.
Hunt was skeptical, but I rolled my eyes and pulled the money from my pack. I was reaching to hand him a few coins when a man about Jackson’s age walked past completely nude, a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth.
My jaw went slack, and I dropped a euro. It went skipping down the rocks in the direction the naked man had gone.
I laughed hesitantly, and fished out another coin for the tunnel troll.
Hunt said, “Are you sure you want—”
“We’re already here, aren’t we?”
I gripped his hand and pulled him away from the tunnel down toward Guvano Beach. It wasn’t a sand beach like I had pictured; instead, it was rocky like the rest of the villages, a small pebble slope that reclined into the water. There were less than ten other people on the beach, half of them completely naked.
We walked past a nude man and woman sun-bathing on a nearby rock and Jackson said, “Before you ask, no.”
I pouted. “Aw … come on. Don’t tell me you’re self-conscious. Believe me, you have nothing to worry about.”
“I was talking about you, actually. But no, I’m not doing it either.”
“Me? Are you telling me what to do?”
I stepped away from him and pulled my sundress over my head. His eyes raked across my swimsuit-clad body. And he reached a hand out to the small of my waist. His thumb grazed the underside of my breast and he said, “I’m not sharing you with complete strangers.”
I slipped off my sandals too and said, “Look around, Jackson. They could care less. Besides … this is an adventure.”
My argument fell flat because he never took his narrowed eyes off of me.
I stepped out of his reach, and my hands went to the tie at my waist that kept the straps wrapping around my body in place.
His eyebrows pulled down into a warning glare. “Kelsey.”
“Jackson.” I smiled back.
This was good. This was what I needed, to live in the now and let go of the past. If I could cement myself in the present, all the craziness that had been drudged up could be washed away.
Slowly, I untied the knot at my hip. When I finished, the strap unfolded, uncovering more of my stomach. I let it hang down behind me while I reached for the knot on my other hip. When this one was untied, I would be able to unwind the suit completely, baring much more than my stomach to the air and sunlight.
“Kelsey, you’re not funny.”
I pressed a hand to my heart, pretending to be wounded. Then I smiled, and pulled down the fabric over my chest just a little, just enough to tease him.
He gave me a heat-filled look. Whether that heat came from anger or something else, I wasn’t sure. Nor did I care.
“What?” I shrugged. “Nobody likes tan lines.”
I untied the second knot, and started unwrapping the fabric, but before I could reveal much more than my stomach, Hunt charged.
He threw me over his shoulders, stopping me from unwinding into nudity.
“Jackson Hunt! You can’t just do this every time I do something you don’t like.”
“It’s worked pretty well so far.”
He started wading into the water with me on his shoulder. Two could play at this game.
I reached down for the waistband of his swim trunks, and tried to push them down over his hips. One of us was going to be naked one way or another.
I didn’t get his trunks down but an inch before he tugged me over his shoulder and tossed me into the water.
The salty water went up my nose, and I rose out of the water coughing, and Hunt burst out laughing.
“Oh, you’re going to be sorry, Hunt.”
I pushed the soaking mane of hair back from my face and glared at him. I backed away, knowing I’d need space for my next maneuver. When the water was up to my ribs, and I was far enough away from him that I felt sure he couldn’t get to me quickly, I grabbed my bathing suit top and tugged it over my head without unwrapping it the rest of the way.
The cool air hit me first, and I managed a small smile before Hunt reached me, and shoved me under the water, which seemed a little colder on this second dunk.
Thankfully, I kept my head above water.
“Jackson,” I tried to stand, but his hands shoved my shoulders back down at the same time that a wave crested against my back.
The bathing suit slipped out of my hand, and when I tried to reach down and grab it back, I came back with only water.
“Uh-oh,” I said.
“What does that mean? Are you okay? Did you get stung or cut yourself?”
I held off answering for a moment, hoping his fear for my safety would soften his reaction to the fact that I now had no way of covering myself up.
“This is your fault,” I prefaced.
“Kelsey, just tell me what happened,” he yelled.
“I might have lost my bathing suit.”
His lips pulled into a thin, angry line.
I smiled.” Adventure?”
He shook his head, and exhaled through his nose.
I swam backward a ways, and he followed. Then I lay back and let my body float up, my chest rising above the water. “Adventure,” I teased again. I waited for him to say something, but I seemed to have distracted him from his anger.
His eyes were glued to my chest, and I smiled in victory.
“You could join me, you know.”
He was still almost fully clothed since he hadn’t bothered to take off his shirt or shoes before dragging me into the water.
He looked tempted, so I added, “We could swim out a little farther.” I pointed to an outcropping of rocks on the side of a cliff that was far enough away from the beach for us not to attract too much attention. “You could put your clothes there until we’re ready to go back.”
It was remarkably easy to get him to agree with me while I wasn’t wearing a top.
Once we reached the rocks, I slipped off my bathing suit bottoms and the now ruined sandals that I’d been wearing when he tossed me in. He followed suit, shedding his shirt, shorts, and shoes.
Then we were naked and somewhat alone in a blue green ocean.
Treading water, we moved closer to each other, until our knees bumped.
“It’s later,” he said. “You did tell me later.”
I swallowed. I could do this. It was a matter of will power. Of control. I wanted this.
He touched a strand of my wet hair, and I wrapped my arms around his neck. My wet breasts smashed into his chest, and he said, “All right, maybe I’m a little okay with nude beaches.”
Shivers chased across my skin. I pressed my cheek to his, concentrating on breathing. His tongue tasted the salt on my shoulder, and I dug my fingernails into his back, not because of desire, but because of fear.
I wanted his touch to heal the hurt. I wanted to lose myself in his kiss, so that I could forget. But he didn’t heal or eclipse, he illuminated. Every single second I spent with him was perfect, which somehow only seemed to excavate more pain.
I pulled his head away from my shoulder, needing a break. His eyes locked onto mine, deep and warm. I wasn’t sure exactly what I saw in his gaze, but it felt too big to fathom, like explaining the unexplainable. Like seeing the light of a star and knowing that light is billions of years old. Like the way time slows near a black hole.
And as we stared, unnamed truths passing between us, Hunt’s kicking feet weren’t enough to keep us afloat. The water moved from my chest to my shoulders, from my shoulders to my neck.
And I thought drowning was the perfect word for the way he made me feel. Drowning after a life of drought.
He laughed and said something about deep water not really being the ideal place for the kind of exploring he wanted to do. I might have laughed. Sound was muted, like we’d slipped below the water, and I was still trapped there beneath the surface.
We slipped our clothes back on, and Hunt tried to make me take his shirt.
“I’ll just have to take it off when we get up there. I’m not wearing your soaking wet shirt when I could put my sundress back on.”
Reluctantly, he agreed.
He didn’t put his shirt back on. And when we were close enough to shore that our feet could touch, I climbed onto Hunt’s back, and he carried me out of the water, my bare chest hidden against his back.
He found a small, rocky alcove and he tried to block me from view as I changed, even though no one on the beach was even paying attention to us. Then together we headed back for the tunnel.
I stopped him and unzipped one of the pockets on his bag.
“Let me get your phone.”
“Kelsey, wait—”
I’d already grabbed the phone and swiped my finger across the screen.
He had seventeen voice mail messages.
My brows furrowed, and I looked up at him. “I thought you said this phone was just for emergencies. Why haven’t you listened to your voice mails?”
“Because they’re not emergencies. I’m sure of it.”
I asked, “Who are they from?”
“Nobody important. We should hurry through the tunnel. We’ve got to head back to Riomaggiore for the night.”
I should have pushed. I should have dug my feet in and refused to move until he told me the truth. That’s what I should have done.
I didn’t.
I let him take the phone, and I followed him into that pitch-black tunnel without saying a word.
He kept my hand clasped loosely in his, and I began to consider what I really knew about him. Which was not a hell of a lot. And the more I thought about that, the more I was certain that he was hiding something from me, something that would break apart our already fragile relationship.
Still, I didn’t ask. Not even in the tunnel where he couldn’t see my face, and I couldn’t see those eyes.
Because there was a part of me, small but not silent, that saw this as an escape. It was the same broken part of me that preferred the dark to the light. If I didn’t know his secret, he never had to know mine.