Two days later, John was wondering when Betsy would arrive this morning.

Only a couple more days, and his two weeks at Balm in Gilead would be over.

In a way he was glad, since he still felt uncomfortably stranded and helpless without a phone or car. But he would miss it here. He couldn’t remember feeling so rested, so free—not since he was a boy, before his parents had died, had he felt like this.

Sometimes it felt like payback was still lurking in that threatening wave, like he couldn’t let himself go so much without terrible consequences. He was trying to talk himself out of that kind of irrationality, though.

He was happy. Betsy was happy too.

Surely there wasn’t anything wrong with this. Surely it wouldn’t all end as soon as he stepped outside these doors.

He looked up when someone came over to sit down on the chair next to him on the patio. Since he’d swum this morning and had just come down after showering and dressing, he hadn’t taken his normal chaise. Betsy would be here any minute.

Cecily smiled at him. “Waiting for Betsy?”

“Yes. She’s supposed to be here soon.”

“It looks like things are going well there.” Cecily’s face was warm and friendly, despite the careful wording of her statement.

Things were going well. Ever since that afternoon on the boat, when he’d come to that unexpected spiritual epiphany, they’d been practically inseparable. He hadn’t said anything yet, but it was clear to both of them that their relationship had changed.

It was new and exciting and breathtaking… and occasionally terrifying. John was still waiting to get a handle on his new feelings before he made anything definite.

But things were definitely going well.

When he failed to answer Cecily’s question, she arched her eyebrows.

“Oh, yeah,” he said quickly. “I guess it is.”

“I usually recommend that people don’t begin or deepen relationships while they’re staying here.” She was speaking lightly and still smiling—it didn’t look like she was trying to give him an underlying message. “People staying here are often letting go of old restraints or trying to be someone new, so it’s not always a good idea to add romance into the mix, since what works here doesn’t always translate into the rest of their lives. But you and Betsy have known each other for a long time. You seem to have a real foundation, so I don’t worry about that with you two. I’m happy for you both.” She reached over to pat his forearm companionably before she got up. “It’s nice to see her so happy.”

John watched as she walked away, hit strangely by her words.

Betsy was happy. And he was the reason for it—at least, part of the reason.

That made him responsible for it.

And what if Cecily was right about his time here? Maybe what he was feeling here, now, wouldn’t last once he got back to the real world. He could hardly remember the real world at the moment. Everything seemed to be sunshine and salty breezes and the touch of Betsy’s hand.

But it wasn’t.

There was famine in the real world. And war. And car accidents. And heartbreak around every corner.

Maybe, when he left this place, he would break Betsy’s heart.

Maybe she would break his.

He hadn’t even checked his email in days. He wondered how Jamal was doing.

With a painful wave of guilt, he realized he hadn’t even thought about Jamal in a couple of days.

He was still trying to come to grips with this reality when a voice broke through his grim reflections. “John? What’s the matter?”

He jerked and blinked up at Betsy’s lovely, worried face. “Nothing. Nothing.”

She frowned. “Well, something’s wrong.”

“I was just thinking about Jamal, wondering how he’s doing.”

Her features twisted briefly. “Oh.”

He’d upset her now. He could see that very clearly. He stood up and pulled her into a soft hug.

She relaxed against him, and her soft body felt better against him than anything he could remember.

“You feel good,” he murmured against her hair.

She laughed softly but didn’t pull away. “And you just took a shower. You smell like soap.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Not at all.” She finally drew back and smiled up at him, looking bright and amused. “Far better than many alternatives.”

“Nice.” He gave her the offended look he knew she was expecting and then glanced toward the beach. “Do you want to walk?”

“Sure.”

They walked down to the wet sand and then started south, and John reached out for her hand.

“I can’t believe you only have two more days here,” she said after a minute.

“I know. The two weeks seemed to last forever and disappear overnight, if both of those things are possible.”

“It feels that way for me too.”

She smiled over at him, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe over how beautiful she looked in the sunshine, how much he wanted to always be with her, the way he would feel if she were no longer in his life.

He had no idea he was capable of feeling this way.

He wasn’t used to letting emotion have so much power over him. He didn’t know how to deal with it.

“I’m going to miss you when you go to visit Mark for two weeks,” she added.

John swallowed. He was going to miss her too. So much so that he wondered if things would change once he was gone from here, once they were separated.  “It’s just two weeks,” he said, since he knew she was waiting for a response.

“I know.” She cleared her throat. Took a strange little breath. “Maybe we should talk about what happens afterward.”

His stomach did a weird twisting thing. He had a vision in his mind of what might happen afterward, but it would mean that everything had changed.

His whole life. His life’s purpose. Everything.

He’d never believed himself to be the kind of person to throw away a valuable career—one that genuinely helped others—in order to indulge in private desires.

“John?” she prompted. “I’m not pushing or anything. But our job positions are… are an issue… with this. We do eventually need to talk.”

He’d made her uncomfortable, worried, and he hated himself for doing it. He managed to say, “I know. We will. I’m still… working through things in my mind.”

“Okay,” she said lightly. “But just so you know, we can work through them together.”

He wanted to do that, so much it terrified him.

Who was this person he was turning into?

“You’re stewing,” she said, after a moment.

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are. I haven’t seen you stewing like this in a few days. What’s the matter?”

He shook his head and reached to take her hand. “Nothing. Nothing, really. I’m just trying to sort things out. I promise it’s nothing important.”

He felt better because she visibly relaxed and smiled at him.

Then he wondered why it felt like she was the most important person in the world.

That shouldn’t be right. Should it?

***

They walked for nearly an hour, and then he bought them lemonades at a beach stand and they sat on an isolated bench to drink them and stare out at the water.

After a while, he wrapped his arm around her, and she leaned against him.

And it felt perfect. So good that he didn’t want to move, didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to go back into the real world that would inevitably hurt him.

He knew that feeling was wrong, but he couldn’t seem to help it.

“Have you always been this beautiful?” he murmured after a few minutes.

She tilted her head up with a wry smile. “That sounds awfully sappy.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be sappy. It was supposed to be a real question.”

She appeared to think about this. “I don’t think I look any different than I used to.”

“Then how could I manage to keep my hands off you all these years?”

With a soft chuckle, she pressed her cheek against his chest. “I guess you’ve always been a man of iron control.”

He had been. He knew it was true. He’d been better at controlling himself than anyone. He’d always prided himself on it.

She’d evidently continued thinking about his previous question because she added, “I’m not wearing my hair in a ponytail and I’m wearing more flattering clothes, but that shouldn’t make a huge difference in how I look. I don’t think.”

She sounded worried about something.

He didn’t like the sound of it, so he pressed a kiss into her hair. “You were always beautiful. I just couldn’t let myself see it.”

This was evidently the right thing to say. He felt her relax.

He stroked her hair as they sat together, and then that didn’t feel like enough. So he nuzzled her neck, her jaw, until she turned her head toward him. Then he was able to claim her mouth.

She responded eagerly, with an enthusiasm that thrilled him. She wanted him to kiss her this way. She wanted even more.

His tongue slipped between her lips as she twined her arms around his neck, and his body started to pulse with building need and pleasure.

She was so sweet and so strong and so much of what he wanted.

What he’d always wanted.

And she was giving herself to him completely. No holding back.

His heart could hardly handle the way she was filling it.

He wasn’t able to touch her the way he wanted because of their positions on the bench, so he pulled her over on top of him, onto his lap. This was much better. She was pressing her breasts against his chest, and his hands were sliding down to cup her soft bottom.

His body was throbbing now—he’d hardened against her completely—and the desire felt like the whole of existence.

She was making little whimpers and gasps that proved she was feeling it too.

He wanted her to feel even more. He wanted to give her everything.

“John,” she panted, her little fingers digging into his back when his mouth traced a path down her neck. “John!”

Nothing in the world had ever sounded better than her saying his name in that helpless way.

He cupped her bottom possessively and pressed her into him more tightly. The pressure on his groin made him groan.

“John.” She was saying his name again. Something had changed about it, but his mind was so filled with her, with this visceral need, that he couldn’t think through what was different.

She’d moved her hands to his shoulders as he rocked his hips into hers.

“John,” she said again. This time the word was paired with a little push.

The push broke through his heated stupor, and he dropped his hands from her body with a gasp. He stared at her flushed, rumpled face above his and tried to figure out what was happening.

The only thing he was aware of was his body was roaring with need and frustration, and there was no way to satisfy it now that she’d stopped them.

“We need to slow down a little,” she rasped, breathing so heavily he could see her chest rising and falling. “We need to… slow down.”

Of course they did.

Of course they did.

What the hell had he been thinking, making out with her in that way on a public bench on a beach?

“Yeah,” he managed to pant, his groin aching painfully at the loss of pressure, friction, relief. “Yeah. Sorry.”

She awkwardly climbed off his lap and sat down on the bench beside him again. “It’s… not a big deal.”

It felt like a big deal. It felt terrible.

And then it felt even worse as he realized that she’d been trying to stop him for a while before he’d managed to let go of her.

“Sorry,” he said again. “Shit, I’m sorry, Bets.”

“You don’t have to be sorry. We just got carried away. It’s fine.”

“How long… how long were trying to get me off you before I listened?”

She rolled her eyes at him. “I wasn’t trying to get you off me. I was trying to slow us down a little. Don’t be ridiculous.”

He didn’t think he was being ridiculous. He knew exactly how he’d been feeling.

He’d lost control. Completely.

He never did that.

He didn’t want to be the kind of man who did that.

Bad things happened when men lost control of themselves.

Very bad things.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. There wasn’t anything else he could say.

“Stop saying that.”

“Okay.”

They sat for a few minutes in silence except for their labored breathing. Eventually, John’s body stopped screaming at him, although he was still uncomfortably aware of being brutally unsatisfied.

“Are you okay?” she asked at a last, her voice soft and anxious.

“Yes. I’m fine. A man who acts like he can’t hold himself back because of his physical condition is a liar and a jackass.”

She chuckled at this, evidently feeling better. “I didn’t mean about that. I mean about… everything.”

“I’m fine,” he said again, although he didn’t mean it quite as much this time.

“All right. If you’re okay to walk, I guess we should be getting back. I feel like I might be getting too much sun.”

“Sure.” He stood up. His body was pretty much back under control, but nothing else felt normal or controlled about him.

Something was wrong.

Terribly wrong.

Heartbreakingly wrong.

He just hadn’t wrapped his mind around what it was yet.

They walked in silence, and Betsy reached for his hand. He let her hold it, but even that felt too torturously close to her.

If he wasn’t careful, he would drag her against him again, draw her down into the sand, kiss her breathless, find carnal satisfaction in her body.

He was so close to doing so it was terrifying.

“You okay?” she asked, as they were nearing Balm in Gilead.

“Yes. Are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“Good.”

Inane, cliched conversation that conveyed almost nothing real. Because what was real couldn’t really be said.

John’s mind was in an uproar as they made their way back up the walkway toward the building.

“Oh, I have something in the car for you,” Betsy said. “I’ll run get it before we sit down.”

She was planning to stay here all afternoon, the way she had the past couple of days.

And John desperately wanted her to and desperately needed her to leave at exactly the same time.

He sat down in one of the stiff chairs in the lobby while he waited. He could have gone with her to her car, but he felt like he needed a couple of minutes to pull himself together.

He was staring blindly at a spot in the lobby when a familiar figure crossed his line of vision.

Vivian, that woman he’d met the other day.

She was dressed in the same expensive, professional way as when he’d last seen her and carrying that same leather bag.

She’d been leaving Cecily’s office, but she paused when she saw him and waved. “Hi again,” she said with a smile.

He smiled automatically, in the way people did when someone greeted them. “Hello. Back again, are you?”

She walked over. “I was just making the arrangements for our retreat this fall. Jeff talked me into it.”

He nodded. “It will be a good place for it.”

“How long are you staying here?”

“Just a couple more days.”

“And you still haven’t used a phone or computer?”

“Nope.”

“That must take some major willpower.”

He gave a little shrug. He wasn’t sure anyone should be complimenting him on his willpower at the moment.

“You sure you don’t want to borrow my phone?” she asked, her light tone almost playful as she offered him her expensive smartphone.

She was teasing, he knew, but he stared at the phone for a long time. In a strange way, it was a manifestation of the real world, the one he knew was waiting for him when he left this place.

The lurking wave waiting to crash into him, drown him.

Maybe things would fall into place better once he reacquainted himself with the world.

“You’re really thinking about it,” Vivian said, her expression changing. She unlocked the screen of her phone and tapped an icon to pull up an app. “You can pull something up on the web browser, if you really want to. I don’t believe in separation from one’s phone.”

He shouldn’t.

He knew he shouldn’t.

But he shouldn’t do a lot of things he’d been doing this week.

He took the phone and pulled up a search on the web version of his email. “Thanks,” he murmured. “I’ll just check my email real quick. It’s been almost two weeks.”

“I hate to think what would pile up in my inbox if I didn’t check in for two weeks.”

John was too absorbed in the subject lines of emails to respond.

They’d all been read. Betsy had been checking his email, exactly as he’d asked her to.

She must have been clearing out the junk, newsletters, and irrelevant stuff since there were fewer than twenty emails remaining.

Messages from a few of his friends. Some updates and informational items from work that he could look at later.

When he saw an email near the bottom of the list from one of their other team members, with the subject line “Jamal,” he clicked on it.

He blinked several times at the three lines of text in the message, sent to their entire team.

Jamal died last night. We aren’t telling John until he’s left the retreat center. It’s going to hit him hard.

John’s eyes clouded over as he processed the words.

He wondered if he was supposed to have received that email at all. Or maybe Betsy was supposed to have deleted it.

It didn’t matter now.

“Everything all right?” Vivian asked, her voice breaking through the fog in his brain.

He gave a little jerk, logged out of his email, and then closed the browser app. “Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Thanks for letting me check.”

Her forehead wrinkled slightly as she peered at him, as if she suspected something was wrong, but they were basically strangers so she didn’t pursue the matter. “No problem. I’m happy to help out another soul lost without his phone.”

She smiled and gave him a little wave as she left the lobby.

John sat down again, his body pulsing as intensely as it had been doing earlier on the bench with Betsy, but for a very different reason.

Jamal was dead.

He’d been a sweet, smart boy who loved American culture. He’d loved to laugh.

He’d never laugh anymore.

That was the real world. The true world. The one he’d always known had been lurking, waiting for him, ready to attack him as soon as he left the doors of his place.

The real world where people were hurting while he was lost in his indulgent idyll here for the past two weeks.

He was suddenly aware that Betsy was standing in front of him.

Betsy was part of that idyll too.

“John?” she asked.

He blinked up at her, noticing she was carrying what looked like a small canvas. “What do you have?” An irrelevant question but the only thing he could think of to say.

She gave him a sheepish smile as she handed it to him. “I saw this at a shop this morning and thought of you.”

He stared down at the oil painting—a very fine one of a man on a gray horse on the beach, too far in the distance to see his face. The scenery of sea and sky behind him were beautiful and tumultuous, and the man’s figure stood out starkly against them.

A man on a horse.

Like the knight from the daydreams she used to have.

His stomach almost heaved. “This isn’t me,” he muttered.

“I know.” She sounded confused. “I just saw it and thought of you. You don’t have to keep it if you don’t like it, if you think it’s silly.”

He did like it. It embodied everything he desperately wanted, everything he knew he couldn’t have.

“It’s not me.”

She seemed to droop in front of him as she laid the canvas on the chair he’d just stood up from. “Then just forget it. What’s wrong, John?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it looks like someone has hit you with a sledgehammer. What’s wrong?”

He suddenly remembered Jamal again.

“Someone lent me her phone.”

“What?” Betsy’s voice was slightly sharp. “No one should have a phone here. You’re not supposed to be on it.”

“I know. But I checked my email.”

He was watching, so he saw the bleak recognition as it passed over her face.

“I know about Jamal,” he said.

She took a deep breath. “I’m so sorry, John.” She reached out for him, but he pulled his arm away so she couldn’t touch him.

“You didn’t tell me.” The words came out as a gruff accusation. He didn’t want to sound so mean, but something was happening here, and he couldn’t shy away from it.

Not anymore.

Not just because he wanted to so much.

“I know.” She took a shaky breath. “I’m sorry about that. But I did call Chuck, and he said it was better not to tell you until you leave here. We didn’t… we were trying to make sure you got some rest.”

“I’m not a child who needs to be protected from the world.”

“I never said you were a child. John, would you please look me in the eye? Let’s go somewhere more private so we can talk about this.”

He shook his head, very clear about what he needed to do now. Painfully clear. “No.”

“No, you don’t want to talk?”

“No, we don’t need to go anywhere else. I think it’s probably better if you leave.” He made his tone as gentle as possible since he didn’t want the words to sound like a blow.

Betsy obviously took them as one anyway. Her features twisted in pain. “John, please. I understand you’re angry, but—”

“I’m not angry. I understand why you did what you did.”

“But we need to talk about it. If this relationship is ever going to work, then we need to figure out how to—”

“It’s not.” Those words too were gentle, almost soft.

She sucked in a sharp breath and went pale. “What?”

“It’s not going to work. Not long-term. It’s just something that happened this week.”

“John, you don’t mean that. I get that you’re upset about Jamal, but—”

“It’s not about Jamal. I’ve been thinking about it. It’s not going to last past this week. I shouldn’t have let it happen to begin with.”

She was dead white now, and she couldn’t keep her mouth steady. “I don’t understand,” she said hoarsely. “Things were going well. Is it about what happened earlier? On the bench? Because I told you—”

“It’s not about any of that.” He needed to end this conversation soon or he was going to completely lose it, take everything back and tell her he was desperately in love with her.

He would stop being the good man he’d always tried to be.

“John—”

“I’m sorry, Bets. You took this more seriously than I did, and I don’t want to string you along. I should have put a stop to it earlier.”

He knew how cruel those words were to say. He could see it on her face. She swayed on her feet briefly before she looked away from him with a jerk of her head.

Her features were working, trying to control her emotion.

She was very close to crying.

Because of him.

He’d been wrong about himself from the beginning. He was evidently the kind of man he hated.

The kind of man to indulge himself at the expense of a woman. The kind of man to leave her heartbroken when he came to his senses.

“Okay,” she said at last. Her voice broke on the last syllable, and she took a ragged breath.

Then she squared her shoulders. “Okay.”

And that was all she said. She turned around and walked away.

He watched her leave, her lush curves still prompting a visceral response in his body. Despite everything, he couldn’t stop wanting her.

But it was better this way.

The two weeks were almost over, and he could go back to feeling decent about himself, sure that he was doing good in the world. Not basking in sunshine and forgetting about what selfishness could lead to.

He’d learned that lesson all too well at sixteen.

And now he was learning it again.

Maybe eventually he’d get to the point where he wasn’t constantly learning it.

He glanced behind him and saw that Betsy had left the little oil painting. He stared down at the man on the horse, silhouetted against a stormy sky.

She thought that was him, but she was wrong.

It could never be him.