“Never trust anyone who hasn’t had their heart broken. It’s a before and after. You never quite see the world the same way again.”
All at once a cloud settles in over my heart. I see my mother, at the hospital, in her bed in Brentwood. The hum and beep of machines.
“I think I need to amend my answer, then,” I say.
“You have?”
I nod.
From across the table, Adam takes my hand. He flips my palm open and grazes his fingers along the inside. I feel histouch up my spine—it gets stuck in my ears, vibrating sound, energy, electricity.
We order dessert. A pot of chocolate and cream I’d like to bathe in. There are delicate chocolate flakes and powdered sugar on top. It might be the best thing I’ve ever tasted.
“Before we leave,” Adam says, “there’s something we have to do.”
We finish our wine, Adam pays the bill, and then he leads me over to the corner of the terrace. There’s a green door, and inside is a glass elevator. It’s nearly dark now, but the entirety of the hotel is lit up in light.
“After you,” he says.
We get inside, and then we’re going down—descending past the layers of gardens and rooms and terraces and dining areas, deeper into the rock. Past the gardens filled with fresh produce and the spa—down, down, down until we land in the middle of a rock cave.
Adam opens the door, and then I see the elevator has spit us out into a stone grotto. We emerge into the night three hundred feet below where we began. The hotel’s tennis courts are to our right, and to our left is the hotel’s lunch spot, followed by the beach club.
Adam takes my hand and we walk down, over to the chairs. The ocean plays just ten feet over, jumping, lapping at the rocks.
“Do you want to sit?” he asks me.
I take a seat on a lounge chair, and he sits down beside me, on the same one. I can feel Adam’s shoulder against mine, and then the hint of his chest pressing into my back.
Down here, at the ocean, the evidence of nightfall is apparent. The moon slowly rises, the whole beach hovering in that space between things. I hug my arms to my chest.
“Are you cold?” Adam asks.
I shake my head. I am not cold. Not at all.
From next to me, gently, I feel him put a hand on the back of my neck and run it down my arm to cup my elbow. I breathe out into the night air.
“Adam,” I say.
I turn to face him. Like last night, I have a powerful, nearly impossible-to-say-no-to urge to kiss him, to throw myself into his arms and feel his skin everywhere. But I don’t. Because I have Eric, and whatever is happening here can’t be enough to forget that.
“Hmm?”
“I can’t,” I say. I want to cut off my own tongue.
Adam removes his hands, slowly, from my body. “I understand,” he says. “Do you want to go?”
I shake my head. I rearrange myself so my back is against the back of the chair. Adam sits up next to me. I feel his breathing beside me—in and out, in and out, like the tide.
We stay and watch the waves until the sky is near black. Until the stars look down on the boats at sea like steady, unblinking eyes.
Chapter Nineteen
Adam is gone the following day, traveling up to Naples for work, and I spend it looking everywhere for Carol. I go to Chez Black and wander down to the marina. I try the shuttered doors of Bella Bar: nothing. I wait by the entrance to the hotel for a solid two hours, but finally at 9 p.m., I have to concede defeat. She’s not here.
I eat a bowl of pasta Carlo sends out to me on the patio. What if I’ve lost her again?
I should have made a plan. I should have said,I’ll meet you here at 10 a.m. tomorrow. But I was drunk and happy and I forgot.
