Lily didn’t trust herself to speak but words weren’t needed.
Alex started slow, pulling almost all the way out before sliding back in. Each thrust was deliberate, devastating, like he was trying to sear the feeling of being inside her on his memories. Lily matched his rhythm, her nails raking down his back, urging him deeper.
Outside, the sky darkened around them, stars beginning to emerge as the last light faded. They movedtogether in the blue darkness, the only sounds their ragged breathing and the endless song of the waves.
“Harder,” Lily gasped. “I want it to hurt.”
Alex shifted his angle, hitching her leg higher over his hip, and drove into her with renewed force. The new position hit something perfect inside her, and she cried out, her inner walls clenching around him.
"That's it, baby,” he growled against her ear. "Let me feel you. Come for me, Lily."
She shattered for the second time, her whole body arching off the sand as pleasure crashed through her. Alex followed seconds later, burying himself deep and spilling inside her with a groan that sounded like it was torn from his chest.
They lay there afterward, tangled together on the cooling sand, neither willing to move. Alex's heart hammered against her chest, gradually slowing to match the rhythm of the waves.
“Ask me to stay,” Lily whispered, before she could stop herself.
Alex went still. "What?"
"Nothing." She closed her eyes, cursing herself. "Forget I said anything."
But the words hung between them, impossible to take back. The thing she'd sworn she wouldn't ask for. The thing she needed him to say first.
Alex pressed his face into her hair, his arms tightening around her. For a long moment, he was silent. Then:
"I wish I could give you what you deserve."
It wasn'tstay.It wasn'tI love you.But the crack in his voice told her everything she needed to know.
He felt it too. He just couldn't say it.
Lily swallowed the sob rising in her throat and pressed closer, breathing him in—salt and sweat and something that was purely Alex. This was all she was going to get. These final hours. This body wrapped around hers.
It would have to be enough.
Morning arrived like bad news —gray and certain and utterly without mercy.
Lily had gotten maybe an hour of sleep, and she could feel it in the sandpaper scrape of her eyes, the leaden weight of her limbs. She went through the motions mechanically: shower, dress, pack the suitcase that feltimpossibly heavy for reasons that had nothing to do with its contents.
The shell went into her carry-on, wrapped carefully in a t-shirt. She couldn't leave it behind. Couldn't leave any piece of him behind.
Alex was quiet too, moving around the cabin with a tension she could feel like humidity in the air. He made coffee—her way, extra sugar, without asking—and the small gesture nearly broke her all over again.
You can remember how I take my coffee but you can't remember how to use your words?
The boat horn sounded in the distance, and Lily's stomach dropped.
"That's... early," she said, her voice strange to her own ears.
"They're usually punctual." Alex set down his mug, his knuckles white around the ceramic. "I'll get your bag."
She wanted to tell him she could carry her own damn bag. She wanted to scream at him to stop being so helpful and start being honest. She wanted to grab his face in her hands and demand to know why he was letting her go without a fight.
Instead, shesaid, "Thanks."
The walk to the dock felt endless and far too short. The morning was beautiful—crystalline water, gentle breeze, the kind of tropical perfection that belonged on a postcard. Lily barely saw any of it.
Her eyes were on Alex's back, the set of his shoulders, the way his hands gripped her suitcase handle like it had personally offended him.
