I turn to face him. Our bodies are close. The crowd keeps pushing us together, hemming in closer, making us hold each other tighter as we move. His face is flushed from the sun and heat, and more relaxed than I’ve ever seen it in public.
“You’re getting the hang of it now,” I tell him, swiveling my hips in his light grasp.
He smirks. “Don’t patronize me.”
“I would never.” I press my palms against his chest and feel his heartbeat, steady and strong beneath my hands. “I’m genuinely impressed. By the end of the night, you might even be mediocre.”
His laugh is low and real and I feel it vibrate through my palms. “High praise.”
The music shifts. The soca drops into a slower tempo, a brief valley between high-energy tracks, and the crowd around us eases back just enough that we’re standing in a small pocket of space. My hair is sticking to my neck. I’m sweaty and laughing and probably look like a person who’s spent an hour in a sauna, but Alec’s intense gaze says he doesn’t mind at all.
He looks at me for the longest time. Then he leans down and kisses me.
Soft. Not urgent. Not hungry. Just his mouth on mine, warm and unrushed, like this is something he does every day. Like kissing me in the middle of a crowded Bridgetown street with countless strangers pressing in on every side is the most natural thing in the world.
He pulls back to look at me, but his hand stays on my waist.
For a second I hold the sweetness of that, the ease of it. The delicious feeling that we have all the time in the world.
But we don’t. Tomorrow we fly home. Him to New York. Me to Arizona. Thousands of miles of reality between us.
I push the thought down. Not today. Today, we have this.
“Ella! Alec!” Colette Tremblay shouts to us from a cluster of festival-goers near a food tent. I glance her way and she waves us over with the enthusiasm of a woman three rum punches into her afternoon. Her husband Pierre is beside her, wearing a festival hat woven from palm fronds that makes him look like a slightly sunburned garden gnome.
They’ve been at the resort as long as we have, and we’ve shared enough pool conversations and dining room run-insduring this last week that seeing them now feels like spotting friends at a block party back home.
Colette pulls me into a hug and within thirty seconds she’s steering me toward a stall specializing in saltfish cakes while Pierre falls into step beside Alec. I catch fragments of their conversation under the music, something about the parade route, Pierre recommending a rum vendor two streets over. Alec listens with the unhurried attention he gives to people he’s decided are worth his time, which is a short list that has grown considerably this week.
Colette breaks a saltfish cake in half and hands me the bigger piece. “Pierre is trying to get your man to try the pepper sauce. Don’t let him. It’s lethal.”
Your man.She says it casually, the way she’d casually refer to someone’s husband over lunch. No weight on it. No wink. Just the easy assumption after seeing us gravitate toward each other all week. She doesn’t seem remotely surprised to find Alec and me together now.
I bite into the saltfish cake as Alec reappears at my side with a small cup of pepper sauce he apparently accepted from Pierre against Colette’s advice. He offers it to me, but I shake my head and before I can warn him, he tries a dip of it on a chip. His expression doesn’t change, but a muscle near his eye twitches once, and I watch him swallow with the determined composure of a man who will die before admitting Pierre just destroyed him.
“Good?” I ask hesitantly.
“Fine.” His voice is half an octave higher than usual.
Colette and I exchange a look. Pierre grins.
We’re still laughing about it when Jess from limbo night finds us, weaving through the crowd with a festival flag knotted around her waist and glitter on her cheekbones. Her husband Mike trails behind her, carrying two drinks and wearing theblissful, slightly dazed expression of a man who stopped keeping count of rum punches an hour ago.
“There you are!” Jess hooks her arm through mine like we planned this, and suddenly I’m listening raptly while she tells me about the costume band they followed for six blocks and the woman on stilts who almost took out Mike with a sequined wing.
Alec’s hand rests on my lower back through all of it. Not pulling me toward him. Not marking territory. Just there. A quiet point of contact that saysI’m right herewhile I do my thing. When Jess grabs my arm to point out a steel drum player, his hand shifts with me and resettles, and the absent ease of that adjustment, like his body already knows how mine moves, sends warmth pooling low in my stomach.
Mike says something to Alec that I miss under the pound of drums, and when I glance over, Alec is shaking his head with that reluctant half-smile that means someone just got a genuine reaction out of him.
I watch for a moment, enjoying just seeing him stand in a chaotic crowd, talking with our new friends as if we’ve known them for years instead of days. The grump I met on the plane has somehow become this easy, relaxed man and there’s a part of me that takes some satisfaction in knowing I helped Alec find this looser side of him.
Jess squeezes my arm as she and Mike peel off toward a food stall. “Come find us later if you guys want to watch the big costume bands come through!”
I nod and wave goodbye to them. Someone jostles me from behind on their way into the crowd, and the movement pushes me against Alec. He brings his arm around my shoulders, holding me to him.
“Let’s go find something to drink,” he says, bending his head near mine. “My mouth is still on fire.”
We weave in and out of the throng, his arm never leaving me. We find a drink vendor and get in line to place our order. A familiar voice calls to me over the crowd.
