But he must have felt my stare, even at this distance, because he suddenly shifted his gaze to me.
My breath was squeezed from my lungs just by his stare alone. Whenever an awkward moment like this happened, when I caught someone staring at me a little too hard or I let my gaze linger on someone longer than I should, my eyes shifted away like it never happened. But the command in his stare was so powerful that I lost the ability to control my own body. I was paralyzed, at the mercy of a stare so unbelievably confident but never on the threshold of arrogance. Someone might interpret it as hostile, but what I felt was intensity. The kind of intensity that, if it came from the sun, would burn you blind.
It lingered for seconds, but each one of those seconds felt like a minute, and the accumulation of the entire moment felt like a lifetime.
One of the guys said something to grab his attention, and his eyes left mine. He smiled at whatever was said and pushed off the counter before they headed into another room.
An indescribable wave of disappointment filled me when he left my sight. I mourned for the loss of someone I didn’t know. Grieved the death of a life I’d never had. It was just a look, barely a moment, more a fraction of a second, but it was more than Enzo had given me in months. Undivided attention, feeling seen ... being wanted.
I didn’t even notice when Enzo returned to his chair. Didn’t notice him come back because my eyes were still on the window where the beautiful man had disappeared. But Enzo didn’t seem to notice that my attention was elsewhere because he was just as focused on the arancini as I’d been on the stranger.
Chapter 2
Aurelia
Enzo’s phone didn’t make a peep, but he was somehow worse.
Far more distant, far more irritable, barely looking at me even when I spoke directly to him. We were in the most beautiful place in the world, but it felt as if we were in a graveyard. Awkward and tense, like every fiber of his being didn’t want to share the space with me.
Was it because I snapped at him a few days ago? Or did he just get fired for taking the time off when his boss told him they had too much work to do? Whatever it was, he seemed to resent me for something.
We sat together at dinner, a restaurant I made reservations at months in advance, but it was clear neither of us had an appetite. We sat on a balcony with a view of the water, but the ocean was invisible in the dark. A small candle was on our table, and it flickered every time the breeze picked up. It almost went out a couple times, but it somehow managed to hold on.
The way we were barely hanging on.
Enzo kept his gaze elsewhere, hand on his glass of wine, tension dripping off his body in waves.
I’d officially had enough of this. “I’m done.”
His eyes flicked to me for the first time that evening. And he had the nerve to look confused by the statement.
“You’re here, but you aren’tactuallyhere. Every time I confront you about your distance, you always have some kind of excuse. I’m done with excuses, Enzo.” I noticed the waiter approach our table to take our order, but he must have caught wind of my words because he awkwardly turned around and addressed a different table instead. “So what the fuck is your problem?”
“Could you keep your voice down—”
“Could you be a man and tell me the truth?”
He slowly straightened in his chair, his hand leaving the stem of his wineglass as his arms folded underneath him. There was a pause, a heavy one under the weight of so many things he’d never said before. His eyes shifted away as he organized the words he was about to present. “It’s time we end this.”
“No shit, Enzo.” There was a slight sting in my chest when he actually did it—when he actually dumped me. On an expensive trip where we should be drinking and fucking and getting sunburned from falling asleep on the loungers at the beach. “But I want to know why. Because you’ve been like this for months. Always making excuses about work or your friends or whatever bullshit comes to mind. I want the truth, Enzo.”
He dropped his eyes again, trying to find a calculated answer.
“No thinking,” I snapped. “Just tell me. Because we were really fucking happy, until one day we weren’t. And I’m not the one who changed. I’m not the one who walked in the door one day as a different person. That was you.”
“Keep your voice down—”
I lowered my voice, not because he asked me to, but because people were turning to stare and I did feel guilty for affecting their romantic holiday just because mine had gone to utter shit. “You care a lot more about strangers in a restaurant than the woman you supposedly love.”
He searched for the waiter, and then he made a motion with his hand, asking for the check.
That somehow made me angrier, the way he wanted to get away from me like I was the problem. Like I was the irrational bitch who’d caused all of this. “Tell me what happened.”
He sat there, slumped in his chair, looking at anything but me.
“Seriously?”
“What do you want me to say?” he asked, full of exasperation, like he was at the end of his rope of patience. Like being subjected to my company was that horrible. Like I was the most obnoxious cunt he’d ever met.
