I follow her gaze. The water beyond the runway is that impossible Caribbean blue, the kind that looks edited even when it’s real. “You’ve never been here.”
It isn’t a question.
She looks at me, still half asleep. “I’ve never been anywhere.”
The drive from the private terminal takes less than twenty minutes, but by the time the car turns through the gates of the resort, Zatanna is staring openly now. Not trying to hide it. Not pretending she belongs. Just taking it in with that raw, honest wonder I am learning is one of the most dangerous things about her.
The villa sits directly on the beach, all white stone and open air and walls of glass that fold back into nothing. There’s a private pool, a strip of untouched sand, and a terrace that leads straight down to the water. Bougainvillea climbs one wall in a riot of color. Somewhere nearby, the ocean keeps breaking in slow, lazy breaths.
She stops just inside the entrance.
“This is not a villa,” she says. “This is a Bond villain’s summer house.”
I laugh, openly and raw.
It startles both of us.
She looks at me, eyes wide. “You do that?”
“Rarely.”
“Good. I was beginning to think you only communicated through smirks and threats.”
I close the door behind us. “That’s unfair. Sometimes I use expensive gifts.”
That gets the smile I wanted. Though, I know I should be thinking strategy. Instead, I’m thinking that I want to keep giving her things that make her look like that.
By noon, we’ve both changed. She’s in a simple black swimsuit under a loose white shirt that does absolutely nothing to hide the fact that I’m in trouble, and I am pretending not to notice how many thoughts I’m having about dragging her back to bed when the beach outside exists.
We eat fruit and coffee on the terrace. She kicks off her sandals and walks straight into the surf like she belongs there, then turns around and calls, “Are you coming?”
I lean back in the chair. “I’m considering whether I enjoy watching you more.”
She narrows her eyes. “Coward.”
That does it. I follow her down.
The water is warm. The sun is hotter. The sand burns underfoot until the tide cools it again. She laughs when a wave hits her knees too hard and reaches for me automatically, both hands on my forearms. I steady her. She doesn’t move away right away.
We spend the afternoon exactly the way people in our position should not.
Swimming. Drinking cold beer from the villa fridge. Lying half in the shade while she reads the labels on imported sunscreen and mocks the language. We race once down the stretch of private beach and she cheats shamelessly by tackling me at the end. I lether, mostly because I like the way she looks sprawled across my chest, triumphant and breathless.
“You let me win,” she says.
“Yes.”
“That is so insulting.”
“And yet you’re smiling.”
She rolls off me and lies in the sand beside me, both of us breathing hard, the ocean loud in the distance.
Then, slowly, the mood shifts.
It happens while we’re back at the villa, both of us on the shaded terrace with our feet in the pool. The heat has gone softer. The afternoon is folding into evening. I pour her another drink and she turns the glass in her hands without drinking.
“What was it like,” I ask, “where you grew up?”
