“It doesn’t,” I admit. “But I still mean it.”
For a moment, there’s only the sound of the ceiling fan and the sea.
Then he says, almost absently, “My mother thinks I am too much like him.”
I blink. “Do you?”
That earns me a long look.
“No,” he says at last. “I think I am too much like him in the ways that matter, and not enough in the ways that kept him happy.”
That is one of the saddest things anyone has ever said to me.
I reach out without thinking and touch his face. His eyes close for one brief second, leaning almost imperceptibly into my hand.
Then his phone rings. The sound slices through the room.
He stills.
I feel it instantly, the way his body changes before he even reaches for the phone on the bedside table. Not panic exactly. But alarm. Real alarm.
He glances at the screen and all the softness disappears. He sits up.
I push up with him, the sheet slipping down over my chest. “What is it?”
He answers the call, listens for about five seconds, and whatever he hears puts a darkness in his face I haven’t seen yet. When he ends the call, he’s already moving. Already out of bed. Already reaching for his trousers.
“Aleksei.”
He looks at me, and for the first time since I’ve known him, I see something dangerously close to fear.
“It’s my mother,” he says.
My stomach drops. “What happened?”
He buttons his shirt with quick, efficient hands that are just a little less steady than usual. “She’s sick.”
The room seems to tilt.
“How sick?”
He shakes his head once, like the answer doesn’t matter or he doesn’t have one yet. “We have to go.”
The ride to the airport feels nothing like the one that brought us here.
No teasing. No warm hands on my thigh. No impossible private-jet seduction hovering in the air like heat.
Just… urgency.
Aleksei is on the phone for most of the drive, switching between English and Russian so fluidly I can’t follow more than a few clipped words. Hospital. Doctor. Mother. Arrival.
I sit beside him in the backseat, dressed too quickly, hair still damp from the shower I barely had time to take, and try not to think about the fact that the last time we were in this car, he was distracting me into agreeing to run away with him.
Now his whole body is tuned toward one thing only.
Getting home.
By the time we board the jet again, the staff has the cabin set up for speed rather than comfort. The flight attendant speaks in soft, efficient tones. The engines spool up almost as soon as we sit down. Aleksei doesn’t even pretend to relax.
