I admired Diana’s bow and the stoic, badass expression on her face. Finally, I turned around and looked at Daniel. He was pink from the sun, and his eyes looked red. It was possible he’d been crying.
“Let’s find a hotel,” I said.
He nodded. I reached out my hand and he took it.
We walked back toward the temple and found a place nearby. We slipped inside a lobby, which had the same style columns as the temple. I let Daniel make the arrangements.And when he got the room key, we walked up the stairs to our room and closed the door.
Then I pulled Daniel’s shirt over his head and brought him close to me. He seemed tentative at first, but eventually he got the idea. He took off my tank top and unhooked my bra. And then we kissed and dropped onto the cool bed beside us. It was a nice kiss, a little hesitant, but his lips were warm and I felt the urgency building when I rolled on top of him.
“We can call this off,” he said. “We can just go home if that’s what you want.”
“Do you have a condom?” I asked.
He held still.
“Yeah,” he said in a sheepish voice.
He took his wallet out and removed one. It looked new.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
I unbuckled his belt and I unzipped my pants, and while I wish I could say we proceeded to have the most mind-blowing sex ever, that wasn’t really the case. But we got over the initial awkwardness and it felt good after a while. I held tight to him and watched his shoulders tense. His face relaxed. And when we lay cooling on the bed afterward, an Italian game show played on the TV.
“Is this what being an adult is like?” I asked.
“Which part?” he said.
“Fighting and having sex and having no idea what you’re doing?”
“I don’t think adults have sex,” said Daniel.
“Tell that to my dad,” I said.
On the TV there was an older couple playing some kind of newlywed game. The man’s face was turning bright red.
“Speaking of your dad...” said Daniel.
I looked away from the TV.
“What?”
“He’s kind of been leaving me a lot of voice mails.”
“Oh yeah?” I said. “Restaurant recommendations?”
Daniel didn’t smile.
“The last one came an hour ago. He said he doesn’t have a passport, but he’s sending someone here to bring us home.”
36
I woke up hours later in the dark of the hotel room, sweaty and unsure of where I was. I stumbled into the bathroom on wobbly legs and sat down on what I thought was the toilet. I didn’t realize it was the bidet until I leaned back on the faucet and sent a powerful jet of ice-cold water straight up my back. I leaped up and smacked my hip on the sink. My hand searched out the light switch near the mirror, and finally the fluorescent bathroom flashed around me.
The bidet was still going off like a geyser behind me. I was shaking and dizzy and I wanted very badly to laugh, but I couldn’t. So I just stood there for a moment, wholly aware of how confused and vulnerable I felt. I was in a bathroom in Sicily. I had just had sex with my dead boyfriend’s roommate. And I had no idea what I was going to do next.
I turned off the cascading bidet and walked into the hotel bedroom. Daniel was still sleeping. He stirred a littlebeneath the rumpled sheets and then fell back asleep. I didn’t regret what we had done. But I didn’t quite know how to feel about it. I grabbed my phone and saw that there was a new message that wasn’t from my father. I didn’t recognize the number, but I knew who it was right away. It read:
