He was standing in the doorway, still. And then I understood. He’d arranged for it.
“The light is incredible here,” he said. “I thought you might want to capture it.”
I turned to him, enveloping him, my heart full.
“You.”
“Me?”
“You like me.”
He paused for a moment, upsetting our usual back-and-forth.
“Iloveyou,” he said. Without qualifiers, without conditions. He allowed it to sit there and wash over me. Warm, like the Caribbean sun.
“You don’t have to say anything,” he said; apparently, I hadn’t. “Just know that I do.”
On Monday, having sufficiently christened all the rooms in the house, we ventured out to explore the island. And sitting beside him, in our rented jeep, the wind in our hair, his arms bronzed and beautiful maneuvering the stick shift, driving on the left side of the road, felt like some kind of teenage fantasy realized. The boyfriend I never had in high school. And as trite as it sounded, I was content to live in that moment. Me, with my middle-aged self.
We spent the afternoon at a small whisper of a beach calledMimi’s Bay on the east end of the island. We’d whiled away an hour at the Anguilla Heritage Museum earlier, and Mimi’s was a stone’s throw away. It was secluded and required a drive up a barely navigable dirt road and a hike through brush to get there. Our entire MO on this trip was to not be identified. And when we arrived on the strip of white sand and found ourselves alone, Hayes high-fived me. Who knew he’d find such joy in escaping his celebrity?
“Remember the first time I was at your place and you told me not to do the baby-fantasy thing with you?”
It came out of nowhere. After swimming and sunning and downing the picnic lunch Hyacinth, our cook, had prepared, we were prostrate on our blanket, soaking up the late-afternoon sun, and he brought it up.The baby-fantasy thing.He’d managed to remember the exact phrasing.
“Did you just not want me to talk about it? Or did you not want me to imagine it at all?” he continued.
“Both.”
He turned to face me then, taking my hand. “Why does it scare you?”
I could not answer him. I could not tell him that still, even with my heart wedged open and him burrowing inside, even with him professing his love,stillthere could be no happy ending. That this teenage fantasy I was living out in my head was just that.
He repositioned himself, placing his head on my chest. “Are you just not going to discuss this with me? Are you just going to leave me wondering?”
“I’m forty, Hayes…”
“I know how old you are, Solène. And I imagine I know what’s running through your head…”
“You’re so young.” My hand was in his hair. His thick, beautiful hair. “You have your whole life ahead of you. Don’t rush it.”
He was quiet for a second, staring up at the sky. “Would you ever have another baby?”
“I don’t know… It would have to be the right circumstances. And it would have to happen pretty soon…”
“Did you and Daniel ever want another one?”
“At one point, yeah… but I also wanted to work. And he didn’t want me to do both.”
He took hold of my hand, squeezing it. “I would let you do both.”
It tickled me. That he was so infatuated he was incapable of thinking straight. That he just wanted to make me happy.
I loved him.
I had yet to say it, but I loved him.
On Wednesday, New Year’s Eve day, we chartered a fifty-two-foot speedboat to go island-hopping. Hayes nixed St. Barth and Saint-Martin because he wanted to avoid the paparazzi at all costs, so we kept it to a tour of Anguilla and its surrounding islands. We had lobster, we had champagne, we had each other, and we were happy. At some point in the afternoon, our captain, Craig, moored our boat just off the coast of Dog Island, and Hayes and I swam in to explore. It was an uninhabited islet that was so serene and raw in its beauty, we did not want to leave. The sand like talcum, the water an unfathomable blue.
