He laughs. “I know.”
“Conceited much?”
He leans down and presses a brief kiss to the top of my head. “You’re the one who said I wasn’t bad looking.”
“True.”
Dane is all hard edges and shadows. Black hair and eyes, broad shoulders built by years of hauling nets, climbing cliffs, carrying too much for too long. The island built him into something hard and solid, all muscle and control.
Sometimes I stare at him and can’t believe someone can actually look like him.
“You could’ve been a model.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious. You could have.”
“No thanks.” He laughs quietly, shaking his head like the idea’s absurd. “What would you do? I mean, if we got off this island?”
I don’t even have to think about it. “I’d write stories.”
He glances down at me. “Yeah? What would your stories be about?”
“People falling in love.” I pause, searching for the right words. “What it makes them do. How it changes everything.”
“I can see you doing that.”
“I think I’d want to live somewhere small and quiet. The kind of place where everyone knows each other, and life moves slower. Not like Brisbane.”
Dane nods. “After all these years out here, I think a big city would drive me insane.”
I smile a little. “Yeah. I think all the noise would get to me. I’m too used to hearing waves and wind and birds instead of people all the time.”
“What else would you do?”
“Maybe travel. Get a cat. Eat really good food.” I shrug. “Simple things.”
“Sounds like you’ve thought about it.”
I drag my finger through the sand beside me, absentmindedly tracing a D + C inside a crooked heart. “Sometimes thinking is all there is to do.”
He leans over and bumps his shoulder against mine. “You don’t see me anywhere in that?”
I turn toward him. It’s harder to read him now with the light fading, but I know that look. He’s holding something back.
“We don’t know what life would look like out there for either of us.”
“Maybe. But it doesn’t sound like you’ve imagined me in it at all.”
He’s right. And there’s a reason for that.
“You’re choosing me now because I’m the only option you have.” The words hurt coming out, but I don’t take them back. Because some part of me believes them.
“No, Charlotte.”
“Yes, Dane. Out there, you’d have choices. Other people. Prettier girls.” I look away toward the water for a second before forcing myself to keep going. “And I don’t know who you’d become with all of that in front of you. I don’t know if this”—I gesture between us—“would stay the same.”
The truth has been sitting inside me for a long time. I just never said it out loud until now.
