Page 108 of The Alchemists

She opened the door, her expression couched in blank suspicion.

She opened her mouth, but he wanted, needed, to get the first word in.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, voice barely more than a whisper. “I love you and I walked away. If you want me back, I’m here. For all of it, no matter how long.”

Lily looked at him. All he wanted was for her to say something. She remained quiet.

“You were right; I’m an asshole.”

An approximation of a smile, so faint it would be nothing on any other face, touched her lips.

“You’re not an asshole.”

“I am.”

“Maybe a little.” She actually smiled then—small and fleeting, but still. “Do you want to come in?”

He very much did.

She led him up the weird, wide staircase to her room. The TV came in quietly through the floorboards of her hexagonal bedroom. It was much pinker, her bed more filled with stuffed animals than he’d anticipated. This room, with gauzy rose-colored curtains and a collage of dance photos that she’d made from magazines and posters, was where she hid all her softness. Behind her armor of frowns and silence and avoidance, here was the open, fluttering heart of her.

Silently, from the doorway, she watched him explore. The antimony wolves slumbered, curled together, on her bookcase, next to a volume of Dickinson. He glanced over his shoulder, nervous that he was trespassing, but Lily only watched him with quiet, apprehensive eyes. She sat on the bed, and he joined her, jostling a stuffed turtle out of the way, then picking it up and gazing at its friendly face.

“Who’s this?”

“Martin.” She flushed.

“I was worried you wouldn’t take me back,” he said to Martin.

“I was worried you wouldn’t come back.”

Lily looked at him, and he dropped Martin, taking her face in both hands as gently as if she were spun glass. She kissed him back forcefully, pressing him backward into the bed and stretching herself out along the length of his body.

LILY

The water was a shade of turquoise so outlandish that she laughed when she saw it. It felt like a prank, but here she was, up to her ankles, then her knees, in a surf so gentle it might have been sleeping. When she turned back to Sebastian to confirm he was still there, he beamed at her from beneath three-hundred-dollar sunglasses.

He was wearing an outfit she would have made fun of if she hadn’t been so cartwheelingly in love, if he hadn’t looked so damn good. He’d traded out his dress shirts and sweaters for a white linen shirt bedecked in tiny embroidered sharks and a pair of coral-pink shorts. Somehow his hair, instead of being flattened and greasy from the international flight like hers was, was already sun-blown and salt-tousled.

Two weeks. They had two weeks to do nothing but lie in the sun and swim and drink and admire each other’s nearly naked—or maybe all the way naked—bodies. Tori had rented a yacht on a remote island in the Caribbean. They’d flown into St. Thomas and then taken a charter plane so small that it left Lily gripping Sebastian’s arm tightly enough that it was still red.

The yacht’s chef met them with the dinghy that would take them to the boat. From there the whole ocean, the whole world, it seemed, was theirs for the taking. Lily was intoxicated. Money—the doors it could open—was intoxicating. It was a wonder that all three of them were anything as close to approaching normal as they were. No wonder rich people were such bastards; they occupied an entirely different world on the same blue planet. And how blue!

That first afternoon and evening they sunned on the deck of the yacht, diving over the edge into the weightless ocean when they got too hot, letting their limbs sprawl long and lazy over each other’s laps. They drank rosé, which Lily would have liked automatically for its pinkness, but which she loved for the way it tasted like a meadow in summer with nowhere to be. They ate ceviche made with freshly caught fish, and Lily didn’t understand how something so simple could be so perfect. As the sun went down behind the island, turning the sky blushing orange and the water purple, Asher pulled out his guitar, tipped his head against the railing, and began to pluck out a song.

Lily snuggled down in Sebastian’s arms, his skin still hot from the sun, and let her eyes drift closed. Two weeks, she had two whole weeks of this. You could live a lifetime in two weeks.

It can’t get more perfect than this.

But when they stumbled into their tiny cabin with the boat rocking gently beneath them and fell into the bed barely big enough for one of them—as his weight pressed into her hips and he slid his hands up her bare, salt-crusted stomach and under the cups of her new bikini, pushing them aside so that he could kiss her, she found out she’d been wrong.

It did get better.

SEB

He wanted to stay there forever, or at least until June, even though he knew that the magic of this particular boredom lay in its fleeting nature. Eventually they’d get sick of ceviche and rosé and probably each other. Each day brought an endless stretch of glorious ennui, of “maybe we’ll sail around the cove and go snorkeling” or “maybe I’ll write some poetry,” and it turned into one of those things or another lazy afternoon nap instead. With nothing to do, wasting time was a fallacy.

But even so, Seb was tragically bad at wasting time. While Lily dozed on deck, the sun quickly turning her skin gold then golden-tan, he researched. He’d promised her he wouldn’t talk about trying to break her curse, but he hadn’t promised he wouldn’t work on it. It was a promise by omission, and it filled him with a gnawing guilt, but he couldn’t not—especially when he looked at her: sleeping, young, beautiful, and safe, and he thought about how much he ached to see her: sleeping, old, beautiful, and safe.