Luca tapped me on the leg with the back of his hand, pulling me out of my thoughts. “What you thinking about?”
I shook my head, keeping my eyes locked on the stars in the sky as I took a drag of the rolled joint. “I don’t know.”
I turned my head toward him as the calm water rocked beneath the little wooden boat. Sailing down the canary in Old Town was one of my most favorite things to do, but it didn’t usually happen with Luca.
“Do you believe in twin flames?”
Luca took the joint straight from my lips, latching the oars into the holders before climbing down beside me. He turned to face me, but I didn’t move, unable to take my focus off the night above. “No. I think it’s full of shit.”
I knew he was going to say that before he did. Luca wasn’t the type of person to explore another realm of possibility. It would make him too uncomfortable to know he doesn’t, in fact, know everything.
“Do you?” he quietly asked.
My lips twitched. “Yes.”
“Ohhhh! What is happening over here…” I heard Cece before I could see her, and that wouldn’t only be because I was laid out on the floor of a boat like a fucking stoner off my head, that’s because that’s usually how people find Cece. By her voice.
Luca grabbed me from around my ass and threw me onto his lap. I smiled down at him, tucking my hair behind my ear before peeking up at Cece and Niko who were standing on the dock. I pointedly made it obvious to not look at Niko. After last night, I knew that for me to survive him and Cece, I needed a distraction. A true distraction. One that would bind me into another realm, because that’s what I needed. Something that strong to take me away from Niko and me. A universe where twin flames didn’t exist.
I pushed up from Luca and wobbled to the edge of the boat to get out. “What are you guys doing?” I was asking both while at the same time ignoring Niko.
Cece looked between Luca and me, and the little worry lines that etched into her forehead made me frown. Cece was intuitive. Too intuitive to fuck a close friend behind her back.
“Not much,” Niko said, but the bite in his tone was obvious. I found my eyes on his despite trying not to. “Why? What were you doing?”
I swallowed past all the bile that rose up my throat from the sheer anxiety of looking at him. Remembering what we did last night, and how he did it. I was a bad person, but I was okay with that, and I was pretty sure he was too.
An arm slung over my shoulders, and I grabbed on to Luca’s hand. I forced a smile. “We’re just messing around. You know”—my eyes locked onto Niko—“keeping each other occupied.”
“Weird,” Cece said, hooking her arm in mine and pulling me in front of her to leave the boys behind. “Are you sure you want to be doing that with Luca?” She squeezed my arm as we continued to walk down the quiet main street of Halsin. “I’m just saying, he’s great as your friend or whatever, I get it, but to have a situationship with him?”
I rolled my eyes. “Cece, he’s fine. It’s nothing serious, and honestly, I need a distraction.”
We reached Mira’s parents’ restaurant and I squeezed the door handle, pulling it open but turning when I noticed she wasn’t following me through.
“Just be careful. Something is—weird about him.”
That was the first time I had ever heard anyone say that about Luca… at least out loud. She was being ridiculous. Luca was just what I needed…
Present
Ten-years-later
Pain isn’t a feeling that hovers until you adapt to it. It tears through your visceral arteries without consent. Death comes later. Pain is just the reminder that it’s coming. And oh… does it come.
I blink through the threat of an old memory, one I would rather delete from my brain. Because do you know what else pain can do? Remind you.
The voice comes back into focus as I stretch my leg over the barre.
“Anyway, about pain! I personally don’t know much about pain, and I’ll tell you why, I didn’t know pain. Well, not to the extent of what I had read or heard about on any of the ten other podcasts you have probably listened to, amirite? Pain. Pain, pain, pain. It’s a fickle emotion, one that isn’t necessarily something that can be turned off. Which is why I’m going to tell you what happened to me that made me never turn it on in the first place.”
I stretch my leg over the beam, cranking my neck sideways to work out the tightness in my muscles. I like this podcast, and I didn’t think I would. She was wrong, though. I didn’t listen to ten other podcasts; hers was my first.