So we ate.
We talked about our plans.
We didn’t talk about the argument earlier.
I gave him a few more pieces to my puzzle, but only things that would never lead back to me: silly little stories from when I was a kid, some of the crazy things that had happened on the road with Raven, mishaps in building my skoolie.
He needed the details, the little pieces that he could attach himself to, the intimacy that was bred by shared disclosure.
That was what he had to have to get him where he needed to be, to get him to the point of no return.
To get the look.
To get the words.
And then I was gone.
Back to my life.
But back to what, exactly? That annoying, persistent voice demanded. Loneliness and the same old roads, the same old sights, the same old everything?
Maybe my life had gotten stagnant, predictable, unfulfilling.
But it was mine.
This?
This wasn’t mine. This was a job. And when I got back to the States, I would collect on it, hop in Wanda, and get lost somewhere, get my head back together, make a plan to shake things up.
“You’ve been distracted today,” Fenway observed two and a half days later as we walked down the beach, his pockets full of mermaid toenails, his hand pressed to the small of my back as I absentmindedly kicked the waves as they teased my feet.
“Have I been?” I asked, leaning into his shoulder, letting myself have that little bit of closeness, of intimacy.
It was a bad idea.
I’d been careful not to touch him because I knew my body was too attune to his, was too attracted to his, and I really needed not to fall back into bed with him again.
Because I needed to keep him chomping at the bit. Not because I was worried what it might begin to mean to me if we kept doing so. I mean, of course it wasn’t that.
To his credit, when I’d pulled away in bed that first night, he’d just snuggled in behind me, pressing a kiss to my head, and falling asleep. And hadn’t made a move since. He probably thought I was on my period. And that worked well enough since I clearly had some self-control issues around Fenway. At least this gave me some space I desperately needed.
That said, if he couldn’t have sex, he still needed intimacy.
A part of me needed it as well, but we weren’t going to talk about that part. I was doing my best to keep that part bound and gagged until I could finish this job, get home, have some space to pick apart this whole situation, come to terms with whatever I found.
“What have you been thinking about?” he asked, wrapping an arm around my back. “Aside from my devilish good looks, of course,” he teased.
“Well, whatever could I possibly think of beside your good looks?” I quipped, getting a chuckle out of him. “Everything. Nothing. I don’t know. What are you thinking about?”
“How excited you would get to see all the vending machines in China,” he admitted, throwing me off.
“What? Why?” I asked, stopping walking, turning my head up on his shoulder to look at his face.
Looking down, his gaze went soft, his free hand raising to tuck my hair behind my ear. “Because I like seeing the world through your eyes,” he told me.
The swirling feeling in my stomach told me that I had him.
It wasn’t those three words, but it was just as good.
And the sinking sensation in my chest said that he had me too.
I had to go.
I had to go before I fucked it all up.
Oh, who was I kidding? I already fucked it up. But at least things were still salvageable.
Even if I had some asinine idea to stay, to admit the whole truth to him, there was no way this ended with us in China, and him looking at me like he was looking at me right then.
Because he would know it was all a fraud.
He wouldn’t be able to trust that anything from me was genuine.
There would be no way to tell the truths from the lies in the past, or in the future.
He wouldn’t be able to live with that uncertainty.
And I couldn’t stomach the idea of seeing the betrayal on his face when I told him the truth.
No.
There could be none of that.
No truth.
No explanations.
Just absence.
I waited until he was asleep, creeping through the suite, slipping into shorts and a tee, grabbing my luggage. Most of my souvenirs were still on the yacht. Wherever that was. But I had brought the little round purse with me to Australia, and had tucked the monkey statue inside it. Along with a rock I had taken from the waterfall.
It was overly sentimental for someone like me, but as I made my way through the suite for the last time, I found myself clinging to the rock, the sharp edges poking into my palm.