by Isla Dean
“Not wearing any.”
She fought to keep eye contact with him rather than scan down the length of him to his wet jeans where only the body of man was beneath. Then she gave in and decided, what the hell, and let her eyes take the downward journey as she slowed her steps and Aiden continued walking toward the rental cart cabana.
Stepping off to the side and watching from just out of earshot, Ivy ran her hands through the knots of her hair as she appreciated the sturdy slopes and lines of muscle that made up the man.
Aiden James… An interesting man, she decided. She’d say ‘sexy’ but it was too trite a word for someone so vital. She watched his movements, posture, gestures, like any painter would. He was handsome, sure, but there was a presence to him that palpitated. A very attractive presence.
She wondered, idly, what was beneath those layers of attractiveness. What did he daydream about? Did he ever sit still and ponder or wonder or wish?
Doubting it, as the man seemed more driven toward action, she twisted her hair back up and fastened it with the band. It would be interesting though, to know what he thought about. What he wanted or strived for.
As he approached her with two matching sweatshirts and a key with a plastic dolphin keychain attached to it, she let out a quiet chuckle. Of course he’d rented a golf cart and, it seemed, bought clothes without having any money or identification. He had, after all, managed to get her to take up cliff jumping. He either had magical powers or he was comfortable persuading people into giving him his way. She figured on the latter and wondered why that added to the appeal rather than detracted from it.
“How’d you talk your way into that?”
“Kindness.”
“Excuse me?” she asked.
He motioned toward the number twelve golf cart they’d been assigned, then handed her a gray hoodie with “Parpadeo Island” printed in red block letters across the chest. “Kindness. I was nice to the guy and he was nice back.”
“Kindness.” Ivy frowned as she repeated the word. “You bought me a sweatshirt with kindness?” Puzzled by the experience, or, more aptly, the man, she pulled it over her head and was immediately grateful for what felt like a cozy blanket against her icy skin.
“You looked cold,” he pointed out then tugged on his own sweatshirt. “So I asked for them. You don’t get what you don’t ask for.”
She supposed he was right but as her mind processed what he said, she began to question when last she’d asked for something she wanted. She’d asked for a few of the art pieces collected during her marriage, that was something. But that was a physical thing, and her mind wanted to search for a comparison that dove deeper, a time when she’d expressed what she needed as a human, a woman, an artist. And she couldn’t think of one single time. It didn’t mean she’d never asked for what she wanted, but rather she couldn’t remember when last she had.
Frowning through the introspection, Ivy sat on the vinyl bench seat in the cart and absently reached for whatever she’d sat on. Pulling out the drowned phone from her back pocket, she cursed.
“What’s wrong?”
Amidst the cheerful shouts of Frisbee-throwing tourists, she held up the black device and let it drain of seawater.
As Aiden was now zooming the cart up the neatly paved road, his glance was quick. “Just a phone, right? Easily replaceable.”
Ivy thought of all the texts with her ex as they worked through the terms of their divorce, the texts from her mom and sister asking when she was going to do the “right thing” and return to Carmel. The frayed ends of her former life had been in that phone.
“Pull over.” She pointed to a slim turnout along the harbor. “Right there.”
“You can try to soak the water out by putting it in a bowl of dehydrated rice,” Aiden suggested. “Never seen it work but I’ve seen it tried by one of my brothers. Of course I’ve also seen him sink a fishing boat so take the advice for what it’s worth.”
When the cart came to a stop, she stepped out without a word, walked barefoot to the edge, and heaved her phone out into the blue abyss, got back in the cart, then said, “Okay. We can go now.”
Instead of pulling back onto the path, he stared at her. “You know, I didn’t know you an hour ago but I thought I had you figured out. Yet, you keep surprising me.”
On a shrug, she said, “I paint and sleep.” She wanted to hiss at the idea she wasn’t doing either very successfully, but instead she let out a slow, steady breath of annoyance. She could’ve done without the news from her failed marriage that her ex was happily remarrying. It was petty, she knew, but her own happiness—her art—was on the verge of failing and the contrast was lowering. “I’m not terribly surprising.”
“Yeah, you are,” he told her as he pressed on the pedal and zipped off. “People don’t generally surprise me, but you do. I like it.”
Who was this man? she wondered, eyeing him. Everything about her day—including him, especially him—had been unexpected. She’d woken up and anticipated to drudge through her usual eight hours of painting, ten if she was starting to crack through the artist’s block. Then a string of details had strung her afternoon into a knot that tightened and tugged in her stomach. And this man, this strange, handsome man had done little more than take one thread with his attention and had managed to loosen the snarl.
“Our stuff isn’t too much further,” she told him, still examining the streaks of sun and shadow that crossed his face. “Just head up that road to the right.”
He did exactly that with what she could only think of as affluent ease. He looked like he belonged everywhere in the world and nowhere in particular. “What brings you to Parpadeo Island?” she asked then paused. “Is that a stupid thing to ask after we’ve jumped off of a cliff together?”
His eyes, clear as green glass, smiled when he glanced at her, causing little tingles of heat to dance to life on her cool skin.
“I’m here because I’ve never been here before,” he told her as if that clarified all in great detail.
She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. “Well that explains it,” she lobbed back then looked out to the line where the coast of California was a slivered mirage in the distance. It didn’t particularly matter that he wanted to curb the conversation. She was done putting effort toward understanding people. She’d spent her life trying to understand and please her family, then later her husband, and the only thing she’d gotten in return was a hollow tunnel buried deep in her heart, preventing her from truly feeling whole.
But Parpadeo was changing that. She was changing that, she knew. She was beginning to feel the quiet murmur of life pulse through her more and more each day. More and more each minute, she corrected.
Because Aiden had nothing more to say, she wished to be back on her perch, painting. There was something new humming through her, some kind of raw newness, and she wanted to express that feeling, putting paint to paper, giving life to what she felt within.
This was it, she realized. She’d been lonely without this feeling, battling the ultimate block of creativity. But this flutter, this rush of energy, this was it.
And, she thought in near desperation, she needed to put that energy to use and paint until her fingers were numb and her body gloriously drained.
She would get Aiden up to Villa Blue, leave him with Donatella, then she’d return to her easel with fresh paper, Ivy decided, her mind plotting the points to return to her art, her purpose.
“Need to jump off the cliff again?”
“No, definitely not,” she said as she surfaced from the microcosm of her mind. “I’m content actually. Yes,” she nodded, figuring that was the best word for it. “Content.”
“We could do a lot better than ‘content’ but your eyes aren’t leaking anymore so I guess it worked.”
Ivy squinted against the glare of realization. “Funny, I don’t think I’ve cried since I got to Parpadeo, until today.”
“You’re telling me that just my mere pr
esence brought tears to your eyes?”
She heard the tone of tease in his voice and tossed it back. “Oh, I bet you’re used to making women cry.”
“Why do you say that?”
She’d said it offhandedly, joining in the banter, so the sincere question made her wonder what she had actually meant. Caught off-guard, she grinned. “I honestly don’t know.”
“It’s all right. I’ll let you make it up to me,” he told her easily.
She felt the fast flutter of flirtation and, uncomfortable, adjusted against the vinyl seat. “I hardly think I have anything to make up for. You’re the one who made me cry.”
“Then I’ll make it up to you.” He slowed the cart, allowing a guy with a yellow and green boogie board to cross, then sped off again.
“You held my hand and jumped off of a cliff with me. You’ve given me enough,” she said playfully, but knew her words were potent with earnestness. That hollow tunnel had a trickle moving through it now, she thought. A slim but steady flow of something that tickled along her insides, awakening more with each new momentous drop. “More than you know,” she muttered to the sea breeze that skimmed along her lips, playing with her breath.
“What’s that?”
“What?”
“You said something.”
“I did?”
“Yes,” he confirmed as he entered a series of switchbacks, his face grinning and his hands gripping the wheel like a kid ready for a ride at an amusement park.
“I was likely saying that you should slow down.”
“You slow down, you die.”
His declaration reminded her how much she craved the quiet calm of her perch on the hill. Adventure really wasn’t her thing.
Ivy gripped the metal bar beside the seat, her body cringing around the corners. “Breathe,” she whispered to herself, and as she exhaled, her shoulders relaxed. She craved her happy place, her peaceful perch, her pallet of paints, all without the presence of people.
But she could tolerate one ride on one afternoon with one strange man, right?
Only he wasn’t strange. Dangerous maybe, she thought again as the path dipped and they caught speed, zooming through the gully that was scented by the sweetness of homemade ice cream from the nearest shop.
Mmm, ice cream, she thought. Had she forgotten to eat again?
“We should grab some ice cream after we get our stuff,” Aiden announced as they passed a boy on the sidewalk with lips as blue as the ice cream he ate.
Cursing that her thoughts had been heard, and that she was so easily waylaid by the idea of dessert, she replied with a simple, “I can’t.”
“Come on. One ice cream. My treat.”
Her vision blurred with the enticing image of an ice cream cone. “Fine. I’ll agree to stop for ice cream on two conditions.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“One, if we eat it on the way to the villa because I really do need to get back to work. And two, if you get the bubble gum flavor like that kid.” The stoic man made nerves hum to life within her and imagining him with lips stained blue had her relaxing a few notches.
“The blue flavor. All right, I accept your conditions.”
“It’s bubblegum. Blue isn’t a flavor,” she told him. Then, as her mind bent with the idea, she considered the way flavors and colors combined in interesting ways. “Blue really is a flavor, isn’t it? It just tastes...blue. No other way to describe it.”
She felt his study of her as she kept watch of the sun-drenched pavement, the cracked white lines of crosswalks they came upon.
“You’re a curious creature, Ivy.”
She glanced at him. “If that’s a compliment, I’ll take it.”
“It was a compliment.”
“Thank you.”
“Welcome.”
Everything about him was fast, she noted. He moved through moments, traffic, and conversations at a speed that had her wishing for her quiet, serene sanctuary on steady ground in front of her easel. The unease set by his pace, his presence, was confusing and she needed to focus, to channel her energy and paint.
After ice cream, of course.
As he paused for a group of teenagers who shoved and tugged each other across the road, she distracted herself by mapping colors to flavors in her head. Red would be velvety, bold, rich. Pastel green would be refreshing, lively but in a subtle way. And what happened when you combined flavors and their corresponding colors? Like a recipe created on a canvas…
“Okay?”
“Hmm, what?” she asked, taking her eyes off the slit in the distance where sea met sky, where thoughts met imagination.
“I asked how long you’ve worked at Villa Blue.”
“Oh, sorry, I was in a zone. No, I don’t work there, I live there. I turned the greenhouse-slash-gardener’s cottage into an artist’s studio. It has a little kitchenette, a bathroom, and a bed that’s basically in the middle of this fantastic vintage glass greenhouse. It has great light for painting when it’s too cold or raining outside.” Ivy paused, noting that she’d shed herself of the ability to make small talk. “I’m not sure why I’m sharing all of this. You’ll like staying in the villa,” she told him, fumbling over her thoughts and words as she emerged from her zone. “It’s really beautiful in that old, California Spanish kind of way. It’s sprawling enough to be grand but it’s old enough to be comfortable. I’m not sure if that makes sense.”
“Perfect sense.” He started driving just in time to stop at another crosswalk so that a mother and son—dressed in matching red and white striped shirts—could cross, and he took the opportunity to glance at Ivy with a crease drawn between his dark brows. “I didn’t realize people lived at Villa Blue.”
“Why would you? You can go now,” she pointed out.
He released the break and putted off, climbing up the hill toward the secluded spot they’d jumped from.
What Ivy didn’t see was the confusion that carried on his face, the marked frown that deepened.
“How many other people live there?”
“There’s Donatella—she owns Villa Blue. She was the one who asked me to come greet you and get you up the hill. I’m not doing a very good job of that, it seems.”
“We’ll get there eventually.” He ignored the “No Off-Road” sign displayed in the cart and rambled off into the dirt. “So you and Donatella,” he prompted.
“Yeah, she and I live there, as do L.B. and Nicholas, who are both managers. I rarely see them though. They’re writing a novel together when they’re not working so they’re usually either tucked into the guesthouse or dashing around tending to things. They’re leaving soon for their honeymoon so you won’t see much of them.
“The rest of the people are guests. There’s a couple from Italy staying right now, an anniversary, I think. The man is very animated and fun to watch, especially his eyebrows as they seem to have a life of their own. There’s a bachelorette group arriving sometime soon. Then there’s a younger couple on their honeymoon that just arrived yesterday. They look so perfect for each other that they look related.” She chuckled, amused, then realized she wasn’t talking to herself. “Sorry. I’m not used to conversations with other people anymore.”
“Why’s that?” he asked as he stopped the cart near the edge where his bag, wallet, sunglasses, and shoes were.
She stepped out of the cart and slid her feet into her paint-splattered flats, swiveling her shoe against the dirt to ensure the sticky gum was gone. “I guess I prefer painting over people.”
He slipped on his sunglasses, grabbed his bag. “You’re quite the enigma.”
“How so?” she asked as she quickly peeked down to the ocean directly below. She’d soared over the edge of that cliff, she thought with a pang of thrill as she returned to the cart, this time settling in behind the steering wheel.
She expected him to say something, to try to get her to scoot over, but he didn’t. Instead he simply slid onto the passenger side of the bench seat, tossed h
is bag at his feet.
“You’re basically a hermetic artist living on a secluded island. You should be hunched over and have wild, erratic teeth, yet you look like a fairy. All that’s missing are some wings.”
Easing down on the pedal, she maneuvered the cart back onto the path toward town. “A fairy…” Her voice trailed off as her imagination pondered a painting of a hermetic fairy. She’d be slight with a lot of sassy hair—maybe a wavy red mass with bright green eyes. Like Aiden’s eyes, she decided, amused. Not that he had the eyes of a fairy. More like the eyes of a rebel.
With a smile she kept to herself, she added, “I’ve earned the right to be whatever I want to be—a fairy, a hunchbacked hermit, or otherwise. And being an artist, living at Villa Blue, it’s exactly what I want.”
“You don’t hear many people declare that something in their life is exactly what they want.”
“I mean it with all my heart.”
“I bet you do.”
“What do you mean by that?” she asked, unable to help but seek to understand, no matter how much her mind declared otherwise.
He examined the landscape that blended the lush and the barren, the palm trees and the shrubs, as he considered. “Because I doubt you say much that you don’t mean.”
She slowed for the tail end of a group to finish crossing the road toward the beach then continued on. “I suppose that’s true. Would you say the same about yourself?”
“Do I mean what I say? Yeah, I guess I do.”
“You guess?”
“I’ll be more introspective after ice cream.”
“Ice cream is good for anything, isn’t it?”
“A cure-all.” He motioned toward a parking space near the ice cream parlor. “So you like living here full time? Really?”
“Of course.” She pulled the cart into the snug spot.
“You don’t get bored here?”
