by Cora Carmack
When we returned to our room that night, our skin was several shades darker, my hair smelled of salt, and we’d managed to get salt and sand in a few inconvenient places.
We both needed a good shower.
“You go first. It’s going to take me forever to get everything out of my hair.”
“I could help.”
As appealing as that sounded, I knew where it would lead, and I was honestly too tired to even think about sex standing up, let alone perform it.
“Thanks, Casanova, but let’s just get clean first. You can get me dirty again later.”
“Looking forward to it already.”
I laughed, and turned to throw my things at the foot of the bed. They hit the floor, and then an arm swooped around my waist, spinning and dipping me backward.
He kissed me slowly, the scruff on his chin tickling my skin. I was constantly amazed at how every kiss with him felt different, felt new. I hoped it would always feel that way.
He stood me up and gave me one more quick kiss.
He said, “I’ve not been this happy in a long time. Ever. Maybe.”
“Me too.”
He whistled as he retreated to the shower, and a smile burst open on my mouth, impossible to contain. I closed my eyes, and stretched out my arms like I’d just finished the only race that mattered.
God, he was perfect.
Well, except for the mess factor, but I could live with that. He’d dumped his things by the door, and I began moving them to the desk.
I could see his phone in the open outside pocket of his backpack, and in a small moment of curiosity and desperation, I picked it up.
I unlocked it. Not to search it, not really. Just to see.
My stomach sank.
Twenty-nine voice-mail messages.
Twenty-nine.
My finger hovered over the screen, and I wanted to listen. Just a quick check, just to make sure they were really nothing to worry about. I touched my finger to the screen, but then immediately pulled it back.
I wasn’t going to be that way. Jackson had been so good about respecting my privacy as we got closer. He hadn’t pushed even though it had been obvious from the very beginning that that went against his nature. He’d done so much for me, more than I could put into words.
I wouldn’t betray him like that. I couldn’t.
I returned the phone as I caught sight of his sketchbook. Somehow the impulse to know what he drew in there was even stronger than the one that wanted to listen to the phone calls.
I told myself I was just going to pick it up, but when I did, a few loose sheets of paper drifted to the floor. I scrabbled to pick them up. I picked up a few sheets, sliding them back into the book. When I turned the last one over, I froze.
For a few seconds, I thought it was the drawing that I’d gotten from that little boy in Budapest. It was the same fountain. I recognized the man at the top, proud and bare like he’d risen up right out of the sea. The same thoughtful women sat below him, their shoulders hunched, their bodies smoothly sculpted.
The drawing was different, though. Darker. Whereas the boy had drawn the world as he saw it, trying to capture the reality of the curves and the physicality of nature, this drawing seemed … sad. The shadows melted into each other, throwing the statues into sharp relief. This drawing gave words to the stone women, frozen forever in time, unable to do anything but exist. The boy had only begun to sketch me into the picture, so that I was almost a ghost, little more than a smile, blonde curls, and a flowing dress.
I was a ghost in this drawing, too. Not because I wasn’t fully realized, but because I was. I sat on that bench, both stiff and somehow wilted at the same time, and I watched the world around me with longing buried beneath detachment, covered over with a paper-thin smile that was little more than a smudge on the page.
I looked to the bathroom, where Jackson was currently just on the other side of a door. Maybe I hadn’t imagined him that day. There’d been a glimpse, just the briefest sight of a head that might have been his, but I’d written it off as wishful thinking.
But if he had this, if he drew this, he had to have been there.
I stopped worrying about getting the chair wet, and I stopped worrying about privacy as I took a seat to scan through the rest.
I’d thought I might find comfort in his sketches. He’d seen right through me with his sketch of Budapest. He’d seen that I was hurting when I was only just coming to terms with it. I wanted to see what he saw now. He was so confident that I could beat the darkness in me. Maybe he saw something I didn’t.
I flipped open the sketchbook, full of hope and fear, wishing that somewhere in those pictures I would find my next foothold, a hand to pull me up.
Instead, they sent me tumbling over the edge.
28
“YOUR TURN, SWEETHEART.”
I couldn’t look at him. I was barely holding it together, and I knew if I looked at him, I was going to fall to pieces. I just wanted to rewind time, take back a few more precious seconds of happiness. I would have cherished them more if I’d known they were coming to an end. But that’s life, I guess. We’re always a half a second late and one word short of what we really need.
“Kelsey? You okay?”
Jackson walked toward me. He reached out, skin to skin, and I moved so fast that my chair toppled over.
“Don’t touch me. Don’t you dare.”
His expression crumpled like a discarded ball of paper, and it looked so authentic, so real that my heart jerked.
I threw my gaze up to the ceiling so that I wouldn’t have to see, so that I wouldn’t get fooled again.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Did I do something?”
There weren’t words for the horror I felt, so I grabbed the sketchbook off the seat of the stool next to me, and slapped the picture of the fountain in Budapest onto the bar.
“That was the day after we met.”
I covered it with a second picture of me sleeping on the train from Budapest to Prague. My face was soft, angelic even, but still sad.
“A few days later.”
“I—” He opened his mouth, maybe to make an excuse, but I cut him off with another sketch.
“And that’s me in front of the monastery in Kiev. Now, I’m not great with time and dates, but that’s roughly a month ago. A month.”
“Kelsey, I can—”
I slammed down another page, and I felt the force echo up through my elbow to my chest.
“And here’s Bucharest. I’m not in this first one, but, oh, look, there I am.” I laid a second and a third. “And I sure as hell don’t remember seeing you at that club in Belgrade, but I guess you were. You captured the light perfectly on that one, by the way.”
I went to lay down more sketches, angry and fighting with tears, but my hands shook. Like leaves, the papers drifted to the ground. Places I’d seen. Cities I’d visited. The last month of my life sketched out in black and white.
“Kelsey—”
“Just explain something to me, Hunt. Is it a game? Or are you a stalker? Are all those missed calls your parole officer? I called you a serial killer that first night or, well, the first night for me. I’d been kidding, but maybe I’d known something was off even then.”
“I swear it wasn’t like that, Kelsey. I know it looks bad, but it was never my intention to—”
“To what? Follow me across a continent? Worm your way into my life? Into my bed? God, but you were fucking patient, weren’t you? If you’d slept with me that first night, I would have left and been on my way. But no … that wasn’t enough.”
He gripped my shoulders, and for the first time, fear coiled around my anger because I had no idea what he was capable of. Even now, I had no idea what he wanted from me.
“It’s not a game. I meant every moment, and I can explain all of this if you’ll just give me a chance.”
A vibration buzzed on the desk, and I snatched Hunt’s phone from where I’d set it down.
I held it up to him. “Or I could find out the truth for myself?”
He threw out a hand as I pressed answer, but I ducked, pulling back a few feet. I stood near the door of the bar and pressed the phone to my ear.
I saw Hunt’s expression first—devastated and defeated. Then I heard a familiar voice through speaker.
“It’s about damn time, Hunt. Tell me what the hell my daughter is doing or you’re fired.”
The phone slipped from my hand, and time seemed to move into slow motion as it dropped. My heart fell at the same speed, long enough that it could have passed through galaxies before it hit the floor. The phone at least made a satisfying crack when it landed, but the crash of my heart was nothing more than a dull, hollow thud.
“Not just a stalker. A paid stalker.”
I guess it wasn’t me he wanted something from after all.
It’s a quiet thing when your heart breaks. I thought it would be loud, louder even than the air rushing around us when we’d dove off that bridge. I thought it would drown everything else out.
But it happened like a whisper. A small, clean split. It broke in a second, and the pain was little more than a pinprick.
It’s the echo that kills you. Like the echo inside the Grotta Azzurra, that tiny little sound kept bouncing around the cavern of my ribs, getting louder and louder. It multiplied until I heard a hundred hearts breaking, a thousand, more. All of them mine.
“Kelsey, just listen.”
How could I listen? I couldn’t hear anything over this pain.
Outside. Outside maybe the sound would have somewhere to go.
I grabbed my bag. It didn’t have everything in it, but it had the most important things. It had what I needed to run.
I blew past him, and I didn’t even look at his body, at the towel slung around his hips. I couldn’t let myself. My mind was decades ahead of the rest of me. My body still remembered the shape of his and that damn gravity still pulled and pulled and pulled.
So I pulled back, and broke out into a run.
I thought I would make it farther, that maybe I could make it down to the main road, and for once there might be a taxi nearby without having to wait or call.
He overtook me before I’d even worked up a sweat. He’d pulled on a pair of gym shorts and two unlaced tennis shoes. He panted like he was running from the devil himself.
“Don’t come near me.”
“I never meant to hurt you, Kelsey. I love—”
“Don’t say it. Don’t you fucking say it.”
“I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
I didn’t know whether to cry or scream or collapse, and my body shook with the force of everything pent up inside me.
I scoffed. “Yeah, I can see how you just did this all by accident. You accidentally followed me all over Europe, and accidentally got paid for it. Shit like that happens all the time.”
“I was going to tell you.”
“I don’t care. It wouldn’t have mattered. I told you about my parents. I told you about everything.”
“I know. I know. And I haven’t talked to your father in weeks. You saw the voice mails. I’ve not told him anything important.”
I was moving to dart around him, but I stopped cold.
“When was the last time?”
He hesitated.
“Damn it, Hunt. When was the last time you played spy for my father?”
“Prague.”
Oh, God. I was going to be sick.
Prague was everything, the beginning of it all. We’d met before then, but I couldn’t even remember half of that now. Prague was where he’d spun my cares away on that merry-go-round. Prague was where he convinced me that I could find another place that felt like home, or another person even. Prague was when I’d started falling.
Goddamn it.
He continued, “You used your card at the hotel in Florence, and he called then on the room phone.”
I knew something had been strange about that phone call with the concierge. He’d lied to me.
“But Kelsey, I swear I didn’t say anything. And I made sure we left the same day.”
That was why we’d left and gone to Cinque Terre.
Even when I thought I was free, I wasn’t. I was a bird with clipped wings.
When I thought I was having the adventure of a lifetime, I was a dog on a leash taking a stroll through the park.
And when I thought I was in love, it was a lie.
I’d wanted a story, and this was it.
And, boy, wouldn’t it make a great one when I was old and unhappy and bitter.
It unfolded just like the rest of my life so far. A smile to my face, and a knife in my back. A hug in public, and a thinly veiled disdain at home. A pretty face and a rotten soul.
I was a fool to think my reflection had changed.
“I checked in when we got to Prague, while you were in the bathroom looking for Jenny. I still knew so little about you, and the night with the roofie had scared me. I didn’t know what I was dealing with. But that was the last time. Once you and I started getting to know each other, I ignored his emails and his calls.”
“Did you tell him I’d been roofied? Did he even blink a fucking eye?”
“I didn’t tell him. I thought … I thought that would come better from you.”
“Too bad. You missed your shot to see just how much my family can suck.”
“I know you’re angry, and you have every right to be. But please … just listen. Just let me explain.”
“It doesn’t matter what your explanation is. Don’t you get that, Jackson?”
“No one’s called me Jackson since before I joined the military. No one but you.”
“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“Jackson was the old me. The kid from a fucked-up family where money was more important than love and society more important than the individual.”
“If you’re trying to bond with me, it’s too damn late.”
“By age seventeen, I was having a glass of whiskey for breakfast. I had to be completely smashed just to get out of bed. I drank myself out of college. I hurt myself and my friends and everyone who cared about me. Even when I was trying not to, I hurt people. I guess I’m still doing that.”
I felt the tears gathering in my throat, and I tried to will them down.
Quiet and cold, I said, “I guess you are.”
“I joined the military mostly to piss off my father, not unlike your reasons for going on this trip.”
I hated that he thought he knew me. And hated even more that he did.
“At first, I was miserable there, too. I got in trouble. I pissed people off. I pissed myself off. But then I got transferred to a new unit, and … they got me. Don’t get me wrong, they called me out on my bullshit and beat me into place, but they understood and they helped. They were like family. My first real taste of what it was supposed to be like. I got sober. Slowly, and with a lot of missteps and failures. But I got there. And life started to look up. I started to believe that things could be better. That I could be better. You would have thought I was in paradise rather than Afghanistan for the way I felt. I couldn’t have been happier. Then one day we were following intelligence and checking out an old meetinghouse that was supposed to have been abandoned. Only it wasn’t. The thing blew with my unit inside. I was near a window, and managed to jump and avoid the brunt of the blast. But I separated my shoulder when I landed and had half a dozen bones broken by debris. In a flash, I lost everything I’d gained. I was medically discharged, and I spent the next six months going to five AA meetings a week just to keep from diving into a bottle of booze to forget that I’d ever known what it was like to be happy.”
“Did you forget?” I asked, my jaw clenched. Part of me wanted to rub salt in his wound, and the other part wanted to know if there was hope.
“Not for a second.”
“Good,” I ground out.
“My father is the one who brought me th
e job. Your father wanted someone to keep an eye on you and make sure you didn’t do anything stupid. Who better than a soldier to keep you safe? I said okay to get my dad off my back. I thought it would be an easy job. Good money, free traveling, and maybe the chance to take my mind off my problems. But then I watched you falling into my old patterns. I watched you heading down the same road, and I just wanted to save you from it. I wanted to keep you from going through what I went through.”
“So you pitied me? Fantastic. Please keep talking. You’re making me feel so much better.”
“I didn’t pity you. I hated you.”
“Keep it coming, Casanova.”
“I hated you because you made me face my past. But once I did that … once I acknowledged it, I started to notice the ways you were different from me. I meant what I said in Germany, Kelsey. You burn so brightly and beautifully. You light up a room when you walk into it. I watched people flock to you city after city, bar after bar. You just … even at your most miserable, you had more life in your pinky than I had in my whole body. And when I stopped hating you, I started wanting you. And then I didn’t stand a chance. I tried to stay away, but I just … I couldn’t.”
He looked at me with such longing that my heart seemed to turn, like his eyes were a magnet, trying to pull it from my chest.
I believed him. There was too much pain in his voice and shame in his body to not believe that he hadn’t meant for this to happen. But that didn’t take my pain away or my shame at being fooled.
I waited to make sure he was done talking, and then I said, “Okay.”
I turned to walk away and he yelled at my back, “Okay? That’s it?”
“Yes, okay. I understand. Thank you for explaining. Goodbye Hunt.”
“Don’t go, Kelsey. Please. I’m sorry. I’ve never been more sorry. I was going to tell you everything as soon as I thought you were strong enough to handle it.”
I stopped, but didn’t turn around as I said, “Of course, I can handle it. It’s nothing, really. Just another thing that wasn’t real.” I could feel myself falling back into that familiar pit, that place where I’d wasted so many years. “It was just another thing that doesn’t count.”
