Problematic Summer Romance (Not in Love, #2)(6)
It’s too much. Too beautiful. The turquoise waters and dark green trees are too bright, like some AI-generated postcard. Except that when I move a few feet from the car and lean forward, palms flat against the stone balustrade installed to keep tipsy visitors from smashing themselves against the rock wall, a gust of wind blows against my face.
It hits my jet-lagged, semicomatose brain that this place actually exists. As implausible as it seems, I’m here. And turning my head southwest makes reality even more questionable, because dominating the view is Mount Etna. The most active volcano in all of Europe. A squat, gently sloped presence. It rises and rises and rises, culminating in a black peak that’s at once terrifying and majestic.
“This is ridiculous,” I whisper to myself. To the volcano. To the air. To the entire Sicilian seascape.
“Right?” Beside me, Eli rests his elbows on the handrail. At his heels, Tiny frantically chases new scents. “I’ve been feeling dirty and ugly since we got here.”
I turn back to glance at the villa, take in the ivy and wisteria that decorate its white facade, and mentally compare it to the house where we grew up. Peacock, meet turkey. “We were raised in a rat-infested hovel, huh?”
“And we never even knew it.”
“What kind of neglectful parents don’t even plant a citrus grove in their backyard?” I reach for the tree at my left, potted in a colorful ceramic vase, and stroke the tips of my fingers against a shiny leaf. When I push it aside, I discover a lemon, plump and juicy and a little pornographic. Its tang perfumes the air surrounding us, mixing with sea brine and something that reminds me of…thyme. The scrub half climbing down the cliff, as if trying to get away from us, is a spontaneously growing thyme bush. I’m in love. “Watch out, Eli. Rue might leave you for this lemon.”
“Too late. The lemon and I already eloped.”
I smile, and he slides an arm around my shoulder to squeeze me into him. We don’t usually hug much, my brother and I, but I’m feeling out of sorts for all kinds of reasons, and this is comforting. “I’m happy you guys decided to do this here. Now, I know I gasped very obnoxiously, back when you told me that you weren’t just going to stand in line for six hours at the Travis County Clerk’s office and exchange plastic bottle rings. But this actually feels like…”
“Like more than an afterthought?” I nod as he draws back. “Like I actually took time off to celebrate and publicly acknowledge the fact that I’m in love with Rue?”
“Ugh, keep it in your pants, please.” But when he tries for a noogie, I can’t help laughing. “Besides, it doesn’t sound like you took off work.”
“Oh, I did. It’s Hark who’s congenitally unable to not check his email. Which is okay, since watching him pick fights is a leisure pursuit of mine.”
I avert my eyes. “Where’s everyone else? I thought Avery and I would be the last ones to get here.”
“You were. Most people are catching up on sleep. Someone went to the city center, and Rue’s taking a walk down at the beach with Tisha.”
I glance at the cliff. Still steep, and half-covered in moss and shrubbery. “Did they jump?”
He points at a spot slightly farther down the coast, where the slope is gentler. Someone installed a stone staircase there, nestled in the dense, burnt orange soil. It twists and turns multiple times before terminating in what looks like a private beach. “Oh, nice.” I let my eyes follow the shoreline, and that’s when I spot it. Right there in the bay, just a few hundred feet into the ocean, there is a small, rocky islet covered in lush vegetation.
“Holy shit. I didn’t think we’d be so close. Is that—?”
Eli nods. “Isola Bella.”
When I first read about it, my only thought was that the locals could have put a bit more of their backs into the naming process. But now that I’m in its presence, it occurs to me that simplicity might have its merits. Because…it’s certainly beautiful. And it is an island—at least, I think so. A round, jagged mound of green and gray, completely surrounded by sea. The only exception is a thin strip of pebbly sand that connects it to the mainland.
“Is it high tide? Right now, I mean.”
Eli shrugs. “Dunno. Why?”
“Low,” a deep voice says from behind us. “The sandbar was underwater this morning.”
Well. I guess I put this off as long as I could.
I exhale, paste a serene expression to my face, and turn around. “Hey, Conor,” I say cheerfully. Which is…a choice, given that nearly everyone else in the world calls him Hark.
Old habits, though.
“Maya,” he says.
Not Hi, Maya. Or Maya, hey. Clearly, he does not feel the need to pepper his emails with overenthusiastic punctuation. Conor barely even smiles, though I refuse to take that personally. It’s just how he is—sharky, impatient, sometimes mean. Maybe it comes from the emotionally dystopian family that raised him. Maybe it’s a deliberate business strategy, being at once intense and scary and angry as the true path to embody the wealth-portfolio guy. I always figured the suits did lots of heavy lifting, but he’s wearing whiskey-colored pants and a simple white T-shirt, and I still could never mistake him for a software developer or a philosophy professor.
Honestly, he’s not my type. Too overworked. Too incapable of letting go. Too single-minded. Too much of a dickhead.