“What happened to the girl?” I ask Adam. Our plates have cleared, and we are enjoying a second bottle of wine. The sun is setting on the sea—dimming the whole evening into blue hues. The ocean darkens from turquoise to indigo. All of a sudden, the terrace is lit by candlelight.
“Oh,” Adam says. “It was a long time ago. We were young.”
“How young?” I realize I don’t know how old Adam is. Older. Thirty-five? Thirty-eight?
“Young enough,” he says. He laughs. “We were traveling all over, and Positano was her nonnegotiable travel destination, so we came.”
“And you fell in love.”
“With the town, yes. I was already in love with her. She ended up breaking my heart six months later.”
“What happened?”
“A drummer named Dave.”
I nod. “I get it,” I say, although I don’t. I never let myself fall in and out of love. I never had other experiences.
I think about last night, Adam across from me.
“How about you?” Adam asks.
“Me?”
“Have you ever had your heart broken?”
I think about Eric, at college, his goofy charm, weekends driving the coast to Santa Cruz, Costco runs, pizza night at my parents’。
“No,” I say.
Adam smiles. “You know what they say.”
“What?”
“Never trust anyone who hasn’t had their heart broken. It’s a before and after. You never quite see the world the same way again.”
All at once a cloud settles in over my heart. I see my mother, at the hospital, in her bed in Brentwood. The hum and beep of machines.
“I think I need to amend my answer, then,” I say.
“You have?”
I nod.
From across the table, Adam takes my hand. He flips my palm open and grazes his fingers along the inside. I feel his touch up my spine—it gets stuck in my ears, vibrating sound, energy, electricity.
We order dessert. A pot of chocolate and cream I’d like to bathe in. There are delicate chocolate flakes and powdered sugar on top. It might be the best thing I’ve ever tasted.
“Before we leave,” Adam says, “there’s something we have to do.”
We finish our wine, Adam pays the bill, and then he leads me over to the corner of the terrace. There’s a green door, and inside is a glass elevator. It’s nearly dark now, but the entirety of the hotel is lit up in light.
“After you,” he says.
We get inside, and then we’re going down—descending past the layers of gardens and rooms and terraces and dining areas, deeper into the rock. Past the gardens filled with fresh produce and the spa—down, down, down until we land in the middle of a rock cave.
Adam opens the door, and then I see the elevator has spit us out into a stone grotto. We emerge into the night three hundred feet below where we began. The hotel’s tennis courts are to our right, and to our left is the hotel’s lunch spot, followed by the beach club.
Adam takes my hand and we walk down, over to the chairs. The ocean plays just ten feet over, jumping, lapping at the rocks.
“Do you want to sit?” he asks me.
I take a seat on a lounge chair, and he sits down beside me, on the same one. I can feel Adam’s shoulder against mine, and then the hint of his chest pressing into my back.
Down here, at the ocean, the evidence of nightfall is apparent. The moon slowly rises, the whole beach hovering in that space between things. I hug my arms to my chest.
“Are you cold?” Adam asks.
I shake my head. I am not cold. Not at all.
From next to me, gently, I feel him put a hand on the back of my neck and run it down my arm to cup my elbow. I breathe out into the night air.
“Adam,” I say.
I turn to face him. Like last night, I have a powerful, nearly impossible-to-say-no-to urge to kiss him, to throw myself into his arms and feel his skin everywhere. But I don’t. Because I have Eric, and whatever is happening here can’t be enough to forget that.
“Hmm?”
“I can’t,” I say. I want to cut off my own tongue.
Adam removes his hands, slowly, from my body. “I understand,” he says. “Do you want to go?”
I shake my head. I rearrange myself so my back is against the back of the chair. Adam sits up next to me. I feel his breathing beside me—in and out, in and out, like the tide.
We stay and watch the waves until the sky is near black. Until the stars look down on the boats at sea like steady, unblinking eyes.
Chapter Nineteen