When I rounded the corner on my way back to the cabin, I nearly ran over Ivy, who tilted her head with a satisfied smirk at the guilty look on my face.
“Have a nice swim?” she asked, eyeing my wet clothes. Her eyes flicked behind me to where Theo and I had just been with Wayland.
When I finally calmed down, the first thought I had was to smack that smirk off her stupid face. But the second thought I had was that she’d just seen me with Theo, and I didn’t know exactly how much she had seen.
“Don’t worry,” she said, not bothering to wait for me to answer her question. Instead, she brushed right past me, turning and walking away backwards with her finger pressed against puckered lips. “Your secret is safe with me.”
She laughed to herself as she turned, and I thought about stopping her, asking her what the hell was wrong with her, confronting her about the pool party.
But honestly?
I had more pressing things on my mind.
I rushed back to the stateroom, thankful to find it empty as I peeled off my wet clothes.
In the shower, I finally brought myself to climax.
I was so worked up from the evening — from my time alone in bed and then the cave with Theo — it only took about sixty seconds for me to fly apart.
So much for staying away from him, I thought, as I guiltily got dressed for bed. But the guilt was so overshadowed by want that I wondered if I really felt guilty at all.
Mostly, I just felt excited.
And desperate for more.
The next morning, I woke up in an empty bed. Joel clearly hadn’t slept beside me, and he either didn’t realize I’d been off the boat or didn’t care.
I reached for my phone, wondering if I’d have a missed text from him, but instead, there was one waiting from Theo.
Come to the top deck when you’re ready. I need you to “work” today.
There was a winking smiley face next to the text, and my stomach did a little flip as I stared at the words.
As I got dressed, thoughts of Joel hammered me with the annoyance of a dentist’s drill. I wondered what he’d done all night, where he’d been, who he was with. Then, I thought of our fight, of our string of fights lately, and how he seemed in no rush to make things right.
My eyes washed over the dresser, and sitting right there on top was the key to the storage under our bed.
And I didn’t care that he didn’t want me to find what he was hiding there.
I’d had enough of the lying, the avoiding, and if I couldn’t get answers from him, maybe I’d find them under our mattress.
But when I popped the compartment open, there was nothing to be found.
In the days that followed that evening in the Blue Grotto, I slipped into Wonderland.
It happened slowly and suddenly, as unseen as water shaping mountains into valleys and as obvious as a forest fire. In the tumble down that rabbit hole, I lost any semblance of who I was before, and I found myself only half-interested in finding out who I would be next.
I just wanted to be me.
Now.
And I wanted to be with Theo.
It was too easy to pretend like he was working on shore and just taking me along so I could work on my photography. Or that he needed me to take photographs of the boat or of him on the boat. We were in a place where time didn’t exist, where other people didn’t matter, where we could do what we wanted without repercussions.
No one questioned us, no one cared.
Well, except for maybe Wayland, who had pulled back from talking to me as much as he had before and often cautioned Theo and I both with a hard glance or two.
Emma would sometimes ask me why Theo needed so many photographs of himself on his giant yacht, but she’d make a joke of it and I’d laugh along, pretending like I was as clueless as she was on the matter.
I didn’t miss Ivy and Celeste murmuring under their breath every time I walked by. Our niceties had ended the night of the pool party. But where I used to cower away from them, duck my head down and scurry by, I now looked them head on with a smirk that I hoped told them I couldn’t care less what they thought of me.
Everyone else was caught up in their own jobs, or perhaps their own drama, and they didn’t seem to notice how much time I started spending with Theo.
Joel most of all.
I didn’t question him when I found the space beneath our bed to be empty after him making such a big deal of it. Maybe it was because deep down I knew I didn’t want to know, or because I simply didn’t care anymore. And he didn’t question where I went each day that I was gone, or why he would sometimes come back from partying with the crew before I came back from my adventures with Theo.
The communication between us was as broken down as an old highway billboard.
If anything, the only thing Joel seemed to care about was getting his next high.
He’d been a drinker ever since I met him, but I had a feeling there was more involved now. I saw it in the dilation of his eyes, in the graying of his skin, in the way he seemed to shake if he went even one day without partying.
We seemed to have both given up on
