I pulled away before my mind realised what was happening.
One second I was falling, then I wasn’t.
his arm across my back, his hand gripping my butt which sent shockwaves through my entire body and made my entire nervous system short-circuit.
“How dare you!” I gasped before I could process anything else.
He wasn’t allowed to touch me like that.
“You were falling!” He retorted quickly but then I was upright, stepping away from him fast enough that the wet stone nearly took me a second time.
He motioned to catch me the second time.
“I’m fine,” I uttered clippedly, before he could speak.
He said nothing and watched me with a perfectly blank expression that somehow communicated how irritated he felt.
I don’t know how to handle this man.
I walked back inside without looking at him again.
~ I didn’t sleep well.
The PR team called at eight but as usual, I was already awake.
I answered with a coffee I hadn’t finished and a vague hope that the call would be brief.
It wasn’t.
It was forty minutes of detailed instructions about natural-looking content, casual photographs, videos that needed to appear spontaneous.
She had drafted a content calendar that was built without my input, and a reminder from my PR lead that the engagement on yesterday’s airport photos had performed better than anything the team had posted in six months.
“The public loves you together,” she said.
I could hear how happy she was about it in her voice.
“Great,” I said flatly.
Damn the public.
“We’ll need beach content today, something at dinner and if there’s any way you could-” “Fine.” I hung up.
Zane was on the terrace when I walked out.
He had his shirt open at the collar, coffee in hand, the ocean spread out below us like the whole thing had been arranged for his personal enjoyment.
He looked obscenely comfortable as he was clearly in his element.
“The PR team wanted us to do a beach thing.” I told him.
He looked at me over the rim of his cup.
“Beach.
Now?” “Apparently.” “Give me ten minutes.” He took eight.
The beach was not a kind of experience that happened to me regularly.
It all felt surreal.
The white sand was actually white and the water a shade of blue that didn’t exist in Seattle.
I saw this only in tourism ads and the likes.
The sun was low, making everything look like a painting.
Our photographer stood at the water’s edge and started telling us what to do.
She was really excited and kept singing about how much she loved love.
She had no idea she was taking photos of two people who had agreed to stop fighting, at least for now.
“If you could hold hands,” she said, gesturing broadly.
“And just walk.
Natural.
Like you’re enjoying the morning.” I looked at his hand.
He was already extending it, patiently waiting for me to take it.
I took it.
His fingers closed around mine.
I immediately noticed the temperature of his skin, the slight roughness of his palm and the fact that he held my hand like he’d done it before, like it was unremarkable.
Maybe I thought entirely too much of it but we walked hand in hand anyway.
The photographer probably took approximately seven hundred photos in twelve minutes.
In between shots, Zane and I didn’t speak and the ocean moved against our feet and my pulse was doing something completely unacceptable.
It was beating way too hard.
“Beautiful!” The photographer called out with a wide grin.
“Now if you could face each other?” I turned towards him.
He was already looking at me.
The sun was behind him, which put his face half in shadow as he watched me so intently that it made me want to look away and at the same time made looking away impossible.
Nobody is going to intimidate me!
I thought immediately, sounding the alarm bells in my head.
I held his gaze because I was Sloane Reed and I did not let people unsettle me in front of cameras.
The photo went live by noon.
By two o’clock it had forty thousand likes.
I checked it four times in the first hour and told myself I was monitoring PR metrics.
I checked it a fifth time and stopped making excuses.
I was enjoying it and even though it was hard to admit, it was true.
The comments were what the internet produced when it decided it was invested in two people: adoration, speculation.
They look actually in love, some of the comments said.
Do we?
I put my phone down.
By the afternoon there was more staged activity.
We were taking poolside photographs with his hand at the back of my chair, leaning toward me slightly in a way that looked like we were having a conversation.
Next, we took a video of us walking through the resort garden that the team wanted to post as a reel.
Then lunch became a full production because someone from the PR team realized the light on the terrace was perfect and spent twenty minutes getting a shot of us eating.
Every time he touched me, hand at my waist, fingers brushing my arm to angle me toward the camera, my heartbeat did something I had decided not to acknowledge.
Stop acting like a teenager, it’s obviously not real .
I cautioned myself every now and then.
By five o’clock, I was irritated with myself in a way I hadn’t been since I was a teenager.
Irritated at how my heart fluttered because of him.
It’s just the proximity.
I told myself.
It would disappear once we go back to our normal life.
I went back to the villa and opened my laptop, a familiar terrain that I knew very well and I could disappear into.
Forty-two emails, a board memo and three messages from Maya, later, that I’d been ignoring since yesterday morning and something settled in my chest.
I was three emails deep when Zane walked in.
I heard him cross the room and stop somewhere behind me.
I waited for him to say something that I could respond to and send him away with.
Instead, he closed my laptop.
“Hey!
What the heck!” I said angrily and turned slowly to face him.
“I was working.” “I know.” “Open it.” I ordered him.
“No.” I stood.
“You don’t get to-,” He cut me off.
“You’ve been on that laptop for six of the twelve hours we’ve been here.
Yesterday it was nine.” He wasn’t raising his voice and that was somehow worse than if he had.
“You are on a honeymoon.
Fake or not, this is where you are and yet, this is what you’re doing?” he asked.
“Are you incapable of being present for five consecutive minutes?” he asked further.
That made me feel like a child being scolded.
But I wasn’t going to back down.
“You don’t understand what it takes to run a company.” I told him.
He let out a humorless chuckle.
“I run a much larger one.” Zane’s retort hit hard.
“Then you know why I can’t just…” I trailed off, scrambling for the words to say.
“I know that you’re hiding.” He stated plainly.
That was the truth and he had simply been waiting for the right moment to say it.
“I know that every time something starts to feel real, you go back to your laptop, because your laptop can’t look at you the way I do.” He said a little too cockily.
The room went very quiet.
“That’s not…
” I started, then changed my mind.
“You know what?
You can’t talk to me like that!” I said instead.
“And I am not going to stay here and let you speak to me like that!
Good night!” With that, I stormed out, effectively avoiding the confrontation.
It was uncomfortable and I was certainly not in the mood to put myself through all of that.
I went to my room and shut the door and lay in the dark staring at the ceiling while his words moved through my head the way words did when they landed somewhere accurate.
Every time something starts to feel real, you go back to your laptop.
I wasn’t hiding.
I was protecting myself.
There was a difference.
I was still deciding what it was when I finally fell asleep.
I woke up at seven to sunlight and silence.
I padded to the sitting room in my socks.
Zane’s bedroom door was open and his bed was made.
But then, his coffee cup wasn’t on the terrace and neither was his jacket on the hook by the door.
I looked at the table where my laptop had been.
It was gone.
I panicked slightly.
Then I checked the terrace, the kitchen, both sitting rooms, and the entrance.
No laptop, no Zane and no note.
What the heck was this man up to?
I wondered.