She could feel the anxious, upset energy radiating off of him, which instantly made her own heart rate slow. They’d always had a sixth sense for which of them was more in need of rescuing at any given moment, and it immediately made the non-urgent party snap into a nurse-like calm. Sometimes, they would joke that they shared a nervous system, and it only had so much cortisol to go around.

“Thanks for coming.” He sighed, grabbing an olive. “I had to get off that fucking boat.” He popped it in his mouth, chewing pensively before discarding the pit.

“That makes two of us, then.” She sipped her water, observing him from across the table. She swallowed, acknowledging her embarrassing behavior up front. “And, I’m sorry for running out like that.”

“What?” he asked, seeming almost surprised. “Oh, yeah, it’s fine. Honestly, I feel like this whole trip was a mistake.”

His words were uncharacteristically cold, and she took a beat before responding.

“Why?” she finally asked, keeping it open ended.

He spoke to no one in particular, musing out loud as the clearly painful memories flooded him: “It’s like, I literally can’t do anything without it being a thing, you know? Everything I do is wrong somehow. He’s like my parole officer.”

“Guy?”

He took a beat and looked up at the waiter, who had arrived with a large ice bucket, two whisper-thin wine glasses, and a bottle he immediately began opening.

“Of course,” Paul finally said, eyes trained on the movement of the waiter’s hands.

“What happened this time?” Alex took pains to linger on this time, subtly emphasizing just how often their conversations about Guy began this way.

“Well, you’ll be pleased to know it had nothing to do with my outfit.” He smiled sarcastically, tasting the wine and nodding approvingly to the waiter, who poured each of them a glass before slipping the bottle into the steel bucket. “Instead, it was about the many other things I’m doing wrong: apparently I’ve gained ‘at least five pounds’ since Spain!”

“That’s terrible,” she said, simply.

For a moment, the affirmation just lingered in the air.

“And it’s crazy, too, because it had zero to do with how the argument started to begin with.”

It was usually at this point that Alex would tell him the origin of the argument didn’t really matter—if it ended in such a personal, cutting way, that itself was a problem. But today, she was too tired to go there. Besides, she didn’t feel particularly qualified to give romantic advice.

“Well?” she asked, searching his darting eyes. “What started it?”

“It was about your video,” he blurted out, emphatically avoiding her gaze.

Her stomach dropped, another onion-like layer of the catastrophe that was this stupid video peeling back.

“Hey.” She touched his shoulder, rotating him toward her. “What do you mean?”