“Yes,” she answered dryly, clearing her throat and holding her pen as if she had been writing something important. “What do you want?”

“I thought I heard you, you sounded like you hurt yourself.”

She paused and took him in, full of the recycled longing she had forced away the second he heard her voice. She ached with it, with the knowledge of what her body wanted—even if her mind knew better.

But she used the denial of her own want to power her, to boost her self-confidence. She clicked her pen, closed her notebook, and sat straight on the bed, tightening the belt of her robe. “I hit my elbow on the nightstand,” she said, looking over at the water bottle and glass perched atop it. “I’m fine.”

“You hit your elbow,” he repeated, looking supremely unsteady on his feet as he followed her gaze over to the nightstand in question.

“Yes. And now I’m going to bed,” she added, standing to turn off the bedside lamps. “Can I help you with anything else?”

He swallowed hard, face slack and dewy from sweat. “I guess not.” He shook his head, turning back into the hallway and roughly closing the door behind him.

The second the door clicked back into its frame, Alex hustled into the bathroom and to the edge of the tub, chest almost painful with eagerness. She roughly turned on the faucet and pulled the gold shower head, with its snake-like cord, from its handle. She tested the temperature with one hand—warm, but not too hot—while the other hand flicked through the water pressure settings. She could feel the clammy desperation in her fingers, the urgent need to approximate what she actually wanted, the knowledge that she didn’t stand a chance of sleeping until she had exorcised the thought of him from her body.

11. Taormina, Sicily

11

TAORMINA, SICILY

Now

The sun was barely rising over Taormina as Alex rounded her fifth mile. The boat had docked unusually early to restock the kitchen, and she used the opportunity to take off before anyone got out of bed. She wouldn’t have to cross paths with them at breakfast, wouldn’t have to awkwardly laugh off last night’s chaos, wouldn’t have to say anything at all. Instead, she drowned out the sounds of her own mind with the music blasting through her headphones, throwing her full weight into each stride until her body was fully exhausted.