Chapter 310

[ 1,084 words ]

Katia’s POV

“Yes,” I said.

He kissed me then, slowly, his hands coming up to frame my face the way they had that morning on the deck, except this time there was nothing left between us to apologize for. I felt the warmth of his palms against my jaw, the press of his mouth against mine growing deeper, more certain, his fingers sliding into my hair as I leaned into him.

The sand gave gently beneath our feet as he pulled me closer, his other hand settling at the small of my back, drawing me flush against him until I could feel the steady, racing rhythm of his heart against my own chest. I let my hands move up the front of his shirt, feeling the warmth of his skin through the thin fabric, and he made a low sound against my mouth that I felt more than heard.

We sank down together onto the cool sand, the candles flickering somewhere behind us, forgotten, the dark water lapping gently a few feet from where we lay tangled together beneath the open sky. His mouth moved from mine to the curve of my throat, slow this time, lingering in a way that made my breath catch every time his lips found a new place to rest. My fingers found the buttons of his shirt one by one, and his hands answered in kind, both of us moving slowly to the way his cock felt inside me. The way every thrust made me feel like I was in heaven without the desperation of the jet or the urgency of that first night when the drug had stripped away everything but instinct.

This was different. I could feel every emotion, every twitch of his cock. I could feel my wall closing in around his length.

This was patient and certain and entirely ours, with no one else’s name hanging in the air between us, just the sand beneath our skin and the stars overhead and the sound of the water that would, by morning, erase every trace that we had ever been here at all.

I did not think about Jude.

I did not think about Delia.

For the length of that night, on a piece of land the tide would take back before sunrise, there was only Julian and the quiet certainty that whatever this was, I no longer wanted to fight it.

The reef sat a short boat ride from the villa, close enough that the staff dropped us off and left without waiting, trusting we would signal when we wanted to be collected again.

Julian had brought the masks and fins himself, refusing the offer of an instructor or a guide, which did not surprise me by this point in the trip. He preferred to do things himself when he could, the same way he had cut the fruit for breakfast with his own hands rather than letting the staff arrange it, the same way he had taken the boat wheel from the resort captain without asking the first morning we arrived.

“You have done this before,” I said, watching him check the strap on his mask with practiced fingers.

“Once or twice,” he said. “Not recently p>

We slipped into the water together.

The cold hit first, a brief shock against skin that had spent the last several days adjusting to air thick with heat, and then it settled into something almost gentle, the lagoon holding us the way water always seemed to hold people who had stopped fighting it. I put my mask on and looked down, and the world beneath the surface opened up in a way that made me forget, for a moment, that there was anything above it worth thinking about.

The reef was alive in a way I had not expected. Color everywhere: coral in shades of violet and burnt orange and pale green clustered together in formations that looked built by something with taste; fish moved through it in schools that scattered and reformed as we passed, indifferent to us in the way wild things were indifferent to anything that did not threaten them directly.

Julian swam beside me without speaking, which suited the moment better than words would have. We moved together through the warm water, following the slope of the reef as it dropped deeper in places and rose closer to the surface in others, and at one point he reached out and took my hand beneath the water, not pulling me anywhere, just holding it, the two of us drifting above the coral in a silence that felt entirely different from the silence we had carried through that first dinner three nights earlier.

A turtle passed beneath us at one point, unbothered by our presence, moving with the slow, deliberate grace of something that had never once in its life needed to hurry.

Julian surfaced just long enough to pull a small waterproof case from the pocket of his swim shorts, the kind built to protect a phone from exactly this sort of afternoon, and went back under to photograph the reef itself. He took his time with it, framing a cluster of violet coral against the shafts of light filtering down from the surface, then a school of fish scattering past in perfect formation, then the turtle again before it drifted out of range.

When we surfaced again, he checked the images, satisfied, and posted one of the reef without me in it, the coral and the light doing all the work, captioned with nothing more than the coordinates.

He turned the camera on me only once we were back near the surface, and even then he did not ask me to look at it. He caught me mid-laugh, water still running down my face from clearing my mask, and once more, a moment later, when I was looking off toward the horizon rather than at him.

“Those are not going anywhere either,” he said when he saw me notice.

“I am starting to think you have a collection,” I said.

“I have a small one,” he said. “Growing p>

He did not post either photograph. He simply slid the case back into his pocket and dove under the surface again, leaving me there for a moment with the strange, quiet realization that somewhere on his phone, alongside the careful, curated images the rest of the world was allowed to see, there now existed a small private archive that belonged to no one but him.

If you find any errors (non-standard content, ads redirect, broken links, etc Please let us know so we can fix it as soon as possible.