By morning, I wasn’t running to the kitchen as often. Damian seemed to have made it through the worst of it. I stretched out beside him, emotionally and physically exhausted. I had managed to get him back to the villa and into bed, supporting his weight, dragging him step by excruciating step.
We were lying under gauzy, white netting. The house was rough, but charming. With no glass in the windows, it was open to the outside, letting the ocean air sweep through. The netting kept the mosquitoes and bugs away, but it also closed off the rest of the world. I could finally look at Damian—really look at him.
If you close your eyes and think about someone you love, what comes back is not a precise list of hair color, eye color, or the things that go on their driver’s license. Rather, it’s the bits and pieces that seep through your consciousness, the things about them that you never realized you were storing away. Like the shape of Damian’s ears and the way his lids had a slight sheen. Everything else had changed—his Adam’s apple, so pronounced, the stubble on his jaw, the way his mouth never seemed to relax—but I still knew his ear lobes, from all the times we lay next to each other on the grass. Every time the trees swayed in the wind, yellow flowers dropped on our faces.
I uncurled Damian’s palm and traced the lines. It was a man’s hand now, big and strong and rough. I felt a crushing tenderness for it. It was the same hand that had rocked me to sleep in the hammock, the same hand that had created paper worlds, the same hand that had showed me how to make a proper fist—not a girly fist, but a proper, Gidiot-busting fist.
I lay my cheek on Damian’s palm and let myself imagine, just for a minute, that we were kids again.
“I missed you so much,” I said to his crooked thumb. “I wrote to you and MaMaLu every day. I didn’t know why you never replied. My heart broke in so many places. I never saw you running after the car, the day we left Casa Paloma. I never knew the hell you were going through. I’m sorry, Estebandido.” I kissed the center of his palm. “So sorry.” My tears trickled onto his hand.
When I woke up a few hours later, Damian’s eyes were open, his hand was still pillowing my face.
“Is it true?” he asked. “What you said?”
Damian speaking softly. I had never heard him use that tone with me. His voice. God, his voice. I tried to reply, but he was looking at me in such a way that I couldn’t find the words. He was looking at me. Skye. Not Warren Sedgewick’s daughter. Not a means to an end. For the first time, Damian was seeing me.
I let him look at me, because I knew he needed that, just like I had needed it. I let him see the girl who had worshiped him, the girl who had smuggled strawberries in a stained dress for him, the girl who had wanted to impress him so badly, she’d asked him to let go of her bike before she was ready.
“Why are you looking after me? Why are you being nice to me?” he asked.
“Why did you push me out of the way on the boat? Why did you stand up to Rafael? ” I reached out to touch his wound, but he flinched and held my hand away. His eyes fell on my bandaged finger and a look of such agony passed over his face that I wanted to wrap my arms around him. But right before my eyes, Damian snapped out of it. He went blank, expressionless, like a chalkboard wiped clean. I stared at his back as he turned away.