Page 53 of Breakaway
I stop walking. He takes two more steps and turns. The water is behind him, flat, and his face is backlit and I can see the shadows under his eyes that were not there the first year. Not the second year.
"Come here," I say.
"I'm right here."
"Luca. Come here."
He comes. I put my hand on the back of his neck. His body settles against me and the performance goes and what is left is his weight, which is less than it should be, leaning into my chest. I hold the back of his head. His breath against my collarbone.
We walk back slower. I take his hand. He looks at our hands and then up at me and says nothing. His fingers tighten.
The villa is cool. The bed is unmade. He sits on the edge with my T-shirt hanging off one shoulder and I sit next to him. Not touching.
"Wes."
"Yeah?"
"I don't know how to ask for things."
"You don't have to ask."
"That's not how it should work."
"It's how it works with us."
"I want to be someone who can say it out loud. I want to be able to say I need you to be soft with me. I used to be able to say that."
"You just did."
He goes quiet. His hand finds mine on the mattress.
"Yeah," he says. "I guess I did."
He lies back. I lie next to him. His head on my shoulder, his hand over my heart. His breathing slows. His weight settles. He is asleep in a minute.
I hold him and look at the ceiling. The camera bag is on the dresser across the room. I have been bringing the camera to this island for three years. The first year I shot the ocean and his feet in the sand and the light on his back and set one of those photographs as my wallpaper. The second year I shot the restaurant and the beach road and the bougainvillea and the balcony at dawn. This year the pictures have been mostly of him.
I am looking at the ceiling and I am thinking about his face when he said the routine works. The face underneath. Not theface the locker room gets. Not the broadcaster. The face of a man describing a life he is surviving instead of living, and not hearing himself describe it.
His hand twitches against my chest. He sighs in his sleep. I press my mouth to the top of his head and close my eyes.
?
Chapter 19: Luca
THEN
The beach is the same beach. Same flat sand, same water pulling back from the shore in long slow sheets. I have been walking it for two days trying to find last year in it.
Wes is beside me. His feet are bare, his jeans rolled to his calves the same way they were twelve months ago when we walked this same stretch of beach.
"The sand is different," I say.
"The sand is the same sand."
"The sand is coarser. Last year it was finer. I remember it being finer."
"You're rating the sand?"
