I didn’t want this to be our last date. “I don’t think so, right?” I said. “It’s not like we’re having fun.”

“Fun isn’t really a prerequisite,” she said. “I actually am kind of having fun though.”

So was I. Sort of. Except for the puking thing.

“I mean, what makes a date a date?” she asked.

“We have to eat something together,” I said.

“And do some sort of activity. Like watch a movie,” she added. “We’ve done both of those things.”

I felt the tiniest tic in my jaw.

“Yeah, I guess we did.”

“So that’s it then. We’ve had our four dates. You still haven’t kissed me though,” she pointed out.

“You want one now?”

She hit me with a pillow.

The pills I’d brought for her eventually started working. I was able to keep down food around hour six. We napped. Woke up and had soup. I took a shower and we’d just finished watching another movie and she’d gotten up to get me a cup of tea.

I looked around her room while I waited for her.

It wasn’t really her room. She didn’t pick the bedspread or the furniture. She didn’t choose the lamp on the nightstand or the towels or any of it. I wondered if she ever got sick of not belonging anywhere or not owning anything that didn’t fit in her two suitcases.

I wondered if she got tired of saying goodbye.

God knows I was sick and tired of saying goodbye. First Dad, then Mom. And eventually Emma too.

Goodbye was the bane of my existence. I hated it.

She came back in and handed me a cup of hot tea. I set the mug on the nightstand to let it cool.

Our knees were touching. We’d been touching a lot.

Maybe the fact that we were sick made the little intimacies less high stakes. We weren’t going to do anything sexual when I was hugging a barf bucket to my chest, so what did it matter if her thigh pressed into mine, or she rubbed my back, or put her head on my shoulder?

But then I started feeling better and we didn’t stop. Maybe we couldn’t.

There was a Get It Out Of Your System energy hovering around us. But I couldn’t get it out of my system. A one-night stand wouldn’t make this feeling go away. It would only make me want more of what I couldn’t have, and yet I still couldn’t stop touching her. Not anymore. I couldn’t trust myself not to take anything she offered me, no matter how temporary. It felt too good. So we cuddled while we watched movies and I held her while she slept and I breathed her in and savored every second of it. Even though I knew what it would cost me the day she left.

CHAPTER 35 EMMA

You’re cheating,” Justin said from his spot in the kitchen.

I gasped from behind the wall in the hallway. “I am not. I’m just better at this game than you.”

“You can’t just camp out and wait for me to come to you. It’s not fair.”

“Are you saying strategically I’ve bested you?”

He groaned.

We’d found Nerf guns in the storage bin on the side of the house, and since it was raining again, we were playing inside.

He darted out from behind the counter. I spun into the doorway, aimed, and shot him right in the chest. He stopped to watch the foam bullets bounce off and tumble to the ground. He gave me an exasperated look, then sprang for me while I shrieked, running into the bedroom laughing.

He caught me from behind, twirled me onto my back on the mattress, and pinned me under him by the wrists.

“You are dead,” I said, wriggling. “I killed you fair and square. Those were fatal shots.”

“I’ve come back to haunt you.”

“Really?” I grinned. “You don’t feel like an apparition to me…” I said, referring to the boner pressing into my hip.

He smiled at me wryly, but he didn’t move. He slid his grip off my wrists and twined his fingers in mine and held me down by the hands.

It wouldn’t go further than this. Just this tease.

This sexual undercurrent between us was like the elephant in the room.

He hadn’t kissed me since that day on the lawn.

I mean, we’d both been sick. Yesterday was the first full day that neither of us threw up. We’d just hung out and watched TV and rehydrated. Cuddled and talked and slept holding each other.

There were erections and long lingering looks and tender touches—but he didn’t kiss me. And I didn’t think he was going to. And it wasn’t my place to kiss him because he’d been the one to reject my last advances. So we just circled each other with tension so palpable you could cut it with scissors. We didn’t talk about it and we didn’t acknowledge it, because what was the point? I was still leaving. That hadn’t changed.

Even if I had.

The shift in me was confusing. Like I was in some new territory and didn’t know how to map it. Maddy wasn’t here, so I couldn’t talk to her about what I was feeling. And I couldn’t talk to Justin about it either because I didn’t know how. It was incredibly complex and also unbelievably simple.

I wanted to be near him.

I had to stay to do it. But that wasn’t an option, because I didn’t want the rest of it. The kids and the permanency and the commitment. I couldn’t meet him where he was, and he couldn’t leave. So we just did this instead. We skirted this line, alone on a bed, attracted to each other, wanting each other but at a standoff with no end in sight.

His eyes moved to my mouth for a split second. Then he let go of my hands and got off me.

I sat up on the bed and watched him pick up Nerf bullets in the hallway with his back to me.

When he was done, he set them on the dresser and then came back to the bed and sat down. He set his hand near mine and my pinky touched his. “When do you want me to leave?” he asked.

The question came out of nowhere. My heart bottomed out.

We hadn’t brought up him going home. It was like both of us wanted to pretend that the time on this island was infinite and never had to come to a close.

I didn’t reply.