The walk back to my villa is ten steps. It feels like ten miles. Each one is a drumbeat in my skull, echoing his voice saying ‘real’ and my mouth saying ‘yes’ and the shower running behind a closed door. I let myself in. The room is exactly as I left it—sunlight fading on the terracotta tiles, my suitcase spilling silk onto the floor—but it feels like a set after the play has ended. My mind isn’t clearer. It’s just quieter, a numb static hum where the screaming was. I see the bed. The crisp, white, unrumpled bed. I don’t even kick off my sandals. I fall onto it face-first, and the world goes dark.

The buzz is an angry insect trapped under my pillow. I swat at it, groaning, my mouth tasting like regret and stale salt air. My phone screen glows with a text from Amelia: *Cultural dinner on the beach. 7 PM. Do not be late. Do not wear jeans.* I bolt upright. The sky outside my window is a deep, bruised purple. Shit. Shit. I have twenty minutes.

What does one wear to a ‘cultural dinner’ next to the man whose taste you still have on your lips? Something that says ‘I am unmoved and sophisticated’ and not ‘I am one frayed nerve away from climbing you like a tree.’ I yank open my suitcase. My hands find a scrap of emerald green silk—a bikini top, really—and a matching wrap skirt made of about a thousand threads. Perfect. It’s armor. It’s a flag. It’s probably a fire hazard. I scrub my face, slap on some mascara and a lip stain that promises to be ‘unforgettable,’ and twist my wild hair up with two sticks. I look like a woman who has her life together. I feel like a haunted house.

I take a breath, square my shoulders, and push open my villa door into the courtyard. The night is warm, strung with lanterns that cast dancing gold pools on the stone. And there, leaning against the archway that leads to the beach path, is Sebastian. He’s changed. Crisp white linen shirt, sleeves rolled to his elbows, dark trousers. He looks like he’s been waiting. He looks like he’s been standing there for a century.

“You’re late,” he says, his voice a low rumble in the quiet courtyard. His blue eyes track over me—the flash of emerald at my ribs, the length of bare leg the skirt doesn’t cover—and his jaw tightens. Just a fraction. A tiny fracture in the marble.

“I’m fashionably late,” I correct, my own voice coming out surprisingly steady. “It’s a cultural tradition where I come from. And I’m right on time for that.” I take a step toward him. The space between us crackles. “Were you appointed my escort, Professor? Or are you just lurking?”

“Lurking implies a lack of purpose,” he says, his gaze still anchored to mine with a force that feels physical. “I was ensuring you didn’t get lost. The path is poorly lit.” I close the remaining distance between us, the scent of him—clean linen and something sharper, like ozone before a storm—wiping away the last of the static in my head. My hand lifts, not to touch his face or his chest as the memory of an hour ago screams at me to do, but to the crisp, folded linen of his sleeve. My fingers brush the sun-warmed skin of his forearm as I adjust the cuff, a deliberately slow, intimate fussing. The muscle beneath jumps. “Your sleeve was uneven, Professor. It was bothering me.”

He doesn’t pull away. He doesn’t breathe. He just watches my fingers on his arm like they’re conducting a silent, devastating symphony. “And now?” he asks, his voice rougher.

“Now it’s perfect.” I let my hand fall, my fingertips singing. “Lead the way, then. Since you’re so concerned with my navigation.”

He turns without another word, a study in controlled motion, and I fall into step beside him on the crushed shell path that winds toward the beach. The roar of the ocean grows, a bass note under the chirp of crickets. The lantern light dapples his profile—the stark line of his jaw, the curve of his lower lip that I have now, technically, bitten. Every step is an echo of the ten I took away from him. My heart is a frantic bird in the cage of my ribs, and the emerald silk feels suddenly very, very thin.

“So,” I say, because the silence is a living thing wrapping around us. “A cultural dinner. Will there be interpretive dance? Should I have worn more feathers?”

“There will be a roast pig,” he says, his eyes fixed on the path ahead. “And, presumably, cutlery. Try to use the fork, Imogen, not your hands. For Amelia’s blood pressure.”

I bark a laugh, surprised. It’s a joke. Dry as bone, but a joke. The tension between us shifts, morphing from pure electricity into something more familiar, more dangerous. It feels like before. “I make no promises. What’s the cultural significance of the pig? Vanquishing one’s enemies? Celebrating gluttony?”

He glances at me then, a quick, blue flash in the dark. “Celebrating the fact that we’re not the ones on the spit.” We round a bend, and the beach opens up before us, a wide crescent of sand lit by towering torches and crowded with long tables. The scent of roasting meat and smoky fire washes over us. I can see Amelia’s sleek bob near the front, Arthur beside her, laughing at something. Sebastian stops walking, letting the shadows of a palm tree cloak us for a moment longer. “Ready?”

It’s not a question about dinner. I look from the bright, noisy spectacle ahead back to his shadowed face. “No,” I say, honestly. “But when has that ever stopped me?”

He doesn’t answer my bravado, just offers his arm with a formality that feels like a dare. I slide my hand into the crook of his elbow, the linen crisp under my palm, the muscle beneath solid as oak. Together, we step out of the shadows and into the torchlight. The heat from the flames is an instant slap against my skin, a welcome distraction from the heat coming off him. A hundred conversations dip for a half-second as eyes flick our way—Amelia’s sharp, Arthur’s warmly oblivious, his parents’ curious. Sebastian’s posture doesn’t change, but I feel the minute tightening of his bicep under my hand. “Chin up,” he murmurs, his lips barely moving. “You’re the one in the emerald flag. Wave it.”

“Imogen! Sebastian! Over here!” Arthur’s voice booms across the sand, a lifeline and a sentence. We’re ushered to a long table where Amelia is surgically dissecting a piece of grilled fish. Her gaze sweeps over my outfit, a single, eloquent arch of her brow. “I said cultural dinner, not cabaret.”

“This is culturally significant to me,” I say, sliding onto the bench beside Sebastian, our thighs a breath apart under the table. “It’s called ‘making an entrance.’” The table is a chaos of platters—glazed pork, sticky rice wrapped in leaves, bowls of something pungent and fermented. I reach for a spring roll. “See? Fork.” I wiggle the utensil at Amelia before taking a messy, defiant bite.

Sebastian serves himself a precise portion of everything, his movements economical. He’s playing his part flawlessly: the attentive brother-in-law, the polite guest. But when Amelia leans forward, her voice low and pointed, his stillness becomes something else. “So. You two walked in together. Everything… alright?” she asks, her eyes darting between us. “No more midnight swims or golf cart incidents?”

“The path was dark, Amelia,” Sebastian says, his tone smooth as aged whiskey. He doesn’t look at me. He butters a piece of bread with fastidious care. “I was ensuring your sister didn’t trip and sue the resort. It’s the sort of logistical foresight you’re always advocating for.” It’s the perfect deflection—dry, practical, and utterly insulting to her sense of order. Amelia narrows her eyes, suspicious but disarmed.

The dinner rolls on in a wave of noise and flavor. I laugh too loud at Arthur’s jokes, I let Amelia explain the fermentation process of the pickled vegetables twice. I perform. And through it all, I am hyper-aware of the man beside me. The brush of his knee against mine when he shifts. The way he fills my water glass without being asked, his fingers just missing mine. The low, private timbre of his voice when he leans in to ask, “Surviving?” His breath ghosts my ear, and my whole side erupts in goosebumps. I nod, unable to speak, because the truth is I’m not surviving at all. I’m drowning in the quiet space between our public performance and the memory of his door closing behind us. The roast pig tastes like ash. The torchlight feels like an interrogation lamp. And I realize, with a sinking, thrilling clarity, that the most dangerous place at this table isn’t in the shadows where we came from. It’s right here, in the blinding light, pretending we’re strangers.