“I see.” He looked back at the picture before carefully setting it on the piano. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“How old were you?”
“Seven.”
“Just a child,” he murmured to himself. “He was in this world?”
I knew what he was getting at: did my father get killed doing the same thing I was doing now? But the reality was far from his insinuation.
“My father was too smart to get involved with this business. He steered clear of men like me.” I sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “He’d fucking hate the person I am now.”
As silence fell between us, I tried to picture Dad’s face in my mind, but with each passing year it had faded and now I couldn’ttell if what I remembered was real or something my imagination made up.
“Where was this taken?” Benoit asked.
“Here on the island, during the Ifestia Festival.” When the name didn’t seem to ring a bell, I continued, “Some people call it the Volcano Festival, since it celebrates the origins of how Santorini came to be. How even in destruction, something beautiful can be formed.” I nodded at the photo, at the fireworks in the background as my father covered my ears from the noise, our faces lit up with huge smiles. I was six, and it was the first time I’d been allowed to go.
It had also been the last.
“It’s a beautiful shot.” Benoit’s lips quirked. “You’re smiling in it.”
“I was six.”
“I know,” he said, and moved a little closer to me. “But it’s nice to know that somewhere inside you is a little boy who used to smile freely.”
“Deep,deepinside.”
“Are you always so cynical?”
“What do you think?”
Benoit put a hand on my arm, and for the first time since I’d discovered who he really was, I let him.
“I think that little boy is still in there. He’s just afraid to come out now.”
I shook my head. “Afraid? Hardly.”
“You’re so used to having to put up a front, show strength, not weakness, that you’ve buried him. But he started to come out with me.”
I swallowed back my denial as Benoit ran his hand up my arm and placed it on my chest. I knew I should shove it aside and walk away, but as he stared up at me with eyes full ofunderstanding, I couldn’t seem to bring myself to move, let alone push him away.
“You can let your walls down,” he said so softly that I almost missed it. “It’s just you and me now.”
“Is it?” My heart thundered under his palm as visions of him on the balcony that first night in Prague, sitting in my lap, flashed inside my head.
Benoit was right—with him I’d shown a side of myself I’d rarely let anyone see, a vulnerable side. It had started out as a lustful craving for him that I couldn’t quit. But the more time I’d spent with him—been inside of him—the more I’d given of myself, until I’d been planning dates in the hopes of impressing him.
That hopeful boy, the one who might’ve grown into a young man my father would’ve been proud of had he lived, had started to re-emerge, and all because this beautiful man had smiled at me.
“When it was you and me, like this,” Benoit said, moving in until our toes touched, “it was only ever us.”
I wanted to believe him. But I wasn’t there yet. So I did the one thing I knew would stop him talking, stop him from pushing me to admit the one thing I wasn’t ready to yet—I kissed him.
I swept my lips over his in a gentle brush, a test. If he wanted to shove me away, he could. But the second my mouth met his, the fingers on my chest clenched around the material of my shirt and he opened to me.
I immediately accepted.
