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And for as light as it was, it almost felt impossibly heavy.
His eyes fixed on the Atlantic, the way it lay flat against landscape. It was such an intensely different picture than the wild Pacific. He hadn’t noticed it before—hadn’t bothered. Now, he couldn’t get enough of the way it looked like polished glass.
“It’s gorgeous here.”
Wilder chuckled. “I’m from Illinois. It’s just flat—the occasional hill. It’s green—endless fields of it. But nothing like this. We never traveled when I was a kid, and after Scott…” He trailed off and shook his head. “It was hard to look across an almost endless ocean and accept that it’s real.”
“Have you been up to the mountains?” Luca asked.
“Once or twice. Jayden tried to get me to hike last year, but it was just a fucking mess.” Wilder grinned. “The cold triggered my vertigo, and I tumbled down one of the hills. I was done after that.”
Luca winced. He’d been skiing. A lot. Utah, France, Canada. He’d done so fucking much, and none of it felt like it had any meaning, because he’d taken it all for granted. He’d never absorbed any of the gifts he’d been given, and here was a man who was overwhelmed by the sight of the ocean—something he saw almost every day.
It was so simple, and yet, Wilder saw it in ways Luca would probably never understand.
“Anyway,” Wilder said, interrupting Luca’s train of thought, “I spent so much of my childhood doing outdoorsy shit, I’m happy not to anymore.”
Luca chuckled. “That’s fair. It’s like me with Malibu and LA. They’re always busy and no one ever sleeps, and as much as I love my hometown, I think I’m craving something new.”
“This is definitely a far cry from the West Coast,” Wilder said, and Luca couldn’t do anything but agree.
He didn’t just mean the coast though, but he didn’t say that part aloud.
As they got into Harbor Town, Wilder carefully made his way down a bunch of side streets, and eventually pulled into a parking lot with full view of the candy cane striped lighthouse. He turned the car off, then turned the light on, but he didn’t move to get out.
“So, there’s this thing that I’ve always wanted to do here. Um.” He suddenly looked very young and almost shy as he bit his lip and rubbed the back of his neck. “You have to book tickets like months in advance, but Roman had a hook-up, so I jumped on it.”
“Okay,” Luca said slowly. “Is it weird? Is it, like, some zombie escape room or something?”
Wilder laughed, shaking his head. “No. It’s this dinner thing at this little aquarium. They have this massive dome where the fish and sharks and stuff are all swimming over you—and you get to eat, and then take a night tour… It’s, I don’t know. Maybe dumb? But I thought it could be fun.”
Luca’s heart was thrashing against his ribs to the point it almost hurt, and he had to breathe through it for a moment. “I like it.”
“Yeah?” Wilder still looked unsure. “I’ve always kind of been obsessed with marine biology stuff—I could just never you know, get the biology part in school. But I know you’re actually from the coast so this might just seem boring and old.”
“I love it,” Luca said, and he wondered if Wilder could hear the intensity in his tone—because it was heavy, and it startled him. But it wasn’t a lie. This was Wilder doing something for him, but he was sharing it with Luca—not his friends in town, not anyone else. It felt like a moment, and God…he wasn’t sure he deserved it. “Thank you for this.”
Wilder lifted his hand, hesitated, then reached out for Luca and squeezed their fingers for a minute. “You deserve nice things, you know. And not for what you give back. Now come on, we need to go check in before they give our tickets to standby.”
Wilder got out of the car after that, and started walking off like his words hadn’t just stripped Luca bare and left him there to face his own reflection alone.
CHAPTER 12
Wilder wasn’t expecting to be as nervous as he was, but the moment he set his sights on Luca, his heart leapt into his throat. Luca looked gorgeous as he stood there on the porch step in his tight jeans and shirt tailored perfectly to his body. His hair was styled, and his glasses stood perched on his nose, and he looked every bit a man who could have graced the pages of a magazine.
When he got in, though, Wilder immediately noticed the way his eyes were red-rimmed and the way the edges of his nostrils were pink. He’d been crying—and Wilder found a sort of confusing and all-encompassing wave of protectiveness rising in him out of nowhere. It took all of his self-control not to demand who hurt him and to take what little bits and pieces Luca was willing to offer.
As they drove to the city, Wilder was overcome with self-doubt about the date. He’d found the courage to ask Roman if he could still get tickets to the Aquarium At Night event, and he only breathed easy when Roman produced the tickets like it was nothing.
Wilder had Dmitri call and place the reservation time, and then it was a matter of keeping himself busy so he didn’t pace a hole in the floor. By the end of the afternoon, he’d taken out his hearing aids, put Dmitri in front, and turned on music with a heavy beat he could feel in his fingertips as he worked with new flavors for the following week’s specials.
It wasn’t enough to keep his mind from wandering, but it was enough to keep him from staring down the clock until it was time to get ready and go.
He second guessed his outfit three times, but as he came down and heard Dmitri’s faint whistle, he felt like maybe he was doing something right. Then Luca appeared outside the manor looking like an actual movie star, and he was once again reminded that their lives existed in two different worlds. He was a nobody in the face of a man who should have inspired Grecian sculptures. Wilder had to remind himself, over and over, that Luca was leaving. He was here for a week, maybe two, and then he’d go back.
And maybe his life wouldn’t be the same as it was—the sort of shallow, painful pretend-play that had been tying Luca into knots, but he definitely wasn’t going to lock himself down to a place like Savannah. There was nothing there to offer excitement or conflict, and Wilder knew too well that it took a special sort of mindset to be content there for long.
And that was okay.
