The engine hummed low beneath them, steady and salt-wet, cutting through the green water toward the tree-line that Nara recognized before she even consciously looked for it.

She knew this ocean.

Her hands were in her lap, fingers laced, and she told herself she was sitting still because the boat required balance.

She told herself that.

Gia had her hands on the wheel and her jaw set at the angle it took when she had decided something and was finished being asked about it.

The wind pulled at her hair — dark, thick, cut shorter since the last time — and she did not push it back.

She watched the horizon.

"I didn’t expect you to be able to drive a boat."

Celia said it from the back bench, looking at Gia’s shoulders, noting the ease there. The complete, infuriating ease of a woman who had quietly learned a skill just to come back to a place.

Gia did not turn around.

"Shut up." 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

That was all. Two words, flat, the finish on them absolute. The sound of a woman who did not want to explain the nights she’d spent on YouTube tutorials at two in the morning because she needed to get to an island and she needed to not need anyone else to take her.

Celia looked down.

The sketch was in her hands.

She had drawn it from memory — him, the angle of his jaw, the way his collarbones sat below his throat, the proportion of his shoulders. She wasn’t a trained artist. The lines were imprecise. But it looked like him.

It looked enough like him that she had stared at it for three nights straight and hated herself.

Her thumb moved over the paper edge.

"Will he even meet us."

Not a question. The phrasing of someone who already believed the answer was no and was asking just to put the fear into the air where it could be examined.

A pause.

The water moved under them.

"I highly doubt he would be there." She turned the sketch over, face-down on her knee, as if she could hide from her own hope. "He must have went somewhere again." Her chin rested in her palm. The gesture of a woman who had been waiting too long and knew it. "With some other woman."

Nara exhaled through her nose.

It was the specific sigh of a woman whose body still remembered things her pride had spent weeks trying to un-learn.

She had woken three times in the past month reaching for warmth that wasn’t there.

She had punched a pillow once.

She had told no one.

The sigh came out anyway, deep and involuntary, her chest falling, her eyes going to the middle distance where the water became sky, and she let the sea breeze do what it wanted with her hair because the effort of caring about that felt absurd right now.

"Shut UP."

Celia’s voice cracked across the deck like a hand slap.

Nara blinked.

Celia had turned fully around on the front bench, one hand gripping the rail, the other pointing — not at Nara, but at the general direction of pessimism, as if she could physically gesture at the attitude and make it leave. Her hair was windblown and her eyes were bright with the specific fury of a person who had packed a bag and rented a boat and was not going to sit through defeat before they had even arrived.

"Don’t you see how he had the power to ’teleport?’"

She said it like she was explaining gravity.

"You think a man who can snap his fingers and move through space is bound by the same limits as your ex-boyfriend who couldn’t even show up on time?" A breath. Her hand swept the water. "The moment he gets bored with whoever — he ’will’ come there. I know it. He will be there."

Nara looked at her.

"...So what." Measured. Careful. The voice of a woman trying not to want things too loudly. "Are we going to stay at that island for some time? Just — camp there? Waiting?" A beat. "We are literally leaving our social lives, Celia."

"Then go away."

Gia said it from the wheel, not turning, her voice carrying easily over the engine and the wind with the practiced authority of a woman who had spent considerable time making sure her words landed.

"You don’t need to come with us."

Nara’s mouth opened.

Closed.

Opened again.

"No." Quiet. The admission dropped into the salt air with the weight of something she’d been carrying since she first said yes to this trip. "I want to meet him."

The silence that followed had texture.

All three of them felt it — the specific, loaded quality of a shared knowledge that none of them were going to name.

Nara looked at the water.

Celia turned the sketch face-up again, tracing the jaw line with one finger before she made herself stop.

Gia’s grip on the wheel adjusted fractionally, her knuckle paling and then releasing.

They were remembering.

Not in the way you remember a date or a meal. In the way the body remembers — cellular, deep, below language.

Nara had been unconscious.

That was the part that still made no sense to her when she thought about it rationally — the timeline of it, the specific arrangement of events that had left her drifting in a drug-and-shock stupor while his hands found her in the dark of the cabin. She had woken to warmth. To fullness. To the rolling motion of the boat combining with something else, something deliberate and deep, and her body had been responding before her mind caught up.

She had slapped him.

She had called him a pervert with genuine, hot-faced fury, her palm connecting with his jaw with enough force that her wrist stung.

He had looked at her with the specific, unhurried calm of a man who had expected the slap.

And her body had — ’inconveniently’, catastrophically — clenched around him anyway when he met her eyes.

She had blamed the drugs.

Three weeks later she was still blaming the drugs.

Her thighs pressed together on the boat bench, because the memory arrived with full sensory detail whether she invited it or not, and she was wearing a thin sundress over her bikini, and she did not need the complication.

’He had reached her cervix without trying.’

She pressed her thighs harder together and looked at the horizon.

Gia’s memory was quieter. More humiliating in its own way.

Not humiliating because it had been bad.

Humiliating because it had been ’good’ in a way that made the previous twenty-three years of her life seem like a rough draft.

She was a person who had long since stopped expecting much from men in that specific department. The two-minute boyfriend was not an exaggeration. She had actually checked her watch once. She had been embarrassed on his behalf.

And then.

’And then.’

For the first time — at twenty-three, in circumstances she would never describe to anyone — she had understood what the fuss was about.

She had felt it in her spine. In her hands, which had gripped his shoulders because there was nothing else to grip.

She had heard herself make sounds she did not recognize as her own voice, loud and embarrassingly unguarded, and she had not been able to stop because the stopping reflex had simply ceased to function.