Separate Rooms

Her mother had booked the villa in January, which meant that by the time I was invited, the sleeping arrangements were already set in stone.

"You're with Uncle Sal," Elena said, the night before we flew to Rome. She was sitting cross-legged on my bed painting her toenails, very carefully not looking at me. "In the little house by the lemon trees."

"Uncle Sal."

"He snores. I'm sorry. My mom thinks it's romantic for us to miss each other."

We'd been together two years. We'd lived together for six months, a fact her mother referred to, when she referred to it at all, as "Elena's apartment situation." I was twenty-six, Elena was twenty-five, and for ten days on the Amalfi Coast we were apparently going to be chaperoned.

The villa sat on a cliff above Positano, pink stucco and green shutters, terraces stacked down the hillside like a wedding cake. Elena's room was on the top floor, with a balcony over the sea. Her mother's room was next door. Her grandmother's was across the hall, and Nonna, I learned within the first hour, slept about as much as a night watchman.

The little house by the lemon trees had two narrow beds, one window and Uncle Sal, who snored exactly as advertised, like a boat engine that couldn't decide whether to start.

Her mother had an itinerary. It was laminated. Every day was full: a boat to Capri, a cooking class in Ravello, a church, another church, a lunch that lasted four hours. Somehow every seating arrangement put Elena and me at opposite ends of it. On the boat to Capri, I sat between Nonna and a cooler.

But Elena had always been better at this game than me.

On the second night, at a long table under a pergola strung with lights, with her whole family arguing about whether the pasta was better here or back home, she slipped off her sandal and ran her bare foot slowly up the inside of my calf. I choked on my wine. Her mother asked if I was all right. Elena asked too, very sweetly, without looking at me, her foot still exactly where it was.

"Fine," I said. "Wrong pipe."

"Be careful," Elena said. "It's strong."

It went on like that. A brush of her fingers across the back of my neck when she passed behind my chair. Her hand slipping into my back pocket for three seconds in a crowded alley in Amalfi, gone before anyone turned around. On the fourth day we swam off the rocks below the villa while her family sunbathed on the terrace above us, and underwater, where nobody could see, she wrapped her legs around my waist and kissed me with salt on her mouth until I forgot how to tread water.

"Your mom is right there," I said, when we came up for air.

"My mom is asleep." She pushed wet hair off her forehead and gave me the slow, wicked smile that had gotten me into this in the first place. "Nonna isn't, though. Swim away from me."

"Elena."

"Swim away," she said, "before I do something that gets you sent home."

I swam away. It was the hardest thing I have ever done.

By the sixth day I was losing my mind. I was sunburned and underslept and so aware of her that I could have told you where she was on the terrace with my eyes closed. She wore a white linen dress to dinner that tied at each shoulder with a little bow, and I spent the entire meal not thinking about those bows. She knew it. She ate her dessert very, very slowly.

Afterward, in the narrow stone stairwell between the terraces, she caught my hand and pulled me into the dark under the stairs.

"I can't do four more days of this," she whispered.

"You started it. The foot thing."

"You started it. You keep looking at me like that."

"Like what?"

She kissed me instead of answering, hard, her back against the cool stone, her hands bunched in my shirt, and for ten seconds there was no family, no itinerary, no Sal, nothing but her. Then a door opened two floors up and Nonna's voice floated down the stairwell, calling her name, and Elena was gone, smoothing her dress as she went, leaving me alone in the dark with my heart going like a hammer.

The opportunity came on the seventh night, and it came from the sky.

Her mother had tickets to a concert in Ravello, an hour away by car, the whole family, a long dinner after. That afternoon a storm rolled in off the sea, and just before they left, Elena came downstairs pale and quiet with two fingers pressed to her temple.

"Migraine," she told her mother. "I'm just going to sleep."

"I'll stay with her," I said.

Her mother looked at me for a long, long moment. Then she looked at the rain, and at her watch, and at Uncle Sal honking the horn in the drive.

"Sal will check on you when we get back," she said. And then, to me, a little quieter: "Make sure she drinks some water."

The cars pulled away down the hill. The rain came down harder. I stood in the front doorway and counted to sixty, and when I turned around Elena was standing at the top of the stairs. No fingers at her temple. Barefoot. In the white dress with the little bows.

"Four hours," she said. "Maybe five, if Nonna orders dessert."

I don't remember climbing the stairs.

Her room was all shadows and blue light, the balcony doors open, the storm coming in over the water. Thunder somewhere far out. Rain hissing on the terrace tiles. She stood in the middle of the floor and waited for me, and for the first time in a week, neither of us was in a hurry.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi."

I'd been thinking about those bows for two days. I untied the first one slowly, and the strap slid off her shoulder, and she let out a breath like she'd been holding it since Rome. I kissed the place where it had been. Then I untied the second one.

"You're shaking," she said, smiling.

"I've been sharing a room with Uncle Sal for a week."

She laughed and pulled me down by the collar, and that was the last thing either of us said that made any sense for a while.

A week of almost had turned into something with real weight, and we didn't waste a second of it. The dress fell. She stepped out of it and pulled me down onto the bed by my belt, and her skin was warm from the sun and smelled like the lemon soap from the villa bathroom. I wanted to learn her all over again, like we hadn't spent two years sharing a bed, and she let me. I kissed my way down the line of her throat, across the pale tan line on her shoulder, over the soft skin of her stomach that made her laugh and squirm, down to the inside of her knee and slowly back up again. Every time she reached for me I caught her wrists and held them above her head, the way she'd been holding me off all week, and she arched up against me and said my name like a threat.

"You're enjoying this," she said.

"Seven days, Elena."

"I know." She broke one hand free and dragged me up into a kiss. "My turn."

She rolled me onto my back and straddled my hips, her hair falling around us both like a curtain, and pulled my shirt over my head. She pressed her mouth to my chest, right over my heart, and then lower, and lower, taking her time about it, until I had to grab the bedpost.

When the thunder cracked right over the house, she didn't even flinch. She came back up, put her lips against my ear and told me exactly what she'd been thinking about across that dinner table every night for a week, all of it, in detail. Then she sank down onto me with a long, slow sigh that I'll be hearing for the rest of my life.

We moved together slowly at first, her hands braced on my chest, the lightning showing me her face in flashes: eyes closed, lip caught between her teeth, a sheen of sweat at her collarbone. Then not slowly at all. I sat up and wrapped my arms around her, and she rocked against me with her fingers knotted in my hair and her breath hot and broken against my mouth, the storm loud enough to cover every sound we'd been swallowing for a week. When she finally fell apart, she did it with her face pressed into my neck, shaking, holding on so tight it almost hurt, and the sound she made pulled me right over the edge after her.

Later, much later, we lay in the wrecked sheets with the balcony doors still open, the storm rolling off down the coast and the air smelling like rain and lemons.

"Sal's going to check on me," she murmured against my shoulder.

"Sal's going to fall asleep in the car."

"Nonna, then."

"Nonna's going to order dessert."

She laughed and kissed my jaw. Far down the hill, a pair of headlights swung around a bend.

I was back in the little house by the lemon trees, in bed with the light off, a full four minutes before the cars pulled into the drive. Sal came in a while later, kicked off his shoes and lay down on the other bed with a long sigh.

"Elena okay?" he asked into the dark.

"She's good," I said. "She's feeling much better."

There was a long pause.

"Mm," said Uncle Sal. "Must have been the rain."

And then he started to snore.