Chapter 319: Chapter 321: The Honeymoon
ARIA’S POV
She found out at thirty thousand feet.
They’d been in the air for two hours and she’d asked three times and gotten nothing and she was considering more drastic measures when Damien reached into his jacket and put an itinerary on the table between them.
She looked at it.
Maldives. Private island. Seven days.
She looked at him.
He was looking at her face with the expression of a man who had been waiting for exactly this moment.
"You’re smiling," he said.
"I’m not smiling."
"You’re absolutely smiling."
She looked back at the itinerary. The villa details. Overwater. Private pool. Butler service. The kind of thing that existed in a register so far from a girl who had grown up watching her mother work three jobs that she still sometimes had to remind herself that her life was real.
"The Maldives," she said.
"Yes."
"You booked a private island."
"A villa on a private island."
"Damien."
"You deserve it," he said simply. "You deserve all of it."
"When did you plan this," she said.
"Three months ago."
She looked at him. "Three months ago we weren’t engaged."
"No," he said. "But I knew."
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then she picked up the itinerary and read every word of it and didn’t say anything else about it because there wasn’t anything to say. He was right. She did deserve it. She was done arguing with things that were true.
They landed at Male at dusk.
A seaplane to the island. Twenty minutes over water that turned from grey to green to the specific impossible blue of the Indian Ocean in the last light and she sat with her face against the window the entire time and didn’t pretend she wasn’t doing it.
Damien watched her.
She could feel him watching her. She didn’t turn around.
"Stop looking at me," she said.
"No," he said.
She smiled at the window.
The island appeared below them....small, ringed with white sand, the water around it so clear she could see the reef from the air. The villa sat over the water on its own jetty, separate from everything, the kind of private that money could buy and that she was not going to feel complicated about.
Not today.
Not this week.
****
The villa was too much.
That was her first thought. Too much, too big, too beautiful, more than any person reasonably needed for seven days.
Her second thought was that she didn’t care even slightly.
Glass floors over the ocean. A bed facing the water through panels that had been opened so the room and the sea were the same space. A deck with a pool that disappeared into the horizon. The sound of water everywhere....below her feet, outside the walls, in the warm salt air moving through like it lived there.
She walked to the deck.
Stood at the edge.
The sun was finishing with the horizon. Orange into pink into the deep blue of the first stars coming through. The ocean was completely still. A kind of still she hadn’t known existed outside this place.
Damien came up behind her.
His hands on her waist.
His lips to her shoulder.
She leaned back into him.
"Well," she said.
"Well," he agreed.
"It’s a lot."
"It’s exactly right."
She leaned further back and he wrapped around her properly and they stood there until the sun was completely gone and the stars came out one by one until the sky was full of them.
She forgot what she’d been worried about.
She forgot there had been anything to worry about at all.
***
They ate on the deck.
The butler had set everything up before they arrived...the table, the candles, food that tasted like it had been made by someone who understood that this was a night that deserved to be fed properly. They ate and talked about nothing important and everything important simultaneously and the ocean made its sounds below them and the stars came out one by one until the sky was full of them.
She hadn’t seen stars like this in years.
The city ate them. She’d forgotten they existed like this....dense and uncountable, the kind of sky that made you understand why people had spent thousands of years trying to map it.
"I forgot stars did this," she said.
"Did what."
"Looked like that." She nodded up. "In the city you get maybe ten. Fifteen on a clear night." She looked at the sky. "This is something else entirely."
He looked up.
"My grandmother used to say the stars were just the light from things that had been burning for longer than we could understand," he said. "That all you were seeing was how far back time went."
She looked at him.
He was still looking at the sky.
"Richard told you that," she said.
"She told him. He told me." He looked at her. "She had opinions about everything."
"She sounds like someone I would have loved."
"She would have loved you more," he said. "That was always her way. She loved the people who came into our family more than the ones who were already in it." He paused. "She said it was because the ones who chose to come had better taste."
Aria laughed.
He smiled.
She thought about Eleanor Blackwood at twenty one deciding what she wanted before she had permission to want it.
She thought about a ring that had sat in a drawer for twenty years and was now on her finger in the Maldives catching the candlelight.
***
DAMIEN’S POV
She came to bed in his shirt.
His shirt from the flight....she’d disappeared into the bathroom and come back in it and nothing else and her hair was down and she was looking at him with the expression that had been doing things to him for a year and that he suspected would be doing things to him for considerably longer than that.
He looked at her.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi," he said.
She crossed to the bed.
She stood in front of him and he reached out and ran his hands up her legs slowly, unhurried, taking his time with it because they were in the Maldives on their honeymoon and he had nowhere to be and he intended to use every second of that.
She watched his hands.
"Damien," she said.
"Mm."
"I need you to know something."
He looked up at her.
"I’ve been thinking about this all day," she said. "Since the airport. Since the plane." She held his gaze. "I’ve been thinking about this room and this bed and you and I need you to stop being slow about it."
He looked at her for a moment.
"You’ve been thinking about it since the airport," he said.
"Since before the airport honestly."
