Page 65 of You, with a View

I push my plastered hair off my forehead. “You have to admit it was splashy. Pun intended.”

“The cherry on top would’ve been you slipping and cracking your head on a rock. This trip is missing a hospital visit.”

My fingers instinctively go to the scab on my knee, my stomach twisting. “No need to make up stupid shit I could do, Spencer. I’ve already racked up a couple of actual instances.”

He moves closer, his expression smoothing out into something lighter in deference to my tight tone. If nothing else, he pays attention. “What, like that time you fell down an embankment and nearly gave me a heart attack?”

“Or the fact that you’re sleeping on the floor because I didn’t read the Airbnb details closely.” We drift to a shallow spot, my toes brushing against the rounded rocks below. Theo stands. It exposes his chest, that softly freckled skin, and he runs both hands through his wet hair, pushing it back from his impossibly handsome face. I clear my throat, blinking away. “You didn’t have to sleep on the floor, you know. The pullout is big enough.”

“Don’t think it is,” he says, his voice the same texture as the red rock I run my palm over to ground me, a velvet roughness. “I wastoo drunk to care about sleeping on the floor last night, but I’m paying for it now. My entire body is fucked up.”

“That could also be the—and I quote—metric ton of bourbon you drank last night.”

He groans. “Not my most brilliant moment.”

My gaze drifts to Paul, who’s across the way, propped up on a flat rock, book in hand. Though he has a clear line of sight to us, I feel alone with Theo.

I turn back to him. “Do you feel better now?”

I can’t help my curiosity—or concern, though it’ll probably be rebuffed.

His face wipes clean of its small smile, his eyebrows cinching back into the frown that’s been his constant companion today.

My heart sinks. I start turning away in anticipation of him shutting me down. I don’t want to look at his face when he does it. I don’t want him to see how much it affects me that I can’t get to him.

“Shepard,” he says just as I start to swim away.

I glance over my shoulder, raising an eyebrow. He looks nervous, but something in his gaze is fortified.

“Can we play our game?”

It’s my game with Gram, but the truth is, playing it with Theo keeps it alive. And if he’s going to hand me a secret right now, he can call it ours all he wants.

“Okay,” I murmur. “Tell me a secret.”

He wipes a hand over his mouth. Delicate water drops shift all over his skin, clinging desperately to his eyelashes and hair, collecting in the soft hollows of his collarbones and rolling down his shoulders, his chest. They touch him everywhere I want to. I resist the urge to press my finger against every one, wipe them away so all he feels ismytouch.

“I’m stressed because they’re—uh, Where To Next’s business model is shifting. We had investors come in last year and buy a majority stake of the company, and—” He lets out a dejected sigh. I move closer, the water lapping gently at my skin, and he watches my approach. “Any way I describe it will be a massive understatement, but to give you an example, the off-season deals will go away eventually.”

“What!” I exclaim. “That’s the best part.”

Theo’s expression twists. “I know. If the projections hold, then we’ll recoup whatever losses we suffer with VIP packages and other elevated offerings. And if they don’t hold, then the whole fucking thing goes down. I think it’ll go one way, everyone else thinks it’ll go the other.” He runs his hand just beneath the water. “Anton and Matias got on board with it quickly. Really quickly.”

“That hurt you.”

Theo’s eyes flash with surprise. “I—I mean, it could run the company into the ground, and there goes all our hard work. It also goes against the reason we came up with it in the first place. Travel should be accessible, not some series of Instagrammable moments that puts people on the outside looking in. This would make it unachievable for some of the people we’ve served for years.”

His voice drops, so quiet that the birds singing above us nearly drown him out. “My dad thinks I’m too emotional about it. He keeps demanding that I do whatever they want just to keep—the peace.” He clears his throat, squinting off into the distance. “Last night I told him he has to stop calling me. I don’t want to spend the rest of this trip miserable over shit I can’t control. It’s bad enough I let him ruin my night last night.”

Relief is as cool as the water against my skin, and pride as warm as the sun shining down on us. I get the feeling he doesn’t set boundaries with his dad often.

“I’m glad you did that. No offense, but your dad’s a dick.”

One corner of his mouth pulls up. “Told you, it runs in the family.”

Normally, I’d jump all over that, but I’m starting to see there’s very little of Theo’s dad in him. Paul’s fingerprints are everywhere; it’s just taking time to reveal itself.

“There’s nothing wrong with being emotionally invested, you know.” His expression softens with the realization that I’m not taking the bait. “It’s not close to the same thing, but for me, caring about the pictures I’m taking means I’m doing my best work. Why is it a bad thing that you’re invested? You built this business from nothing. If you’re worried about its success, of course you’ll want to fight it, whether it’s business, emotion, or a mix of both.”

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