I’ve already shared a couple of winners, but just to keep it recent: I lost my job the day after my roommate moved out. In June, I got some car repairs done and a ticket when a hit-and-run shoved my brand-new car into a no-parking zone. And this summer an old woman fell asleep on my shoulder on the bus, and I only realized she was dead, and not actually asleep, after I’d missed my stop.”
His eyes go wide.
“I’m kidding about that last one. I don’t even take the bus.”
Ethan bends, cupping his hands over his knees. “I don’t know what I would actually do if someone died on me.”
“I think the odds are pretty slim.” Even half-asleep, I grin as I pour our coffee into two paper cups and slide one in front of Ethan.
Straightening, he says, “I guess I’m suggesting that you give the idea of luck too much power.”
“You mean how positivity breeds positivity? Please don’t tell me you think you’re the first one to mention this to me. I realize part of it is outlook, but honestly—it’s luck, too.”
“Okay, but . . . my lucky penny is just a coin. It doesn’t have any great power, it’s not magic, it’s just something I found before a bunch of awesome things happened. So now I associate it with those awesome things.” He lifts his chin to me. “I had my penny the night we ran into Sophie. Logically, if everything was about luck, that wouldn’t have happened.”
“Unless my bad luck countered your good luck.”
His arms come around my waist, and he pulls me into the heat of his chest. I’m still so unaccustomed to the ease of his affection that thrill passes in a shiver down my spine.
“You’re a menace,” he says into the top of my head.
“It’s just how I’m built,” I tell him. “Ami and I are like photo negatives.”
“It’s not a bad thing.” He tilts my chin, kissing me once, slowly. “We’re not supposed to be carbon copies of our siblings . . . even when we are outwardly identical.”
I think about all this as we move into the hallway. I’ve spent my entire life being compared to Ami; it’s nice having someone like me for me.
But, of course, this awareness—that he likes me the way I am—trips the following one, and once we’re in the elevator and headed to the lobby, the thought bursts out of me, unattended. “I guess I’m a pretty firm one-eighty from Sophie, too.”
I immediately want to sift the words out of the air and shove them back into my face.
“I guess, yeah,” he says.
I want him to add, “But not in a bad way,” again, or even “I’m glad,” but he just grins down at me, waiting for me to spew some more nonsense.
I will not indulge him. I bite my lips closed and glare up at him: he knows exactly what he’s doing. What a monster.
Ethan continues to smile down at me. “Are you jealous?”
“Should I be?” I ask, and then immediately amend, “I mean, we’re just having a vacation fling, aren’t we?”
He lets surprise slowly—skeptically—take over his features. “Oh, is that all this is?”
The way this lands feels like a boulder rolling down my spine. We’re only a couple of days away from hate and into tenderness—it’s way too soon to be talking about this in any serious way.
Or is it? I mean, technically we’re in-laws now. It’s not like we can leave the island and never see each other again; at some point we’re going to have to deal with what we’re doing . . . and what the fallout will be.
We step out of the elevator, pass through the lobby, and, in the darkness, get into a cab; I still haven’t answered him. This is one I need to sit with for a little bit, and Ethan is apparently fine with that because he doesn’t prompt me again.
What’s amazing is that even at four thirty in the morning there is traffic headed up through the national park to the crater’s peak; there are vans with bicycles, hiking groups, and couples like us—we’re a sort of couple—planning to lay down a towel and huddle together in the morning chill.
It takes an hour to get through the traffic and to the top, where we scrabble up a series of rocks to the peak. Even though the sky is still mostly dark, the view is breathtaking. There are clusters of people standing huddled together in the cold