Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,75
have—that I have—stood on a few summits.”
Vida wasn’t sure why this should blunt the pleasure she took from the view.
“But I’ve never been here before.”
“No,” Vida said quietly. “And neither have I.”
His smile overtook his face. “This is a good one.”
“Is it?” She couldn’t bring herself to smile back. “How would I know? Maybe this is a very average summit.”
“Don’t you remember what you told me in the dining room of the Princess?”
“No.” Vida had to laugh at that. “Who can remember such things?”
“You told me that the adventures of young women are adventures of the heart—or of husband-hunting. And that it was enough for you to see the heights of the world through the eyes of the man you would marry.”
“That does sound like something I’d say,” she allowed, although the Vida who would have said it seemed very far away. “But of course I have no husband.”
“And I have no other summit. Should we see what more is out there?”
They walked down into the valley, through the grasses, under trees that were entirely different from the trees on the other side of the ridge—trees that dripped purple flowers and disgorged bright birds—walked past streams and wooded pools. They saw shelled sea things that had been broken against the rocks, leaving gleaming piles of treasure. The seabirds had dropped them to make their feast. On the far side of the island they found another cove, this one even more dramatic than the one where Fitzhugh had entertained her one night by moonlight.
“This place was a volcano once,” he said.
“How can you be sure?” she asked.
“I can’t. I’ve been to places in the world where they know there was a volcano because of the way the ash is compounded in the rock, and because of the lore of the people who live there. They’re always shaped something like this. The island will have a high ridge and a valley, a cove cut open to the sea that long ago was burned by hot lava. My favorite place in the whole world is like that. An island in the Mediterranean. A giant volcano erupted there once, and wiped out a great civilization. We went there to rest after a trek in the Sahara, and I’d go down to the port at sunset and talk to the old fishermen bringing in their haul for the day. If Fitz hadn’t needed to return to New York, I would have stayed there on that volcanic island a long time.”
Vida shivered at the thought. “You don’t think this island could erupt.”
“Oh, no—that was long ago.”
“How does a person know so much?” Vida wondered out loud.
Sal shrugged. “There is an eon of history in every pebble, if only you know how to interpret it.”
“Sal,” she said. The very sound of his name in her mouth made her shiver. She’d said his name so many times by that point. But it was hard to say now—there were so many things she wanted to ask him, and they all seemed very difficult to put into words. “Do you remember when you swam out to me? The night we got the pig, the night the current was strong?”
“Yes.”
“And afterward, on the beach?”
“Yes.”
She was blushing furiously with her own girlish stupidity. Why had she brought that up? It was because she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She desperately wanted him to be thinking about it, too.
After a long pause, to her enormous relief, he said, “That was nice.”
“Yes, wasn’t it nice?” Her words were coming faster now, she didn’t feel that she could control them, she was afraid she would say something too true. “I remember being so easy and full of good feelings.”
“I was, too.”
“Well then why didn’t you—” She was out of breath suddenly, was having a hard time knowing what it was she was trying to say. “What I mean is—you might have tried . . .”
“Tried what?”
Vida’s laugh was high, nervous, stupid sounding. What was that laugh? She didn’t sound like herself at all. It seemed very urgent that he understand that was not her ordinary laugh. She would tell him. She opened her mouth to explain, but instead she heard herself say, in a clear and even voice, “To kiss me.”
“Oh.”
“That was very, very silly of me to say. Why would you want to kiss me?”
“It’s not that I didn’t want to.”
A big breath filled the sail of her lungs and the surface of her eyes was suddenly wet with an emotion that she wasn’t