Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,83

other in these kinds of rooms—how rivalrous she had once been. But she went on, determined to explain herself: “I was very in love with grand cities and civilized gatherings and all of that—but I must tell you, there is nothing quite as beautiful as the world with no building or road to mar it, the world brand new but also ancient, everything untouched by the busy agendas of people like us.”

“You’re too profound for me, dear,” said Adele with a smile that was neither warm nor charmed. “But I can see that you’ve gotten quite a lot of sun. How will that look on your wedding day?”

Vida smiled more brightly and held Adele’s gaze until Adele was shamed into looking away.

“Vida,” said Fitz, turning back from Adele’s husband, wearing an expression that began as a warm smile but was tense, alert to trouble, ready to change into something else at any moment. “Will you dance?”

“Oh, yes,” Vida said, relieved to leave the conversation she had muddled somehow. She lifted her arms, and let her fiancé place his hands at her waist and wrist and move her backward, into a dance. “I don’t think that woman liked me very much.”

“I heard what she said. I love how you look. Anyway, she will like you. We went around together for a time, so she might take just slightly longer than everybody else to admire you as I do. But she will. They all will. Don’t worry.”

She was glad she wasn’t the same girl as before—the kind who would puzzle over a slight all day and all night. It was easy now to move away from Adele Jones. Whatever she had against Vida didn’t matter to Vida at all. She didn’t have to play by those rules.

As they moved across the floor, through the rise and fall of bodies, their own frames lifting up off their toes and coming down to their heels as they turned and turned and turned to the music, she experienced that peculiar sensation, that coming back on shore after a long swim. She missed that sensation—that rocking that was just a memory of being rocked by the sea. “I’m not worried,” she said, and her lips parted in a smile that was not about this room, or this moment at all.

“Then what?”

“I was just thinking of this day when I swam out too far in a bad current and Sal followed me—he showed me how to swim along the shore until I was out of it. It might have been scary, but it wasn’t. I was so pleasantly exhausted afterward, and it was as though I saw where I was for the first time. Where all of us are, I suppose. It was a good day.”

“Vida.”

“Oh, dear.” She snapped back from the memory, and produced the high tinkling sound of her most effervescent laugh to put him at ease. Why had she revealed so much? Yet she had that crazed feeling, like standing at a cliff’s edge with no desire to step back to safety. “Sal’s your friend, I know—”

“Vida.”

“There’s nothing to confess, it’s just that—”

“Vida!”

“But we did become close. In fact, I felt that—”

“Vida, enough!”

She was startled by the vehemence with which he cut her off. She couldn’t think now what she had been about to say. She was confused, unsteady. The mania of the previous moment evaporated. Fitz glanced around, to see if anyone had noticed. But the room was noisy; everyone was a little drunk and consumed with their own business.

“Enough,” Fitz said. He said it quietly, but with more force. Vida understood that he was forbidding her from saying more on the topic of Sal. “It impressed me very much how brave you were through the whole ordeal. But now that you are saved, now that we are to be married, you should put it in the past.”

Vida felt stung by his vehemence. That he had so forcefully told her what to do. But she could put that away. She had to. She effected a cheery tone. “Yes! You’re right, of course. Let’s be married, let’s have it all over with as soon as possible, and then we can go off with our bags, lightly packed, in search of the next summit.”

“Summit?” When Fitz’s brow folded up in confusion it had the strange and winning effect of making his eyes seem more blue than the moment before.

It made him look very handsome, and Vida smiled, thinking of how he would look in a