it made me feel a whole lot less alone.
I was up and ready within an hour, and fifteen minutes after I walked into the kitchen I was back in the passenger seat of the golf cart—which Nikos still wouldn’t let me drive—and we were flying down the hill toward the grove of olive trees, a picnic basket bouncing along in what I now thought of as the bed of the golf cart.
I clutched the handle of the door next to me and just laughed. I’d come to understand that ‘fast’ was his preferred speed, so at least it wasn’t a surprise this time.
“Have you ever considered being a race car driver?” I asked, grunting as we hit a bump in the road.
“I’ve done it,” he answered, without any hint that he was joking. “I wasn’t very good at it, though. To me, going around and around and around on the same loop is just boring. I prefer more variety.”
He hit a curve in the path going approximately a hundred miles per hour and swerved around it, and I swore that we were actually up on two wheels for a moment.
I just shook my head. I was awfully glad that he was feeling so much more relaxed around me these days—but I was also hoping that we’d make it to the grove in one piece.
We did get to the start of the olive grove in once piece—and in what I thought had to be record time—and at that point, he slowed down to a crawl.
“These trees,” he said, his voice suddenly gentle and almost reverent, “have been here a whole lot longer than I have.”
I looked at him, confused, and then looked at the trees in question. “How? There’s no one else on this island.”
“But there was,” he said, his voice still soft. “Before I came, this entire island belonged to a farmer. That was how I knew it was here at all. He wanted to sell the land, and I happened to be in a position to buy. I also… Well, I didn’t want to be on the mainland anymore.”
He cut himself off, like he’d already said more than he wanted to say, and I swallowed the fifteen questions that had already jumped up. How long had he been here? Why had he moved? Why was he here all by himself?
I got the very distinct feeling that he wasn’t going to want to answer any of those, though. Which was why I went for something tame, instead.
“How old are the trees?” I asked.
He gave me a glance that I thought must have been grateful, and said, “I think they’ve got to be a hundred years old, at least, and that depends on whether they were here when that farmer moved onto the island. He might not have been their first keeper. Olive trees can live a really long time, you know. Up to a thousand years.”
I looked back at the trees with newfound respect. “Well then, they’ve seen quite a lot, I guess. Does that… make them, I don’t know, better? More special?”
He parked the golf cart and got out, and I followed him, wondering what exactly we were going to be doing today. A crash course on olive tree growing? Nikos reached out and ran a hand gently along the gnarled trunk of the closest tree, then reached up to pick one of the green olives. He brought it to his nose and inhaled deeply.
“People do say that older trees produce richer olives,” he said quietly. “Though I’ve heard that said mainly about olive oil, not snacking olives, which is what these are. Still, I think it gives the place a certain sense of history. It’s pretty crazy to know that these trees have been around three times longer than we have, isn’t it?”
He offered me the olive, his expression asking me if I wanted it, and I shrugged and took it.
Then, without thinking, I put it to my mouth and slid my teeth along the outside, taking a bite of it into my mouth.
Hey, I’d had about ten thousand of his olives so far. I knew they were edible. What I didn’t know—at that time—was how much they had to go through before they became edible.
That olive was quite possibly the most bitter thing I’d ever encountered in my entire life. My face puckered up without any conscious thought from me, and I nearly choked in my need to get it out of my mouth. I spat it