Wanted All Along

Chapter Two

Three days later, Amara stepped off a plane into air so warm it felt like a hand pressed against her skin.

She’d booked the trip on a whim she still couldn’t fully explain—an island she’d seen in a magazine years ago and never thought about again until that night, scrolling through destinations at midnight with her chest still raw. She hadn’t told her sister where she was going until she was already in the air. She hadn’t told anyone much of anything. That, more than the flight itself, felt like the real departure.

The resort was small and quiet, tucked along a stretch of beach where the sand was pale and fine and the water came in soft instead of crashing. Amara checked into her room, unpacked exactly nothing, and walked straight down to the water with her sandals hanging from two fingers.

She stood there a long time, letting the tide reach her ankles and pull back, reach and pull back, like the ocean itself was breathing. She didn’t think about Daniel. That surprised her. She’d expected him to follow her here, the way heartbreak always seemed to follow people onto planes and into new cities, uninvited and unbothered by distance. But standing there, she felt only herself. Just Amara, with sand between her toes and no one waiting on her to be smaller, easier, less.

She decided, right there, that she wasn’t going to spend this trip thinking about what she’d left behind. She was going to spend it finding out who she was when nobody needed anything from her.

She saw him for the first time at the resort’s open-air bar two nights later.

He was sitting alone at the end of the counter, a laptop open in front of him despite the palm trees and the string lights and the very obvious point of a place like this, which was to not work. He had his sleeves rolled to his forearms, a glass of something amber and untouched at his elbow, and the particular stillness of a man who’d learned to look calm even when his mind was somewhere else entirely.

Amara noticed him the way you notice a static shock before you understand what caused it—a small, sharp awareness, gone before she could name it. She looked away first. She told herself it didn’t matter.

She ordered a drink, something fruity and a little too sweet, and took a seat two stools down, close enough to overhear the bartender ask him if he wanted a refill, far enough that she could pretend she wasn’t listening.

“I’m good,” he said, not looking up from the screen. Then, a beat later, closing the laptop with a decisiveness that seemed to surprise even him: “Actually. Yeah. One more.”

Amara smiled into her glass. She didn’t know why that small moment of him changing his mind struck her as interesting, except that it did.

He must have felt her looking, because he glanced over, and for a second neither of them said anything. He had the kind of face that took a moment to place—not because it was unremarkable, but because it held itself so carefully that it took a beat to see past the composure to whatever was underneath it. Dark eyes. A jaw that looked like it rarely relaxed. When he finally spoke, his voice had an easy, unhurried quality that didn’t match the tension in his shoulders.

“You’re going to tell me that’s a mistake,” he said, nodding at his own glass. “Working on vacation.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.” She took a sip of her drink. “But since you brought it up. Yes. It’s a mistake.”

That got something out of him—not quite a laugh, but close. “Noted.”

“Kian,” he said, after a moment, like the name had been sitting there waiting for the right point to offer it.

“Amara.”

“You’re here alone,” he said. Not quite a question.

“I am.” She didn’t offer more, and he didn’t ask for more, and something about that felt like the first honest conversation she’d had in longer than she wanted to admit. No explanations required. No apologies for showing up somewhere by herself, wanting nothing from anyone.

“So am I,” he said. “Though not by choice, exactly. My assistant booked this. Said I needed to disappear for a week before I did something I’d regret.”

“Did it work? The disappearing?”

He considered the laptop, closed now beside his glass. “Ask me in a week.”

They talked longer than either of them probably intended to. Amara learned he ran a company—he was vague about the specifics in a way that made her curious rather than suspicious, like a man used to people wanting things from him the moment they learned what he did. She didn’t push. She found she liked not knowing yet, liked the version of him that existed outside of what he owned or built or controlled.

He asked about her, and she surprised herself by telling him more than she meant to—not about Daniel, not yet, but about the flight she’d booked without a plan, the way she’d been someone smaller for a long time and had finally decided to stop.

“That’s either very brave,” Kian said, “or very reckless.”

“Maybe it’s both.”

“Maybe.” He turned his glass slowly on the counter, watching the condensation ring it left behind. “I don’t think I’ve done anything reckless in about a decade.”

“How’s that working out for you?”

He looked at her then, really looked, in a way that made her feel suddenly aware of her own skin, the warm night air, the space between them that felt smaller than the two stools it actually was. “Ask me that in a week too.”

The bartender rang the last call somewhere behind them, distant and irrelevant. Amara realized, with a small jolt, that she didn’t want the night to end yet, and that wanting something that simply, that immediately, felt like its own kind of reckless.

“I should go,” she said, and didn’t move.

“You should,” he agreed, and didn’t either.

Neither of them said anything else for a long moment, and in the quiet, something passed between them that had nothing to do with words—an understanding, unspoken but entirely mutual, that whatever this was starting to be, they both intended to find out.

“One more drink,” Kian said finally, waving down the bartender before she could argue.

Amara didn’t argue.

They stayed until the string lights dimmed and the staff started stacking chairs at the far end of the bar, until the conversation had drifted from work and travel into smaller, stranger things—the last book that had actually kept him up reading, the reason she still couldn’t watch a certain movie without crying, the fact that neither of them had told anyone back home exactly why they’d needed to leave.

At some point, Kian’s hand found the back of her stool, not quite touching her, just close enough that she was aware of it the way you’re aware of weather changing. Amara didn’t move away.

“I fly out Sunday,” she said, when the bartender finally, gently, told them the bar was closing.

“I fly out Sunday too.” A small, private smile. “Small island.”

“Small island,” she agreed.

They walked out together into the warm dark, past the pool lit up an unreal blue, past palm trees rustling with a breeze that smelled like salt and something sweet she couldn’t name. Neither of them mentioned where they were headed. Neither of them needed to.

Amara thought, walking beside him in the dark, that this was probably a terrible idea. A man like Kian—composed, guarded, clearly used to getting exactly what he wanted and nothing he didn’t ask for—was not the kind of complication she’d flown out here to avoid.

But she also thought about the version of herself who’d spent two years making herself smaller for someone who didn’t deserve the space she gave up. That version of her would have gone back to her room alone, told herself it was the responsible thing to do, and spent the rest of the trip wondering what might have happened if she hadn’t.

She wasn’t going to be that woman anymore.

“My room’s this way,” she said.

Kian didn’t hesitate. “Lead the way.”