‘Donde vas?’ the cab driver asked him.
‘Torre de los angeles,’ he answered, giving the taxi driver the name of the hotel. Then he laughed out loud, realising what the name meant. Tower of Angels.
Angels? His stomach clenched. He had to tell her his secret. Since that night three years ago, he’d convinced himself that not believing in something meant it couldn’t be real. He’d definitely been proven wrong. Today, he would tell her everything. Today he believed.
• • • • •
A two-hour cab ride later and Josh was back at Ella’s hotel, heading straight for her apartment. He had no idea what he was going to say to her, or exactly why he’d come back, but her comment about destiny had haunted him all night. She was right—coincidences didn’t exist.
His hand was shaking as he knocked on her apartment door three times. Paloma, the receptionist, had been elated to see him and insisted he go straight to her room. She’d said Ella was home, but there was no answer.
Was she still asleep? He checked his watch, saw it was nearly midday, and knocked again. No answer.
Perhaps she was out in the back?
When they’d spent the day on the beach, she’d told him how much she loved taking photos of the sea. Maybe she was on the beach. Even if she wasn’t, he could wait for her on her patio. He wasn’t going to put it off any longer, even though he had no idea how he’d find the words to speak the unspeakable.
He left the hotel via the side entrance and walked around the perimeter of the grand building. The back of her apartment was silent save the distant hum of cicadas and the calm waves lapping the sands of their little beach. The sun was hot and high now, and he pulled up the sleeves of his shirt before climbing the stairs to her patio garden. As he reached the top, he could hear the gentle lap of the pool.
Then he saw her.
Like a mermaid, she glistened beneath the water, her long golden body swimming effortlessly below the surface. When she reached the end of the pool, she took a deep breath and dived back under, her arms by her side and her legs hardly moving as she glided from one side of the pool to the other. Josh stood transfixed, staring at her naked back and the way the sun glinted off the curves of her hips and her perfectly pointed toes.
She reached the other side, stood up, took another deep breath and then screamed.
‘What the fuck! Josh? Oh my God, you scared the crap out of me! How long have you been standing there like a weirdo?’
He snapped out of his reverie and held his hands out in front of him.
‘Sorry, sorry, I got here a few seconds ago. I didn’t realise you were home. I knocked but you didn’t answer. I needed to see you. I was going to wait for you out here.’
Ella swam to the edge and climbed the steps out of the pool. Her dark hair, much longer when wet, reached down to her waist and dripped onto the patio as she stood before him. She was completely naked. He reached for a towel on the chair beside him and offered it to her while shielding his eyes, but she swatted him away.
‘Don’t look so uncomfortable, you creep. I’m sure you had no problem with my body last night before you did a runner. I can’t believe you didn’t even say goodbye or leave a note.’
Of all the things he’d expected her to say, that wasn’t one of them. During the entire journey from the airport to the hotel, Josh had struggled to understand why he was running back to Ella. Now, as she stood before him, water dripping into tiny puddles at her bare feet, he knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted her. Not in the obvious way he’d wanted other girls in the past; this time he wanted all of her—mind, body, and soul. Forever. It was so clear now.
They were meant to be together; they always had been. Ella had known it before he’d even admitted it to himself.
‘Well, then say something!’ she said, whacking the top of his arm. ‘I thought you had a plane to catch? Or did you forget something last night? Like respect and manners?’
‘I’m not going to LA,’ he muttered, keeping his eyes fixed on the puddle of water at their feet. ‘LAX Airport is closed. Terrorist alert or something.’
After a long silence she spoke.
‘So, you still believe in coincidences?’
‘Not anymore.’
‘Why are you here then? Fancied another quickie, did you?’
Josh stepped forward and wrapped the large towel he was holding around her shoulders. He gently lifted her hair and placed it over the back of the towel, enveloping her body within it. Her arms were pinned to her side as he held it closed.
‘I never slept with you last night, Ella. We didn’t even kiss. Not properly.’
‘Not properly?’
‘You sang at me at the bar, and I gave you a quick peck on the lips as part of your embarrassing show. We had quite an audience.’
Ella made a strangled sound and turned her head. He took her chin and gently moved it back until they were facing one another.
‘Hey, I had fun.’
‘It was you who put me to bed and left me water and headache tablets?’
He nodded.
‘And you didn’t undress me?’
‘What? No! The first time I saw you naked was two minutes ago when you stepped out of the pool like an angry siren straight out of a teen sci-fi fantasy.’
Ella swore under her breath and tried to walk away, but he held the towel tighter. He was scared to let go, scared of what would happen next. Ella wasn’t just some girl. Whatever he did next was going to lead him straight to his future. Right now he was more than happy to stay in this tiny pocket of time, holding on tightly to her towel. Nothing but him and Ella.
Her wet face was inches from his, so close he could see the water droplets on her eyelashes glinting as the sun beat down on them. The air was silent. It was just her breath and his. A heartbeat. The earth paused, waiting, fate resetting its path.
‘What are you doing, Josh?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. You tell me. You seem to have all the answers.’
With a shake of her shoulders she freed her arms from the towel. She stepped forward, making him stumble backwards until his back was flat against the wall of her apartment.
‘You believe me now?’ she asked, her wet body inches from his. ‘You believe there’s an “us?”’
He placed his hands on her waist and felt her shiver beneath his fingers.
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me. What am I to you?’
His hand slid past her waist and over her hips, pulling her closer to him. Her cold chest was now pressed flush to his. This was it—his first step into a future that had already been mapped out for him.
‘You’re someone I want to fall in love with.’
Ella ran her hands through the back of his hair and pulled him closer until her lips were brushing against his.
‘That’s all I needed to hear.’
Josh had kissed a lot of women in his life, whether for acting or for real. There was never any shortage of actresses or fans he’d thought he cared about, and they had all been more than happy to be kissed. A kiss was a kiss after all. When the script said the kiss took his breath away, he’d act out the part—looking stunned and misty-eyed—but he’d never truly believed a kiss could be that powerful. He had no idea that a kiss could render you speechless, useless, and completely and utterly spent.
When Ella kissed him, his whole world imploded and everything disappeared. There was no her or him, just a them. Everything was condensed into a tiny pinprick of time that lasted an eternity.
When she pulled away, he saw she’d felt it too.
‘I told you,’ she said, struggling to find her voice.
He pulled her back and kissed her again, harder and more urgently. He wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her toward him until there was no space between her damp body and his.
‘Ella,’ he said. Her name sounded different now, more familiar than even his own. ‘Ella, I need to talk to you.’
She stared at him, her
eyes struggling to focus.
‘Yes, we need to talk.’
She stepped back and he pulled her forward again, their mouths hungry for one another.
‘Sorry. Go!’ he said, laughing. ‘Go and get dressed. If you don’t, then we’re not going to get any talking done today, and there’s a lot I need to tell you.’
She smiled hesitantly, wrapping the towel around herself again and walking slowly back to her apartment. When she reached the patio doors, she looked back at him. Her eyes met his and it felt like a punch to the stomach. Ella had always been his destiny. Why had it taken him so long to see it?
ELLA PEEKED OUT of her bathroom window at Josh. He had his back to her and was leaning over the garden wall, watching the kite surfers on the horizon. What the hell had just happened? She’d kissed him because she was trying to prove to herself that Zac had been wrong, that Josh wasn’t anything special. But that kiss! That wasn’t a normal kiss. That was…What the fuck was that?
She put on a long cotton dress and roughly dried her hair. That kiss had changed something. It had realigned her when she hadn’t even realised she’d been derailed. The world appeared differently now—it was finally the right way up. Neat. Easy. Like everything was going to be OK. She hadn’t felt like this since before her mother married Richard seven years ago. Had she been struggling against her life path for seven years?
She picked up a hair elastic and headed for the garden while brushing her wet hair.
‘Hey,’ Josh said, turning around at the sound of her footsteps.
She felt shy and could see he did, too. No more full-of-himself de Silva. He took the hairbrush and elastic out of her hand and twisted her around so she was facing the sea.
Without saying a word, he lifted her hair from her damp dress and gently combed it through, his fingertips brushing the back of her neck with each stroke. A light shiver ran down her spine at his touch. He parted her hair and started braiding it from one side to the other.
‘Are you doing a French plait?’ She laughed. ‘Where did you learn to do that?’
‘My mum. When I was a kid, she used to like me brushing her hair. She’s always been an anxious person; she said it relaxed her.’
‘Tell me about your family,’ she asked, realising she knew very little about him aside from teen magazine gossip.
‘Well, you’ve met my dad. Portuguese, larger than life, successful film director, arsehole. My mum was a Miss America finalist back in the day, and they got together when she was about eighteen. He said he’d get her into the movies, but he never did. They lived in Portugal where I was born. Apparently, they spent a summer right here in Tarifa when I was a baby. My grandfather had a small hotel. Then we moved to London and things turned to shit.’ He’d stopped braiding her hair. All she could hear was the sound of his gentle breathing on the back of her neck and the soft swish of the waves. ‘The bigger my father got, the smaller my mother became, until eventually she was nothing but a watery smile. The more fragile she got, the more he disliked her—it was a vicious circle. He didn’t care. In the end, it was me who was up in the night dealing with her panic attacks and picking up her meds from the doctors.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Someone had to be there for her.’
‘Do you have brothers or sisters?’
‘One brother.’
‘Is he an actor, too?’
Josh laughed.
‘He’s two years old. He’s a cute kid, but I don’t see that much of him. In the end my dad’s affairs caught up with him and one of the women told the papers she’d had his kid, although who knows how many more brothers or sisters I have out there. Mum was never the same after he left; it ruined her. He now lives near me in LA with a woman not much older than I am, and my mother’s in London trying to remember how to breathe again. I travel back and forth quite a bit.’
All this time Ella had thought that Josh was just a spoiled brat, a rich kid with the perfect life. He had the looks, talent, money, a beautiful mum, a successful father, and not a worry in the world. How wrong she’d been.
‘It’s why I was such an idiot in uni,’ he continued. ‘Things between me and my dad were pretty messed up back then. He still directs some of the films I’m in, but he knows I hate him. Although I do my best to keep it out of the media—you know how these shitty gossip magazines love a scandal.’
Josh finished the braid, swung it over her shoulder and then kissed the back of her neck.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘Come.’
He took her hand and led her back to her apartment. Her clothes and underwear were still scattered all over the floor from the night before, her bed unmade, but the only thing Josh was looking at was her.
‘Sit down,’ he said, signalling to her bed. ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for a long time. I’ll feel better once you know.’
‘About your girlfriend?’
‘What? Oh, that. No. I don’t have a girlfriend, not a serious one. I was just…I don’t know why I told you I had one. This is much more important.’
Ella raised her eyebrows at the news but said nothing. No girlfriend was a good thing—wasn’t it? She perched on the edge of the bed and watched him walk to her bedroom wall that was adorned with photos and paintings. He lifted one down. It was the largest frame there, containing a giant feather that was as long as a peacock’s but was also wide and bright white. Ella’s heart skipped a beat.
He sat down beside her and handed her the frame.
‘What’s this?’
She swallowed, but her throat was so dry it hurt.
‘It’s a feather.’
‘From where?’
What was he playing at? She could feel her hands getting clammy. She placed the frame beside her on the bed, scared she would drop it.
‘I don’t know. I just thought it was pretty.’
‘It’s not from a bird, is it?’
Why was he doing this? Josh couldn’t possibly know; only her mother, father, and stepbrother knew. They had seen Zac for what he was, what he used to be before he…She bit down on her lip but couldn’t help her eyes filling up with tears. The feather was all she had left to remind her that Zac had been real.
Josh took her hand in his. One of their hands was trembling; she wasn’t sure whose. Perhaps both.
‘Ella, if whatever we have between us is going to grow, then we need to be honest with one another. And I need to be honest with myself.’ He breathed out and looked up at the ceiling. ‘I know what this feather is, and I have known for a long time. I didn’t want to believe it, but when I saw it in your room the other day, I had to finally admit it to myself.’
‘What do you know?’
‘I know what Zac is.’
They stared at each other for a long time, neither of them wanting to make the first move. Ella hadn’t spoken the truth about Zac in three years, no one except her parents whom she’d bored rigid with her ‘will he, won’t he come back’ conversations until they’d both told her to move on.
But she couldn’t stay numb any longer. She was back on her path with the man she was destined to be with, yet here he was talking about the one person she needed to start forgetting. A single tear trickled down her cheek. Josh wiped it away, but more tears fell. He pulled her into his arms and held her.
‘He isn’t coming back,’ she said, sobbing. ‘He’s dead. He said I was meant to be with you and he was right. There’s nothing between Zac and me, Josh. Not anymore. He’s gone…forever.’
‘Shh, it’s OK.’
‘How did you know? No one knows.’
She sniffed and rubbed her eyes. Josh leant over to her bedside table and handed her a box of tissues.
‘I saw something three years ago, something extraordinary,’ he said. ‘I was desperate to talk to you about it, but you’d gone. Your disappearance was all over the news. They were saying that you’d had a family drama and run away, but I knew the trut
h. I’d seen it with my own eyes but was struggling to believe it, so I tried searching for you. No one at uni had seen you, so I went to your house and your dad—I mean Richard—wouldn’t tell me where you were, either. I was going crazy because I knew you were the only one with the answers. But I couldn’t find you.’
Ella screwed the wet tissue up into a ball. He’d been searching for her? All these years he’d been wanting to talk to her?
‘What did you see, Josh?’
‘New Year’s Eve, the night your stepdad had the grand opening of his new restaurant. Do you remember?’
She nodded. How could she forget? It was the night that had changed everything.
‘I was having a crap time at home,’ he continued. ‘My parents were on the verge of splitting up. I had tickets to the hotel restaurant opening. My dad had given me some spares, but I had no intention of going. I was at some girl’s New Year’s party not far away in Islington, and I was getting drunk and miserable, so I decided I had to see you. I felt terrible about the last time I saw you, when I was a creep to you on the bus. I needed to apologise face-to-face.’
He’d been at the New Year’s Eve party? Ella didn’t remember seeing him.
‘I got to the hotel about ten to midnight and London was heaving,’ he said. ‘You know what it’s like in town that time of year. Fireworks were going off already, and everyone had had too much to drink. I showed my invite to the doorman and he let me in. I was a bit drunk, and to be honest I was also nervous about travelling up the side of the building in a glass lift. The restaurant is on the ninety-ninth floor, right?’ She nodded. ‘People told me the view is amazing, but it’s bloody scary that high up. I was lucky I didn’t have to queue for the lift as everyone was already at the top of the hotel, counting down to midnight. As the lift doors opened, some guy rushed out and pushed past me. I think it was your stepbrother. I don’t know him, but I recognised him from the newspapers and stuff. Anyway, I got in the lift. It had just started to snow, so I couldn’t see anything but white. It was like floating in the middle of a cloud for ages, which made it less scary. How long does that lift take to get to the top floor?’
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