MARIA

It’s too bright out today. Blindingly so. Like the sun crawled out of bed nursing a petty grudge specifically against your corneas and decided today was the day it would exact revenge.

Your palms form an ineffective visor above your eyes, everything still burns despite this.

The sand throws light back at you in sharp, splintering flashes, like someone crushed up a chandelier and scattered it along the shore, sea spread out before you in that lurid, too-perfect blue that does not look real anywhere outside of vacation brochures and edited Instagram posts.

You squint toward the shoreline, blinking against the glare until Emma and Joy emerge in pieces.

A moving arm. Emma springing up and down at the edge of the surf. Joy beside her, louder, both hands around her mouth with the grave urgency of someone trying to rescue you from land.

Which is ironic because you are on land. And land is safe.

Land is reasonable. Land is not going to seize your ankles with freezing water and stop your heart out of spite.

Whitaker’s speaker thuds behind you, the bass breaking open in the breeze as Joy yells, “Stop being such a wuss!” and Emma adds, a little gentler, “Come on, it’s really not that cold!” 

“They're just gonna keep bugging you, you know,” Jack butts in, flipping another page of his book with a flick of his wrist. “Might as well rip the band-aid off.” 

You glance sideways at him, stretched beneath the umbrella like some indolent deity, skin still glistening from the generous layer of sunscreen you smeared into his chest earlier, fingertips skittering shyly over muscles and bones as he tolerated it with begrudging patience.

His shoulders, however, still blush pink at the edges, a physical monument to yesterday’s disregard for your very detailed and considerate planning.

Jack Abbot would rather burn a little than admit you might know best. The eternal martyr, sacrificing comfort at the altar of pride.

You didn’t give him the chance today.

“But the sand,” you protest, words coming out a little more whiny than intended, each syllable a tiny balloon of anxiety popping mid-air. “It gets wet, Jack, and then it sticks in between my toes, and dries in weird little crusty patches, and then I’m stuck thinking about that all afternoon instead of, I don’t know, enjoying myself, which is the entire point of a vacation — at least as far as I understand vacations, and —”

Jack’s book snaps shut decisively, interrupting your spiraling train of thought.

He stares at you, expression caught somewhere between amused tolerance and weary affection, as though he’s watched you spin yourself dizzy like this too many times before. And he has.

“Hey.” His voice is level, gently pulling you back to earth by the scruff of your neck. “We’re at a beach. Sand is inevitable. Rinse it off, dry your feet, move on. You’re preemptively ruining your own day, you realize that, right?” 

A helpless little pout blooms across your mouth, the tired-and-true expression you reserve for only the direst emergencies. Which, admittedly, occurs more often than you’d like to acknowledge.

It’s practically foolproof.

And the way Jack’s gaze softens in increments demonstrates that.

He sighs in response, an unconvincing performance of irritation, eyes half-lidded in exaggerated exasperation.

“Look,” he mutters, resignation thickening his voice, “if it gets that bad, just come back up here and I’ll...I don’t know, help rinse the sand off myself, if that’s what it takes.” 

“Kay,” you mumble, the concession melting off your tongue in the most petulant way possible, fingers fussing at the edges of your cover-up, dragging it upwards.

“There we are,” he drawls, squinting to look at you. “Atta girl.” 

You resist the urge to stick out your tongue at him as you pull it fully off.

And when you do, a sudden, piercing wolf-whistle splits emerges from somewhere in the sea of your peers.

You reel backwards until the backs of your legs nearly knock into Jack’s chair.

You freeze when you get your bearings, cover-up still bunched in your fists, shoulders crawling toward your ears as Dana’s voice sails across the beach.

You think it might be loud enough to alert passing boats.

“Well, damn. Didn’t have you pegged as the type.” 

For a second you think she means the bikini, which is revealing, yes, but nothing crazy.

And that would be bad on it’s own, honestly, because it’s weird enough to have your coworkers perceive you in swimwear, but then Santos gasps from your left.

“Little Miss Prim-and-Proper has a tramp stamp?”

You can feel your eyes double in size.

You release a strangled little laugh. At least, you meant for it to be laughter. You think it sounds more like a sparrow smacking headfirst into a glass window.

“Oh, it’s — it’s nothing,” you insist, swatting a hand. You hope no one notices that the pitch of your voice has risen several octaves. “I honestly forgot it was there.” 

A lie. A terrible one at that. Because yes, obviously, people forget about permanent body art all the time. Perfectly normal. Perfectly believable.

You turn so your back is toward the ocean, blocking the majority of everyone’s view of the damning evidence as your palm flutters helplessly near your hip.

Whitaker rolls slowly onto one elbow from his spot on a towel, eyes narrowing. “Is it, like, supposed to be symbolic?”

“Is — what?” 

“The tattoo,” he elaborates, waving a hand in your general vicinity, like he’s reluctant to approach it directly, wary of frightening you off. Valid concern. You do feel like a flight risk at this exact given moment. “Does it represent something meaningful?” 

Dana snorts into her drink. “Yeah, kid. It means she had a wild semester and access to eighty dollars.”

You part your lips, words half-formed. Explanations or possibly just meaningless static. More likely the latter.

Because with everyone’s eyes suddenly looking at you waiting for you to say something, the attention feels a little too overwhelming.

“It’s a pomegranate,” Jack announces suddenly, rescuing you from yourself. You could kiss him right then and there. “For Persephone. Rebirth, renewal, growth, all of that. She got it sophomore year of college.”

“Yeah,” you agree faintly. You glance helplessly from face to face, feeling every glance bounce painfully between you and Jack, dissecting the air between you into tiny, fragile pieces. “It’s, um — exactly that.” 

Samira’s the first one to offer a reassuring smile. “Oh, that’s actually really beautiful.”

You release another round of nervous laughter, shoulders inching down cautiously. A little uncertain whether you’re in the clear just yet.

Apparently not. 

Langdon jerks his head toward Jack in one jerky movement, sunglasses nearly tumbling from the bridge of his nose. “Hang on. Why the hell does he know that?” 

Your stomach does a violent drop. Like someone yanked a trapdoor beneath you and forgot to cushion you fall.

Shit.

Of course. Why wouldn’t this happen?

Because clearly, the tattoo itself was only a minor humiliation, the polite opening number before the headline act of Jack publicly revealing his encyclopedic awareness of the ink approximately one inch above your ass.

But this is salvageable, right? It’s plausible that you would’ve told him this on a night shift after too much adrenaline and too little sleep.

Your gaze swings toward Jack, wordlessly pleading, imploring him to explain this all away, practically mentally gripping him by the collar and begging for mercy, but he only shrugs. Lazy and indifferent with the tilt of his burnt shoulders.

“Kind of hard to miss from certain angles.”

You watch everyone’s faces go slack jawed.

You don’t wait around the witness the dawning realization behind you.

There’s no need; you can feel it spreading through the air like spilled ink soaking silently into paper.

A terrible little chain of silence, then gasps, then hissed laughter like matches flicking alight one by one. You’ll never live it down, you think.

Someone’s voice calls after you, but you’re already moving towards the ocean.

Suddenly, wet sand seems acceptable. Inviting. Wonderful, even.

this fic was part of my 2 year celebration: maria's summer in santorini 𓆉°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･ to learn more, click here!

“Do you do this for all the girls?”

You’re a drowned thing perched on porcelain, damp and ungainly and trying very hard not to think too hard about the fact that Frank Langdon is standing between your knees with a hairbrush in his hand.

A sight for sore eyes if you’ve ever seen one.

Your hair hangs wet down your back while he works through it in sections, slower than you expected, rougher than necessary, and still somehow not rough as you would like. 

But that’s an inside thought.

He catches on the knots, drags them loose with a muttered exhale, then smooths the strands down with a concentration that feels almost insulting in its sincerity.

Like this is annoying. Like you are annoying. Like he is being dragged through some inconvenient act of service by the cruel hand of fate and his own intact moral code. And maybe he is. You can’t remember in truth.

All you know is he looks very nice like this.

Sun-burnished and tired and quietly put-upon, with that hard mouth of his set in a line severe as a coastline in winter. 

And you, with your pink little arsenal of good perfume and brighter smiles and the ability to joke your way out of almost anything, are suddenly defenseless under the close-up precision of him.

Every crease at the corner of his eyes. All of it too distinct. Too lovely.

“I don’t do this for you, either. You were standing there looking helpless.”

Which is rude, first and foremost. Rude and also difficult to dispute.

You don’t even have a real comeback ready because your brain is still trying to reconstruct the chain of events that got you here.

You’d only come inside to assess the damage, meaning a quick mirror check, maybe a mournful little silence for the state of your hair, and suddenly there he was in the mirror behind you, a cloudfront of shoulders. Like the patron saint of disapproval had decided to manifest in broad shorts.

Then there were words. Something cutting and dry from Frank, something sparkly and defensive from you, words back, words forth, words that shouldn’t mean anything at all.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, in the strange conversational undertow you two are always getting dragged out by, the distance closed without permission, and he ended up with a brush in his hands and between your legs.

How many times can you mention this before it gets old? You’ll test it to find out.

You puff a dramatic little breath out through your nose. “Helpless is such an ugly word, you know. I prefer temporarily glamor-compromised.”

His brows furrow.

“Fine. Temporarily glamor-compromised, then. Doesn’t change the fact that you were still standing there like a drowned kitten, obviously needing someone to step in.”

He drags the brush through the ends of your hair with slow, unhurried strokes, and the mismatch of him is almost enough to make you dizzy. His voice still carries that rough scrape to it, but his hands are built and used with such care.

You wonder if this is what he’s like in action at work. You’d never seen it, really, given your aversion to anything gross and scalpel-y. You avoid the trauma bay at all costs.

But it’s a nice thought to imagine, if you scratch out the gruesome parts and just focus on what his hands would be like under such pressure. Careful and precise and exacting.

You lean forward before you can think better of it, knees knocking into his sides, and lift a finger to tap the tip of his nose.

“I think,” you murmur, watching his face up close like it might tell on him, “you might just enjoy fussing over me.”

He doesn’t flinch like you thought he would.

Instead, his fingers gather the strands at the nape of your neck and give a small pull, bringing you that fraction closer.

Close enough that the rest of the room drops away. Close enough that your eyes snag on the places the sun has kissed and then, apparently, bitten him a little.

Cheekbones lit with more warmth than usual, and sprinkled across both, so faint you almost miss at first, are freckles.

You stare for a second too long, because really, what is that about? What bureaucratic failure in the heavens allowed this man to be built with that level of unnecessary ornamentation?

“And I think,” he says, lowering his voice an octave, “you enjoy being fussed over.”

You feel your mouth run dry, taking an unnecessary swallow to try and reduce some of the swelling.

“Maybe I do —”

The bathroom door swings open. 

Perlah stops dead in the threshold.

Her gaze moves once. Up your glistening legs, to your perch on the marble counter, to Frank standing squarely between them with one hand still tangled in your hair like this is a normal occurrence. Like this is some totally reasonable use of departmental time and resources. 

Whoops. Might be hard to explain this one.

One of her eyebrows lifts in a slow, gorgeous arc, the expression of a woman upon whom fate has just bestowed a gift basket full of gossip. 

“My mistake,” she says with a sweet as poison grin. “Didn’t realize Mr. and Mrs. Langdon had the bathroom occupied.”

“It’s actually Dr. and Mrs., if we’re being tradi —” you start at the exact time Frank says, “Leave.”

She lifts her hands in surrender as she starts to back out.

“Leaving.” There’s a sing-song quality to her voice.

The door swings shut behind her.

You imagine the entire Airbnb will know about your made-up transgressions in approximately 0.3 seconds.

You clear your throat. “For the record, Mrs. Langdon really does have quite a nice ring to it.”

Frank’s stare is pointedly blank. A stare so incredulous it could stop a pulse at twenty paces. The kind that should, by all logic, make you behave. 

It does not.

“Get down from the counter.”

this fic was part of my 2 year celebration: maria's summer in santorini 𓆉°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･ to learn more, click here!