MARIA

There are, you feel, worse fates than ending up marooned in Santorini wearing Jack Abbot’s clothes.

A plague of locusts, for one. Stepping on a lego barefoot perhaps. Or, in what may in fact be the cellar floor of human suffering, finally getting your suitcase back only to unzip it and find nothing inside but hideous hospital scrubs and lonely, misshapen shocks instead of your cute little outfits and your even cuter, very tiny bikinis you were supposed to be wearing on this trip.

And honestly that’s not entirely outside of the realm of possibility.

You packed at two in the morning with the executive function of a feral raccoon rifling through a gas station dumpster, so really the universe would be well within its rights to punish you.

This, then, was fine. More than fine. A salvageable situation. A win, even, if you angled your head and refused to inspect it too closely.

Except for the microscopic issue that his clothes smell like him.

Which you understood in a distant, theoretical way you know rain is wet or fire is hot or men’s clothes tend to smell like the men wearing them. 

But now you understand it in that immediate, full-body way of a person trapped inside the atmosphere of a man she is trying, with only moderate success, not to be weird about.

Tobacco. Leather. Something dry and woodsy underneath, oak maybe, something warm and stern and impossible to separate from him now that you’ve noticed it.

It smells like competence. Like an almost-choice. Like the split second before you do something you already know you’ll have to lie about later.

And now it’s all over you. In the collar. In the cuffs. In every breath you take like your lungs have joined the opposition. 

You huff it in like an addict and make your way into the living room. 

Rain taps steadily at the tall glass windows, turning the whole house dim and silver at the edges.

Most of the group has collapsed into the couch in various stages of damp-haired, wine-soft sprawl, limbs overlapping without much regard for ownership, all of them fixed on some black-and-white film flickering across the tv screen. 

The kitchen counter is crowded with wine glasses in varying stages of neglect, some nearly full, some reduced to lipstick ghosts and shallow red smears at the bottom, and you decide this is as good a moment as any to acquire one of your own.

You deserve it, after all.

You grab an unused glass and pour a generous amount.

From the end of the couch nearest to the kitchen, Victoria looks up from her phone, takes one look at you, and arches a brow. 

“Nice sweatshirt,” she remarks. “Should we be thanking you for your service?”

Your eyes drop to the enormous ARMY stamped across your chest, which, in hindsight, does feel a touch less subtle than you might have hoped. Not understated, exactly. More like a public service announcement.

“Lost suitcase,” you say, heat climbing to your face as you fuss with a sleeve that falls halfway over your hand. “Jack let me borrow something, so… blame the airline.”

Santos lets out a sharp little laugh from beside her, all pleased with herself before she’s even opened her mouth. Never a promising sign.

“That’s a new one. Usually people skip straight to admitting they’re sleeping with him.”

You sputter around a mouthful of wine, swallowing too fast, too badly, eyes watering as you whip around to glare at her over the rim of your glass.

“Trinity,” you stage-whisper, eyes huge. “Jesus Christ.”

“Who’s sleeping with who?”

Jack’s voice lands from somewhere directly behind you. 

You turn and there he is.

Grey sweatpants riding low on his hips, black t-shirt skimming a chest and shoulders broad enough to make the whole rest of the room look underbuilt, all of him calm and self-contained in a way that makes you feel, by contrast, like a person assembled in a rush from spare parts.

You force your eyes upward with considerable effort and bite your tongue hard enough to keep from openly staring. 

Santos is dead. Santos is dead and, before she dies, you are taking every single one of her beach towels. Let her drip-dry for the rest of the trip. Let her know hardship.

“Nobody,” you say quickly, then quicker, before somehow the first version had not been convincing enough. “No one is sleeping with anybody. There’s no sleeping happening. That is not a thing that is, um, happening.”

Jack gives you a quizzical look at that. You imagine he might be considering have you checked out.

Then his mouth tips at one corner. “Shame. For a second there it sounded interesting.”

Before you can scrape together anything remotely usable in reply, Jack is already moving past you, one hand catching lightly at your waist as he goes, casual, thoughtless, the absent sort of touch that means nothing to him and enough to shave several fiscal years off your life.

He heads straight for the couch, dropping into it.

Santos leans toward Victoria and mutters, in a voice carrying all the discretion of a car alarm, “Yeah. Real shame.”

You choose, with great maturity, not to acknowledge her. Which is easier to commit to in theory than in practice, especially when you turn toward the choice and realize your choices have narrowed to two.

One, the far corner, between Robby and the intern under a blanket that is doing a pathetic job of concealing whatever the hell is going on beneath it.

Or two, the open seat beside Jack.

You cross the room and lower yourself into the space next to him, careful to leave what you hope reads as a normal, socially unremarkable amount of distance between you.

He doesn’t look away from the movie.

“No need to get that defensive about your love life, kid,” he murmurs. “We’re all adults here.”

“I was not defensive,” you whisper back, which, admittedly, sounds suspiciously like the sort of thing a defensive person would say. You take a sip of wine. “It was a misunderstanding. That’s all.”

At that, Jack finally turns his head and looks at you properly. “So you are sleeping with someone?”

Dana’s eyes flick up from the movie, sharp and curious for exactly one second too long.

“Will you keep your voice down?” you hiss, then immediately drop yours lower still, because apparently hypocrisy is one more thing you’ll be sampling tonight. “No. I am not sleeping with anyone. And even if I were, that would be none of your business.”

He lifts both hands in surrender.

“Fair enough. Not my business,” he agrees. You exhale, which turns out to be premature, because then, after a beat, he adds, “Could’ve fooled the room. They seem to think everyone about you is my business.”

Your fingers twitch, and the wine makes its move, sloshing clean over the rim and splattering across the front of your — his sweatshirt in one dark, awful splash.

“Shit,” you blurt, already half setting the glass down, reaching for the hem in a burst of useless panic, like maybe if you rub at it fast enough you can bully time into reversing itself. “Jack, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to, I just, you said that and I…”

“Hey,” he says, catching at your wrist before you can make the stain worse. “It’s fine.”

“No, it’s not,” you say, mortified. “I just spilled red wine all over your sweatshirt.”

“You spilled red wine on an old sweatshirt,” he corrects.

Before you can launch into a fresh round of apology, he leans in and lays a hand flat over the stained part of the sweatshirt like he’s assessing damage. Entirely practical. Entirely innocent. A normal thing to do when something has been spilled on his clothes.

Your body reacts like it has never encountered human contact before, going warm and taut all at once, every nerve abruptly standing at attention.

You become excruciatingly aware of the space between you, which is to say there almost isn’t any.

“It’ll wash out,” he concludes, drawing his hand away.

You swallow, still staring at the stain because the stain is safer to look at than his face. “I feel awful.”

“You look awful.” 

Your head flies up so fast your neck nearly protests. He catches the horror on your face and, finally, there it is, the quick flicker of amusement.

“Upset, I mean. More upset than I am.”

“Of course I’m upset. You were nice enough to let me borrow your clothes and within, what, an hour, I’ve turned one of them into a crime scene.”

“That’s dramatic.”

“It’s merlot on gray cotton. I ruined it.”

“It’s not ruined,” he says, easy as anything. “And even if it was, I’ve got more.” His eyes flick briefly to the sweatshirt. “I was going to let you keep it anyway.”

Your brain, already functioning at reduced capacity, latches onto I was going to let you keep it anyway and immediately begins behaving like it has never encountered a normal sentence before. Which is ridiculous. It is a sweatshirt. People loan each other sweatshirts all the time. Probably. In very casual, emotionally neutral circumstances. None of which feel remotely relevant here.

“This is exactly the kind of thing that happens,” you murmur, “when the airline loses your entire life. Murphy’s law ans all that.”

He laughs softly through his nose.

“What all was in the suitcase?”

“Everything,” you say. “Clothes, makeup, skincare, my will to live.” Then, because apparently embarrassment has made you reckless, you add, “My bikinis too, which was kind of the point of coming to Santorini in the first place.”

He is quiet for a second.

“Too bad,” he says. “Would’ve liked to see those.”

Santos lifts her head from the couch like a shark catching blood in the water.

“Gross,” she says. “Can you two either make out or shut up? Some of us are trying to watch sad people chain-smoke in peace.”

A quiet laugh ripples through the room. Dana hides hers behind her wineglass. Victoria doesn’t look up from her phone, but the corner of her mouth gives her away.

You lock your eyes on the television with the rigid focus of a person trying not to burst into flame in public.

Your face is hot enough to qualify as an environmental hazard. A flare-up risk. One loose spark away from requiring intervention.

Beside you, Jack shifts back into the couch, looking unbothered. 

“Good movie,” he murmurs.

You take a long sip of wine and decide, not for the first time, that the airline owes you financial compensation, emotional damages, and possibly a public apology.

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

You’re crouched by the rocks, thinking (maybe overthinking, definitely overthinking) about how tides are basically nature’s very slow, very patient way of rearranging furniture, nudging the shoreline grain by grain. Erosion as decoration, oceanic feng shui.

Your toes, lacking imagination or enthusiasm for your existential oceanic musings, wriggle unhappily in gritty sand, damp and insistent, like the world’s least appealing exfoliation treatment. 

But you’re stubborn, and stubborn means you’ll ignore discomfort if there’s something captivating enough to distract you. And just ahead, caught in the safe anonymity of shadow, is a small crab. It skitters sideways, freezes mid-motion, as though playing the world’s tensest, tiniest game of red light, green light. 

You’ve never really gotten the hang of “enjoying” the beach like a normal person, have you?

Even as a kid, your beach trips meant scraped knees and awkward contortions above tiny tide pools. Scientist postures adopted decades too early. Your mind always running away from you, darting through an endless maze of questions that refused resolution.

Once you tried to smuggle an entire jar of seawater home, insisting it was important, vital even, despite overwhelming visual evidence that it was just… salty water with a few grains of drifting sand. 

“Brachyura,” a voice says from behind you, abrupt and far too close to your ear to belong to a stranger. Your breath hitches and your foot slides ineptly in the damp sand.

Gravity lurches enthusiastically toward public embarrassment, already whispering promises of sandy humiliation, but a pair of hands find your shoulders, tugging you gently upright like an oversized marionette whose strings they’ve begrudgingly learned to untangle.

You crane your neck up, blinking upward through eyelashes clumped from salt air.

Langdon. 

Fresh from the water, apparently. Incarnation of stern practicality wrapped in saltwater shine. Hair dripping small rivulets of ocean down his neck, skin glistening damply, sunlight skittering over his features as if it, too, is uncertain it will find a kinder place to rest. 

“I — uh, well yes, that’s — technically that’s just the infraorder,”  you stumble hurriedly, words tumbling like dominoes, trying desperately not to acknowledge the persistent warmth of his hands still bracing your shoulders. You straighten your spine, awkwardly graceful (okay, mostly awkward), as your mouth rushes ahead without permission from your brain — “Which is good, infraorders are perfectly good places to start, broad strokes and all that, but, if you want specificity, which I assume you do, since you’re you and everything, accuracy-wise, I’d guess Grapsidae? Because of, um, the carapace? Although I realize that’s probably not visible from your angle, which makes this an educated guess — or maybe an overly ambitious one? Anyway, I might be wrong — though, honestly, I don’t really think I am.”

Langdon’s eyebrows lift fractionally, and without explicitly calling out your obvious spiral into nervousness (small mercies), he simply crouches next to you, hands moving from your shoulders to his knees, leaning forward into your shared fixation on the tiny creature.

“Carpace shape would definitely clarify,” he agrees softly, eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Of course, if accuracy’s our goal — and you’re right, that’s very much my thing — we could always catch it and verify. Or is speculation more your comfort zone?”

“Catch it?” You practically squeak, eyes wide, picturing your clumsy human hands accidentally crushing something so small and helpless, immediately spiraling into guilty imagined apologies and crab funerals (poorly attended, perhaps only yourself, a few baffled seagulls, and the soundless waves). “No, no, speculation is good. Excellent, actually. Much safer for everyone involved, particularly tiny, defenseless beach residents.”

“Probably wise,” he murmurs, his voice barely louder than the tide hushing at your feet. “Better not to risk it. I suppose some things are best left unconfirmed.”

You shift infinitesimally closer, almost involuntarily, and find your voice tumbling out again before you can reconsider, earnestness coloring each syllable: “I'm still inclined to think it's Grapsidae, though.”

Langdon hums in soft acknowledgment, a small sound that vibrates through him into you, startlingly intimate in its resonance.

“Confidence is appealing, even misplaced confidence,” he remarks casually. “Though I’d argue it looks more Portunidae.”

“No — no, see, Portunidae is — well, not impossible exactly, but definitely unlikely, because the back legs on Portunidae are paddle-shaped, distinctly modified for swimming, right? And this crab, if you look closely, has pointy, ordinary walking legs, which —” Your eyes flicker upward, catching the small, barely-there curve of his mouth. “Oh. You’re… you're totally messing with me right now, aren’t you?”

Langdon’s smile broadens just enough to confirm your suspicion, eyes glinting. He lifts one shoulder in a lazy half-shrug, lightly apologetic in theory, not remotely in reality.

“Guilty. Sorry,” he admits. “I have this innate desire to contradict you. Consider it a character flaw.”

You tilt your head slightly, making an unsuccessful attempt at hiding your grin, cheeks undeniably warm. Purely sun-induced warmth, naturally (or at least that’s what you tell yourself).

“That explains everything,” you say, affecting an exaggerated, mock-serious air. “Honestly, this puts your whole personality into clearer perspective.”

Langdon chuckles quietly under his breath, the sound rare and low enough to draw your eyes back to his face. “Well, now you know. Incurably flawed, I'm afraid.”

“Deeply incurable.”

He holds your gaze for a second longer, a quiet smile playing softly at the corners of his mouth, before turning toward the distant line of waves. 

“Come on,” he says, voice gentle, almost affectionate. “Let's walk. We'll leave our mysterious friend to its existential privacy.”

You follow, still smiling, sand soft beneath your feet and heart inexplicably lighter.

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

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