Free White Vespa by Kevin Oderman Page A

want to go? It’s a lesser Dodecanese. Some very beautiful places on the island, just made for a camera,” Jim said.
    â€œWhen are you going?”
    â€œThe best connections are tomorrow.”

Twenty-one
    22 June
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    Anne slept late and then stayed in bed a long time after she was awake. She ran her hands over her torso, feeling her ribs. She liked the way her narrow fingers fit in the grooves between them. She felt light inside, a glow under the skin of her taut abdomen. That would be hunger. When she got up, she told herself, she’d eat, oranges maybe.
    She rolled over and pressed herself into the bed, writhing quietly. She wondered about her face, how it looked now, how it would look in the photographs Myles had taken the day before. The thought made her feel uneasy, exposed. The whole session had gone out of control from the very beginning. She hadn’t been what she’d intended, hadn’t shown what she’d intended, had no idea what she had shown.
    She rolled over again; her feet slapped the floor and she sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on her knees, hands in her hair, kneading her scalp with her long fingers. Then she remembered Paul.
    â€œShit,” she said softly.
    Â 
    She twisted the juice from four oranges into a glass, filling it to the rim. She drank off an inch and then refilled it from a bottle of vodka she kept in the refrigerator. She stirred it with her finger and then washed her hands.
    She wanted to be alone. Outside, the sun was hot, very hot. She put on her bathing suit, a serious, one-piece black suit made for actual swimming. She’d decided she’d swim first, think things over after. Think about Myles and about Paul. But as she walked by the boatworks and on around the point where they’d met Paul yesterday, she found she couldn’t help but think about him now. Sými was small. You were going to bump into people; then you’d remember them where you had seen them, and they would rattle in your head when you didn’t want them to. As long as you stayed out of things, you could keep clear, but then, that’s all you could do. And it wouldn’t be possible to
live that way on Sými. Here, you would have to act, or be acted on, and she’d come to act.
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    The first cove was crowded with day-trippers but Anne had had enough of walking. She picked her way through their pink flesh to the water’s edge, kicked off her sandals, and waded right in. She despised people who waded in slowly, who refused to take a plunge. As soon as the water was deep enough, she dove, swimming strongly under the surface of the water for a long time. The surface shone like the broken shards of a bright mirror, and she swam under it, out of sight, until she was well beyond the farthest swimmer. By then, her chest was tight, but she forced herself to glide up through the surface, no commotion. She rolled onto her back and took deep, even breaths, her eyes cast up into the simple blue of a clear sky.
    She watched the seabirds riding the wind, now close and low, now drowning in deep sky. Anne let herself go, just floating, felt the small waves rippling through her. The birds, she thought, were in flight but not fleeing. For all their ease and poise, they were hunting.
    She held her arms out like pale, thin wings. She tried on a hunting expression, severe eyes under drawn brow, head cocked a little. Then she began to swim, her legs scissoring through the sheer sea water. She lifted an arm up out of the sea then plunged it back in again and she was gone, diving deep.

Twenty-two
    22 June
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    Paul had been surprised by Anne’s open hostility. That wasn’t fun. He didn’t like other people’s hostility unless he was trying to provoke it. He lay flat on his back, doing sit-ups in sets of ten. He was between sets and breathing hard. The dust stuck to him. He started in, ten more. The hard floor hurt and he resented the dust, and he thought