“What is he doing here?” Lindsey says after I drop John in the new room and go to retrieve some clothes. Kat is in the shower.

“I don’t know.” I gather my makeup, scooping up a black cotton dress to throw on.

“You’re moving into his room?” Her voice is incredulous. She sinks onto the bed, her face flashing with anger before it skids into disappointment. Her shoulders slump, and she shakes her head. Somehow this resignation I see in her is worse than the bitchy attitude she wore like a hood earlier in the trip.

I stop searching for my other black sandal and face her. “I don’t know what’s going on right now, so please, please, please cut me some slack. I have to stay with him, Sin. He’s my boyfriend.” There, I’ve said it again, and it feels a little more natural. “He just dropped a couple thousand dollars and flew to Greece to see me. I didn’t tell him to come, but he’s here.”

Lindsey sighs. “I’m sorry, but this is supposed to be a girls vacation, after all.”

“I know that. It’s not exactly what we planned.”

“Not exactly.”

I shoot her a look, and she has the decency to appear sheepish.

“Sorry,” she says.

I return to my search for the missing sandal, peering under the beds and Kat’s pile of clothes. “I just can’t believe he did this. It’s so unlike him.”

“Why did he say he came?” Kat asks, exiting the bathroom, naked and looking for a towel.

I find my tan sandals under a beach towel, but not the missing black one. “He said I sounded different on the phone. He wanted to make sure I was okay.”

“Ooh, he sensed something,” Kat says, toweling her hair.

“Ah!” I find my sandal wedged between a bed and the wall, but then Kat’s words sink in. “What did you say?”

“Nothing,” Sin says, giving Kat an exasperated stare.

“Well, he did, didn’t he?” Kat says. “He knew something was wrong. He might have a feeling that you’ve been with someone else.”

“Kat!” Sin tosses a pillow at her.

“Oh God, I hope not,” I say. “I don’t know if I can have that talk with him right now.” Now I’m pissed off that John is here. This is my vacation, my escape.

“Don’t focus on that now,” Sin says. “It may not come up, or you may want to tell him, or something different might happen altogether. But I have to ask you—is he with us for the rest of the trip? Will he go to Athens with us?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well—”

I cut Sin off. “Look, I need you guys to give me some time to sort this out.”

“There’s less than a week left,” Sin points out. “Only a few days, really. How much time do you need?”

“I can’t say. I just have to see what happens, what his plans are. Can you guys be patient with me?” I stand in the doorway with my makeup bag, sandals and clothes gathered in my arms.

“Sure,” says Kat.

Sin waits a second before she finally nods.

“How’s everything at home?” I ask John as we get ready for dinner. I take the towel off my head and as I do, my arm hits his shoulder. “Sorry,” I mumble.

We used to be able to maneuver around each other effortlessly in the bathroom. I’d lean into the mirror, applying my mascara, while he brushed his teeth behind me. He’d shave while I sat on the toilet, rubbing lotion into my legs. But now we seem to have lost our rhythm, our sense of direction. We keep banging into each other, and each time I’m startled all over again to see him here.

“Work is crazy as usual,” John says as he shaves his jaw, leaving a strip of skin in the white cream. “No one could believe I was going to Greece.”

“I bet. I can hardly believe it myself.”

God, why did he have to choose now to be spontaneous and crazy? I would have been ready to go home and face him at the end of this week, to try and improve things significantly between us, but here? I can’t wrap my head around the fact that he’s suddenly in Mykonos, in the middle of my girls trip.

John finishes shaving and turns away from the mirror to face me. “Do we have time for a little R and R?” He flicks the towel away from his waist. His nakedness embarrasses me somehow, and I nearly jump away in surprise.

“Oh! No. I mean, we’ve got to meet Kat and Sin downstairs in a few minutes.”

He growls and pats me on the rear. “Then distract me. Tell me more about what you’ve done so far.” He picks through his bag and extracts a tightly rolled pair of boxer briefs.

“Geez, there’s been so much.” I launch into a generic list of all the sights we’d seen in Rome.

“Have you met many people?” His question alarms me. It’s unlike him to be interested in the small details. Is he searching for information? Has he discerned my infidelity, like Kat said?

“Well, let’s see.” I turn on the hair dryer so I have to shout above it. “There’s Trent and David and Jenny.” Conveniently, I skip over the description of any acquaintances made in Rome or Ios. I yell above the dryer’s buzz, going on and on about the people we’ve encountered here in Mykonos. When I’m done, I dash into the room and pull my black dress over my head, stepping into my sandals as if I’m in a race, when what I want to do is close off John’s people-you’ve-met line of questioning.

“Ready?” I ask, grabbing my purse and opening the door.

He nods, but I’m not so sure I am.

Dinner is a study in contrasts. The Kennedy boys, as well as Jenny and her friends, are friendly, rambunctious. They have the wait staff eating out of the palms of their hands and the manager buying ouzo shots for the table within the first hour. John, meanwhile, sits stiffly at my side, looking distinctly uncomfortable with all the boozing and yelling.

“Are you all right?” I whisper to him.

“Culture shock,” he says. “Or something like that. I’ve spent too much time in the office lately, I guess.”

But I know what’s really going on. Every once in a while, when John gets in a social situation where he senses he’s being judged or scrutinized, he gets flustered, the Iowa boy in him deciding he’s not good enough, doesn’t know enough.

Normally at these times, I’ll talk a lot to cover up for his sudden lack of conversational skills. The first time my parents met him we were at an exclusive restaurant in the Loop.

In the bathroom, my mother said to me, “He’s not a mute is he, honey?” When I said no, of course not, she replied, “So why not let him talk?”

I’d tried, but at such times, the gaps of silence screamed at me. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, this high-powered lawyer, all tongue-tied and shy.

Yet now I see that my aiding John that way doesn’t help either of us, just as his brief assurances that I’ll be fine as a lawyer, without discussing the issue, doesn’t help me. So I refuse my inclination to engage in mini conversations with him that would exclude the others, and I refuse to answer for him as I so often had. And there he sits, seeming more and more miserable by the minute.

“How long are you going to be here, John?” Jenny asks, refusing to give up.

“Not sure,” he says with a bland smile, before he returns his gaze to the stuffed grape leaves he’s rotating in a clockwise fashion around his plate.

Jenny plows on. “How do you like Mykonos so far?”

“Great. Really great.” His eyes shift back to the stray piece of meat he’s trying to return to the constellation on his plate.

Sin catches my eye and cocks her head in John’s direction, mouthing, “Nice manners.” She’s right, but I still want to cuff her in his defense.

John and I are sitting at the end of the table, and I keep noticing a canvas that hangs on the wall above his head. It’s a large oil painting of a man and a woman sitting in two chairs by the sea. The man has his arm around the woman’s back, a cigarette in the hand that dangles from her chair. Smoke pours out of the man’s mouth as he leans toward the woman, forming a screen between them. I keep staring at it, my eyes lifting past the white collar of John’s shirt, past his concerned green eyes and thinning hair, until he becomes irritated.

“What are you looking at?” he says, twisting his neck around in a quick awkward movement.

“It’s that painting….” I say, letting my words fall away. I can’t stop staring at it.

“What about it?”

“Nothing,” I say, making myself lower my eyes, forcing myself to focus on his mouth, which has kissed me a million times. What I don’t say is that the painting strikes me as a metaphor of sorts, representing two people with something vague and intangible between them—two people like us.

When the manager returns to the table an hour later with another round of ouzo and the bill, John tugs my sleeve.

“Can we get out of here?” he whispers.

Kat hears him and raises an eyebrow at me.

I feel like barking, “No! This is my vacation. We’re doing it my way,” but I hold my tongue and take a deep breath, thinking that John has made an effort—a gargantuan, if misguided, one—by hauling himself all the way across the Atlantic to find me. I need to make an effort here, too.

I nod at him, and he throws a pile of drachmas on the table that would easily cover the entire check as well as the tab of the table next to us. I retrieve a few of the drachmas. “We’ll see you guys later,” I say. “Where will you be?”

“Scandinavian Bar as usual,” Jenny says cheerfully.

“Will we really see you?” Lindsey asks, pushing her full ouzo glass away.

“Yes.” I look at her as if to say please. I flash a fake smile at the rest of the crew.

“Where do you want to go?” I ask John as we leave the restaurant, turning a corner onto one of Mykonos’s many snaking streets. I look around, trying to figure out if we’re heading toward the docks or the heart of the village.

“Let’s go someplace where we can talk.”

That stops me dead. I’ve been craving those words for the last six months. Lately, I’d have given anything—my apartment, my beat-up Mercury Tracer, my favorite Michigan sweatshirt—if he’d told me he wanted to talk. Instead, I was forever chasing him to give me anything resembling a conversation, while he just wanted to get back to the files he’d brought home, back to work. And he wants to talk now, in Greece. Murphy’s Law.

“You want to talk?” I try to sound nonchalant. “Uh…about what?”

“Us. You and me.” His words are confident and definitive now.

“You and me,” I repeat stupidly, trying to give my brain some time to catch up with my mouth. I wish I could postpone this conversation until I could sort through the slush of feelings in my head. I nod for a second or two and finally look up to meet John’s eyes. He flashes me his crooked smile, the one I can’t resist.

“Let’s go down to the dock,” I say.