Was the sky ever this blue at home? The sun seemed to beam here, and out across the glittering bay I could see Mount Vesuvius poking its summit through the skirt of morning fog that hung around its slopes. The blossoms in the bushes were beginning to uncurl their petals with the light. Birds twittered tranquilly in the trees. She seemed as if she was about to cry.

The light dappled across her there on the bench beside me. In the shade of the trees, it was cool—the heat of summer seemed just a touch dampened. Her shirt hung loosely off the slopes of her breasts. I could see her chest heaving, her lower lip beginning to tighten about itself only to relax. She let out a long exhale and leaned back on the bench, looking up toward the blue of the sky.

“I just wish it somehow wasn’t my fault. I wish I could blame it on you. I wish you’d raped me or hit me or taken advantage of me because I was drunk or something—anything horrible so that it wasn’t my fault.”

“I mean, I did bite you,” I said.

She held back a laugh. “Shut up.” She was nervously spinning her ring around her finger. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Fuck, I don’t know. Something to take it all back. I’m married.”

And so she was, but that didn’t seem to be a problem last night when the lights of little Sorrento by the sea were dim and the breeze came coolly off the Mediterranean, skirling between the houses with their sloping roofs and the shutters of windows that bumped gently against their frames above us in the alley where we were both took turns pinning the other to the wall before making our way inside. In there we could hear the clatter of the shutters against the windows, but not the tick of the wind. It was calm, and quiet, and warm, and the candle burning in the corner unfurled a thin strand of black smoke against the tile wall. The limoncello bottle was emptied first, then cast aside on its back on the floor. Our clothes piled on top of it, and we woke with the sun with the breeze dead and the window ajar to the serenity of still morning air.

I leaned away from her on the bench and cast my arm over the back of it. “Well,” I said, “It’s not like he’d ever find out. There’s a whole ocean between the two of you.”

“We go home in two weeks.” “So?”

“So, I have to tell him.”

“Why? That’s a terrible idea.”

She threw her hands up to her temples and pressed in on them with two of her fingers.   “He’s my husband.”

“Well, do you still want him to be?” I asked. She looked at me, shocked at the audacity that I could make such an inference. She didn’t say anything. “Because last night, these past few nights, it hasn’t seemed to matter that he’s your husband. Seemed like it mattered more that he wasn’t here.”

“You barely even know me. We met what, a month ago? You don’t know me at all.” “I know you well enough…” I held my tongue there, letting her finish the sentence herself. I thought it was best, but I shouldn’t have done it.

“You know what? Fuck you. You barely know me at all. We sleep together once and you think you know me? We were drinking last night, that’s it.”

“And hugging and kissing and rubbing up on each other and flirting for weeks before that.”

“Whatever. We were drunk. It was a mistake.”

“It wasn’t, and we both know we weren’t.”

“It was nothing. It was a mistake. We were in the romantic fucking Amalfi Coast, and we made a mistake.”

“If that’s what you want it to be, Kate.”

Our conversation went silent there in the shade of that little tree looking out on the bay. The sun had risen and the glitter of the waves cast awesome reflections against the walls of the houses of the town and the cliffs they sat upon that towered over the water. Far away a boat churned in the waters. To our left a couple slowly descended a long flight of steps to the strip of beach that rested at the bottom of the cliffs beside the marina. I could feel the heat of the day beginning to creep into the streets behind us.

“So, what now?” I asked after a while.

“I don’t know. We can’t do that again. We can’t do anything again.”

I said nothing. I looked down and watched my hands work at themselves as though I were detached from them.

“Grant, I love him.”

When I looked up she was boring her eyes into mine, imploring me to give in, begging me to see anything else in them, but I loved her.

“I understand,” I said. “Nothing else will happen. Never again.”

“Good.”

“No more biting,” I teased.

Kate let herself laugh this time and hit me playfully on the shoulder.

We stood from the bench and hugged with as much awkwardness as we could force into the embrace, but there was no self-consciousness in any of it, and we could not make it to exist after we had loved each other through the night before.

Now we were only friends. And we walked quietly away from the bench together down the narrow, brightly colored, pennant-lined alleyways of little Sorrento by the sea. As we meandered through the streets and navigated shaded hairpin turns induced by the cliffs that fell away to the water, we began to inch closer, subconsciously at first, but impossible to ignore once her hand brushed against mine for the first time. We looked sheepishly at one another when it happened for the second and she looked down to her feet and tucked her hair behind her ear in the dappled light beside the wall under the trees of little Sorrento by the sea. We could hear tile merchants and fruit vendors hollering in Italian, up the street and around the corner where a pearl-blue moped was parked.

She let her hand brush against mine again, and this time it lingered. Slowly, beginning with the pinkies, our fingers and hands began to curl and attach to the other’s as thorns do to a shirt. We were both looking at the road as we walked. And I felt her hand slip away like the prolonged dying of a flower.

Kate stood in the arched doorway of her apartment with the sun on her face, her eyes squinting in the brightness. “I’ll see you this evening?”

“I’ll be there,” I said, and she nodded, opened the door, and disappeared from the view of the sun. It hung there high in the sky over the crisscross of streets as I made my way back to my apartment. And through the still open window I could see the sun reflecting off the rows of waves out in the bay all the way to Naples. I watched the light change from inside that day, and when my roommates began to stir about in the next room, I stayed there in bed with an arm bracing myself against the wall, watching the sun reflect off of the waves. What a fool I was to have believed anything would come of it. And now there would be row upon row of questions as soon as I poked my head out my bedroom door. They would be satisfied with any answers or non-answers I gave them and would want to walk down the long stairs to the beach beside the budding flowers in the bush beside the bench where the sun had dappled her face in the early morning light, where I had wished I could have held her against me and felt her curves against my arms and my chest. I wished I had been a bolder man, or I wish she would have resisted any of my advances, that she had slapped me in the alleyway. Hard. And that a neighbor had seen through an open shutter and ducked her head back inside ashamed to have seen me so embarrassed there below her window. I had felt her, instead of the sting on my cheek, and to know it was gone away was like watching a ship sail by your deserted island without stopping. I could not flag her down.

I wondered what Kate was doing. Was she lying there in bed convincing herself that perhaps such serendipitous things as these were unavoidable and those involved were better for it despite the consequences? What a thing it would all be if there were no repercussions, no shockwaves to reverberate—ever. Just lying there, listening to the shutter clatter against the window and Kate rising to open it to the night’s sea breeze, her candle-lit silhouette lingering beside the window to look out on the moon’s reflection in the bay, Vesuvius looming off in the distance beside the lights of Napoli. What I would have given to trade the harsh reflections on the waves of the water now for the soft moonlight on the darkness of the sea.

I watched the glow of the sun arc outside the window, first booming proudly from the zenith, until somber photons kissed the cliffs that led down to the waters. According to legend,

Odysseus’s sirens lounged on the rocky crags above the beach here. He heard them but sailed on, bound to the mast.

In the afternoon I allowed myself to get up and walk about the apartment and answer the cascade of questions I’d known were coming. My answers and non-answers satisfied those asking. And we went for a walk around town before we had to get ready to go to dinner.

“How formal is this thing?” I asked.

“Pretty formal, I think. Semi-formal? I don’t know. Just wear the nicest things you brought.” I put on a button up and my best pair of unwrinkled jeans. We gathered ourselves, and before we left, we each took a pull from a bottle of grappa. I needed to be drunk for this.

And there she was—a short red dress—the slopes of her petite breasts—shimmering legs—smoky eyes—flawless­—holding a glass of red wine that matched her lips, and she was as drunk as I had needed to be in the amber light below the cliffs of little Sorrento by the sea. Above us I could see the evening sun glint off the pastel colors of the houses of the town. I looked around us and tried to avoid meeting her eyes. I listened to some conversation beside me. I wasn’t paying any attention. I was watching the light.

“What an amazing place,” she said, and I knew this was coming, “don’t you think so, Grant?” I looked down from the sirens’ cliffs to her. She was glaring at me through a smile. She took a sip of her wine and watched me above the rim of the glass.

“Beautiful,” I said. I tried to listen to the conversation beside me again.

“Simply amazing. I wish my husband was here to see it.”

“Yeah. I bet that would be nice.”

“It would.”

I nodded and took a gulp of wine from my glass. I looked to the cliffs, I looked to the gently rocking boats of the marina, I looked to anywhere but the fire in her amber eyes. Kate finished her glass and grasped the bottle from the center of the table, pouring herself another. There were couples climbing the long stairs to the bench, and I could hear the laughs of late-day swimmers echo off the cliffs down the beach. I wished I were somewhere else. I felt the heat of mortar bursts again. I felt my heart contract and the adrenaline pulse through my body and heard the whizz of the metal when she spoke.

“Wish my husband were here to see this. Just look at Mount Vesuvius over across the bay.”

I did not want to, but I turned in my seat and stared out across the water to where Vesuvius stood stout above Naples. She knew she had me when I looked at the slopes of the mountain; Kate knew she’d won.

“Remember climbing it?” I asked. “We stopped at that little restaurant near the summit. We bought two bottles of wine. One to drink, one for your husband. And we drank the whole thing and watched the boats come and go in the bay.”

“Stop.” She’d said it with authority and finality. She crossed her legs and took another sip of her wine, now looking away from me at some boats coming and going in that same bay under a now darkening sky, their wakes catching the last rays of the sun. Any victory was gone in her eyes.

And if there had not been consequences I would have stood from my seat and leaned across the table and taken her glass of wine from her hand, set it down, and kissed her again as I did at the summit of the mountain across the bay. But there always are, so I did not.

As the courses came, Kate’s glasses of wine were downed with increasing rapidity. She was good and teetering by the time the main entrée arrived. Lamb and vegetables on skewer with risotto. The long length of the table dug in; conversation became sporadic. Drunkenly, I decided to make a joke.

“Yeah, this is good, but have these Italians ever had KFC?”

It got some laughs, and across the table Kate rolled her eyes and lifted her wine glass.

“You’re the worst,” she said.

I lowered my fork to my plate and raised a bit of rice. I could feel my head buzzing. “That’s not what you said last night,” I said, and took the bite.

Suddenly, like a snake, her arm snapped across the table and I felt her palm strike my cheek. She’d slapped me. Hard. Truly, and with vehemence. And as I felt the sting in my cheek, my wine glass was upset, and shards of glass and red liqueur spilled over the cobblestones at my feet. I could feel the eyes of the table turn toward me and heard the conversation cease. I looked up, and across the table and she had leaned back in her seat with her legs and her arms crossed, pumping venom into me through her eyes.

I wish I had stood and reached over the table and grabbed her by her hair. Or I wish I had flipped the whole thing over, sending food and wine and happy conversations into the water. I wish I had yelled at her, asked her what she thought she was doing. But I did not. I understood. And calmly, meekly, I stood up from my seat and said my goodbyes to the people beside me, waved to the ones down the table, and made my way toward the long flight of stairs that wound up the cliff to little Sorrento by the sea.

We are only the steps we have taken—upstairs, across mountain passes, wading in the sea, carrying a heavy load. One follows the other; the first is taken and the rest is now determined. If one event naturally did not lead to the next and there was only a singularity in time and place then things would have been different. Only then. But I could live hereafter drinking in the sight of candle and moon-lit silhouettes. But in all life, as in a war, there are only the things you have done and one step leads to the next leads to the next or the end. One is a natural repercussion of the previous, but in the heated moment there is no before, and after is but a vagueness. You only do what you do. Run where you run. Fire where you fire. The present is formed by the past, and the future, in turn, is formed by the present. I suppose that is all there ever is. You take your steps, and if one is misplaced you fall into bright regret, begging for silhouettes, remembering them, trapped in them.

The stairs that led up the cliff to the town were many and steep, but I took each of them, feeling the sting in my cheek as darkness fell, knowing the embarrassment of the others at the table having seen me so ashamed, the quiet end to dinner, happy conversations spilled to the sea, but the stairs opened up to the platform that crossed beside the bench, and the lamp-lit town with the last slightness of the sun’s light silhouetting the slopes of the roofs of the homes. And behind me, I still hoped to hear following footsteps echoing off the walls that lined the meandering cobblestone streets atop the siren’s cliffs of little Sorrento by the sea.