Chapter Ten - Cake By The Ocean

The villa Karin booked was far bigger than I'd imagined — seven bedrooms, all facing the sea, an infinity pool that dissolved into the horizon, and a sprawling outdoor kitchen that made Nikau's eyes light up the moment we arrived.

"Sei," he said, exploring every corner of it like a child loose in a toy store, "did you see this? There's an outdoor pizza oven.”

"You and Beck already have a week of menus planned, don't you.”

"Maybe," he admitted, with zero remorse.

Our room — per the text from Karin that had made my heart stutter strangely when I read it last week — faced the open sea. A large bed draped in white netting, and a private terrace wide enough for two loungers and a small table.

"This—" I stopped at the threshold, suddenly awkward.

"Nice, right?" Nikau had already set our suitcases in the corner. 

Both of them. He looked completely at ease, as if sharing a bedroom with me for a full week were the most natural thing in the world.

Maybe, by now, it was.

 

The first days in Lombok ran on the most pleasant rhythm. Snorkeling off a tiny gili reachable only by boat. Group dinners on the beach, grilled fish, Rinjani towering in the distance. Sary insisting on teaching everyone beach volleyball despite her own technique being far from convincing. Nights that always ended with all of us in a circle on the sand, wine in hand, laughing until late.

On the fourth day — the day before Karin's birthday — most of the group left for a full day of island hopping: three small islands, more snorkeling, then a picnic on what was allegedly the most Instagrammable beach in Lombok.

I chose to stay.

"My legs are still sore," I told Sary, who gave me a long, investigative look before shrugging and running after the others toward the jetty.

Nikau — who had obviously never intended to go if I stayed — sat on our terrace that afternoon with a book he wasn't really reading, while I lay on the lounger beside him, savoring a villa that, for once, was quiet and entirely ours.

"Why do you keep rubbing your legs? Actually sore?" he asked at some point, watching me over the top of the book.

"From yesterday's snorkeling. These muscles aren't used to exercise.”

"Want a massage?”

I turned. “Seriously?"

"I am a great masseuse," he said, with a mysterious little smile that left me unsure whether he was joking.

Minutes later I was lying on the bed, on my back, both feet in his lap, his hands working my soles with precisely the right pressure — not so gentle it lost its purpose, not so hard it hurt.

"Wow. You're good," I said, eyelids dropping from sheer comfort.

"I told you so."

His hands moved slowly to my calves, thumbs pressing into the muscles still tight from yesterday. I let out a soft groan, feeling my whole body loosen.

"A little higher," I said, eyes still shut, not thinking for one second about the implications of my own sentence.

Then I felt his touch travel up, past the back of my knee, climbing higher — toward my inner thigh. And the quality of it changed. It was no longer a medical massage. His movements grew slower. 

More deliberate.

My eyes snapped open.

Nikau was watching me, intent. His hand rested still on my thigh — not advancing, waiting for my reaction.

"That tickles," I said, reflexively, the words coming out a beat too fast. "I'm ticklish."

The corner of his mouth lifted, as if he knew exactly that ticklish was not the word I meant. "Ticklish?"

"Yes. Ticklish."

"Okay," he said — not arguing, not quite stopping either.

His hands moved slower now, far more intimate against the skin of my thigh, and I could feel my breathing losing its rhythm.

"Nik—"

"Still ticklish?" His voice had dropped, heavier and deeper than before.

I chose not to answer, because I wasn't sure what kind of sound would escape my throat if I tried.

He stopped. Looked straight into my eyes. Giving me all the room in the world to decide — the way he always had.

"Sei," he called softly.

I reached out, pulled him down to me, and Nikau needed no further explanation.

What followed unfolded slowly, with no trace of hurry. A kiss that began as a soft touch and deepened into something dense and consuming. His hands traced my body with extraordinary care — until I finally stood to change, in the bathroom that connected to our bedroom.

I always closed the bathroom door. Always.

That evening, I left it wide open.

I stood frozen in front of the sink mirror, looking at my own reflection in a way I hadn't allowed in years — truly looking, instead of avoiding.

Slowly, I took off my dress. I was acutely aware of the open door behind me, and the fact that from the bed, Nikau could see every line of my body if he chose to.

I looked back at the glass.

Fifty-one years old. A stomach no longer taut. Skin beginning to loosen at the upper arms, the inner thighs. The silvered rivers stretch marks had carved across my belly and hips eighteen years ago and never taken back. Breasts that had fed a child and paid for it in the currency of gravity. A body that had done everything asked of it — grown a person, survived a marriage, run a company through two recessions — and been graded, by the one man who'd sworn to cherish it, and found wanting.

My trauma reflex moved faster than my consciousness: both arms crossed over my belly, hiding the part of me I had privately judged least fit to be seen by anyone.

And then came the second wave — worse than the first, because it turned inward.

Look at you, the old voice said, and it wasn't Vino's voice anymore, it was mine, which is always the cruelest translation. Look at you standing here half-naked, fifty-one years old, actually hoping that man wants you. Actually letting yourself want to be wanted. How pathetic is that.

Because that was the part I couldn't forgive myself for. Not the stomach. Not the marks. The wanting. Somewhere in the last few weeks I had let myself begin to hope — to imagine that a man built like coastline and fourteen years younger might look at this body and feel something other than politeness — and standing here now, exposed, that hope felt like the most humiliating thing I had ever done. It is one thing to be found unattractive. It is another, far more shameful thing, to be found unattractive while you were foolish enough to hope otherwise.

He won't actually want you, the voice pressed on, sour and familiar, a tenant that had squatted in my head for years without ever being invited. He's a professional. He's good at this. That's the whole point of him. If it weren't for the contract, a man like that would never so much as—

I made myself keep looking. That was the discipline of it — refusing, for once, to drop my eyes. But every second in front of that mirror was a second of watching a woman I'd spent two decades managing into invisibility, and hating that some traitorous, girlish part of her was still, even now, praying to be seen.

I had never felt so unbearably naked in my life. And the dress was only the smallest part of what I'd taken off.

Footsteps from the direction of the bed.

Nikau walked to the bathroom doorway and stopped exactly there. In the mirror, I could see his tall frame standing behind me.

I braced to squeeze my eyes shut, ready to assemble the stiff, polite expression I used to bury deep embarrassment. But what I caught in the reflection locked every muscle in my body.

He was not wearing a forced, courteous expression. He did not look like a man professionally concealing discomfort.

He looked... captivated.

His eyes traveled over my body at an unhurried pace, as if refusing to miss a single detail. And there was an admiration in them so genuine that I had no idea what to do with it.

My arms stayed crossed over my stomach.

"Hey," he said gently, reading my defensive posture. "You okay?”

"I..." My voice came out small and useless. "I'm not sure, Nik—"

"You don't have to explain if you don't want to," he said, calm. 

"But if you want to tell me — I'm here.”

I looked at my reflection, then at his face behind mine — still wearing that same awestruck expression, still refusing to come one step closer, honoring the boundary. Waiting. And in that second, a wall I had held up with all my strength for decades finally came down. The most honest sentence of my life slipped out.

"A long time ago," I said quietly, my voice starting to shake, "someone told me my body stopped being attractive after I had

Arga. And I— I know it was ages ago. I know I should be past it by now, but I—" I swallowed hard, forcing the deepest fear into words. "Sometimes I think you want me because it's part of our contract. Not because you actually want me."

"Sei."

That single word stopped my spiraling.

He stepped forward slowly and stopped just behind me — close enough that I could feel his breath and the warmth of his body, yet deliberately not touching my skin at all. Leaving the decision entirely mine.

"I'm not going to tell you you're beautiful," he said, eyes holding mine in the mirror. "Because if I said it now, it would sound like I was trying to make you feel better. So I'll say this instead—" He paused, as if making sure every word would land exactly where it needed to. "Our contract has never made me feel like this, Sei. The contract didn't put me on an eight-hour flight to a hospital in Tokyo. The contract doesn't make me recite the order of the charms on your bracelet like it's my greatest achievement. What I feel right now, looking at you—" He shook his head slowly, his eyes dark and certain. "That's my choice."

My crossed arms began, slowly, to fall.

"Your body is not something you should hide from me, Sei," he continued, low and absolute. "It's the perfect body for you, and I happen to love it. I don't care about anyone's standards for how you're supposed to look. And I—" His gaze shifted up, locking onto my eyes in the mirror instead of my bare skin. "I'm hoping you'll let me get closer to you. And more intimate with you."

I held his gaze in the glass, and let go of every ounce of self-doubt that had chained my logic for decades.

"Can I touch you now, Sei?" he asked.

I nodded.

 

He didn't reach for me right away. Instead he took my hand — the one that had been guarding my stomach a moment ago — and turned it over, pressing his lips to the inside of my wrist, just below the charms. Then he guided it to his own chest, flattening my palm over his heart so I could feel how fast it was going.

"Feel that," he murmured. "That's you. That's what you do to me. No contract wrote that.”

He let me set the pace after that. He had me touch him first — my hands learning the warm expanse of him slowly, permitted, unhurried — until the trembling in my fingers wasn't fear anymore but something closer to wanting. Only when I finally leaned into him, forehead to his sternum, did he lift me. One arm under my knees, the other at my back, gathering all eighty kilograms of a body I'd spent years apologizing for as though I weighed nothing at all, as though I were something precious he'd been waiting to carry.

He laid me on the bed and looked at me the way he'd looked in the mirror. No hurry. No flinching. Cataloguing.

"Let me," he said, "just—let me.”

And then he set about the slow, deliberate work of unteaching me every lie I'd been told.

His mouth started at my collarbone and did not rush. He kissed the soft rise of my belly — the exact place my arms had shielded — with a reverence that made my breath catch on a sob I hadn't expected. Every time my hands moved to cover myself, he gently drew them away, kissed the knuckles, set them back on the sheets. 

No. Let me see you. Let me have all of it.

When he moved lower, settling between my legs, the old panic surged one last time.

"Nik—" I reached for his shoulders. "You don't—you really don't have to—"

He looked up the length of my body, chin resting just above where I was already undone, and there was nothing dutiful in his face. Only hunger, and a patience that undid me more than the hunger did.

"I want to," he said simply. "I've wanted to since Tokyo. Let me, sayang."

And I — for the first time in my careful, managed life — stopped arguing and let myself be wanted.

What he did then unspooled me thread by thread. Slow. Attentive. Reading every hitch of my breath and answering it, filing away each sound I made and using it, patient past anything I thought a person could be patient through. I gripped the sheets. I lost the thread of my own thoughts. Somewhere I stopped bracing and simply felt — a wave gathering with an inevitability I couldn't manage or postpone or control, and for once didn't want to.

When it broke, it broke completely. I heard a sound leave me I had never made in my life.

I came back to myself flushed to the chest, breathing ruined, one hand over my own face out of a shyness that felt absurd after what had just happened. He rose over me, pressed a kiss to the warm skin below my ear, and I could feel him smiling against me.

"There she is," he whispered.

"I can't believe I just—" I couldn't even finish. My whole face was on fire.

"You blush all the way down here." He touched my sternum, delighted, like he'd discovered something rare. Then, softer, his forehead against mine: "Will you let me make love to you now? For real?"

I didn't have the words. I'd used them all up.

So I answered the only way I could — I wrapped my legs around him and reached between us and guided him to me, and the sound I made as he finally pressed into me was so loud in the quiet villa that my own hand flew up to cover my mouth, some last reflex of a woman who'd spent her life being discreet.

He caught that hand too. Not to pin it — to lace his fingers through mine and press it into the pillow beside my head.

"Don't," he breathed against my jaw, moving in me now, slow and deep and certain. "God, Sei. I love how warm you are. I love feeling you around me." A ragged exhale. "Don't hide any of it from me."

And I didn't.

 

The next morning — Karin's birthday — I walked down to the breakfast table with Nikau beside me, the two of us trading smiles in a way I'm certain could not be called subtle.

The moment I sat, Sary — who had been watching me with a mischievous expression I knew by heart — leaned in.

"Somebody just had a good fudge last night," she whispered, at a volume deliberately loud enough for half the table.

I choked on my water. "Hey!!"

She shrugged, zero guilt. "Just a little observation."

The table exploded. I felt my face burn to the tips of my ears. Nikau — seated beside me and making no attempt whatsoever to rescue me — smiled placidly and sipped his black coffee as if nothing had happened.

"You're really not helping, Nik," I whispered.

"Well... I did have a great fudge last night, Sei," he whispered back, sinfully low, a teasing glint in his eyes. "Several fudges."

"NIKAU!"

 

Karin's birthday party that night was held on the villa's private beach. Fairy lights hung between the coconut palms, a long table crowded with dishes from the best caterer in Lombok, and low music that made the whole night feel like a scene from a film.

I sat back in a beach chair, wine in hand, watching this circle — my second family — move happily around the small bonfire built for the cake.

Rosa and Beck sat closest to the fire. Rosa was laughing freely, her head resting on Beck's shoulder in a way that reminded me how long and crooked her road here had been — from a woman terrified that love had to be earned by pleasing, to a woman who could lean on someone tonight with no fear left in her at all.

In another corner, Sary was explaining something to Sam with her hands flying everywhere, and Sam — usually all control and sharp edges — was laughing openly, in a way that made me realize how thoroughly that man had changed her days since their first month together.

Grace and Sesa sat at a quieter rhythm than the rest, fingers laced under the table. Grace's chair faced the open sea — not a wall, not a corner — and I knew that was no accident.

Andin and Mesa were deep in some intensely intellectual debate, books or politics, delivered in a way that made it obvious to everyone that they were flirting through argument.

And Nina, folded into Dane's arms, looked truly at rest tonight — not the twenty-four-hour standby single mom the world required, just herself. Just Nina.

And Karin — surrounded by everyone singing happy birthday in voices that were far from beautiful and full of love — smiled wide in a way that was entirely uncurated. The most honest, happiest smile I had ever seen on her face.

"What are you thinking about, Sei?" Nikau sank into the chair beside me and, in one easy motion, lifted me into his lap as if I weighed nothing, his gaze joining mine on the crowd.

"I'm thinking," I said, turning to him with a small smile, "about who's next."

"Next what?"

"The next story," I said lightly. "If this whole life of ours were a novel."

Nikau followed my gaze to Rosa and Beck. The two of them stood side by side now — Rosa carefully cutting the birthday cake, Beck close behind her, hands resting protectively at her waist, his chin dropping to her shoulder to whisper something that made her laugh and swat his arm.

"Them," he said, reading my logic without needing the explanation. "Those two have the most story that hasn't been told yet."

"Agreed," I said softly.

He pulled me tighter into him. And for a while we simply sat like that — me folded into his lap, the two of us watching the little family we'd built out of one perfectly legal act of madness grow into something far larger and more meaningful than seven lonely women who, months ago, had sat nervously staring at seven cream envelopes on a glass table.

"Sei," he whispered near my ear.

"Hm?"

"Thank you."

"What for?"

His arms closed around me, tighter. And when he spoke again, there was a tremor in his voice I had never heard from him — not the assertive pride he usually wore, but something deeper. Sincere. Vulnerable.

"Thank you for letting me be part of this," he said quietly. "Of your life. Of them. Of all of it."

I rested my head on his shoulder, watching the bonfire dance, wrapped in the laughter of my friends, the slow music, and the warmth of a family we had chosen and built ourselves.

"I'm happy, Nik," I said softly — the most honest sentence I had ever spoken to another human being. "Really happy."

"Me too, Sei," he answered warmly, pressing a long, gentle kiss to the crown of my head. "Me too, sayang.