Around six o’clock each day, the majority of the Sunset’s patrons, full of sand and sunburn, climb the rock steps back to the huts. Nearly everyone spends the next few hours napping, preparing themselves for another night’s festivities. Dinner isn’t served until ten o’clock, but I’ve developed a habit of rising early for the night, leaving Kat and Sin tucked in their beds, each day making them look darker against the white backdrop of their sheets. After a quick shower, I head out to the deserted terrace, catching a glimpse of Spiros, CeCe and their family through the open door of their hut. The kids laugh and talk over each other in Greek, Spiros and CeCe passing food and smacking the hands that try to take a plate out of turn. It often strikes me that they don’t have lots of money, nor do they live an elaborate lifestyle, but Spiros and CeCe seem like two of the most content people I’ve ever met.

While they’re feeding their family, the bar operates on an honor system. I’ll pluck down a few drachmas on the counter and help myself to an Amstel from the industrial fridge. Despite my fall that first day, I’m still attached to my table, the one closest to the edge of the cliff, and I’ll sit there, careful not to rock back on the hind legs of the chair. I never saw the soap opera blonde again, thank God, and I’ve started to wonder if maybe I conjured him up in my drunken imagination.

Sitting at my table, sipping my beer, I watch the most incredible sunsets—vibrant hues of oranges, pinks and yellows mixing and mingling in the sky, until the golden circle of sun slips lower beneath the water that grows navy blue with the oncoming darkness. I can’t believe that everyone else can sleep through this, but I’m not quite willing to share it, either.

Most nights, I simply sit and soak it up. Other times, I pull Francesco’s card from my purse and stare at it. The card has become worn by now, the corners crumpled and soft. I imagine calling him, hearing him say, “Bella,” in that honeyed voice, hearing him tell me he misses me. But then I feel ashamed and I stash the card away again, wondering what it says about John and me that I keep thinking about some boy in Rome who can’t even buy himself a proper scooter. I love John, I know I do, but sometimes I find myself wanting to be unattached and single. Wanting to find more Francescos and soap opera blondes. Yet at the same time, John is like family, and I can’t imagine my life without him.

Toward the end of the sunset, my sunset as I’ve come to think of it, people start trickling out of their huts to get dinner. We usually sit with Johnny Red, Noel and Billy, and I’ve gotten used to the way they alternately compliment and rib me. Billy is especially sweet.

“You’re burning a bit,” he said one night, leaning toward me and running a finger over my shoulder. “Best to put something on that.”

There are others at the Sunset that we’ve become friends with, too, and who usually join us for dinner. There’s Gunther, a short Norwegian whose favorite English word is wicked. He applies it to everything—the beach, the drinks, the food, the bars, the women. And then there’s the two Swedish girls, Lina and Jenu, both of whom appear stereotypically Swedish with blond hair, blue eyes and translucent ivory skin. They seem to gaze at me intently when I speak. Whether this is from their efforts to decipher my English or an actual interest in me, I can’t say.

The rest of the guests at the Sunset are a mix of Europeans, Canadians, Aussies and a few Americans thrown in for good measure. A dizzying din of languages and accents rises during the dinner hour. Whenever we meet someone new, someone who doesn’t speak English or can’t understand my Italian, it’s a challenge to converse, but we try, using gestures and stilted words. Kat is the best at it.

“I…am,” I heard her saying one night in a loud, slow voice. She was standing by a table of German men, pointing toward herself, “from…Chicago.” When the men responded with enamored but confused looks, she said, “You know the cliché—Chicago, bang bang,” and pantomimed shooting a gun, Al Capone style.

“Ah!” the group cried, understanding. “Chicago, bang bang!”

The men love Kat, as they always do, and she seems bent on finding a new one each night. I wonder if I should buy her a box of condoms, but I don’t want to piss her off by assuming she’s sleeping with all of them, and I don’t want to encourage her if she is. She’s always been outgoing and certainly never shy about sex, yet Kat now appears to have a compulsive edge to her scamming. She still won’t talk about the Hatter incident, and I still think it’s messing her up. I watch her every night as she moves about the terrace, friendly to a fault, constantly talking or flirting.

Meanwhile, I find myself sticking to our usual table at the edge with Lina and Jenu, the Irish boys and Gunther. Each night, I watch them devouring plates of moussaka, Greek lasagna or souvlaki oozing with cucumber sauce. My mouth waters, and I imagine diving headfirst into the cheesy moussaka, but I hold myself to Greek salads, liking the feel of my body as some of the bar exam weight comes off.

After dinner, Spiros gathers the troops around midnight to give those who are ready to party a ride into town, where things are just beginning to hop. One night as I headed for the truck, I glanced around for Kat and Sin and found them talking by themselves at the bar, their heads inclined. Kat laughed, throwing her head back, putting her hand on Lindsey’s forearm, and I missed them then, even though we were in the same room.

That night on the way to town, I slumped in the back of the pickup, gripping my head, attempting to save my hair from being wind-whipped into a beehive. When Spiros finally ground to a halt, I raised my face over the rim of the pickup, shocked at the sight. The sleepy village I’d seen on our way in from the ferry had been transformed with the dark sky, the air full of battling music from different bars, the main street glutted with strolling people and crawling cars. Lights were strung along telephone poles and across the tops of houses, making it seem as if the stars were hanging low, blocking out the real ones above.

That night, like every one since then, we followed our nightlife routine, which was set by the Irish guys, who apparently fancy themselves as our ambassadors to Ios. This routine dictates that we start at one of the small pubs in the village that line the winding stone sidewalks. The bars have dubious names such as Bar 69 and Orange Love, and they serve colorfully named drinks like the Nipple Lick, which is some Kahlua concoction, and Blue Balls, a purplish-neon drink with God-knows-what in it. Around two in the morning, most people make their way to one of the late nightspots, both of which sound Gaelic rather than Greek in persuasion. The Dubliner is a big sprawling club with indoor and outdoor dance floors. The favorite among the Sunset crew, though, is Sweet Irish Dreams. It’s small compared to the Dubliner, but that doesn’t stop them from letting in everyone who can pay the cover price. The place becomes so crammed with humanity that everyone stands or dances on any available surface—the tables, the benches, the chairs, even the bars.

On most nights when we arrive at Sweet Irish Dreams, the Irish boys will muscle out a spot for us. Lindsey scoots to Billy’s side in the hopes that tonight will be the night. Kat prowls the place like a lion. I am one of the gawkers.

A few years ago, I wouldn’t have blinked twice before climbing on one of the tables and shaking my thing. Now, though, I’m afraid that if I shake it too hard, I’ll send people and glassware flying. Still, I know that I’ve lost some weight, and I’m not sure whether it’s that or the charge I got from my night with Francesco, but somehow I must have plugged in the mental Vacancy sign on my forehead because I’m getting hit on by cute guys at an average of a few times an hour. I know this shouldn’t flatter me. Sweet Irish Dreams is a breeding ground for one-night stands, a fact no one tries very hard to cover up. But I am pleased, my anemic self-esteem becoming healthier with all the attention it’s being fed.

I play a game with myself, trying to guess the nationalities of these guys by the style of the come-on, and I’m getting good at it. The German guys stand and stare for at least an hour and only walk over when their friends push them away like eleven-year-old boys on a playground. In sharp contrast, the Italians don’t have to think about it at all. Once they spot you and decide they want you, they just drop the lids of their eyes, lick their lips and sidle up to you without a word or a glance back at their group. The English blokes usually try the team approach with two or three guys at once, apparently trying to give everyone an equal shot.

It’s the shy guys from the smaller countries that I like best, though, maybe because I can fool myself into thinking that they see something more in me than a reason to buy a condom. Lars is one of those guys. A tall, lanky Norwegian with curly, almost white hair, he strolls over to me one night as I come out of the bathroom. At least I think he’s going for a stroll, although he moves like a guy whose body has just sprouted two feet and whose limbs feel foreign to him.

“Hello,” he says, ducking his head down so he can reach my ear.

“Hi,” I say. I consider just walking past him, like I might with one of the Italians, but his face is earnest and open.

“I am Lars.” He nods when he’s done with the sentence, as if pleased that he said it properly.

“Casey,” I say, nodding back.

He smiles a little, his gray eyes moving over my face, from my lips to my eyes to my hair and back again, which is completely unlike the Italians, who generally go straight to my cleavage. “May I buy you a drink?” He smiles a little more widely, and I’m sure he and his buddies practiced this line on the plane.

I hold up my full beer and shake it a little to show him I don’t need one. His smile fades. I can see him wondering what to say now that his good line has failed him.

“I have a boyfriend,” I say, but he clearly doesn’t understand. “Boyfriend,” I say again, louder, but it’s futile. I shrug and point to Noel and Johnny Red, who oblige by gesturing for me to hurry back.

Lars nods, giving me an endearing, sheepish little shrug, before he lopes away.

“What about us?” Noel says when I made my way back to our spot.

“What about you?” I say, slipping onto a vacant bar stool between him and Johnny Red. Noel has tanned dark brown by now, the sun etching fine lines around his eyes. Johnny, meanwhile, just seems to multiply his freckles with each foray into the daylight, so that he’s become spotted to the point where the freckles are almost joined together.

“Well, you don’t seem to fancy any of these blokes—” Noel says.

“Not that you should,” Johnny Red cuts in.

“No, no,” Noel says. “Bunch of pansies, but maybe you should consider one of us.”

Noel and Johnny begin modeling their muscles for me, curling their biceps and striking weight-lifter poses, grunting along with each one. I laugh and clap my hands, leaning back and looking from one to the other like I’m trying to decide between the two. We’re yucking it up like that when Sin walks over.

“What are you guys doing?” she says, shaking her head at the spectacle Noel and Johnny Red are making.

“She’s trying to pick which one of us she wants to shag tonight,” Johnny Red says, striking another muscle-head pose, and he and Noel and I all crack up again.

I notice that it feels a little peculiar, though, a little embarrassing almost, to be laughing like this with the Irish boys instead of Sin.

One night, I meet an Australian girl named Nicky. We’d already bumped into each other at the bar and in the bathroom, so when she accidentally steps on my foot ten minutes later, we laugh and introduce ourselves.

“We’re supposed to be friends, eh?” she says in her heavy, Aussie accent that I find endearing. She has spiky gold hair and a ripped, lean body.

“Looks like it,” I say.

We talk for twenty minutes, giving abbreviated versions of our life stories. It isn’t hard to shorten mine. There’s little more to say than, “I went to college, I went to law school, and here I am.” Nicky, though, has to condense years of travels and adventures. She’s been away from Sydney for three years, during which time she’s been to India, Morocco, South Africa, Europe, the U.S., and a handful of countries I’ve barely heard of.

“How can you stay away from home for so long?” I ask her.

She waves a hand. “Oh, it’s no big deal, is it? That’s what all me friends do. We run around the world for years and years, and then we go home and settle down.”

“Wow,” I say, fascinated by the concept. “It’s like you’re escaping everything. You just get to run away.”

“Ah, no, darlin’. It’s not like that, actually. This is all about finding, not escaping.”

I scrunch up my face, unable to follow her.

“See, this trip,” she says, “this living in hellholes half the time, never getting a hot shower, always being poor, it’s not heaven on earth or anything, is it? It’s one big learning curve. It’s learning about other people, other countries, and most of all, about me.” She keeps talking, describing the cesspool she lived in while in New Delhi and the job she took in Amsterdam that entailed selling space cakes in the Red Light District. She’d done all that, she tells me, to find out what she’s made of, what she can take, what she wants to do with the rest of her life.

“Wow,” I say again, struck by the elevated level of her thinking, so clearly miles and miles above my own. I briefly consider moving to Amsterdam and selling hash brownies instead of practicing law in Chicago, but I can’t see how that would make me learn more about myself.

I lose Nicky when I make another bathroom run, but her spiky hair and her lean frame keep coming back to me. Nicky is a true traveler, I realize, while I am merely a tourist. During the six months I lived in Italy, I’d seen the difference. I was a traveler back then, learning the language, seeking out places that weren’t in the guidebooks, meeting people whose families had lived in the area for hundreds of years. But I’m back to tourist status now, going to all the places every other tourist goes, meeting more Italians, Irish and English than Greeks, scratching the surface of a place rather than really digging into it. Come to think of it, this is how I’d led my life lately. Even my relationship with John is only scratching at the surface these days.

Sometimes I imagine John here at Sweet Irish Dreams, standing in his button-down shirt, glancing around at all the craziness, shaking his head. He wouldn’t be curious about all these people the way I am. He’d simply find it amusing. John sees the world as straightforward rather than something with odd facets, hidden paths or alternative journeys. He doesn’t agonize, he makes choices. He doesn’t whine and moan when something goes wrong, he moves on. His parents, Gary and Mary Sue Tanner, still live in Butterfield, Iowa, the same place they’ve been for the last thirty years, in their nice little house and their nice little community with very few curves in the road. The funny thing is that although John has moved on to the big city, he still sees his existence the very same way.

And maybe that’s the big difference between us. John has already carved out his life, while I want more than I have now, more than I am now.