Keep This Promise

by Willow Winters

  I wondered if Mateo Casalles knew what he was doing. Judging by his easy-going attitude, and his philosophy on clothes, he probably didn’t care what people thought. I think he was just a flirtatious man with his own ideas of fun. Damn if that didn’t make him more endearing.

  I think I needed to take up his philosophy. I thought that’s how I approached life too. But maybe not. Mine had too many cracks in it, where people could get to me.

  Minutes later, I was brushing the grass off of me while Mateo and I discussed where to have our business meeting. According to Jerry, this part of the day was less conversational and more about actual business situations and how to handle them in English. At breakfast we had been given a small loose leaf booklet that was full of scripts we could follow. All in all, it seemed like a pretty serious ordeal. There was the phone call, where he would go into his room and I would go into mine and we would call each other and go over a script. Mateo didn’t seem too sold on that, I guess because without visual clues, it was harder to speak.

  There was also a business group meeting and we’d have to find another pair to do that, or we could do a faux job interview, which could pretty much turn into any employer trying to hire someone or any company trying to sell.

  To my surprise though, Mateo eventually settled on the business call.

  “I fear it, so I should do it,” he said. I admired his reasoning. I took my script and went to my apartment. Sara wasn’t there, so I took a seat on the couch beside the phone and waited for him to call me. The booklet had everyone’s extension, which was kind of nice if you got bored and felt like wanting to talk to someone. Unfortunately, we were blocked from making long distance calls and I was pretty sure a collect call to my house would get refused. I told myself to run to the computers on my pre-dinner break so I could finally get in touch with my family.

  While I waited for the phone to ring, feeling like I was back in high school all over again, I poured myself a cup of clean-tasting water from the tap and looked around the silence of the room. Aside from my early bedtime the night before, I really hadn’t had a place to myself in a week, not since I left for London. I was quite a private person, despite what most people would say, and really cherished my time alone. I liked having my own personal space to think and to dream. Perhaps that’s why I’d never made any really close friends over the years—I never felt I needed them.

  And yet standing in the kitchenette of the foreign apartment, surveying the cream couch and the iron chandeliers and the dark-wooded floors of the sparse room, I felt this strange gnawing in the pit of my chest. It was like I didn’t want the alone time, the time to think. I wanted to go back outside and be around people, soak up their personalities and their essence, like a dull-toothed vampire. This was very unlike me—one day at Las Palabras and I was changing. I wasn’t sure if I liked it.

  The phone rang, jolting me out of my thoughts. I ran over to it and snatched it up. “Hello?”

  “Vera?” Mateo said over the line. His voice sounded higher on the phone, crisp and professional.

  “Yup,” I said and immediately started toying with the phone line, wrapping it around my finger.

  A thick silence permeated the line. He cleared his throat. “You are supposed to go first. It says so.”

  Oh, right, the script. I flipped open the pages, feeling a bit nervous all of a sudden. There was something quite serious about Mateo’s tone, as if we’d stopped being friendly for a moment.

  The script was fairly straightforward. I was an investor who was calling about the business. My job was to ask Mateo the questions and he only had a brief word or two telling him what he should talk about without supplying him the actual script. He had to make that up on his own, pulling from his real life.

  It went okay, at first, but when it called for me to ask him “what are the advantages of investing in your company” he started to stumble over his words. He was saying them wrong, drawing a blank.

  “Merde,” he swore harshly into the phone. “Fuck. Fuck!”

  I was taken aback by his change in tune. I swallowed hard and said, “It’s okay. We can just start over. It’s a hard question.”

  “It’s a question I can’t even answer in Spanish,” he said bitterly. “How the fuck do I answer in English?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I continued to coil the phone line around my finger. I heard him sigh.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I am sorry, Vera.”

  “It’s okay,” I said in a small voice.

  “It is not okay,” he said. “But it has nothing to do with you.” He paused. “I will try and think of something to say about my company for next time. Do you mind…do you mind if we just talk instead?”

  “What about?” I asked.

  “You. Let’s talk about you. Vera Miles.”

  “I’m not very interesting.”

  “You say that, but I have many questions.”

  I smiled, my heart starting to beat a bit faster. “Okay…but if I tell you all my secrets, you’re going to find me boring.”

  “You? Boring?” he chuckled warmly. “Impossible. I only have twenty questions for you, like the game. You know the game, yes?”

  “Yes,” I slowly said. But I seriously didn’t feel like playing it with him. Now, if the game were reversed, that would be another story.

  “Well, I shall ask you one question a day. I am here for only twenty-one days, so on the last day you can ask me a question.”

  “That hardly seems fair,” I said. Still, if he had to ask me a question every day, that meant he had to talk to me every day. I couldn’t say no to that.

  “It is fair, to me,” he said simply. “First question is…did it hurt when you got that hole put in your tongue?”

  I laughed. “What? My tongue ring?”

  “Yes. Did it hurt? It looks like it would hurt.”

  Funny, I’d never seen him eyeing my tongue ring before. Usually it was quite noticeable when someone finally spies the silver inside your mouth. It’s not like I went around all day doing the Julia Roberts laugh.

  “Yeah, it hurt,” I said. “But I don’t mind a bit of pain.”

  “I see,” he said. “It suits you.”

  “Really?” All I’d heard from my mother and sister was that it made me look like a cheap tramp. I was sure to someone like Mateo, it was looked at as being gross and immature.

  “Yes,” he said. “When I was younger, I thought it was a cool look. I wanted one.”

  I couldn’t picture Mateo with a tongue ring—or any kind of ring, other than his wedding one. “I have to say, I can’t really imagine you with a tongue ring,” I admitted. “It’s not really your style.”

  “Oh, I was a fun person, when I was younger,” he said. “Now, I just get buzzzzzed. That’s it.”

  That was the second time he had said when he was “younger.” I wondered if being around him was like reliving the past. “You’re not old, Mateo,” I told him. “You’re not even forty.”

  “But I will be forty before you will be forty. You will only be twenty-five.” He sighed. “You will see. Sometimes you are stuck being the person you are and not the person you were. Or could be.”

  The somber quality to his voice filled the air around me, making the apartment seem shades darker, like the curtains had been pulled closed. It was scary how I totally understood what he was talking about, no matter what age I was.

  He cleared his throat and went on, his voice louder. “Well if you do not mind, Vera, I think I will need to make a phone call or too, a real one. I will see you tonight at the party, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said softly. The receiver on his end clicked off and I stared at the phone for a few moments before hanging it up. Through the littlest lapses in character, I was beginning to think there was more to Mateo than what met the eye. Though he’d be playing twenty questions with me, I was going to make sure I unravelled him first, silken thread by silken thread.

  Chapter 6

  “I’ll gi
ve you ten euros if you do it.”

  I put down my drink and gave Eduardo a steady look. “Are you serious?”

  “Of course,” he exclaimed and patted Angel on the back, hard. “Isn’t that right, Angel?”

  Angel, who probably spoke the least English out of everyone at Las Palabras, nodded. Like his namesake, he had a round face and a mop of curly brown hair. His thick-framed glasses and geek chic outfit made it hard for me to determine if he was a young hipster or a nerd in his mid-thirties. He worked for a software company in Madrid, which didn’t help.

  I plucked the cherry out of my screwdriver and held it in front of my mouth. I looked to Eduardo who was eyeing me with a big fat grin on his face.

  He and Angel were among the first people to show up at the party. I had gotten there early, not wanting to pull the same thing I did at dinner and get there late. I had gotten so wrapped up with catching up on Facebook and writing long emails to Josh and Jocelyn that I barely noticed everyone piling past me into the dining room. By the time I logged off, all the tables were taken and I had to sit with Edna, a retired teacher from Manchester who really didn’t seem to like me. She was here with her husband Nick and I recognized them as the people who had given me dirty looks on the bus.

  Luckily, the Spaniards I sat with were nice. There was quiet Cristina who barely talked and Yolanda, a hippie-ish woman with a toothy grin and really dark skin that looked like beef jerky. Yolanda loved to talk and show off the English she picked up from some yoga guru in Nepal. I don’t know what she was talking about, actually, but it prevented me from having to contribute to the conversation. I just concentrated on the wine and the food the whole meal, occasionally looking over at Mateo who was sitting with Wayne, Beatriz and a pretty blonde I think was named Polly. He had seemed to be chipper over dinner, laughing loudly at whatever Wayne was saying.

  “Well, do it,” Eduardo coaxed to me, bringing my attention to the task at hand. He was a cute guy, late twenties, kind of short and on the preppy side but he had flawless golden skin and really nice smile. He was also a bit of a pervert. Then again, so was I.

  “All right,” I said. I placed the cherry in my mouth and bit it off seductively. This part was for the show. Eduardo eyed my lips eagerly as I sucked on it for a moment and Angel seemed to blush right up to his roots. Then I smiled and swallowed it down. Time for the party trick.

  I placed the stem into my mouth and with deft concentration I slowly worked the two ends together with my tongue, trying to tie it into a knot. As sexy as it was supposed to be, it’s actually impossible to look good while doing this and I knew my face was contorted.

  It took a few seconds longer than I would have liked but eventually I opened my mouth and stuck out my tongue, the knotted stem displayed proudly.

  Eduardo pulled an impressed face.

  “Showing off your ring?” I heard Mateo say. A deliciously fresh ocean smell filled my nose and Mateo came into view, walking behind Eduardo and peering at me in curiosity. I promptly stuck my tongue back in my mouth and watched as his mouth curved up in a wicked smile.

  Angel nudged Eduardo. “Give her money.”

  I tore my eyes off of Mateo as Eduardo groaned and fished out his wallet. He slapped ten euros down into my hand and winked at me. “It was worth it.” He and Angel turned and walked off to the bar, which now had a line of people at it, the two women from reception now back there and popping off bottle caps.

  Mateo folded his muscled arms across his chest. Though he was still wearing his sleek blue dress pants from earlier, now he had a white linen shirt that was unbuttoned just enough to give a hint of groomed chest hair. Something about that made a lusty thrill run through me. Every guy I’d been with had been smooth and hair free as a baby. Mateo was one hundred percent the opposite of that, one hundred percent man.

  One hundred percent taken, I quickly reminded myself before the screwdriver went to my head.

  “You got a job?” he asked in a smooth voice.

  “What?”

  He nodded at the ten euro note in my hand.

  “Oh,” I said, shoving it in my small purse. I smiled. “No, I’m just taking bets. Tying a cherry stem with just your tongue, it’s a classic.”

  He grinned at me with his white, polished teeth. I noticed there was one on the bottom that was kind of crooked. I liked that. It gave him character—not that he needed any more. “I wouldn’t know,” he said, in a way that let me know he did. His eyes left my mouth and then traveled down my body. “You look very nice.”

  There was nothing smarmy or inappropriately sexual about the remark but my body didn’t know that. A shiver went down my spine and my nipples hardened. I cursed myself for not wearing a bra, even though the flowery maxi dress I was wearing did a good job of keeping the girls up.

  “Thank you,” I said, trying not to beam too much. I was about to say the same thing to him when Claudia appeared at our side, reeking like a cloud of cigarette smoke. Man, she had the worst timing.

  With her she had Becca, who looked a bit older than me, pixie red hair, pale as snow skin with freckles, and Sammy, a tiny, plump Australian chick in a too-tight shift dress, topped with frizzing blonde hair and gap-toothed grin. Sammy had sat next to me at the computer terminal when I was waxing on to Jocelyn about the program so far (I had been too paranoid to mention Mateo) and she’d come across like a chatterbox, talking to everyone who came through. Now she seemed drunk, swaying on her high heeled pumps, but she was smiling and anyone who smiled was good in my books.

  “Vera,” Claudia reprimanded, “I missed you at dinner. I sat with these two, do you know Becca and Sammy?”

  I caught Mateo’s eye briefly as he gave me a sly nod and then moved over to the bar to go talk to Antonio. Damn it. I suppose being around four women was probably too much for him.

  I turned my attention back to Claudia, said hi to Sammy again and nodded at Becca.

  “I saw you earlier,” Sammy slurred in her Aussie accent. Since the bar hadn’t been open for long, I wondered what she had been drinking. “I was going to tell you I liked your boots, the ones you had earlier, but you seemed to be writing up a storm.”

  “I was getting my friends caught up,” I said, even though I really only had one friend.

  She pointed a finger at me. “You know what you should do. Becca here, she has a blog. She blogs about her travel adventures and such. You should have a blog. Did you know this is her third time doing the program?”

  Now I was intrigued. I looked at her with raised brows. “Really?”

  Becca nodded shyly. “Yeah, three years in a row,” she said in quiet Scottish accent.

  “Then you must like it,” I said. Captain Obvious, reporting for duty here.

  She blushed but didn’t say anything, which made me think there was more to her story. Unfortunately, this was the time that Jerry appeared, climbing on top of the coffee table again, with a microphone he just whipped out of nowhere. I made a mental note to talk to Becca later and affixed my attention on Jerry before he yelled at me.

  “Greetings, Anglos and Spaniards,” he said, his crackled voice coming out through a speaker in the corner. Totally unnecessary considering how small the room was. “I hope you’ve all enjoyed your official first day at Casa de Las Palabras!”

  People clapped at that, a few hollered. I had the impression that everyone had gotten drunk at dinner because that’s the only way I could imagine anyone tolerating Jerry’s embarrassing enthusiasm.

  “So,” he said, “I wanted to kick off the week with a party just for you guys. There are no rules, except for speaking English. Have fun and make sure you tip the bartenders! Every other night after dinner, we will be participating in the extracurricular activities, so enjoy this night while you can! Ole!” He then jumped off the coffee table, took a bit of a stumble and went falling into Angel who was the one closest to him.

  I groaned and shook my head, looking back at the girls. Sammy was pulling a flask out of her bling bling
purse and passing it to Claudia. So, that’s how they were doing it.

  Claudia took a sneaky sip back and then, after an inquisitive glance to Sammy, passed it on to me.

  I took a gulp of the burning, stinging liquid.

  And that was that.

  When my alarm went off at seven am the next morning, I could have sworn I had died at some point during my sleep and gone straight to hell. It was impossible for anyone to feel this horrible. My stomach burned with firewater, my hair smelled like an ashtray and the room was spinning slowly, in beat with the pounding in my head.

  I moaned and tried to roll over but my head was in a vice and every time I moved, it tightened until I could feel my pulse in my temple. If I was back home, I would have taken some Gravol, drank a litre of Gatorade, taken a few B vitamins and prayed for sleep to take me away again.

  But I wasn’t at home. I was in Spain. I was at a program that I was technically working for and there was no such thing as sleeping off a hangover. I had to get up. I had to get on with the day.

  I had to try really, really hard not to vomit everywhere.

  I practically crawled into the shower and sat on the tiles, letting the warm water hit my face, trying to knock some sense into me.

  Dear god, what the hell happened last night?

  Everything came back, sifting into my brain like shards of glass.

  After Claudia, Sammy, Becca and I finished the flask of grappa—aka firewater, aka burning liquid of death—our party of four got moved upstairs. The dangerously narrow iron staircase led up to a large room where we’d be having all of our “extracurricular activities.” I don’t know who designed the building and thought putting the bar downstairs would be a bright idea, but there you go. From the amount of people who tripped on the small steps, we quickly nicknamed it the staircase of doom.

  Once up there, it turned into a full-on dance party. Mustached Antonio started doing the hustle. Sammy was trying to grind up on Ricardo who was trying to grind up on Claudia. A massive conga line formed and I got stuck between Dave and Eduardo. Yolanda started making out with an Anglo guy I hadn’t met with. I was telling crude jokes with Dave and the English girl Polly. At some point during the night, I thought it would be funny to do Jaegerbombs with Beatriz.