She flushed. Of course. So many conversations they still needed to have. That first week that they’d spent together in constant contact, very rarely more than a few inches separating them on the beach in Goa, her hand on this thigh, his toes digging in the sand under her butt, had been full of late night conversations that only ended when they surrendered to sleep mid-sentence. These days, the closest they came to that kind of intimacy was when she fell asleep texting Javi while she was far from home. Recapturing that closeness was easier from a distance sometimes than it was in person.
They’d almost ended before they’d begun, she remembered, the first time she’d insisted on paying for her half of their hotel room. Javi had been so insulted he’d practically sputtered with outrage. She had literally thrown money at him in the street when he wouldn’t accept it from her hands, this fascinating, fuckable man who would not listen to her. She’d told him he could meet her at the airport for the next leg of their trip, but only if he could find a way to accept her as an equal.
“It’s not about the money, Javi. Blow it on a, on a . . . kite, for god’s sake! But I pay my own way.” They’d seen kites the day before, multi-colored fish and parrots and monkeys, dancing and swooping in the stiff ocean breeze.
Her hours in the airport, wondering if she’d just made a terrible mistake, had been stomach-churning in anxiety. Off the beach, she was back in jeans and a long-sleeved peasant blouse. Her conservative dress and open, friendly face made it easy for people to talk to her, but they suddenly seemed less than ideal as a lure for a man whose desire had lain on her like a blanket.
“Hey.” The tug on her hand jerked Magda back into the present as the bartender slid their plated burgers onto the polished wood counter in front of them. Javi drifted his hand from her bare shoulder down to her elbow, fingertips skimming and raising all the tiny hairs on her arm, and suddenly her throat was tight. Her vision swam as she blinked and her nose got hot, which meant it was turning pink too as she sniffed.
Because he had showed. She didn’t know what permutations and twists of logic Javi had performed on himself—because for him it wasn’t logical that she should pay for things when he made so much more money than she did—but he’d come striding through that airport in Goa, wheelie in tow, a tightly rolled cylinder of sticks and green fabric in his other hand. He’d dropped into the seat next to hers, tangled his hands in her hair, and pulled her head to his chest. She’d closed her eyes and let his words rumble through her.
“I’m going where you’re going. Or staying.”
They’d flown the frog kite on every beach they’d visited since. The bribes he’d paid to a rural government official had been brutal, but she’d married him before he’d left her, grumbling at her inflexibility, to finish her research in northern India. He’d met her at Terminal 5 at O’Hare when she’d landed at midnight two weeks later and hadn’t let her out of bed for the entire weekend except when she’d needed to go to the bathroom. Even then he’d stood outside the door and kept talking to her until she shouted at him, “Go away, for Christ’s sake, it’s impossible to pee when you’re making me laugh!”
He made his lists and his plans and they all included her. Sometimes she went along with them and sometimes she went her own way, but every time she came back to him. Her true north.
She’d asked him once why he’d done something so insane and unplanned as get married to a woman he’d known less than a month and only in a strange land far from home. His family, she’d already learned, was large and traditional and she imagined their weddings were celebrations that invited new family in, not removed someone from their orbit. She’d hoped for romance in Javi’s answer, been willing to settle for sentimental. Got neither.
“I knew I wanted to get married.”
“Let me guess. It was next on The List.” She put the capitals in with her tone. The List had been charming at first, Javi’s goals for a life that had grown so far beyond his roots he astonished her. But it didn’t take a rocket scientist—or a particle physicist—to figure out that most people’s next steps involved children and family stuff.
Not her forte.
He flushed. “Well, yes. It was.” He’d twined her fingers with his and stared at her knuckles. “And then you were there.”
Now, she shook her head and tried to smile at Javi when he asked if her burger was cooked properly, pointing to her full mouth as her excuse not to answer.
He made it sound so simple, when she knew it couldn’t be. She’d heard the long conversations, half in Spanish, half in English, he had with his mother every Sunday morning while she slept in. They started with cheerful banter and teasing, but ended in unhappy murmurs.
Javi’s laughter was a sound she prayed for, saving stories on her travels that she would hoard to her chest like jewels until she came home to him and poured them at his feet. Every chuckle or outright guffaw shone in heart like a diamond.
Those Sunday morning conversations muted all the laughter in her husband until his smile, when she arose and found him in some distant corner of their big house, was a tired shadow.
“Man, your mother must hate me.” She stared at the curved edge of her bite out of the burger, the imperfections of her teeth notched into the bread.
Javi jerked his head back, a sharp movement in the corner of her vision.
“Why would you say that?”
“Because we haven’t been to visit.” A half truth. The canyon yawned beneath her feet. Maybe she could say it if she put the words in someone else’s mouth. Instead of her husband’s. “Because I don’t stay with you. Because I keep you from your family.”
Because I keep you from having a family.
No.
Those words were locked behind her teeth, because to say them was the worst thing in the world. Worse than lists or hating lists or anything she pretended to fear as much as she feared that thought.
“She doesn’t hate you.” He scrubbed a hand over his face and shook his head. “I’m in deep shit if I don’t bring you home soon for a visit, but you? I was her last unmarried son. She loves you already.”
Magda wished that could be true, but then why was there such a heavy weight of words unspoken when she came home to him? She wiped her plate clean with the last of the fries, scraping up the dregs of the sweet and sour tomato ketchup that echoed like home in her mouth.
The old man in the cap next to Javi asked if they wanted to smoke hash with him and they laughed and shook their heads no. She nodded at the bartender for the tab. He laid it in front of them and she looked at Javi.
He lifted an eyebrow. “You got that?” His grin invited her in on the joke.
Yes, he’d learned. And changed. She forgot that sometimes, how much he’d changed for her. She smiled at him, and when his hand brushed her cheek, she leaned into it for a moment. Then paid for them both and grabbed Javi by the hand, pulling him from the bar.
There was so much more she still wanted to show him.
She had a place in mind, though she wasn’t entirely sure where she’d been when she’d spotted it that morning. The narrow alleys of the barrio twisted and turned and cut through residential blocks between the more major streets, hiding places only the locals knew about. She held Javi’s hand in hers, thick warm fingers wrapped around her smaller ones, and squeezed it when he got impatient, wondering aloud if she knew where they were going.
“Nope.” And kept walking. She felt every muscle in his body tense next to her, a tightening in the atmosphere around a man who did not wander. But he kept walking with her.
The alleys were quieter than the main roads, frequently leaving them the only pedestrians in sight as they passed arched gateways that led to hidden courtyard gardens. They passed one where the music of falling water escaped past thick walls, and she stopped to look.
“C’mon, don’t. That’s private.” Javi tugged at her as she wrapped a hand around one of the wrought iron rails. The white marble fountain inside the courtyard was small, t
wo bowls in a pyramid with water trickling from the smaller to the larger. Plain white benches and large planters bursting with riots of green surrounded the fountain, covering parts of the intricately-tiled mosaic floor.
“If they wanted it to be private, this would be a door, not a gate.”
She stayed at the courtyard gate for another minute, just to prove her point, but felt like a jerk the entire time. Javi’s good manners and politeness and preference for knowing how to behave properly at all times were character traits she loved but couldn’t match. Her emotions flashed like a disco ball against the steady glow of Javi’s calm. When she stepped away from the gate, he fell into matching strides with her, letting her lead although she bet the urge to Google-map their stroll was eating at him.
She knew their intended destination was close. Something about the curve of the buildings, second story balconies nearly kissing across the alley above their heads. A knock and the grating slide of metal on metal caught her ear. A door opened and closed twenty feet ahead of them.
A detour from her end goal, but what was the point of travel if you couldn’t step off the beaten path when a mysterious door beckoned? That was the heart of her passion, the lure of the unknown-but-real. The dirty, battered real world of people she didn’t understand, but would try to, when they let her catch a glimpse of their lives beyond the polished surface.
She grinned at Javi, who pulled his eyebrows together, giving himself two tiny vertical lines that she always wanted to soothe away with her thumbs. He leaned back against her hands, reluctant but still following her lead as she walked right up to the sheet metal door with the tiny riveted shutter at eye level and knocked hard.
When the little shutter opened and eyes peered out at them, she plastered her most adorable you’ve seen me before, I’m totally a regular smile on her face. The eyes flicked up over her shoulder. She could feel Javi glowering behind her. The speakeasy shutter slammed shut.
The scrape of a bolt being slid back vibrated through the door.
“Jesus. Are you trying to get us killed?”
The door swung open and she stepped back before it clipped her. The short, brick-walled corridor in front of them lead to stairs that dropped down out of sight. The bouncer settled himself, beer belly stretching the hem of his Taylor Swift T-shirt, on a tall stool next to the door.
She darted glances at the T-shirt until Javi caught on and followed her gaze. “I don’t think it’s an underground biker bar, babe,” she said, biting back a smile.
“Shit. This is why I freak out sometimes.” He jammed his hands in his pockets. “I think about you doing this without me, and it makes my heart stop.”
His voice was quiet. Too quiet.
She jerked to a halt and wrapped her fingers around his wrist. Most of the way around. The bones were too thick for her fingers to touch.
“Hey. Hey.” She gentled her voice when he looked at her. Slid her hand up his arm to grip his shoulder. “You know I don’t do anything stupid when I’m by myself, right? It’s only because I’m with you, Mr. Muscles, that I knocked on the door.”
She held her breath. Was this the moment when he admitted that it was too hard, being with her? Or rather, being so far away from her because of the choices she made?
He leaned his head back against the rough plaster of the wall and she watched him push the tension out of his muscles, dropping his shoulders. When he looked down at her, he seemed farther away from her than usual.
“You laugh at my list. I know.” The non sequitur threw her for a loop. “But you have a list of your own.” He waved one hand in a small circle, indicating the building surrounding them. “It’s just that your list has the whole world on it, and I can’t give that to you.”
She inhaled sharply, recognizing the pain in the words.
And what about what I haven’t given you?
She left the words unsaid. They should never have ended up here, on a delayed honeymoon after a rushed wedding that had felt inevitable at the time, but now seemed like the kind of thing people who got sucked into cults did just before coming to their senses.
She wondered if they were coming to their senses.
“But you do give me the world.” She could admit that. Her own family had asked her when she was going to stop gallivanting around and settle down. Javi had never once asked her that. “I’m sorry if I’ve let you think I don’t know that.”
The muscles in his forearm were tight as she balanced against him with one hand and stood on tiptoe to press a kiss like a benediction to his cheek. His hand gripped her hip and for a moment she wondered if he’d let go, but of course he did. He dropped his forehead to hers. She heard him sigh and her eyes stung until she blinked.
“I’m sorry, too.”
She didn’t ask him what he was apologizing for. There were too many things already.
In the low-ceilinged basement bar at the bottom of the staircase, they mixed into the crowd of locals—the only tourists in the room—a scenario she slid into like a naked skinny dip in mineral springs. Soothing and exciting together. Javi struck up a conversation with the dark-haired men around the pool table, nodding at her with a smile when she tapped him on the shoulder and pointed her chin at the bar.
The container ship captain who’d propped himself next to her at the counter while she ordered a drink was leaning in a little too close. She made him draw on a napkin a map of the route he’d leave to follow in two days, opening up a little space between them as she leaned back to avoid blocking the light.
Heat radiated against the skin of her shoulder blades, and she leaned into it, knowing who was behind her without looking. She spun her stool around until he was at her side.
“Everything okay here?”
“Yup.” She slid her arm around his tight waist and tugged him flush against her side, loving the feel of him under her hand, this giant of a man who never lost track of the tiniest detail involving her, no matter where she was. She tipped her head back against his arm as he slid it behind her and stroked her far hip.
Pleasure bloomed under her skin where he touched her, a subtle vibration that made her fingertips tingle and usually led to suggestive lip biting if she stared at her husband for too long.
Javi pressed a kiss to her hairline, and his mouth felt sad. Then he stole a swallow of her drink, which had arrived unnoticed at her elbow, and returned to the pool table, leaving her with a wink that looked forced.
“He doesn’t act like a husband.”
“How’s that?”
Captain Container was still at her side, unlit cigar clamped between his teeth, two deep grooves between his brows as he pinched them together.
“He lets you wander around without him, talking to strange men.”
She smiled. As a summary of their entire relationship dynamic, that wasn’t too far off. “You’re not that strange, trust me.”
The stories she’d told Javi when they’d first met had made his hair stand on end. A poor move, in retrospect. She’d been showing off a little, because her stories were so much more interesting than her looks, or at least she thought so. Also, she’d been dumber in her youth and less inclined to worry about keeping her skin in one piece than she was now, which meant she had some pretty entertaining party tales in her portfolio. But she’d clearly given Javi an exaggerated idea of what her days were like when she traveled. If he’d been worrying that every trip was like some of the dodgier ones she’d described, he must have been near frantic with stress while she was gone.
But he’d never once suggested that she not go. Her chest was suddenly tight, a warm, wet ball of feeling shoved up behind her ribcage, making it harder to breathe all of a sudden.
“He acts like my husband.”
Across the room, Javi glanced up from the pool table, where he leaned over the cue, sighting down it at the black eight ball. His shirt was bunched up around his shoulders, heavy ropes of muscle running up his forearm to disappear under a cuffed sleeve. She stomped on t
he wet ball of feelings and made it all about wanting.
Lord, she just wanted this man so hard. Maybe that could be enough.
She locked gazes with him and let him see it. Threw back the last of her pilsner, left the glass on the sticky Formica bar, and got up off her seat, patting the sea captain goodbye on his arm. “Adios, señor. Safe travels.” She didn’t take her eyes off her husband.
Without looking at the table, he drew his elbow straight back and then rammed his hand forward, cue ball cracking off the eight like a rifle shot. He stood up and handed his cue stick to his opponent as she walked toward the door, the eight bouncing uselessly around the green felt, nowhere near a pocket.
She was halfway up the stairs when he caught up to her. She imagined his breath hot on the back of her neck, and her flat shoes smacked against the stairs with an extra burst of speed. With a flick of a wave at the bouncer, they were out the door and back in the alley, the streetlights shining off the wet cobblestones, shining in too many places, even most of the way into the next gateway they passed, where she pulled him in after her and spun herself until her back hit the wall, right as Javi pushed up against her hips.
Her stomach flipped, that fast first drop on a roller coaster, and she wrapped her leg around his hip, canting her own hips to press against him and make it easy for him to get a hand on her ass. She loved the feel of him there, his wide palm covering most of her cheek, his hand from thumb to pinkie spanning her from hip to crack, fingers digging in just enough to let her read his desperation.
Her mouth opened under his to a kiss that felt like punishment, and she wondered again if he was pretending not to notice the fissures in their relationship, the same way she’d pretended to be a tourist on the hotel roof. Was pretending now that her marriage was working. Javi’s mouth pushed her back, her head against the wall, an ache at the back of her skull as his tongue thrust and pushed at her own. When he tore his mouth off hers and let her go suddenly, she staggered into the street, dizzy with wanting him and needing to move. To keep moving, because stopping, standing still, meant the end of this last night and she couldn’t bear it, the knowing it was almost over.
The Rain in Spain Page 3
