Barcelona Days

by Daniel Riley

  “Light blue something. Not much material.”

  “You’re saying you wish I wore that.”

  “It was all that was going through my head.”

  “You wish I dressed like a stripper beneath the Céline.”

  “I’ve been searching for the right way to say it for years.”

  “So you get her out of the straps and hearts and strings. She thinks she’s in a Fifty Shades movie. She’s practically gonna come from the soundtrack alone. Meanwhile you’ve got your tongue in her pussy and a finger in her ass.”

  “Jesus.” Will looked to the bartender again, searched the dining room for their waitress. Of course nobody was paying attention to them. Of course nobody cared. They were as inconsequential to their surroundings as they’d been their whole trip.

  “And she’s totally shaved, I’d assume?”

  “Whit, I dunno.”

  “Oh, you don’t remember that either? You didn’t notice?”

  “If I had to characterize the experience, I would say that she had gotten ready for the night with the intention of being naked with someone.”

  “Completely waxed, then.”

  “It reminded me of college,” Will said, smiling now. “Before I met you.”

  “And so what about Will, then?” she said, plowing ahead. “What does he get out of it?”

  “What he’d expected?” he said. “She kept asking if it was okay, and if she was doing it all right, and if there was anything she could do differently.”

  “Hot.”

  “After a little while I went back to doing what I was doing and things started driving toward maybe-sex.”

  “She can’t believe how lucky she’s got. Someone who knows how to handle himself. Meanwhile, you’re certainly ready for maybe-sex. A stranger for the first time in seven years.”

  “And honestly?” he said. “It was around then that I started thinking about work. It was getting late and all I could think about was what needed to get done before noon, and how much I hated every last element of that work, and how terrible I was bound to feel in the morning.”

  She breathed deeply through her nose. “If nothing else about this story is true, I know that detail is.”

  “And so as I’m sort of drifting to tomorrow’s to-do list, just kinda going about whatever business, she says to me, ‘You have great hands,’ and—”

  Whitney burst. She laughed like she hadn’t all trip, a little squeaky wheel of delight. Her eyes asked for more. More more more.

  “And the music keeps breaking,” he said, picking it up again. “Cutting in with ads for stores around where she went to college. Must’ve been tied to the zip code where she signed up for her non-premium service. Ads for grocery stores in upstate New York.”

  “Colgate. Hamilton. Skidmore,” she said.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “You didn’t get a good look at the sweatshirts crumpled up in the closet?”

  “Do you want me to pick one?”

  She rolled her eyes. “So the music eventually cuts back in. It keeps her in the mood. She’s still gearing up.”

  “And, yeah, at some point she just kinda says it sweetly, she gets up in my ear again and whispers, ‘Do you want to have sex?’”

  “Very polite lawyer bee.”

  “And so we have sex.”

  “How?”

  “The normal way.”

  “She’s on the bottom.”

  “She’s on the bottom, she’s on top.”

  “The normal ways,” Whitney said. “She has the night of her life. She’s making a real show of it since no one’s on the other side of the temporary walls for the first time in months. You make her come seven, eight times.”

  “Here’s the part I’ve been waiting for, though.”

  “Uh oh.”

  “Here’s the whole point of everything up to now,” he said, shifting on his seat. “It’s happening, there’s all the normal stuff, she seems to be enjoying herself. The album’s running through again for the second time and another ad’s playing for three-for-one something or other. Then she sort of scoots up the bed and gives the impression that she might turn over and face the other way.”

  “She wants you to fuck her from behind.”

  “Hold on. We’re just sort of going through the motions, nothing crazy, she’s still on her back, but we go to shift things up. It’s all happening slowly. But then, without warning, the whole right side of my face just cracks—like it’s been hit by a two-by-four or something. Somehow this knee’s come gunning for me. This limb, connected in no way to the hips beneath me, has come whooshing like a propeller blade, smack in my face, and hard. Kneecap, leg bones. All at once, my face is hot and damp. Eye and cheek throbbing, nose gushing.”

  “Oh my god!” Whitney, alight. Whitney, in love. Those gleaming teeth. Those wide wet elastic lips.

  “She’s mortified. She hops up. Throws on a robe. I ask for directions to the bathroom and end up in a closet. I must be bleeding out like a pig all over the place. I find the bathroom, close the door, get a good look at myself, naked and pasty and pathetically out of shape. Just the sight everyone wants to see after imagining themselves doing all the right things in bed. It looks like I’ve murdered an animal in the sink, there’s so much blood. I get some toilet paper up my nostril. Clean up as best I can. Watch my dick shrivel in the mirror.”

  “Your clothes are in the bedroom.”

  “It’s not the most comfortable three minutes, getting dressed again.”

  “God, I legitimately feel terrible for her.”

  “I say goodbye.”

  “You kiss her good night. You mitigate the humiliation, I hope.”

  “No kiss. It’s late. There’s been a lot of drinking and mouthing around. There’s some thick breath. I don’t know how okay I make her feel about the whole situation. I sort of hold her hand and shake it and tell her there’s nothing to be sorry about.”

  “You shake her hand goodbye?” Whitney said, pressing her palms to her cheeks like the Munch. “Oh, Will…”

  “I know. I was rusty. I was out of practice. But, hold on, there’s more. When I get to the front door, I can’t manage the right combination of the deadbolt with the other two locks while standing there in the dark. Then I hear this creature scratching with keys on the other side of the door, and we screw each other up again and again until ultimately I’m standing there in front of this mousy brunette wearing a backpack stuffed with bricks, and a Nalgene bottle clipped to the strap with a carabiner. One of the roommates, I presume. The hospital resident. She can’t take her eyes off me. And it sorta gives me butterflies, if I’m honest. This impression I seem to be making on women all over the city all night. What I’ve forgotten, of course, is that I basically have a bloody tampon sticking out of a hole in my face. Naturally I offer her my hand, too, and we shake. She looks reasonably mortified. For her friend mostly, I’m sure. I could be a home invader, for all she knows. I wish her a good night. I ride the elevator down and watch my face warp in and out in the dented reflection of the doors. I looked like one of the Picassos we saw yesterday.…I step out in the cold night. I hail a cab. Return home from the strange land across the river, my head pulsating, my face all bloody…”

  “And your balls gone blue.”

  “Nice,” he said. Will snorted and finished what was left in his glass. “Foreshadowing, for what it’s worth?…I didn’t come with anyone.”

  “Wow,” Whitney said, shocked and saddened in equal proportions. “That’s terrible. Foreshadowing, for what it’s worth?…The same can’t be said for me.”

  What timing! The waitress was at their shoulders. She apologized for the delay. She pointed to the chalkboard above the bar with its inscrutable Catalan. Through her broken English and their pathetic Spanish the three were able to agree on the simplest order: whatever the chef suggested. It was the sort of friction-less decision that might cost them a fortune. But the risk was less than picking out the names of dis
hes they couldn’t decipher. They understood the waitress to be asking about food restrictions, and they both shook their heads no, and it was a thing, like so many things, that was radically compatible between them. It was precisely the reason why they’d gotten engaged.

  When Will proposed, he managed to do the thing he’d worried would be impossible: he actually surprised Whitney. They’d been together for seven years. They’d shared spaces and they’d lived apart. They’d traveled long distances to visit one another for a night, for three hours. They’d left parties to talk on the phone. They’d Skyped across oceans. They’d moved in together, into a studio apartment of their own, no roommates, no bathroom split among people they weren’t sleeping with. They’d bored their single coworkers, accepted their role as the practically married couple among their wider searching set. When they’d been introduced to new partners of friends, those fledgling pairs looked to them to share the laws of enduring chemistry. They obviously knew something about sticking it out. After all, they’d been together since college.

  Senior spring, but still. They’d met in the gardens. They’d seen one another before, but had never spoken until then. Which was at least half by design. For by the afternoon they came into each other’s lives, Whitney had been operating for some time at a frequency that she and she alone was tuned to, moving about campus with urgency and purpose, and a well-honed indifference to student life. She was just ready—had been ready all her life, maybe—to get up and out and on with it. Just as she had been with her first exit, when she left home for school. It was time now to get going with the life she’d been looking for all this time. Consequently, she seemed then to carry herself like someone with a hard-won secret or a past forged by fire, or at least like someone with several somethings figured out. It was the thing that attracted Will to her so very much that first afternoon—that she possessed a knowledge of herself like no one else he knew, like someone in at least her mid-twenties.

  Whitney would joke with Will for weeks and then months and then years that they couldn’t have met a day earlier. That it was serendipitous timing, the only way it could’ve worked out. Until that afternoon, she’d argue, he wouldn’t have been ready for her—submitting his sweat-stained T-shirts and milkshake addiction and lack of a single credit card to his name as evidence of the lack of requisite maturity. But deep down, Whitney knew that it was really she who had needed every last hour up to that point to complete her transformation away from where she’d come from and who she’d been.

  There would be a grand dispute in the years that followed about who smiled at whom first. But what is undeniable is that the screenplay Whitney was reading that day was a screenplay Will knew by heart. And when he told her so, she told him to prove it. He asked her to read a setup, and when she did, he delivered Michael’s lines to Kay: This one time, this one time I’ll let you ask me about my affairs.

  What made the whole thing spark, though, wasn’t that he’d answered correctly, but rather how embarrassed Whitney had been made by his earnestness. She burst into laughter, the squeaky wheel of delight that he’d soon learn meant that the comedy was actually tickling her nose. Still, she picked another scene and read another prompt, and though he knew those lines too—knew them like breathing—he refrained this time. Will had proven that he’d understood. And that successful navigation of the challenge—that restraint and that pivot—was what prompted each of them to draw for one another, for several warm hours, much of the map of their separate lives apart up until then.

  He left her there in the gardens that afternoon because he had to meet some friends for dinner downtown, near the house they shared. There was a March Madness game on and their school was playing, did she know that? Of course she knew—but she let him tell her himself. They had won in the first two rounds of the tournament. They were in the Sweet Sixteen thanks to the junior star, JJ Pickle, who had led them deeper into the postseason than the program had ever been before. But besides JJ Pickle, Will and his housemates were certain the winning streak had been preserved because they’d each eaten a fried-chicken sandwich during both the first half and the second half of the first two tournament games. It was important to do their part again tonight, she surely understood.

  She liked that he walked away from her that day, that he left her there in the long shadows that hadn’t been present when they’d first started chatting. She liked that he didn’t ask for her number, even if he’d meant to. She could find him, just as he could find her. But of course, after all those years of never crossing paths, they bumped into each other at a bar that very night. Maybe she went downtown knowing that there was a chance. Maybe she went downtown knowing that that was the point. They’d dispute that intention, too, for weeks and then months and then years. But if running into each other out of the blue again wasn’t a clear enough sign from the universe that they’d better go home together that night, then they didn’t know what was.

  When Whitney woke up beside Will the next morning, she surprised herself with how purely at home she felt in his bed. She wasn’t concerned by the light coming through the beach towels he’d nailed to the window frame in lieu of blinds, nor by the laundry lining the baseboard that made it impossible to tell whether the floors were carpet or hardwood. The only thing that bothered her even a little that late-March morning was the realization that they had just six weeks left of college to make up for all the lost time. She rested her head on his chest. She watched his eyes flutter to consciousness. But even as she stretched her mind to its vastest limits, it would’ve been impossible for Whitney to comprehend that it would be Will, and Will alone, for the next seven years of her life.

  The waitress plopped down the first dish: garlic shrimp and fried eggs. They were starved, but they ate patiently. They didn’t know how many dishes they were in for. They hadn’t any idea what was coming.

  “Well, go ahead then,” Will said. “Your turn.”

  “Okay,” Whitney said, cautiously. “Um…it happened early.”

  “I don’t doubt it. The whole thing was your idea. You were hungry.”

  “I didn’t do anything to prompt it, it just…”

  “That face, that body, that California light…who could resist?”

  She shook her head faintly. “More like: locked inside a hotel during a lovely sunset, hiding in the corner of the restaurant, drafting notes.”

  “Stretched out long and lithe on the striped yellow beach beds of a hotel on the water,” he continued. “A handmade sign that says, ‘I may be engaged but I’m DTF.’”

  Now she was the one looking around at the staff, looking for anyone listening. She forked a shrimp. “Alone in the hotel restaurant, not even late, but the place has the feeling of it being late, the way everything does out there. The restaurant’s cleared out by nine-thirty. I’ve got a glass of wine and a shooting script that needs to solve a location fuck-up. Flooded basement in a bar they scouted for weeks.”

  “You told me about it. I assumed you figured it out and went to bed.”

  “That was the plan,” she said. “But I’m no longer alone in the restaurant. There’s a man at the bar. He’s ordering a drink. He flips over a shoulder and catches me staring.…The guy looks like Adrien Green. The guy really looks like Adrien Green. Turns out it’s Adrien Green.”

  “Come on.”

  “At the bar. All alone. Waiting for a drink. And he smiles at me.”

  “You spend forty-eight hours in L.A., single in the world for the first time as a functional adult, and your first night out you run into one of your top five dead or alive?”

  “I thought for a minute you’d sent him. A 1-2-3 welcome gift.”

  “I should’ve thought of it,” Will said. He was wearing the shock in his face still. He shook his head. “So does he do the smile?”

  “He does the smile,” Whitney said. “You can see all of his teeth. The big rubbery gums. He does the whole thing in a flash—GQ-cover-serious to mischievous little boy—and I start to feel my s
kin, like, getting turned inside out.”

  “All right, fewer Tiger Beat sensations.…So you go up and tell him about your predicament.”

  “The flooded bar or the fact that I’ve only got thirty days to hit three?”

  “You tell him you need to ask him for a favor…” Will said.

  “Weirdly, he gets his drink and walks straight over to me,” Whitney said. “Stands right there and keeps smiling. Asks what I’m working on. Asks if he can sit down.”

  “Do you tell him that you’re a professional woman with an important job that can’t be disrupted by German-English movie stars of a certain woman-melting age?”

  “I tell him about the show and he says it’s exactly the sort of thing he wishes he got asked to read for more often. That it’s just another strike against an agent who hasn’t given him anything good to look at lately.”

  “By this time he’s sitting?”

  “He’s sitting, and I guess I’m pretending that he’s just another person staying at the hotel who’s come down for a nine-thirty nightcap.”

  “But you don’t tell him that while you’re a perfectly responsible twenty-nine-year-old woman, you have zero control over your heart, mind, and pussy in the presence of a bona fide celebrity?”

  Her face was overtaken by a wide wine smile. She really did love him. “I think it became clear by the end of the encounter.…But no, at that moment I acted as though I was just another industry executive who spends her life in meetings around famous people.”

  “You don’t tell him to forgive you, but you know everything about every woman he’s dated, every film he’s gone out for and failed to land, and how every critic described his cock when he unzipped his pants in the gigolo movie?”

  “A burnished bronze bell clacker,” she said.

  “A hazard in a lightning storm,” he said.

  “I edged up to it. We talked about streaming services. We talked about shows he liked. He talked about the mutant thing and the new PTA. I finished my drink and told him I’d seen a couple audition tapes of his. For something that never got made, from when he was fresh off the boat. West End straight to here, he’d said on the tape, and they asked him where he was living and he’d said a couple blocks off the park in the East Village. So I told him I lived right there these days.”