I breathed in deeply, trying to quell my raging hormones. “Do you mean it in that sense when you swear?”
Mateo smiled carefully. “I don’t take fucking lightly.”
Okay, so what the hell were we really talking about here? I stared at him, hoping my face was blank.
“So then what did you do after you…looked up shit?” he abruptly continued on with the conversation, as if that weird moment had never happened.
“Uh,” I fumbled for words. “I, uh, went on the drive for lunch.”
“The drive?”
“Commercial Drive,” I explained. “It’s a popular street near my house. Lots of artsy types, hipsters, hippies, bums. Good places to eat, and there’s an Italian section too.”
“You met someone there?”
I shook my head and looked down at my chipped fingernails. “No. I went to eat by myself. My brother was working.”
I could feel his eyes on me but I avoided looking up at him. “Hmmm,” he said. “No friends to meet? No boyfriend?”
I sucked in my breath, the questions grating me raw. “I have friends,” I said, quietly defensive. “I just don’t see them often. School is over. And my best friend, she’s in another province.”
“And the boyfriend?”
Finally, I had to look at him. “Obviously I don’t have a boyfriend.”
He frowned, wearing a face of genuine puzzlement. “Why is that obvious?”
I bit my lip for a moment. “I don’t know. I just thought it was. I don’t think I’d be here if I had one. I don’t think I’d be…me…acting the way I do.”
What the hell was I saying? This hangover was making me talk way too much.
“Very honest,” he said after a beat. “Do you like to be alone?”
I shrugged. “I think so. It’s easy.”
“Easy to be you?”
“No. Easy to only worry about yourself.”
He nodded and I could see his dark eyes churning with my words. “You are close with your brother, yes?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s pretty lame but I think he’s the closest person to me. Do you have any siblings?” I asked him, hoping to turn this onto him.
“A sister,” he said simply. “Lucia.” He pulled the chair closer to me and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, the Rolex glinting in the weak sun. “Is it just your brother?”
Back to me again. I exhaled noisily, to let him know that this wasn’t a fun subject. “No, I have an older sister.”
“But you don’t get along.”
“No, we don’t,” I said. “I mean, I’m nice to her and I make an effort. She’s just a bitch.”
His forehead wrinkled. “That doesn’t sound like a nice thing to say about your family.” He seemed genuinely shocked by that.
“Well, she is,” I said. “She’s always been that way but it got worse after…it’s a long story. My family is fucked up, that’s all you need to know, and I don’t care how that sounds. Every family needs a black sheep to call them out on their bullshit.”
“And Vera Miles is the black sheep,” he commented. He leaned back. “But I don’t like that name for you.”
“Vera?”
“The black sheep. You seem more like a red sheep. Maybe a bright color, like your shirt.” His eyes traveled down to my chest, focusing there for just a moment, just long enough for me to feel a heat deep inside, melting the ice that had built up over the last few minutes.
“I’m definitely not a sheep at all,” I said. “Black cat is more like it, I think. Maybe even a black hole.”
“A black hole,” he said carefully. “That is in space, yes?”
I nodded, relieved that the conversation was heading in astronomy’s direction. Now, this I could talk about and not feel weird about. I straightened up and shoved my sunglasses on top of my head, blinking at the sunlight. “A black hole is a star. Or, it was a star that collapsed onto itself. It’s a lot more, um, scientific than that but basically it keeps collapsing, eventually absorbing all light and other stars and matter around it. It’s fascinating, really, because we don’t know all that much about it. And it’s kind of scary, to me, anyway. And invisible.”
“I learned about that in school, when I was a child,” he said, “though I knew it as agujero negro. But no, you are not a black hole, Vera. You are fascinating, but you are not scary and you are not invisible.” He said that with subdued passion, like it was a fallacy to even suggest it. “You are the opposite. What is the opposite? Estrella?”
I raised my finger. “No more Spanish.”
“A star, then.” He gestured to my tattoos, the shooting stars on my chest, the constellation on my arm. “You are a star. That’s what I shall call you. Star.”
My heart flipped. “In that case, I think Estrella sounds better.”
He fixed me with a satisfied smile. “Good. Then it is settled. Estrella,” he said, voice lower over the word.
The world seemed to still.
Our eyes stayed locked together, silence settling on us like silk, trapping in the heat between us. It couldn’t all be in my head, could it? This was a moment that had to be happening for him too. The look in his eyes was intense, practically carnal. They glittered darkly, searching me. People didn’t just stare at each other like this without meaning to.
You’re hungover and delusional, my inner critic said, trying to muffle the butterflies.
“May we join you?” a thickly accented voice broke through our connection. I looked away from Mateo, reality snapping me into place, and up to see Sara and Lauren peering down at us hesitantly.
Well, Sara looked hesitant. Lauren had her arms folded and an accusatory twist to her lips.
“Sure?” I said, trying to act nonchalant, like I hadn’t been ensnared in a heady, strange, moment with Mateo. I quickly made my face as impassive as possible and pointed at the chairs closest to us. “Pull up a seat,” I added breezily.
“We thought it would be fun for the four of us to talk,” Lauren said, dragging her chair over, the sound on the tiles scraping the inside of my ears. Today she was wearing short shorts, a polo shirt and had attached a length of faux-pearls to her glitter glasses. She didn’t look like she could have any fun, period.
My eyes quickly darted over to Mateo but he seemed as impassive as ever. He got up and pulled his chair closer to mine and pulled out his phone, seeming to scroll through things.
Lauren narrowed her eyes at him. “What are you doing?”
I sucked in my breath and glanced nervously at Mateo. As casual as this place was, he was still an older man, a professional and a stranger and she was talking to him like she was his teacher. I mean, she kind was, so was I, when you thought about it. But fuck her and her stupid fucking glasses. Where did she get the nerve?
Mateo’s eyes slid over to her, appraising her coolly. “The dictionary on my phone helps me with my English.” He went back to the screen, not expecting her to argue with that.
“So,” Sara said, a forced smile on her face. “I asked Lauren questions and she asked me questions and then she said we should talk to you and ask questions.”
Oh great, more questions. Can we please talk about my crappy family and what a loner I am, a black hole?
No, I corrected myself, steeling my doubts with Mateo’s warm words. You’re Estrella.
“I’ll go first,” Lauren said, crossing her pale legs. She eyed Mateo and cleared her throat until he reluctantly met her gaze. “Tell us about your wife.”
My chest constricted at the peculiar bluntness of the question. Mateo squinted his eyes at her and then passed me his phone for some reason. I gingerly took it in my hands and looked down at it, confused. The notepad was open and on it he had written Does this girl have a problem in her head?
I nearly choked out laughing. Lauren was looking at me like she was about to demand we “share with the rest of the class” but Mateo brought back her attention.
“My wife is a very lovely woman,” h
e said and though he was polite about it, there was that edge again to his voice. “She is very pretty, very smart and a very good mother.” Was I disappointed to hear that? Probably not. Then again, I was good at lying to myself.
Lauren didn’t seem satisfied with that. “What is her name?”
“Isabel,” he said and the name did funny things to me. Things like, making me feel the lightest lashes of guilt for fawning over the husband of Isabel Casalles.
From the way Lauren was watching me now, I could tell that had been her intention with the question. She had noticed us together, our interactions, the way I stared at him without realizing it. She wanted to let me know that she knew and to remind me that he was married.
Like I fucking needed her to remind me of that.
While Mateo went on to tell her about his daughter Chloe Ann, I took the moment to quickly write under his message, that she was just a bitch. I handed it back to him without looking. I ignored the tingly feeling I got when our fingers brushed against each other.
He grasped the phone in his hand and looked over at Sara, asking her to tell us about her husband. While Sara tried to find the right words, he looked down at the message I wrote and his brows furrowed. He looked back at me, as if to say what?
I leaned over his seat and looked down at the notepad. Thanks to the wonders of autocorrect, instead of writing Lauren is a bitch I had actually written down Lauren is a bicycle. A guffaw escaped my lips and more giggles threatened to spill. The thought that Mateo had been eying Lauren and trying to picture her as a banana-seat cruiser with pearl streamers and made me feel like I had just ingested a crate of the sillies.
“What is so funny?” Lauren asked haughtily. Mateo and I were both laughing now. His laughter was rich and reverberated through me, remedying me like a tonic.
“It’s something that got lost in translation,” I managed to say.
“Right,” Lauren said with a narrow-eyed smile. “Well, then let me ask you a question, Vera.” The way she said my name was accusatory, as if I were using an alias.
I stared back at her expectantly, knowing that whatever was coming I probably wasn’t going to like.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked innocently. Too innocently.
“Actually,” I said, with a wide fake smile, “I was just discussing that with Mateo. I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Not even Dave?”
My face fell. “What are you talking about? Dave? From here? No.” I tried to laugh but it felt hollow.
“I saw you kissing him last night, that’s all,” she said, taking off her glasses and wiping the lenses on her shorts. “Thought he was your boyfriend.”
The fuck. The fuck!
I felt absolutely mortified, like she was instigating that I was some slut, and not in some funny ha ha way, but as in I was a terrible, unclean, easy person with no respect for herself. I didn’t even have the words to say anything back, all the snappy retorts I would normally have used had slipped away somewhere and I was slack-jawed and fumbling.
“Is this your business to know if she has a boyfriend?” Mateo asked, leaning forward. The polite tone to his voice was totally gone.
Lauren looked surprised but quickly covered it up with a lift of her chin. “I was just curious. Just trying to make conversation. That is our job here, isn’t it? I had seen Vera kissing him last night, so, naturally, I assumed they were together. I mean, why else should I think otherwise?” Her pitch went up at the end, as if to once again make it seem like an innocent question.
“You must come from a very strange country,” Mateo said, “where women are not allowed to kiss men for their own pleasure.”
Was Mateo sticking up for me, for the fact that I had kissed Dave?
Lauren looked appalled. “I am from America. Women are better than men in America and we are allowed to do whatever we want. Frankly, I think you and your country is a little bit backwards, with your politically incorrect machismo and caveman mentality. Not to mention how racist and repressive you are toward the Moors and anyone else who emigrates from Africa.”
He shrugged and ran his hand through his hair. Though his face was neutral and pose relaxed, I could see his chest heaving slightly, as if this was getting him angry. I couldn’t fucking blame him.
“Lauren, please,” he started. “With all respect, I do not think you know what you are talking about. Every country has bad, it doesn’t make the people bad and you can not fully understand something else, whether it is another person or a whole country, without being in the shoes. You, being an American, should at least relate to that.” He spoke in a calm and measured voice and a small part of me found myself falling for him. This wasn’t just a physical thing anymore. The man had strength of self and character and damn if I didn’t love it.
“I don’t understand how being an American has anything to do with it,” she stated. Meanwhile, Sara’s eyes were volleying back and forth between the two and she was sitting on the edge of her seat like it was a tennis match.
“Well,” Mateo said, getting to his feet so his tall frame was towering over her, “you are coming across as rude and arrogant. It would be wrong of me to say that all Americans are rude and arrogant. Of course, that is not true. It is only you. You, Lauren, are a bicycle. Vete a la mierda. In English, that means go to the shit.”
With that he got up and held out his hand for me. “We have fifteen minutes left to talk, you and I.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I put my hand in his, shot Sara an apologetic glance and let him bring me to my feet. We walked away from the building and up the path, not heading anywhere in particular. It wasn’t until we were a safe distance away that he dropped my hand. Had it been an act of solidarity or one of affection? All I knew was that my hand now felt empty without his.
I looked over my shoulder at the reception and dining hall where we could still see the shadowy figures of Sara and Lauren. Poor Sara had totally got roped into Lauren’s weirdo agenda, using something as fun and innocent as our one-on-one sessions and turning them into a self-serving platform for her PC issues.
“That woman is fucked to shit,” Mateo said under his breath.
“No kidding.”
He turned to face me, scrutinizing my face. “I thought it was your first time meeting her on the bus. Do you know her?”
I shook my head. “No. But I’ve dealt with chicks like her before. By the way, they really hate it if you call them chicks. They take politically correctness and feminism to a whole new hateful place.”
“Ah, these are these haters,” he said. “The English word has come over here to Spain.”
“Yeah, haters is one way to describe them. They take anything—feminism, religion, lifestyle choices, art—and they ruin them. They go so extreme that they lose sight of the original goal. Lauren…she’s just bitter and angry and probably hates the fact that I like sex or something. She’s a slut-shaming super femme. I bet you a hundred bucks that her vagina is covered in cobwebs.”
Mateo burst out laughing again. It was the sweetest sound to my ears. I grinned at him, relishing his joy, and blushing a bit at my words. Sometimes I forgot that I wasn’t always appropriate.
“You are special, Estrella,” Mateo said, his eyes softening as he gazed at me. I started sucking on my lip, wondering what the hell to say to that. “But,” he went on, looking back to the view, “I do not want to take your bet. I have no doubt that you are right but I do not wish to the one who…verifies it.”
“Me neither,” I said with a smile.
The rest of the day went quite well despite the hangovers and the fact that Lauren was a bicycle. For some reason I had thought that it would have reflected badly on me for having had a drunken makeout session with Dave, but it hadn’t, at least not with Mateo or Becca.
In fact, as the evening rolled around and I had the rest of my one-on-one and business sessions under my belt, I’d actually bumped into Dave as I waited for a free computer. It was awkward for a
second and then it intensified when I said, “Sorry about kissing you last night.”
Luckily, Dave pretty much took it in stride. And by that, I mean he shrugged and said, “It’s cool.”
And it was cool. After dinner and our activities, which consisted of a very silly, very immature game of forty-person charades, I went to bed early with a smile on my face. I’d survived my second day and I did so feeling like I had people who had my back.
Chapter 8
The next four days rolled on together as one. You would think that because I was speaking to different people each day, that each day, hey, each hour, would stand out. But it didn’t. There were a few Spaniards who I really liked, who made an impression on me: Eduardo and his cute ways, Angel and his innocence, tall, young Ricardo in his earnest enthusiasm, long-haired rocker Manuel, and sexy Nerea with her blue hair, who seemed like me in ten years. But everyone else was just normal, just okay enough, just ordinary people whom I didn’t really have a connection with. So those sessions, well they just kind of blended into one.
Of course, there was Claudia and Becca and Sammy and occasionally Polly or Beatriz but we pretty much did the same things every night. Eat dinner, take part in the activities, then drink at the bar. I did have to say, that our behaviour—especially the behaviour of the Spaniards—totally loosened up over the days. It became more flagrant, more perverse. I loved it. This was the true side of the Spaniards—they were just finally finding the skill to express their naughty selves in English.
The only thing that really stood out about the four days was my interaction with Mateo. Once I had him for a business meeting and twice I had him on a one-on-one. Most nights we tried to have a meal together. It wasn’t like a thing we agreed upon, but if he wasn’t looking for me, I was looking for him. I liked that. I liked it a lot, to know that someone was seeking me out.
On each of those four days, Mateo had asked his questions.
His first question he asked me was why I studied astronomy. We went for a walk down the country lane, past the oak trees and lavender fields, indulging in this sun-drenched early summer. I told him how I’d fallen in love with the stars at a young age, all because of a book. The Little Prince. I became obsessed with the infinite possibilities of the twinkling lights in the sky. Oddly enough, I had a fear of space—I knew I’d be the last person to ever get on a space shuttle. Space was cold and scary and lonely. But the planets and the stars and the cosmos of forever, they were my own exploration. I could study them, peer through a telescope, map their ever evolving status, putting a piece of myself out there on a journey without ever fully investing myself.
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