“Oh,” I said slowly. Why was she here? Where was Mateo? I shook her hand, limp at first until it really clued in who I was speaking to. Jesus, where were my manners? “Hi,” I said quickly. “Sorry. I just got off the plane and…um, I guess I thought Mateo would be here.”
“He was but he got called into a meeting with the lawyers,” she said with a sympathetic smile. “He asked me to come in and get you.”
“That was nice of you,” I said, feeling terrible. I couldn’t have had the best reputation—I mean, if he asked her to come, then she knew about me. And now she had to come to the airport and pick me up.
“Do not worry about it,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Do you need help?” She gestured to the cart. “I parked in the temporary lot but it is not too far.”
“No, I’m good, thank you.”
“You are good?”
I needed to stop saying that. “I don’t need any help. I have it.”
She smiled and flipped her long hair over her shoulder. I caught a whiff of a women’s perfume I couldn’t quite place. She walked slightly in front of me, her car keys jangling from her hand. I noticed she was wearing strappy stiletto heels, and I envied her ease in them.
“I like your shoes,” I said as we stepped outside into grey skies and muggy warmth.
“Mango,” she replied. “The autumn sales will start soon. We will have to go. Mango, Zara, Blanco, they have the best deals. You can get a leather jacket for forty euros. Forty! Real leather.” She looked at me over her shoulder. “Do you like shopping? I like your tattoos.”
“Uh, thanks,” I said, caught off-guard by how friendly she was. I guess it made sense, since her brother was a charmer. Still, I thought if I ever got a chance to meet Lucia I would have been met with hostility, not this instant buddy-buddy thing, which surprisingly, I didn’t think was an act.
I pushed the cart forward, struggling to catch up with her long-legged gait. “And yeah I like shopping. We have Zara at home. They have nice dresses.”
She shrugged. “More or less. It is a Spanish store, yes? But I have a feeling you will like Blanco more. Once you are settled in with Mateo we shall go.” She raised her keys in the air and clicked the fob repeatedly until the electronic doo doo of the locks unlocking rang out down the row of cars. Satisfied, she waved at me to follow.
Wow. It was a silver Mercedes two-door…car. I didn’t know cars well, obviously, but it looked really pricey.
“Nice car,” I said.
“You like it? My boyfriend bought it for me,” she said.
“Nice boyfriend,” I commented, giving her the slow nod of approval.
“Yes,” she said, staring at it with an appreciative smile. “He likes to spoil me. You will meet him too, soon.” She opened the trunk and lifted my backpack up, apparently packing some muscle in her thin arms. Together we lifted up my heavy suitcase and pushed it into the back.
“Come now,” she said with a jerk of her head. “I will take you to your new home.”
Whoa. I know I had moved all the way here for him, but to hear where I was staying being described as home was jarring to my ears. My home. That seemed fucking surreal. It’s like I stepped off a plane and found a friend and a home right away. It didn’t seem right. It seemed too easy.
As she peeled the car smoothly out of the parking lot, she grinned at me slyly. “It seems you are in shock.”
I swallowed. “Yeah.”
“My brother didn’t tell you much, did he?”
“Not really. But I didn’t ask too much either.”
“I see,” she said, pulling out a tin of Altoids from the middle console. She offered one to me, and though I wasn’t a fan of strong mints, I knew my breath was probably rank after being on that plane for twelve hours. I put it on my mouth and the taste made my brain perk up.
“Yeah,” I said. “It was all kind of last minute. I guess I was just so focused on getting here, and I didn’t really think about what happened after. Mateo told me about his new apartment, after…um, you know. But I guess I didn’t really think about the whole moving in, physically, that this would be my home.”
“Are you worried?” she asked, her lips pursed slightly, her thin brows furrowed.
Yes, I was very worried. But about things that she’d probably take the wrong way. “No,” I told her. “It’s just…”
“Don’t worry, I understand,” she said. “I can only imagine how it is for you, to leave home suddenly and come here. Of course, Mama and Papa, we were so surprised about Mateo and you. We thought that, yes, he was different when he came back from Las Palabras. But when he asked for a divorce and then he told us about you, well…”
Well, ain’t you a whore, I finished in my head. Frankly, I didn’t think I’d heard it enough.
“Well, it certainly was surprising,” she went on with a flash of smile. “But in the end, it made Mateo happy. We all knew that he wasn’t happy with Isabel anyway. At least I knew that. She was always in it for the prestige and not him.” She shot a quick glance at my face, as if to make sure I wasn’t the same. “Like I said, he was happy when he said he met you. It did happen fast, and I’m sure there will be words said about it from the other side, but what can I say, Mateo knows what is best for him and we all support Mateo.”
That was an awful lot to process at once. “So your mom and dad, they weren’t angry at him?”
She shrugged. “Papa didn’t really understand, at first. But my mother, she knew. I think it was a similar situation for her, you know, when she met Papa. None of us had seen Mateo so…like…” she tapped her fingers against the steering wheel in thought, “like he was back in Atletico. You know, the life back in him. That was so nice to see that we didn’t really care what had brought about the change in him.” She eyed me out of the corner of her eyes and smiled. “I can see though that you are a nice girl. Very different from what he is used to, so don’t be surprised if some people give you a funny look. It is just that you are so much younger, and you have the tattoos. It doesn’t really mix in with certain types of people. But you know, I like you.”
I felt my shoulders relaxing slightly, despite all the shit she had said that I should get nervous about. “I like you too.”
“Good. Mateo says I can be a pain in the behind, but as my brother he has that right.”
“Are you two close?” It sounded like they were even though he didn’t talk about her all that often.
She tilted her hand back and forth. “More or less. We’ve always had our age differences between us, so perhaps we aren’t as close as we should be. But we make an effort.”
The funny thing was that they were closer in age to each other than I was to Mateo. I bit my lip.
“But that is not the only thing,” she went on reassuringly. “By the time I was a teenager, he was already moved out and part of the team, so I didn’t see him very much. He is a good brother though. And a good father, too. Perhaps not the best husband.”
I looked at her, my hackles raised. She was smiling at me. “It is true, no? I say, if you can’t laugh about it, then life is too serious. Divorce may not be as popular as it is in America, but it happens more and more. It’s just life. You make what you can of it, yes?”
I nodded, swallowing slowly. “Yes.” If only other people would see it so easily. “So, can I ask how he’s been handling it? The divorce, I mean?”
She rubbed her lips together and shrugged as she brought the Mercedes off the highway and on to a boulevard. “It is not easy. Isabel does not want him to have joint custody.’
“Why?”
“I think she is punishing him the only way she knows how.”
“With their daughter?”
“Si,” she said. “That is what it has come to. I am not too sure if Isabel knows about you specifically or that you are here, but she does know there was another woman. Of course she is hurt and humiliated, as any woman would be.”
My chest felt cold, heavy. This was all my fault.
“She is lashing out. She doesn’t want Chloe Ann to ever see her father again.” She dabbed pale pink nails at her eyes that were suddenly wet, her voice going an octave higher. “And then I would never get to see my niece again. Papa, Mama, they love their granddaughter. And Isabel doesn’t care. She doesn’t even care what is best for Chloe Ann, which is to see her father. They are close, you know. Mateo would do anything for her. I know that is the only reason he has stuck with Isabel for so long.”
Shit. This was too much. Despite what Mateo said about being unhappy before I came along, and wanting a change, wanting a new universe, this wouldn’t have happened this was if it wasn’t for me. I did this. His sister could be losing her niece, her parents could be losing their grandchild. Mateo could be losing the light in his life, his happiest memory. All because of me. Because I wanted him. Because I was young, in love, and selfish.
“Do not be so hard on yourself,” Lucia said with a sniffle, as if she heard my thoughts. “Mateo will win. There is no reason for him not to. The courts will see he is a great father. It’s just such a long process because Isabel is making it so. She is fighting it every step of the way, even for his money. Spanish women, we like to fight. But Mateo will be fine in the end. He is very respected.”
“Makes me think I probably shouldn’t have come here so soon,” I said carefully, my words pricked with regret.
“Perhaps,” she said. “But falling in love with another woman does not mean you are not a good parent. That should have no effect on it.”
“Even if the other woman is fifteen years younger, and covered in tattoos and piercings and is Canadian?”
She studied me for so long with those pretty eyes of hers that I was afraid we were going to collide with the back of a van. “We like Canadians,” she finally said. “It will be fine.”
After that sobering conversation, I asked her about things that didn’t make me feel like a horrible human being. She told me all about her job in marketing for a major cell phone company, how she still lived with her parents because she and her last boyfriend had only broken up six months ago and she had nowhere to go. Now, despite the car, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to move in with her new one. When I asked her why she didn’t move out on her own, she told me that didn’t sound like a lot of fun.
Eventually the car pulled down one of the prettiest streets I had seen yet. It was wide, with classic buildings and lots of greenery and color. There were all sorts of smartly-dressed people on the sidewalk, tons of boutiques and tapas bars. Even on this grey day, it had life to it.
“This is the Salamanca barrio,” Lucia said. “My ex-boyfriend lived down that street right there. I love it here, you’re lucky that Mateo got a place. It can be quite expensive.”
“Where do you and your parents live?”
“We are just north of the city. My boyfriend now lives in the Ibiza neighborhood, and it is not so bad. If he asks me to move in with him, I will not mind.”
We drove around the block a few times, Lucia peering at the apartment buildings, until she drove down toward another road. “Sorry,” she apologized. “I have only been here once. But now I remember.”
Finally she found a parking spot in front of a cream colored building with almost a Parisian look to it. “Here we are.”
I stared up at it through the car window. It was gorgeous. I was going to be living here?
We got out of the car, Lucia swinging the pack over her shoulder, me with the suitcase, and we walked through the glass doors of the entrance. The floor had white marble tiles, and the concierge desk was dark wood. Lucia nodded at the man behind the desk who was sifting through a newspaper, and we continued over to the elevator.
“He is only here during the day,” she said as she pushed the button. “At night you need to use your keycard to get in the building.”
The elevator was tiny as hell, barely fitting us and all my stuff; the floor was red velvet that had seen better days. I guess not all the building was as well-renovated as the lobby. I liked that. It felt more like me, to have something a bit tired and rundown.
We got off on the top floor, which was the sixth, and I followed Lucia down a long hallway of sleek hardwood floors with a red and gold runner carpet down the middle. The doors to each apartment had intricate moldings around the frames. You’d never find a place like this in Vancouver and have it be from the actual time period.
“How old is this building?” I asked.
She shrugged as she tried to find her keys, her glossy hair falling in her face. We had stopped at one of the doors at the end of the hall, light streaming in through an ornate window. “Mateo would know. Maybe two hundred years old, more or less. Our buildings here aren’t as old as the other European cities.”
“It’s old to me,” I told her, amazed.
She stuck the key in the lock and we walked into my new home.
I sucked in my breath. It was beautiful.
The floor was hardwood like the hall, but a lighter maple color. The walls were textured and a creamy off-white. The ceilings were very high and had iron chandeliers hanging from them, much like Las Palabras, but these were painted the same color as the walls. As I slowly walked down the front hall, marvelling at the Matador paintings on the walls, I came across the kitchen to the left, a big open space of gleaming chrome and granite, fit for a chef. Beyond that was the living room with a flatscreen TV and soft white leather couch. Windows on the far wall stretched from floor to ceiling, bathing everything in light. You could hear the muffled sounds of the street below and had a view across the street to another beautiful apartment.
“This is amazing,” I said under my breath, peering out the window. I looked over my shoulder at her. She was standing to the side of the kitchen, my backpack still on her shoulders, texting someone on her phone.
Deciding to give myself a tour, I looked to my right and saw another hallway with a bathroom at the end of it. I walked down it and peered into the first room to my left. It was a small den, barely furnished except for a roll-top desk, a laptop, and an open filing cabinet. A few papers spilled onto the carpet beneath. A large amount of boxes were stacked along one wall. Seeing that, seeing the proof of Mateo having to move, having to start his life over, picked at my heart a bit.
I wasn’t the only one faced with massive change.
I continued down the hall, calling over my shoulder, “Do you know when Mateo will be back?”
I opened a door across from it on the right and peered into what looked like a small guest bedroom, tastefully decorated but unlived in.
“He just texted me,” she said. “Should be another hour or so, he hopes.”
I nodded and opened the door on my left. The last one. The master bedroom. It was gorgeous: a king bed with a fluffy white duvet that you’d find at fancy hotels, a large window that opened to the street, a humongous antique dresser, a walk-in closet (great excuse to go shopping with Lucia), and what looked to be a vast en-suite bathroom.
“So,” Lucia said. I turned to look at her putting the backpack down on the couch. “Now that you are here, I’m afraid I have to leave before the traffic gets too bad.”
I walked down toward her, both afraid to be alone and eager to take in my new place by myself.
She embraced me in a quick hug and a perfumed kiss on each cheek. “I will see you soon, yes?”
“I hope so.”
She smiled coyly. “This is your home now, Vera. You are with my brother. We will see each other so much that soon I will be a pain in the butt to you, too.”
She turned and strutted toward the door. Then she stopped and said, “I forgot to leave you these,” and put down a key and a key card on the kitchen island.
Then she was gone and I was all alone in my new place.
I was immediately overwhelmed by the silence, by the unpacking that needed to be done, by the shower I needed to take, by the exploring I needed to do. Instead I lay back on the couch and closed my eyes.
&nbs
p; Chapter 23
The sound of keys rattling in the door woke me.
My eyes sprung open, my heart immediately off to the races. I sat right up and turned to look at the door, blinking a few times. I had to remember where I was. Mateo’s place. My place. I had fallen asleep on the couch, my body and mind weary from my travels.
My god, was it Mateo at the door?
I didn’t have to wonder for long.
The door opened and in he stepped.
All the breath was taken out of me.
Time came to a crawl.
My heart kicked up a notch.
The air became charged, electric.
All those cliché things that actually do happen to you once Mateo Casalles steps into a room.
He looked unbelievable. A sharp cut steel grey suit that showed off his broad shoulders, a white shirt underneath with top buttons undone to show off the dip of his throat, and no tie. Grey loafers with no socks so you could see a sliver of tanned feet. A thick briefcase in his large hands.
No wedding ring.
I paused on that for a moment, feeling the weight of it, before I looked up to his face.
He had a few day’s worth of stubble along his strong jaw, his hair a bit more tamed than I was using to seeing, slicked back slightly. I preferred his hair messy, but this showed off his great nose and high cheekbones. There was a faint trace of purple under his eyes, like he hadn’t gotten enough sleep, but the look in his eyes more than made up for it. They were full of wonder, amazement, and a hint of longing and desire that made me think perhaps I was his favorite food after all.
“Vera,” he said in a low voice, unsure, as if I were an apparition. He kicked the door shut with his leg and walked slowly toward me, putting his briefcase on the counter while his eyes never left mine. We were locked in our gazes, that charge in the air thrumming between us.
I found myself slowly getting to my feet, staring at him, feeling that tiny bit of awkwardness that you get when you see someone you haven’t for a long time, someone that you’ve been dreaming of, someone that owns your body and mind. It was like a first date, each person sussing out the other, wondering if they felt the same, wondering what to do.
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