Call it a tactical retreat, Abby tells herself as she leans back against the door to her ensuite. She feels silly, beyond silly, locking the door and sitting on the edge of the obscenely large Jacuzzi.
She's going to think I'm crazy, Abby thinks, and then wonders why on earth she should care what Ixazaluoh thinks about her. She's sure the woman's forgotten she even exists by now. Or, no, she's probably at home with her family laughing about this weird gringo who paid her an obscene tip and then vanished before she could return with her order.
When Abby envisions Ixazaluoh's family, she is very careful to imagine that all have shadows, each and every one.
Abby has reservations for the resort's Japanese restaurant, and she has to be there in an hour and a half. She showers the chlorine, sweat, sunblock and sand from her skin, and spends an hour puttering around her suite naked simply because its warm enough, and because she can. She opens the windows that face out onto the pool and turns down the lights so her silhouette won't be seen. She paints her toenails on the balcony, naked under the moon, and thinks about the ruins of the city she'd seen when she'd been to the Mayan Riviera last year. Tulum, it was called, she thinks. There had been a ziggurat, not as high as some of the more famous ones, but Tulum was the first place the sunlight hit on the summer solstice and they'd cut holes into their buildings so the shaft could penetrate the entire city from the shoreline.
The solstice is close, Abby thinks with a sudden jolt. Three days away, maybe? Four? She's not sure, and she is suddenly, petrifying afraid to put down her nail polish and go check her laptop. A small splatter of purple drops from the end of her brush and splashes with perfect precision into the centre of an orchid painted onto the tiles beneath her chair.
Her gorge crawls up her throat and she swallows once, heavily. The smell of wet polish, acrid and strong, suddenly turns her stomach. In the moonlight, the splatter looks like blood.
I'm being ridiculous, Abby scolds herself. One pretty, haunting, weird woman and a play of light on the deck and I'm suddenly having the screaming willies about blood sacrifices and human victims? I'm being ridiculous!
She shakes her head, water spraying out from the shoulder-length mass of boring brown curls and spattering down her back. She finishes applying the nail polish, wipes up the spilled splatter with a tissue, and then waddles back into the bathroom to wait for the colour to dry and to slick herself up with moisturizer. All this dry heat is hell on her skin, and she wishes she had a boyfriend here with her—or a friend, at least—to rub the lotion between her shoulder blades, in that horrifically itchy little spot that nobody seems to be able to reach on themselves.
Once she's drip-dried, she puts on a light floral perfume. She dresses carefully, in the breezy little black dress with the full skirt and the plunging neckline that her girlfriend gave her for Christmas, and finishes it off with a patchwork of chunky silver and lapis lazuli jewellery that she has assembled over her many, many trips to Mexico. She only ever wears it here, believes it's too big and too showy for home, and for the first time she wonders why she thinks that way. Perhaps it's because she doesn’t like being reminded of the work she dislikes so much when she's out in the real world, in her real life.
Then she slips on her strappy sandals, grabs her teal shawl, and checks her appearance in the mirror. It's the same outfit, the same uniform she's been wearing out to dinner at resorts for the last three years. It's easy, it's comfortable, and Abby has long ago stopped caring if it's attractive. This is just what she wears.
Catching the glint of silver and turquoise peeking out from between the strands of her dishwater brown hair, Abby has a brief thought for Ixazaluoh. What would she think of Abby, looking like this? All dolled up with literally nowhere to go.
Abby shakes her head and bites the inside of her cheeks as punishment. No, she's only just got her breathing back to normal. She is not, she is not going to get herself wound up again. She's being ridiculous. She's being silly.
She's just lonely, and keyed up, and slightly drunk from the piña coladas. And she refuses, absolutely refuses to believe that she saw what her stupid old brain seems to think she saw.
All the same, she spends the whole evening jumping at shadows, and when she retires to bed after typing up her notes on the dinner, she doesn't allow herself to admit how ridiculous she is for jamming the desk chair under the patio door handle, and pushing the armchair up against the suite's door. She's on the fourth floor, for goodness sake, and she hasn't got anything valuable.
Nobody will be breaking in.
Nobody has any reason to.
Here on a resort, Abby has learned to make herself as unmemorable, as forgettable as the staff. It's better that way.
She just wonders, now, if it's possible to also make oneself invisible.
☼
Dear Abby,
I'm looking for a resort for my family and I—we have two young children—that has a real flavour of the country. We want to make this vacation a learning experience. Can you suggest something with four stars in Thailand?
-Roaming Dad
Abby stares at the computer screen and wonders how this is her life. A crappy column that satirizes a popular advice writer, and a sunburn on the tops of her feet where she forgot to put on sunblock cream yesterday morning. It itches like crazy, and she tries to subtly scratch the burn with the cracked skin of her heels without irritating it further.
There is no one at all around her. She's chosen a lounge chair as far from the pool and the rowdy drunkards, the swim up bar, the games of water volleyball and the screaming children as possible. It's a shaded area, lots of palm trees reaching over the manicured lawn to vie for the clear space above the deck. It's close to the staff entrance to the kitchens, and the air smells of bacon and eggs, and underneath that tamarind and cinnamon, jalapeños and pineapple. Later, when she's all caught up on her work email, Abby is thinking of going down to the beach.
She tells herself it's because she should check out the much-talked up natural reef that the resort's beach cradles, and not at all because she's never seen Ixazaluoh on that part of the compound.
Abby types up five hundred words about her agency's most expensive all-inclusive tour to Thailand, the four-star hotel, the safe little café run by safe little trained chefs, the children's play area and the highly scripted elephant tour through the jungle to see movie filming locations. She did this trip two years ago, and it was somewhere around then that this disquietude had begun to settle around her heart.
She thinks it had something to do with how sad the elephants looked.
A shadow moves between Abby and the green-dappled sun, and she blinks up at it, wondering if someone has come to try to engage her in a conversation. Usually having her laptop outside with her encourages some vaguely paternalistic man or other to tut over her and tell her that she's on vacation and she should relax. It's one of the worst chat-up lines Abby's ever heard, and unfortunately, she's also heard every variation.
But it's not a man.
It's Ixazaluoh. She's holding a tray with one glass of water, and one piña colada, and she is smiling her pearly purple-brown smile. Today's hideous neckerchief is aqua and Day-Glo green. Abby clamps down on the urge to scream and jump, and instead flicks her eyes to the clock on the computer screen.
"It's only eleven," she says. "Bit early for a piña colada."
"You are on vacation," Ixazaluoh says, and her grin gets bigger, brighter, somehow more without actually changing at all.
"You know very well that I'm not," Abby says, and she doesn't mean to be grumpy, but that's the way it comes out.
"All the more reason," Ixazaluoh says and puts both drinks down on the little table beside Abby's patio chair without asking.
"You… you don't have to," Abby stutters, suddenly, overwhelmed with shame. She hates that these sorts of places feed their clients such a sense of entitlement, and hates more that she can't seem to shake the guilt for it. Ixazaluoh is just doing her job, and she's getting
paid to do it well, isn't she? "I wasn't trying to… buy your attention or, or anything."
Ixazaluoh laughs, and it is sweet and clear and somehow reminds Abby of the sound a little stream makes when it splashes along a small, rocky waterfall. Plinking echoes, and soft deep plunges. The computer on her lap keeps her from being able to see Ixazaluoh's feet, and maybe that's a good thing.
Abby's got herself convinced that she was being ridiculous yesterday. She doesn't want to prove herself wrong, however accidentally.
"I do nothing I don't want to do," Ixazaluoh says patiently. Abby wonders if English is her first language, because it's excellent. Nary a burring consonant or Spanish vowel to be found. She speaks lightly, easily, and with a strange forthrightness that makes Abby wonder exactly how many languages she speaks—Abby's only heard that queer flatness of tone and roundness of vowel from true polyglots.
How can this woman be so educated and still just work as a drinks server?
"I didn't mean—" Abby tries, but then Ixazaluoh sits down on the lounger next to Abby.
"Nor do I… give my attention to those I don't want to," she says softly.
Abby is riveted. She can't take her eyes off of how Ixazaluoh leans forward, conspiratorially, the polished planes of her forehead and cheekbones, the soft spray of her eyelashes. "I don't want you to get in trouble."
Ixazaluoh grins, that wide grin full of honest appreciation that somehow doesn't change at all from the bland one she wears when she's serving except in how it completely does. "They won't see," Ixazaluoh says, her voice low.
Abby bites the inside of her cheeks to keep from asking about yesterday, about the way Ixazaluoh wound around the people who didn't seem to see her, about how she moves gracefully and silently, like a koi among rushes. She keeps her eyes firmly on Ixazaluoh's, big and dark and shining with something like mirth, and something like a look she's never seen in a woman's eyes before. In a man's, sure, across a table or across a bar, but never a woman's. Ixazaluoh licks her lips, and Abby can't help but get drawn in by that flash of pink sliding across purple-brown.
Cold-hot panic slams against the back of Abby's neck. That sense of screaming not-right-ness crawls along her flesh and yet, and yet, she can't back away. She's… enchanted, she thinks is the right word.
"Drink your piña colada," Ixazaluoh whispers. Abby doesn't realize that she's leaned toward Ixazaluoh until she feels her breath against her cheek. It is soft and cool, like a stream. "And finish your work. And then I will bring you some lunch."
"Th-thank you," Abby says. She sits back, and Ixazaluoh rises and then she is gone, slipping around the crowds, vanishing behind a resort-sponsored beer pong competition.
It never occurs to Abby to question why she's suddenly decided to abandon her plans to head to the beach.
☼
It is just after noon and the soft buzz of white rum has made her loose, the warmth of the sun and the familiar whirring of her laptop luring her toward sleep. It would be unwise to nap on a patio chair at the full zenith of the day, but she's draped her legs with her gauzy floral bathing suit cover, and her hat has a wide enough brim. The only thing she'd really need to worry about is the laptop, and who on earth would want to steal that? She could just throw a beach towel over it, close her eyes…
A soft touch on the back of her neck, a fingernail scraping just between the small curls that the humidity makes of the hair at her nape when she has it up in a ponytail, and Abby leans into the clandestine intimacy of it for two seconds before she realizes that she doesn't know who's touching her, and it makes her jump out of her skin.
"Jesus!" Abby says, jerking upright. Behind her, Ixazaluoh laughs her clear-water laugh.
Abby twists in her seat, setting her laptop down under her own tented knees, and glares up at Ixazaluoh. Before she can say anything, the woman has plopped herself in the free patio lounger next to Abby and is pressing a bowl into her hands. It is filled with soft, still warm tortillas and tamales, fried plantains, and something a bit creamy and white that Abby thinks might be cheese.
"What's this?" Abby asks. It smells heavenly.
"Lunch," Ixazaluoh says.
"Where did you get this? I've never seen this at the buffet. Or this." She picks up some of the plantain and pops it into her mouth and, oh god, it’s incredible.
Ixazaluoh sets down a cup of something that looks like pure chocolate next to Abby's empty piña colada glass. "A bit clichéd in my choices, I'll admit," Ixazaluoh says. "But why eat American food while among the Maya?"
Abby has a corn tortilla halfway into her mouth, smothered in the cheese, and so can only nod emphatically in agreement.
"You like it?" Ixazaluoh asks.
Abby nods again and makes an enthusiastic noise. She offers the bowl to Ixazaluoh, but she just shakes her head and says, "It is for you. Just for you."
Abby saves the liquid chocolate for the end, and is only mildly surprised by the swift, sweet kick of heat that chases down the back of her throat. It's decadent in a way that Abby's never indulged in before, rich velvet and spice on her tongue, coating her teeth.
Ixazaluoh watches it all with keen, narrowed eyes. Abby can't help but feel self-conscious as she takes her last swallow and sets down the empty cup. She licks the chocolate that lingers on the bottom of her lip away, afraid it will drip down her chin and make her look like an idiot, and Ixazaluoh's gaze jerks down to her mouth. Ixazaluoh's cheeks have gone dark and ruddy, Abby realizes suddenly, and in response she feels colour climbing up her own face. Warmth pools low in her belly, like the chocolate has decided to go all the way down and start coating her more intimate parts, bypassing her stomach entirely. It surprises Abby.
She's never, never felt like this with a woman before.
"Yes, good, yes," Ixazaluoh murmurs softly, so softly, and then she leans forward.
Abby could stand up. Abby could lean back. Abby could put out her hand and say, "No, stop."
She does none of these things.
Instead, she stays very, very still. She closes her eyes. She holds her breath. She waits.
The cool puff of breath against her mouth makes Abby tense up, but then there are warm, smooth, gloss-slick lips against her own. They press, careful and firm, without being insistent or shy. It is the kiss of a woman confident that she will not be turned away.
Abby's not-goddess takes one of Abby's hands between both of hers. She pulls Abby to her feet, their mouths still connected like a grounding wire.
"Come, come with me," Ixazaluoh says against Abby's teeth, and her fingers twist between Abby's.
Only then, when Abby breathes "Yes," does Ixazaluoh pull back. Her genuine smile has returned, the real one, and she tugs Abby towards the kitchen doors. Abby can no more resist stumbling in her wake than a dinghy can resist being towed by an ocean liner.
Abby looks down. Ixazaluoh still has no shadow. She should be scared, she knows this logically, because people without shadows shouldn't exist. But it doesn't matter, because Ixazaluoh is beautiful, and she is kind, and she tastes fantastic, and she wants Abby. Nobody has wanted Abby like this is years, maybe even decades. And Abby wants to feel wanted.
Ixazaluoh pulls Abby into a storage closet, flicking on the light and locking the door behind them. There are shelves and shelves of tablecloths and neatly pressed napkins on every wall, and Ixazaluoh crowds Abby back against a soft stack of fabric. Hands on either side of Abby's head, palms flat against the wall, breasts crushed together in a way that Abby never realized would be completely distracting, Ixazaluoh says: "May I?"
"Yes," Abby says, even though she isn't entirely clear what she's consenting to. Sex, she knows, but not the details of what Ixazaluoh has planned. Who cares? Abby can be flexible. She's never been flexible before, but what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right?
Abby gathers her courage and cups Ixazaluoh's breasts in her hands, fingers digging in to the sides slightly through the fabric of her hideous shirt. Ixazaluoh moans and dives back
into Abby's mouth, not taking it slowly this time, not shy.
"Mmm, chocolate," Ixazaluoh murmurs. "Food for the gods, you know." She kisses and nips at the side of Abby's mouth, where she must have spilt some.
Abby, emboldened, flexes her fingers and curls her tongue against the back of Ixazaluoh's teeth, and that's when she feels the nametag, hard and crisp against her palm.
Abby jerks back, drops her hands behind her back like a guilty child.
"Oh, god, I can't," she says.
Ixazaluoh frowns, and Abby realizes that she is shorter than Ixazaluoh. That Ixazaluoh is looking down at her through half-mast eyelids and gorgeous lashes. Abby wants to tilt her head up, to offer up her neck like a submissive wolf bitch, and so she does the exact opposite. She can smell the sweat coming off of her own cleavage.
There is a heavy, uncomfortable silence.
"You're an employee, you might get fired," Abby clarifies.
"So your objection is to my employment, and not me?" Ixazaluoh asks. A smile begins to bloom in the corner of her mouth and, oh, god, Abby wants to eat it.
"And to the fact that I'm, you know… a tourist. A guest. I don’t want to… I mean, this sort of means I have…"
"Power over me," Ixazaluoh clarifies.
"Yeah."
Ixazaluoh's smile begins to bloom in the other corner of her mouth as well, until the two sides have touched and her grin near splits her face. "Thoughtful of you," Ixazaluoh says. "I appreciate it. But you hold no power over me. I do what I do because I want to do it."
"Right. Okay," Abby says. "But… just, I don't… I just want to be clear: I'm not going to pay you for sex." It is a struggle to say out loud. It makes her feel guilty.
"Am I asking you to pay?" Ixazaluoh replies, dark eyes shining in amusement.
"Well, no, but… I don't want you to… to have to…"
"Abby," Ixazaluoh says, raising a hand to cup her palm over Abby's rambling. "Do you know who Ixazaluoh is? Whose name I have?"
Abby shakes her head, no, and the feel of Ixazaluoh's warm, dry skin brushing lightly against her lips makes every hair Abby possesses stand up and start to beg.
Dear Abby Page 2