The Rain in Spain

by Amy Jo Cousins

  Another visit he’d arranged with her happiness in mind.

  God, she was a mess.

  The skinny waiter reappeared. He’d run his eyes over her legs every time he’d condescended to check on her, resentment at being forced to leave the air-conditioned bowels of the hotel for the crazy Americana on the roof written all over his face. His steps slowed at seeing the two of them, sitting at separate tables.

  Shit. It was a small hotel. They’d been very noticeable. The honeymoon couple whose reservation had gotten messed up, landing them in a room with two twin beds instead of the double bed they’d booked. Javi had wanted to switch to the Alfonso XIII immediately, the five-star hotel where people still talked about that time Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie had visited.

  She hadn’t minded the twin beds by then, so she’d told Javi she didn’t want to leave the Barrio Santa Cruz, the old Jewish Quarter, preferring their tiny, authentic hotel to luxury.

  The kid in the black pants and pressed white shirt stopped halfway between their two tables, looking from Javi to her and then back at Javi.

  Pains in my ass, she imagined he was thinking.

  She held her breath.

  Please don’t break this spell.

  “Dos más de lo que la señora toma, por favor.” Javi didn’t move an inch from his casual sprawl, but his voice made the kid jump and scurry away for two more of what she was drinking.

  The pigeons circled the tower again, swooping with that flock intelligence that let them stretch out in a long line before smoothly bunching up again, each bird always aware of its companions even as it flew an individual path.

  “What are you drinking?”

  She dragged her finger down the side of the glass, pushing more condensation to puddle on the table. “A tinto de verano.”

  “Red wine of summer?” Her Spanish accent was decent, but it still took him a moment.

  She smiled, feeling fond. It wasn’t his kind of drink. “Sort of like a Beaujolais mixed with Sprite. Gaseola limon.” He pursed his lips, trying not to smile, and she knew he was wishing he’d ordered a beer. A Cruzcampo like the locals, even though he thought it tasted like shit. “Between the mixer and how rarely that kid makes it up here, I’m pretty sure I can just keep ordering these and still find my feet underneath me when I’m done.”

  They shared another smile. Getting used to the slower pace of Spanish restaurant service was hard for Americans, accustomed to constant, hovering staff.

  Today she had mostly enjoyed the long, lingering gaps between visits from the waiter, leaving her in sole possession of the rooftop and its view of all the sights they’d come here to see. Everything close enough to identify, but still out of reach.

  “How long have you been up here?”

  She didn’t actually know. “What time is it?”

  “Almost ten.”

  She looked away. The last sliver of a fat orange sun was sliding below the horizon, the sky still alight with pinks and golds to her left, but a velvety navy to her right where the heavy storm clouds still threatened. The city in front of her was a Magritte painting, buildings silhouetted against a lighter sky, windows glowing incandescent gold or fluorescent white, sparking against the dark.

  “The sun sets so late here. Not like at home.” Her cheeks were warm with the beginnings of a burn, even with the hat. He was waiting. “Since six.”

  “By yourself?”

  She flinched. He couldn’t think there was someone else? She tensed her shoulders, ready to defend herself, but then saw him. Head down, staring at the table top.

  By yourself? was completed with instead of with me.

  “Yes. Just thinking.” She couldn’t get her head straight around him. It was too hard to think past the wanting him.

  “About what?”

  About the influence of the Moors on Spanish architecture.

  About the difference between Iberian and Serrano ham.

  “About whether or not my husband made a bad choice when he married me.”

  Sharp inhale. His head jerked up. “Magdalena—”

  She shook her head. Don’t. She couldn’t have this conversation with him as herself, always lost in the spell of this man. Maybe she couldn’t have it at all. She’d never wanted so hard in her life, the way she wanted him. All her crushes and earlier loves were faded by him, old photos with washed-out colors, disappearing before her eyes.

  The waiter returned with their drinks—tall skinny glasses with four swallows of wine and sparkling lemon soda over ice—and left the scrap of paper that was the bill on Javi’s table. He would tip too much. They both did, knowing it exposed them as tourists but unable to stop.

  No one spoke. The waiter left.

  “I came from Barcelona. Have you been?” she asked. It was harsh, slamming the gate like that. Javi’s shoulders bunched up under the untucked white button down, his hands wrapping around his glass, fingers overlapping to the third knuckle, fingertips white. He wanted to push, she knew.

  She held her breath.

  The last of the sun slipped below the horizon. The pigeons had flown away to roost for the night, safely pressed breast to breast in the eaves of the cathedral perhaps.

  “Yes.”

  Her exhale was audibly shaky. “Did you like it?”

  “People have a strange idea of what belongs in a museum there.”

  He’d been perplexed and almost insulted by the living room that looked like Mae West in the Dali Museum two days before. His engineer’s brain understood paintings in frames or statues on pedestals, but balked at the idea of a sofa as a pair of lips and framed pictures of cloudy skies for eyes. She’d watched the families passing through, parents kneeling down next to small children to point and direct their stares, and had loved it.

  “But did you like it?”

  “I am glad to have seen it.”

  Right there.

  That was it.

  Her breath hiccupped in her chest, catching right under her breastbone with a sharp pain. “You can check it off your list.”

  “Yes.” His eyebrows lowered as he spoke slowly. He knew something about his lists bothered her, but didn’t understand what it was. And that was what would break them, she feared. She couldn’t help wondering what list had had her name on it.

  The wind picked up. At last. Hot air fluttered the hem of her skirt against the back of her knees, a butterfly touch. She lifted her face and let it flow over her cheeks instead of tears.

  “You like lists.”

  He hesitated, staring at her. She wondered if everything felt like a trap to him. “I don’t want to miss anything.”

  “But you can miss so much, looking ahead to the next item on your list.”

  “It’s just a list.”

  But it wasn’t. It was everything. Because she wasn’t the last item on that list. She knew that. And being with her, the wanderer, home for one week and then gone for two, made so much of what she knew he wanted impossible.

  A fat wet drop splashed against the back of her hand. The warm water beaded up and ran down her wrist. She looked up. Clouds blotted out the stars everywhere except a slice of the sky to the west.

  “I think it’s—”

  Deluge.

  The rain fell like a hot, wet hammer, soaking them to the skin in moments, pushing her full glass of tinto de verrano to the brim. She yelped and sprinted for the tiny awning over the door to the interior. A second behind her, Javi also crowded under the scant protection, shirt molded to his broad trapezius muscles and plastered over his chest. Dark strands dripped in front of his eyes until he slicked his hair back with one hand, grinning as she laughed and held her dress away from her chest with one hand, wiping rain out of her eyes with the other.

  “The rain in Spain—” she began.

  “Falls mainly wherever we are,” Javi finished for her with a twist of a smile.

  Misquoting My Fair Lady had become a running joke on their trip.

  Their legs were still getting
soaked, the rain falling so hard it bounced off the rooftop and splashed them up to their knees. Gusts of wind shifted the faint silver curtain of rain off the vertical. Her chest heaved with the deep breaths of an adrenalin rush. They’d both abandoned their drinks in their race to shelter. She had her straw bag, contents mostly dry, but—

  “Oh, no.”

  Javi looked at her. “What?”

  “Nothing.” Her hat sat on the chair, the last guest at a party who refused to take the hint that it was time to go home, getting pounded by the rain. She shrugged. It wasn’t going anywhere. She could retrieve it later. Javi nudged her with his elbow, then again when she didn’t say anything. “It’s just my hat.”

  He looked down at her. She shrugged. He lifted a hand, fingers curved, and for a moment she thought he was going to touch her, push her wet hair back behind her ear or grab her by the back of the neck. She froze. The rattle of the rain pouring down was almost louder than her heartbeat thumping in her ears.

  He dropped his hand and walked out into the rain.

  If she’d been dying to save that hat, she’d have run through the rain, skidding to a halt at her tiny table to snag it, and then raced back to the awning.

  Javi walked, his white shirt translucent, his cream pants getting darker. Water ran off his fingers and the ends of his hair and splashed up from each step. Across the roof and then back, the wide brim of her hat clutched in one large hand. He stared at her all the long walk back that seemed to last for an hour, until suddenly he was right there in front of her, and he didn’t stop walking until she was pressed up against the plastered-over brick of the entryway, his body against hers. His mouth fell on her like the rain.

  She braced her hands against his shoulders, so much wider than her own, and pushed. But somehow her push was a pull and her mouth opened under him, his teeth scraping against hers as he dove in, hand tangled in her hair, and he groaned into her mouth as she straddled his thick thigh and rocked her hips against him. His tongue in her mouth was desperate, tangling with hers, his breath harsh and hot. She dug her nails into his shoulders until he tensed and she knew she’d hurt him.

  Wet fabric dragged over her skin as his hand slid up her thigh and she shivered, though it was still too hot for her to be cold. Tearing her mouth away from his, she pushed her head back against the wall.

  They stared at each other, chests bumping as they breathed hard, rain streaming off the edge of the awning on all three sides around their tiny square of shelter.

  Javi’s fingers relaxed, letting her thigh drop. The wet fabric of his pants scraped against the inside of her knee as her leg slid back down to the ground. The wall beneath her shoulder blades was rough with the smeared curves of plaster.

  Her hat was crushed between them. She slid a hand in close, touching nothing, until she pinched the brim between her fingertips. Javi stepped away, still looming over her, back to the rain, blocking most of the water that managed to get in under the awning. He always made her feel tiny, delicate, which was funny. Average height, average weight, legs built for miles of long, wandering walks, arms and back strong enough to carry her own pack, all her baggage. She’d never felt as girlie as she did around Javi’s carefully cultivated brawn. He wasn’t vain about his body. It was a tool he’d honed, for reasons she thought she mostly understood. But he overwhelmed her with his physicality, so oddly balanced with his cold, cerebral approach to the world.

  Right now, she could see the dark shadows of the hair on his chest through the wet shirt and wanted to put her hands on him, palms over his shirt pockets, and see if she could trace his muscles through the layers of cotton. Clutching her hat with both hands seemed like a better idea.

  He took another backwards step, until the rain had to be pelting him again. She pushed away from the wall. Shakily.

  He pushed his hair back once, then again. She tugged the hem of her sundress back down and held her hat against her chest. They stared at each other.

  When the door swung open, they jumped. The kid stuck his head out and scanned the patio, grumbling and giving them the stink-eye when he spotted their glasses abandoned on the table.

  “Lo siento.” I’m sorry. She hated being rude in a foreign country.

  She didn’t know if the rain was letting up or if the kid just ran like the wind, but his clothes were far drier than theirs when he skidded to a halt back under the awning, fingers plunged into their drinks to hold the glasses. He glanced at them and grimaced, lifting the glasses.

  “No te preocupes.” Don’t worry. Javi handed him a tangerine ten euro bill and the kid grinned.

  Yes, they were Americans. Enjoy it, kid.

  He held the door open for them, and she went inside, missing the magical space of the empty rooftop as soon as she left it. The tiny elevator closed around them like a cage.

  Her hand hovered over the buttons for each floor. There were only six. Their room was tucked at the end of the hall on the third floor, far from the noisy elevator and the rumbling pipes of the shared bathroom, its location the best the hotel could do in apology for the bed situation. Javi muscled the gate closed.

  She wasn’t ready. In their room they would sit opposite each other on twin beds and in the low light of the nightstand lamp she would let out all the words locked behind her teeth.

  “I was thinking of getting another drink. I found some interesting places today.” She looked at Javi over the head of the waiter, who was bouncing on his toes in impatience at her dithering.

  “It’s pouring.” He leaned against the elevator wall, but she knew him well enough by now to see the fists in his pockets, and his casual stance hid nothing.

  “I have my umbrella.” She’d carried it all day and cursed the rain that had followed them from Madrid to Barcelona, but never fell on the dusty, baked streets of Sevilla. He’d bought the Hallucinogenic Toreador one for her at the Dali museum, rolling his eyes when she squealed over it as he slid it onto the table at dinner, a surprise errand he’d run while she napped before their late reservation. “If you held it, we might not get too wet.” She held her breath.

  Javi’s eyes were always dark, rich and warm. At that moment, they were molten. The corner of his mouth curved up. She wanted to warn him to not be happy with her when she might end up breaking his heart.

  She pushed “0” and the elevator jerked into motion.

  Chapter Two

  In the lobby, the waiter slipped away to the bar. She stopped at the heavy wooden double doors to the street and folded her very practical hat into eighths and stuffed it in her straw bag. Javi held the umbrella at the ready, thumb on the button, and pulled on the door, opening the umbrella with a snap over her head as soon as she set foot onto the cobbled street.

  She could make this night a gift. A handheld walk through the way she lived, showing him how she touched and tasted a new city. One more chance to see if he could understand her and why she might never be what he wanted. Not the last chance, surely, though it felt like that sometimes.

  It seemed like she’d been holding her breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop, for their entire marriage. The people who’d raised her had never understood her. She’d lost her home with them when she’d left it, felt like a stranger every time she visited, until eventually she’d stopped. How long could it take for Javi lose patience with her travels? To feel that she was a stranger to him, too? She feared he was already there.

  Magda told herself not to be melodramatic. Javi, however different from her, would be kind. She would spend this night showing him how she moved through the world, and then she would ask him if they could still love each other when what they needed was so different.

  He would tell her the truth, even if it broke them.

  The best presents, even the going-away ones, were about the recipient and not the giver, so she walked him through the twisting, narrow streets and alleys to the Irish pub that had landed, straight from Dublin, mere blocks from the Cathedral.

  The ceiling was hig
h, a narrow strip of stained glass windows circling the large room around an enormous central bar. The high-backed wooden booths were all occupied, so they squeezed in at the bar. She caught Javi eyeing the Harp Lager tap with yearning.

  “You know you want it.”

  “I do not.”

  “Liar.” She leaned close and whispered in his ear. “They make a cheeseburger here with cheddar and bacon.”

  He groaned and let his knees sag, catching himself on the bar with both hands, an exaggeration of weakness to make her giggle. “You’re an evil woman.”

  “They have thick-cut fries and Heinz ketchup.”

  “A wicked, evil woman.”

  She ordered from the genuine Irish bartender with a lilt in his voice and a grin on his face. The bar was crowded with students and travelers from a dozen countries for whom an Irish bar anywhere was as familiar as home.

  Cheers and guffaws erupted from the booth nearest them as what she could have sworn were teenagers pounded the table in unison while a kid with a blond buzz cut trickled the last of a pint into his mouth and dropped the empty glass onto a table crowded with empties.

  She shook her head. At least the streets of Sevilla were safer for a group of tipsy revelers than most American cities. Wedged in between her and a man with grey hair under a flat cap, Javi bumped up against her shoulder. She smiled at him, inviting him to share the joke. “College students.”

  He nodded but kept his eyes on the bartender.

  “Did you study abroad junior year?” Maybe engineers didn’t do that. So many things she hadn’t had time to learn. She smiled to herself. Philosophy majors were off like a shot.

  “No.”

  “No interest?” Why even ask? Did she need any more confirmation that her peripatetic travel-writer shoes shouldn’t be parked under this man’s bed?

  His smile was a wry twist. The man next to him stood abruptly, knocking into Javi, who curved his body around hers, balancing himself without pushing against her. “Studying abroad is what the white kids do.” He put his hand on her shoulder for a moment, tugging her close as another couple edged up to the bar behind her. She tilted her head back. “We’d just gotten our papers after the amnesty when I went to college. We were still paying the fines.”