YOU MATTER TO ME, NOW

by Jan Vivian

  ‘It means nothing…this?’ he said in a flare of misplaced anger, ‘is that it?’

  ‘No, it’s not that at all,’ she said her tone softening. The sweep of her hand to his back made him stay by her. ‘No complications…that was the deal that we made, Monty. Now, we had better clean up and get dressed.’

  ‘As you wish,’ he said sullenly. Even then he held a hand out to her and watched Alicia rise from their makeshift bed.

  The practicalities of tidying up were soon settled. Alicia left him to go to the bathroom to freshen up; he decided to join her in a brief and renewed show of consideration for the woman who had succeeded in pleasing him. It now felt as if two strangers had to share one bathroom.

  They exchanged glances but offered no touch to the other’s skin. It was coldly business-like now. Business, of the kind Monty had no experience of, had been transacted and he felt a moment’s loathing that he had stooped to doing it in this way.

  Tomas may be inured to the ways of dealing with such matters, the realities of an arranged rendezvous for sexo, as the ads referred to it and nothing more, but he was new to the experience.

  ‘Settle things with Tomas, would you, Alicia?’ he said, much to her dismay, before rushing out of the bathroom. He dressed in unseemly haste, thinking only of himself now.

  He had lived for the moment, had been with a stranger in unremarkable surroundings and met every energetic and athletic demand made upon him on the hard floor of Beatrix’s apartment. He was in a part of town he only passed through and he would have to consider carefully whether to become involved in these capers.

  Enjoyment was one thing; being paid for having a ‘no strings’ tumble and straight sex with Alicia was an act too far.

  12

  This Is The Way It Goes

  ‘Hello?’ he did not recognise the number on his i-phone’s screen.

  ‘Monty!’ a happy voice exclaimed. ‘Alicia! I’m so glad to hear you…just about!’

  ‘How did you get this number?’ he asked suspiciously and in a voice lacking any warmth or his usual charm, when a woman called. The connection was very clear and he heard the rumble of traffic in the background. Was she again at Beatrix’s place hatching some reunion with him and Tomas?

  ‘That’s a nice way to say hello,’ she responded easily. ‘I simply asked Tomas for a number.’

  ‘Okay!’ he said softening. ‘It’s a surprise…a big surprise, that’s all.’

  ‘Unwelcome, is it?’

  Monty paused. A couple of weeks had passed since their only meeting. Their shag was an event that he was unlikely to forget, nor the discomfort of doing it on the floor of Beatrix’s flat.

  ‘Hearing from you like this is a surprise. That’s all I’m going to say on it.’

  ‘Are you so very busy that every hour of the day and night is filled, Monty?’

  ‘Where’s this going, Alicia?’ he asked calmly, not giving a direct answer. ‘You had your ways of ending things the last time…’

  ‘The only time…so far,’ she observed calmly.

  Monty was on his way to the car after a fulfilling gym session. There were some emails to attend to back at the apartment and to consider how contact could again be made with Anna. There was nothing like a settled routine to their Skype chats, or the sending of a new photograph, just to keep their interest in each other alive.

  Going to the UK and having a reunion weekend with her was out of scope at the moment, apparently, and he had no way of knowing the reasons for that. Things between them were on the drift but no one else was involved, in her case. She had told him so without being asked. Saying to her, ‘it’s been a while since I saw or spoke to you,’ had done the trick, unintentionally.

  The same went for him…if he discounted completely the evening with Alicia. He stood in the shade of a shop entrance and tried to talk above the noise of the traffic.

  ‘The only time I met up with you I was told to show no emotion…not to make a big deal of our time together…not to care or to think we’d get any closer. Have I got that wrong?’

  He thought to ask and not sound too peevish about it.

  ‘That still goes, Monty…’

  ‘And so there’s no need to go on…to talk of some special arrangement. I take it that’s why you’re calling me?’

  ‘We had a good time,’ she said clearly before pausing, chastened by his aggressive tone. ‘That’s what I thought about it…and…I wondered if it might be even better if there was a next time?’

  ‘And it would have to be more comfortable,’ he said breezily.

  Hearing Alicia’s bright laugh he knew there was no sense in being angry with the woman. She was on the end of a phone and not with him, or knocking at the door trying to rekindle the flame that had flickered so briefly and waywardly between them.

  ‘I could make it so, Monty…if you’d only see me again?’

  ‘Hm?’ he pretended not to have heard her above the din of the road traffic close-by. ‘What was that, Alicia?’

  ‘I asked if we could meet up again and share some special moments.’

  ‘I’m not the only one who could do that for you…’

  ‘But you’re the one I’ve met,’ she said. ‘It’s important for me….doing it in this way and with someone I know.’

  Her voice had risen and Monty wondered if she was a little desperate to hear the only answer that mattered. That was difficult to believe and then not; Tomas had answered an advert; Beatrix hadn’t responded to one of his. That wasn’t quite how this particular game, one he had walked in on, was being played now.

  He also remembered their energetic coupling, her rampant clawing ways of it that had bothered him once they’d split. He had rushed home and scrubbed down, checked that his body didn’t bear any marks from the claims she had made upon him and that he had finally, but eagerly, responded to.

  ‘And I don’t know what to make of your call, Alicia…’

  ‘Just say you’ll think about it?’

  ‘Until…when?’

  ‘Until I call you again, say tomorrow?’

  ‘Okay,’ he answered hesitantly. ‘Please don’t expect me to ever call you back. I have to tell you how it goes…I hope that’s clear and acceptable to you?’

  ‘Yes, Monty,’ she replied, accepting his right to determine how it might go with them again. ‘I…I like your reserve…it feels protective.’

  ‘Of my feelings…and what I’ve done, only once with you. That’s why you call me…not the other way about.’

  He sensed that Alicia was chastened by his way of speaking back to her and he wondered, once more, why she should put up with him being so rude. It would spare him the unease that she was drawing him into her life, that she was using him and that he had gone along with the plan. It was something strange, the feeling that he could have ‘gone with her’ for lustful reasons alone.

  He didn’t think of himself, just yet, as someone who used people. May be that was where he was going wrong in business life?

  ‘Thank you. I’m not such a bad person, you know…Monty.’

  She was gone.

  Alicia had made no marks upon him but had left a nagging memory of their time together and what he had now been asked to consider. Memories did not wash away so easily; Anna’s loss to him made that only too clear. He guessed Alicia’s age to be thirty five or so. Had she been hurt by some guy in her life, dumped or emotionally abused, just like Beatrix had been? Why seek fleeting comfort, enjoy squelchy wantonness with him, unless a deeper and long-lasting commitment with anyone was the last thing on her mind, at least for now?

  What Tomas did in his spare time for the women in his life was his lookout. He would have to speak to his friend about disclosing all sorts of details that others might use.

  Discretion came at a price. So did loyalty.

  He felt that he was being tested again, just as they had done it to him at work. Losing that and the lovely Anna were a big price to pay; their loss wasn’t entirely t
o be made up by diversions in the shape and ways of Alicia, or was it?

  He saw many girls at the gym club where he worked out and swam, so why find a deviant distraction with a woman who did things on her own terms? The way the jobs market was in the city, and in spite of good connections, getting into work again was going to be a whole lot harder than dating someone in this aberrant way and at times of her own choosing.

  Even now he couldn’t keep out of his head the thought that to set out on this way of things depended on someone else.

  Anna.

  ●

  Thinking of Anna’s place in all of this was a cop out.

  All he had to do was really commit to her, tell Anna that he would fly to London and spend time with her, somehow. The fact that she would be at work while he mooched about waiting for her wasn’t the best of scenarios. She’d have to take time off work, take a holiday.

  If she was to do that, Anna might as well stay at his apartment and they’d act as if they were living together; they’d walk about the vibrant city that had become his home and behave as lovers.

  Having invested so much here, in Barcelona, he really couldn’t believe in living anywhere else.

  Anna wouldn’t give up everything to be there for him…not after the two nights of making love and being together, at work and away. Instincts had compelled them to concede to each other. Some called it lust, others a passionate fling with a work colleague. So, put like that, the way things were between them now offered no certainty or assurance that they would get together again any time soon.

  He took the tablet from the VW’s luggage compartment and booted it up. The screen soon showed that he could connect and did so, clicking on the Skype tag. Another message would find its way to her, to the woman he called ‘lovely Anna’.

  I can’t help calling you that. The attached pic was taken last night when I was hoping to meet up with friends and go to a themed watering hole, one of the many here. We’d decided on a place that has a Yank car hanging over the bar. I guess, after a few drinks there, you wouldn’t feel it if it came down on you! At a loss to know quite how to get together with you again…guess you can’t get away from work, and if I came to London that wouldn’t change? BIM can’t spare its brightest, can they, so that she tends to the needy? Me. Still love how it was between us – it felt real. Monty xx

  He took to thinking back to the previous evening.

  A passer-by had taken the picture as he took an evening stroll in La Ramblas just to get in the mood for a night out. A rain shower made the pavements glisten and he had sensed that the freshened air gave the picture its sharper look. The camera had been handed back, the guy grinning.

  ‘Is it for the girl friend?’

  ‘Yeah, just to remind her of what she’s missing,’ he had chosen to admit, unafraid how that would sound. The truth had been spoken out of how he felt about a settled way of things between two people…that he had yet to fully re-discover.

  He had ducked into the bar, his expectant mood boosted by the noisy throng inside only to discover that the crowd he was to meet were nowhere to be seen. A call soon confirmed that the plan had changed.

  Outside, and despondent, he heard the story; they were going to a dance club instead; it made no sense to go somewhere just for a drink when you could dance and get wasted as a lead in to the weekend. The crowd of friends had a settled way of it, taking any kind of work offered and living it out with steady girlfriends, their relationships heading for the bonds of marriage when a change of fortunes and greater reliable activity returned. The chances of that happening at any time soon, he was reminded, were slim. He only had to think of Tomas to know how life went down.

  ‘Well, if you change your mind about coming,’ Rodrigo had jovially told him, ‘you know where we’ll be. Oh…by the way, Clara will be there…’

  ‘Clara? I thought she was in Madrid living the life?’

  ‘Was is the word…she was in Madrid.’

  ‘I see,’ he remembered saying calmly. The times when the girl’s name would have wound him up were long gone.

  ‘Clara may like to hear from you…take up on old times? She asked my Angelina whether you were still around…and, you know…settled in a relationship.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘That we didn’t know, Monty. Are you?’

  ‘No, but that won’t ever change anything as far as Clara and me is concerned.’

  He had spoken that out defensively.

  Clara had been his ‘first love’ in the easy university days when you finally clicked, got down with a girl knowing all the right moves…as far as you’d both discovered them after frantic fumblings became satisfying endeavours. She had made him wait, though, for she lived by the golden rule of ‘don’t be easy’. To that guiding principle she had soon added others, so he was told after they’d split up. ‘Don’t be poor’ and ‘don’t be ugly’.

  She wasn’t that rich or much of a looker, either.

  Now, Rodrigo’s mention of Clara’s name had soon brought him down to earth and his predicament.

  To continue with Alicia was to be feckless and promiscuous. To pursue Anna would be to conduct a long-distance romance just as the sending of a picture, an attachment to a Skype message, seemed to confirm.

  He went back to the apartment and drank a few beers on his own.

  He was educated, fit and had some money of his own.

  These dips in his life would be lived through; everyone had them from time to time. You simply needed to take your mind off things to get a sense of perspective.

  13

  Shared Moments

  ‘Hello, Alicia,’ he said in good humour.

  The fact that he knew it was her calling him before she had responded to his greeting was taken as an encouraging sign. He had stored the numbers she had called from before.

  ‘Hello, Monty…can we talk?’

  He heard the expectancy in her voice that she would soon hear him agree to her wishes.

  ‘Yes, I’m at home…it is the weekend after all.’ He spoke easily, choosing to volunteer that piece of information just to set the mood. ‘I’m heading for the beach later…after a gym session.’

  ‘That’s where you get the body from!’

  ‘I guess,’ he said on a soft laugh. ‘You’ve noticed, have you?’

  ‘You could remind me…by being with me again?’

  ‘Uhm…’

  The conversation might continue in faltering steps as each of them tried to tease out what they wanted to hear.

  ‘About later?’ she coaxed.

  ‘Later in the day you mean?’ he said breezily.

  ‘Yes, after I finish work…late afternoon, say?’

  ‘You’re at work…on a Saturday?’

  ‘As it happens, yes I am, yes. It’s my turn on the rota…it doesn’t happen too often, fortunately.’

  He had never bothered to ask her what she did, assuming the place was funded by an ex-husband. How little they knew about each other!

  ‘Is it break-time?’ he asked looking at his watch. It showed eleven thirty, just about the right time for the pre-arranged call.

  ‘Yes, I’m having a coffee…and a ciggy.’

  ‘I didn’t know you smoked…’

  ‘I don’t usually…’

  ‘I’m sorry for how I spoke to you yesterday,’ he now said considerately.

  ‘My call shocked you. I understand that now and thought about how it went…several times.’

  ‘You’ve changed your mind, about wanting to see me…about getting together again?’

  ‘No…and that’s a nice way of putting it,’ she acknowledged sweetly. Monty took to remembering Alicia’s stern expression and doubtful looks at him when they had first met. Now, she was a different woman. ‘I hope that you’ll tell me we can meet again…remember how we were and could be, perhaps?’

  She almost crooned out her wish to know of him in less-strained circumstances and with the experience of the first t
ime still fresh in her mind.

  ‘Perhaps, Alicia…’

  ‘Oh!’ she said in a deeper tone, ‘Oh!’

  ‘It’s like this…I’m not like Tomas. We think and feel differently about the arrangement we made the other night. I do especially.’

  ‘Don’t you think I know that?’ she said tersely. ‘It’s the reason I wanted to call you the first time. I hoped that we could make up for it…make being together a little different, for both of us.’

  ‘But it’s still an arrangement?’

  ‘Yes, of course it is! What more do you want from me except what I want from you?’

  He was at a moment’s loss to answer that one. Alicia was no surrogate for the feelings aroused by Anna. At least the woman confessed to a raw physical need that he would want to satisfy. Alicia offered him an easy distraction from what was playing out in his other life.

  ‘Monty, are you there? We fuck…get together for that. Man…or is it boy? You still don’t understand do you?’

  ‘I understand perfectly, Alicia,’ he replied after a moment’s pause so that he could control his temper and her sudden provocative ways of speaking to him. He could have told her to get lost, not used the expletives that could have readily come to mind, but he didn’t. ‘Think for a moment what I may be wanting out of the arrangement, Alicia…okay? Then, you can call me back. I’m going to the gym…it’s safer!’

  ‘Save some of your energy, won’t you?’ he heard her say but rang off all the same.

  ♥

  The gym instructor had been asked to set the routine at high intensity. When he was through Monty felt wasted. The session had only bought him some time, it had failed to clear his mind of Alicia’s claims for attention or the fact that his resolve not to concede to her requests was weakening.

  Tomas had a lot to answer for. His friend’s response was only too easy to imagine.

  ‘You could always have said ‘no’.’

  Alicia had called him twice; the screen of messages alerted him to the fact as he sat by his locker. He also saw that Anna had sent a text message saying at what time they could see and speak to each other on Skype.

  He groaned. What a feckless guy I am, stopping short of thinking that he was unfaithful. The relationship with Anna remained fragile…it’s a poor excuse for your wayward thoughts, man!