by Wayne Santos
She rose from the chair. “Getting some premonitions that I should give up on this conversation.” It was more than a premonition. Something screamed inside her. The fear went up another notch.
He smiled again and gestured downwards with both hands. “Understood, understood. Mea culpa. I actually just wanted to talk about some pitches that some of the other staff want to put together. They were asking for your help, so I wanted to get a feel for your availability.”
Maria told herself that he was getting to the point of this little tête-à-tête, but oh, man, was he ever using some loaded language…
Still, she got through it. She steered back to the task at hand, asking which groups wanted to do their pitches, what they had in mind. He kept trying to edge into more familiar, intimate language, and she kept pirouetting away from it in as diplomatic a way as possible. She was working here because of him. It was only a couple of years ago that Aurelio Valdez had approached her online, dated her, and then found out she was an artist. The romance hadn’t lasted, but the job offer had. And, true to his word, he never actually did anything creepy: no presumptive touches, no requests for dinner that were threats to her employment. He dropped the occasional hint, as he was doing now, but it was always just words, nothing more. Insistent, passionate words, delivered through almost–olive-colored eyes and chiseled, exquisitely stubbly chin, with that rakish Spanish hair, and a stomach that spoke of many sit-ups. And also a kind of possessive assholishness that flared up only infrequently, but raised enough red flags to scare her off completely. When they’d been dating, he was still on his best behavior. She had no desire to see him at his worst.
The rest of the day was busy but uneventful. She had a bit of catch-up to do since she hadn’t finished her work yesterday—due to lurve—but it had been worth it. Her lurve, and even her low-level anxiety, had made it into the work. She looked down at the lush greens of the jungle she was working, noted the little details that might not have occurred to her before: the insects, the dappling of sunlight on leaves through the canopy of the jungle above. The gnarled roots of the trees as they moved unfettered through the soil, and leaves and twigs that lay scattered all around the ground. It was like she was practically there, in that jungle. Knew every last centimeter of it.
She even took a turn to the four-footed to work out some tension from the night before. Normally she wasn’t much of an animal girl, aside from some dopey sketches of her cat, Camus, but today she’d ridden her Cintiq hard, coming up with some big, American plains out in the mid-west, complete with a horde of mustangs. She’d worked obsessively on the lead horse in particular. There was just something about that one she really wanted.
By the time the end of the day rolled around, she’d put in some good work on what she was supposed to, and squirreled away a few personal works she wasn’t. But they were all good. The one she liked, in particular, was an almost impressionist piece, a kind of Gustav Klimty riff of Maria and Tate, embracing in golden robes. She’d debated making it a bit more 21st century by adding emojis, but she liked the classic look.
That, and it looked a damn sight better than the quick napkin doodle one of the interns had pushed over, when he’d seen what she was working on, with the words SO HAWT hovering over Tate. To be fair, Tate was hawt.
But it was a good pile of work, and Maria didn’t feel the least bit guilty about the day before. She’d put in her time and made up the difference. Now she could put in more time and get fit.
The gym was another nexus of weirdness in Maria’s life. She’d initially tried it on a trial period for one month and wasn’t too impressed. She’d been ready to walk away from it, maybe get an elliptical machine or treadmill for home, when a new instructor had shown up. Mateo Herrera had quickly swept her off her feet with an elaborate seduction that ultimately failed. But it had got her a free lifetime membership, by way of apology, and his constant presence as a personal trainer. That hadn’t been a bad deal, as Maria’s thighs and ass were tighter now than they were ever likely to be at any other point in her life. She was always going to be on the shorter side, and she was never going to have an amazing hourglass figure, but she surprised herself with how much her looks could improve once she started taking her health and fitness seriously, and Mateo had been a patient, generous, uncritical part of that. Even if he did lay it on a bit thick with the Latin Lover stuff sometimes.
Today’s workout was a bit different from the normal routine.
She thought, at first, it was just her. She came in with a smile, eager to get going. Mateo gave her his customary hug and told her that it was going to be a one-on-one today, which was just fine by her. As usual, he rippled with muscle definition under his shirt. Maria knew entirely too many good-looking men, but she wasn’t about to complain.
She put in the time, not objecting at all when his regimen pushed her with more reps, faster movements, getting more strength into it. She welcomed it. She had a lot more energy; maybe it was lurve energy, maybe it was the anxiety of the morning, the dream she could no longer quite name, but she was going to put the surge to good use.
“That’s some outstanding work, Malihan,” Mateo said. “Usually, you’d be threatening to sue by now.”
“I can take it today. I want to,” she said. “I need to get myself into amazing shape.”
Mateo laughed. “Getting yourself toned for the love of your life?”
Maria didn’t bother to reply, she was too busy doing crunches, but she smiled as she gasped and panted through the routine.
Mateo, who stood over her, grinning, arms akimbo, lost his smile with the speed of a brick through a window.
Maria continued to do her crunches. “What?”
“Nothing. Nothing, I… I mean, good for you.”
She stopped. Needed to speak now, because she’d never seen Mateo freak out over anything unless you counted his theatrical disappointment when someone stumbled on a milestone he’d set. This time, however, he looked genuinely distraught.
“Mateo. I was just smiling.” He looked afraid, which was handy because she could practically smell her own fear. It was rising again, reminding her of yesterday, of the half-forgotten dream this morning, the continuance of anxiety.
“A smile says everything.” He looked down at the ground, then put on a smile of his own, a broken, lost puppy smile, that reminded Maria of kindergartners being told to be happy on their first day of school, just before they burst into tears. “I’m… I’m happy for you, Maria. That’s great.”
Maria nodded, and then went back to her crunches.
“Aurelio is a very lucky man.”
She stopped again, her spine going rigid like a steel rod, and glared. “Wait, what?”
“You’ve made your choice, and the better man won, I guess.”
She stood up, her heart beating faster now, and not from the exertions. “You know Aurelio Valdez? And all this time you never told me?” Anger and fear hit her in the chest from two different directions.
It’s happening. But she didn’t know what that meant.
“It didn’t really matter until now,” Mateo said. “Well, maybe more to the point, nothing matters now.”
“It matters a whole fuck ton to me now, Mateo.” Was she shouting? She was probably shouting. He’d earned a shouting though. “I mean, what the fuck are you talking about, with choices and better men? Was there some kind of bet going on? Is this some kind of messed up She’s All That—”
“Pygmalion.”
“Keep your farm references out of this thing, I’m talking about people. Me. And I am not livestock, so are you telling me that you and Aurelio had some little contest going? And I was the prize?”
Mateo was stricken. “Does… does this mean you might dump him?”
“I’m not going out with him!”
“But… you’re going out with someone, I thought…” His stricken expression changed to one of horror. “Oh… oh no… Maria. Maria, this is very important. You are not in love
with Aurelio Valdez? It’s someone else?”
“Well, it’s not you,” she said. She turned to leave the room. “I’m glad I didn’t pay for this membership, I won’t have to ask for my money back, after such shitty, creepy service...”
“But you can’t be going out with someone else,” Mateo cried out behind her. “I haven’t seen anything on social media!”
“I’m not on social media!”
“Why not, everyone else is!”
“Then I guess you have nothing to worry about if it’s only real when it’s on social media,” Maria said, not bothering to even turn back and face him. “A word of advice? The next time you’re interested in someone, keep it legal. And not creepy. That last one, especially.”
She walked out of the gym without grabbing her change of clothes or anything else. She just wanted out of there. They could keep the other stuff, none of it was important.
She went home, showered, changed, and fumed. It was like her life was this drawing that was supposed to slowly complete into a warm, comforting picture. She’d seen the four legs, the tail, and the drawing gradually moving to what she was hoping; a smiling dog, with its tongue, lolling. Instead, it finished with some messed up, deranged baby head, chewing a human thigh bone.
And the rest of it had been so cute up until that point.
Now she wondered whether she was even going to keep her awesome job, which really fucking pissed her off. But she wasn’t sure she’d be able to take coming in all the time knowing that Aurelio Valdez had been acting on an even lower, more opaque, heretofore unexpected level of psychopathy. And her hot personal trainer had been in on it.
She had two hot Spanish guys jonesing after her. This should have been Goddamn amazing, and maybe if she were still 15, she might even wish they would fight over her. Shirtless.
But she was not 15, and her life had actually been in a pretty good place up till now. So the idea of two good-looking men creeping on her—and apparently communicating with each other—did not actually improve her mood, her life, or her love life.
Tate was not an executive at one of the world’s biggest game studios. He was also not an exquisitely sculpted specimen of manhood who also worked as a male model/extra in commercials, movies, and TV shows.
Tate was just a barista. He wasn’t creeping on her. He had no conspiracies surrounding him that had been going on without her knowledge for the last couple of years, and thus had no capacity to gouge at her life.
And she really wanted some of that simplicity right now.
So Maria decided to get it.
Chapter Three
THEY DON’T MAKE ’EM LIKE THEY USED TO
AS FAR AS Annex places went, Maria hated Ezra’s Pound, the café. She found the clientele there so far up their asses about how artistically relevant they were that they’d become a sort of human doughnut. Tate, however, made a great cup of coffee. And it was only because his coffee had been so damn good that she kept coming in to get a cup, and then get as far away from the patrons there as possible before their Pretentious Radiation gave her Pretentious Cancer.
Today she came in, while he was still on shift, ignored the two people that stopped their discussion of Margaret Atwood as a post-modernist, post-feminist, post-postal literotic icon to stare at her frumpy clothes. She sat down at one of the tables.
Tate brightened immediately, his face breaking into that sweet, unpretentious grin that canceled gravity and made her feel like she was floating.
“Hit me with a double and keep ’em coming,” she said. She turned to the two people still staring. “You know, if you say ‘post-feminist’ three times in front of a mirror, Margaret Atwood will appear and question your role in the patriarchy.”
The two people left.
Tate appeared almost miraculously with one of the mismatching mugs that were part of the ironic-chic thing the café had going. “Okay, so something definitely happened with you.”
“How can you tell?”
“You never actually stop here. Also, I thought you liked Margaret Atwood.”
“She seems like an okay lady,” Maria said. “She lives in the neighborhood, you know?”
“I did not actually know that.”
“That’s because you’re on the low end of the dilettante spectrum.” She sipped the coffee. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. So good…” A tear coursed down her cheek, but it was caffeine time, and her need would not be denied.
Tate looked down and looked at her. Really looked at her this time, his brows crossing. “Maria? Did something happen?”
Horses giving her the finger and screaming obscenities in dreams. A boss that didn’t quite take no for an answer but firmly knew where the legal borders for sexual harassment were and only dipped in his little toe. A hunky personal trainer that had apparently been in cahoots with the boss. And God knew how long that had been going on, and now on top of it all, did this mean that she was about to bounce from an awesome job, or just make it worse by trying to take them to court and making all her coworkers hate her?
“Maybe,” she said, but her voice had a quiver in it that threatened to break.
“Oh, well, time to break employee rules.” He leaned in closer and kissed her. “I’ll get out of here, and we can talk about whatever it is,” he said in her ear.
“Oh, no, Tate, sweetie, you’re working now.”
“Someone will cover for me. And if not, I’m a good barista. There’s other places. If I have to choose between my job and you, that’s not even up for debate.” He smiled, kissed her one more time on the forehead, and then went back to the counter to talk to the other woman there.
Was it possible to feel simultaneously grateful and shitty? Maria felt like some kind of Neapolitan ice cream of ambiguous emotion, where she did not want Tate to lose his job over some impulsive need to be with his girlfriend, and yet at the same time, this was making an otherwise horrible day kind of awesome in a I-Really-Need-This sort of way.
She bounced back and forth between just leaving without him, or telling him she was leaving and that he should finish the shift, or just grinning and running the words someone loves me! over and over again in her head. Nothing had won the debate by the time he returned, already slipping on his jacket and saying, “Let’s go. I’m yours.”
“You really are, aren’t you?”
He held the door open for her and kept pace beside her. “It’s funny, the thought that I might belong to someone used to bother me a lot. But when I think about not being yours, I feel… like I’m not anything. Like not being yours means not even belonging here, in this place and time.” He shrugged and shook his head. “That probably sounds scary. Or pretentious.”
“I totally want to kiss your scary, pretentious mouth.”
He laughed, and he let her, and they continued on to Roycraft Parklands, a forested valley that ran between the chic, artistic and campus neighborhoods of the Annex, and the upscale, hoity-toity, fancy-ass homes of St. Clair. Rich people walked dogs here that cost more than the average, four-year university degree, while university students spent the last of their tuition money on beer, or wandered around with their phones trying to capture Pokémon.
They spotted a young, vibrant, deliriously pretty white girl with red hair, sitting in a small copse of trees, staring thoughtfully out at the world before jotting things with focused intensity in some kind of black leather journal. A pang of wistful jealousy; Maria had wanted to be this girl, or someone very like her once. Someone who made worlds just with a journal and pen. She seemed to be the epitome of a profound, beautifully brilliant college student until they got closer and she realized there was nothing but emoji scrawls on the creamy, high-quality paper. Was she drafting social media comments ahead of time?
The weight of her worry lightened here. Forests made her feel better. Maybe that’s why she liked drawing them so much. Here, with the birds, and the rustling leaves, and the crunch of feet through the soil and branches, everything just made sense. She and T
ate made sense. Like they had walked in forests a thousand times before. There was something deliciously familiar that licked at the edges of her mind as his hand slipped into hers.
And then she talked.
She explained her day, she gave the background on her boss, Aurelio Valdez, and then the backstory on her personal trainer, Mateo Herrera, and her reaction realizing that, for years, the two had been connected somehow, in some contest to win her over. And how she didn’t know what the hell she was supposed to do with all this.
“Can I ignore it?” she asked Tate. “Can I just pretend that no one said anything weird, and just hope it never comes up again, and keep my awesome job, with awesome people and benefits, and not have my life shaken up? Because I really don’t want my life shaken up right now, I was pretty happy with the way it was going.”
“If you ignore it, do you think nothing will happen, and everything will just keep going the way it is?”
“That could happen, right?”
Tate looked at the ground as they walked and he gave it some thought. “It’s not impossible. I just wonder if it’s all that realistic.” He looked at her again, his hand squeezing hers. “I mean, as creepy as it might be, I can sort of understand why those guys would go a little crazy trying to win you over. You’re worth the struggle.”
“See, but it’s not creepy when you say this stuff the way you do. It’s endearing. It’s like you’ve got this distillery that filters out the crazy, stalkerish bullshit and purifies it to like 90-proof endearing. I can swallow that. Why is it so hard to find a guy that’s hot and not completely toxic in some random, unexpected way?”
Tate stopped walking. “You think I’m hot?”
Maria was stunned. She raised her arms and frantically waved them. “You’re half-British, half-Filipino! Eurasians are like the prettiest Goddamn people on the planet, how is this not obvious to you?!” She punctuated her hypothesis by putting her arms around him and kissing him some more.