The Rain in Spain (3 page)

“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.

I
n 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 high, 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.”

She flushed. Of course. So many conversations they still needed to have. That first week that they’d spent together in constant contact, very rarely more than a few inches separating them on the beach in Goa, her hand on this thigh, his toes digging in the sand under her butt, had been full of late night conversations that only ended when they surrendered to sleep mid-sentence. These days, the closest they came to that kind of intimacy was when she fell asleep texting Javi while she was far from home. Recapturing that closeness was easier from a distance sometimes than it was in person.

They’d almost ended before they’d begun, she remembered, the first time she’d insisted on paying for her half of their hotel room. Javi had been so insulted he’d practically sputtered with outrage. She had literally thrown money at him in the street when he wouldn’t accept it from her hands, this fascinating, fuckable man who
would not listen to her.
She’d told him he could meet her at the airport for the next leg of their trip, but only if he could find a way to accept her as an equal.

“It’s not about the money, Javi. Blow it on a, on a . . . kite, for god’s sake! But I pay my own way.”
They’d seen kites the day before, multi-colored fish and parrots and monkeys, dancing and swooping in the stiff ocean breeze.

Her hours in the airport, wondering if she’d just made a terrible mistake, had been stomach-churning in anxiety. Off the beach, she was back in jeans and a long-sleeved peasant blouse. Her conservative dress and open, friendly face made it easy for people to talk to her, but they suddenly seemed less than ideal as a lure for a man whose desire had lain on her like a blanket.

“Hey.” The tug on her hand jerked Magda back into the present as the bartender slid their plated burgers onto the polished wood counter in front of them. Javi drifted his hand from her bare shoulder down to her elbow, fingertips skimming and raising all the tiny hairs on her arm, and suddenly her throat was tight. Her vision swam as she blinked and her nose got hot, which meant it was turning pink too as she sniffed.

Because he had showed. She didn’t know what permutations and twists of logic Javi had performed on himself—because for him it
wasn’t
logical that she should pay for things when he made so much more money than she did—but he’d come striding through that airport in Goa, wheelie in tow, a tightly rolled cylinder of sticks and green fabric in his other hand. He’d dropped into the seat next to hers, tangled his hands in her hair, and pulled her head to his chest. She’d closed her eyes and let his words rumble through her.

“I’m going where you’re going. Or staying.”

They’d flown the frog kite on every beach they’d visited since. The bribes he’d paid to a rural government official had been brutal, but she’d married him before he’d left her, grumbling at her inflexibility, to finish her research in northern India. He’d met her at Terminal 5 at O’Hare when she’d landed at midnight two weeks later and hadn’t let her out of bed for the entire weekend except when she’d needed to go to the bathroom. Even then he’d stood outside the door and kept talking to her until she shouted at him,
“Go away, for Christ’s sake, it’s impossible to pee when you’re making me laugh!”