Signal to Noise(70)

Sebastian lay on the bed and placed his hands behind his head, looking at the ceiling.

“You think so?”

“Absolutely. I mean, you had a thing for Isadora Galván.”

“I did.”

Meche tilted her head and smirked. “So is this like a stamp collection or something? Diddle all your ex-classmates and you get a prize?”

“No. I didn’t understand back then, what you meant to me. I assumed I could find the same easy feeling with many other people. But time passed, people passed and it was never quite the same. Then the other day I was walking to my mom’s place and I saw you across the street. It all just... hit me. I haven’t been able to stop feeling... I’ve felt things I haven’t felt in ages. It’s all because of you. I was so alive when I was with you. It was like... like it even hurt.”

“Sounds like a book I read,” she said. “It was shelved under ‘sappy.’”

“You didn’t feel like that about me?”

He looked at her with dark, steady eyes. Meche had to avert her gaze, sitting cautiously onto the mattress.

She remembered being a teenager, being near Sebastian, very clearly. It had been thrilling. Every single morning, walking at his side to school, their shoes dipping into puddles, their easy smiles and the easier banter. Oh, she had been so in love with him and not in the ‘sappy’ way. Not the crush a teenager has for a handsome boy, like Constantino. She loved him absolutely and if she never kissed him then—really kissed him, not whatever microsecond of a kiss they had shared—never made him her lover, it was because they had already touched more deeply than any youthful caress.

“Maybe. It was a while ago.”

“How long have you waited for someone?”

“Oh come on, you got married,” Meche said, flipping on her stomach and pressing her chin against the back of her hand. “You probably had two dozen girlfriends after that. You weren’t waiting for nothing.”

“I have been waiting for something, always without knowing it.”

He peered at her from beneath thick eyebrows and Meche half-smiled because maybe—just maybe, this was no admission—she had walked the streets of Paris once-upon-a-time expecting to stumble onto somebody. Maybe she sat by the river and read her map and wondered if someone would turn a corner and appear there.

“God, the way you talk,” she said, trying to rub the half-smile off her face. “You didn’t spew those lines when we were young.”

He’d seen it though, recognized her mirth, and was now giving her a sly look.

“An improvement or a drawback?”

“Did you ever visit Europe?” she asked, changing the topic because she would have liked him even if he couldn’t string two words together and she wasn’t about to tell him that.

“No,” he said. “Something always got in the way.”

“Even though you could afford it by now?”

“Maybe I was afraid I wouldn’t find you. Or I would and it would be different.”

She chuckled and he shifted, looking down at her.

“What’s funny?”

“I have no idea,” Meche said.

There was a scar on his left hand which had not been there before, a long gash which went up his arm.

“What happened?”

“Car accident,” he said. “Three years ago.”

Meche stretched out a hand, touching his brow, a tiny little line there.

“And that one?”

“Someone cracked a bottle open on my head.”

“Really?”

“It was a wild 1999.”

He stretched his hand down her leg and tugged at the denim, exposing her tattoo. It was a sentence, circling the ankle.

“‘A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,’” he read. “Someone finally read Shakespeare.”

Just so I could come back at you when you called me illiterate, she thought and that sounded too much like admitting he’d had some huge influence on her life. Which was not the case. Not really.

“Drunk in Amsterdam, 2000. It seemed like a good idea at the time. At least it’s not a Looney Tunes character or some Chinese character I can’t read.” She glanced at him. “No tattoos?”

“No tattoos and no piercings.”

“What kind of damn punk were you?” she asked moving closer to him and he shifted a bit too, closing the gap between them.

“A very low-key punk.”

“Your shirts look expensive.”

“Some are. Still with the t-shirts?”

“Can’t wean myself off them,” she said looking down at the one she was wearing. Abba. “My defense is it’s vintage-chic.”

“That’s not chic. They do fit better than they used to though.”

“Yeah, well, bras help.”

“Do you keep a bag-lady jacket in your closet?” he asked.

“That was an awesome jacket,” she said.

“No. It was god-awful.”

“You drew on your shoes.”

“I still doodle. Not on my shoes. You should come to my place and look at some of my drawings.”

Meche scoffed. “That’s such a cheap come-on.”

“I can try something better.”