When We Believed in Mermaids(104)

From my laptop, I make reservations on a plane for this very evening. It costs a fortune, but I don’t care. I kick it up another notch and go first-class. It leaves at 11:45 p.m., and I’ll be home in the morning. I’m already packed. Maybe I should just go to the airport.

A knock sounds at my door, and for a moment I consider not answering. The only person who comes here is Javier.

But it would be deeply unkind to leave without letting him know. Taking a moment to center myself, I open the door. He’s wearing soft jeans and the long-sleeve heathery T-shirt that fits him perfectly. His feet are bare, which awakens that physical part of me that still wants him.

“Hey,” I say, trying to sound normal. “I just knocked on your door.”

“I was practicing guitar,” he says, and his eyes sparkle. “Anything I can do for you?”

“Come in.”

He sees the suitcase on the bed. “What is this?”

“My sister—Dylan—There is . . .” I shake my head. “I just can’t do this. I need to get home.”

“You’re leaving? Now? Today?”

I throw another shirt into the suitcase. “Yes. It’s time. I have to go.”

He frowns slightly. “Did something happen?”

“Yes. Confessions of all kinds. Things I didn’t know. Things I didn’t want to know.”

“Are you all right? You look—” He reaches for my arms, kindly, and I dodge him, unsure what will happen if he touches me. “Distraught.”

“I’ll be fine once I get out of here and back to everything normal.” I swallow. “I’m sorry, though, about leaving so abruptly. I really have enjoyed your company.”

He licks his lower lip, and there’s something in his eye that I haven’t seen before, something darker. “Enjoyed?” He steps closer to me, and I step around, and he follows, as if we’re dancing.

“Stop it,” I say. “I’m not that woman.”

“What woman is that, Kit? The one who falls in love, who lets her emotions come to the surface?” He brushes the very back of my nape with light fingers, and I shudder. It freezes me, and I can’t seem to move away as he closes the distance between us and kisses the place he touched, lingering and light. His hands slide around my waist, and I can feel my heartbeat in every part of my body—my palms and the soles of my feet, my thighs and breasts and throat.

He turns me in his embrace and firmly backs me into the wall behind me. I hear myself gasp as our bodies connect, and he smiles faintly. “Enjoy is a little thing, like olives.” He runs his hands up the backs of my thighs, under the skirt I’m wearing, and hauls me closer. “This is much, much more than that, and you know it.”

He bends to take my mouth in an insistent kiss, his whiskers abrading my chin. I find myself making a soft mewling noise, and my hands are on his body, pulling him into me. He kisses me, and kisses me, and kisses me, his hands roving, rousing. There are tears on my face, and I don’t know why—I don’t think that’s ever happened before—but all I can think is that I need his body, all of it.

Our joining is nearly violent. No exploration. No ease. Just lips bruising and clothes ripped away, my shirt and my swimsuit top and panties, his jeans. Then we’re rocking hard against each other on the bed I will never sleep in again. We’re both lost in it, lost, lost, lost, dissolving and melting and reassembling, me in him, him in me, my molecules lost in his skin, his lost in my bones.

When it’s over and we’re panting, he doesn’t move but cups my face in his hands. “That is not enjoy, mi sirenita. That is passion.” We’re both breathing hard. He holds my gaze, bends to sup my lower lip. “That’s love.”

Tears are running from my eyes onto my temples. I slide my hands into his hair and feel his skull. “How can I trust that, Javier? Insta-passion?”

“Is that what it is?”

“I don’t know. I’m terrible at all this.”

“Don’t trust me,” he whispers, running his index finger along my jaw. “Trust us. This.”

For a long, long moment, I wish I were someone else, that I had some tiny bit of the heedlessness that marks my mother and sister. “I can’t,” I whisper. “I just can’t.”

He gazes down at me, touches the tears. “The ice is melting.” Gently, he kisses me. “You go. But I want your email. I have been writing all day. I want to send you a song.”

“Oh, don’t.” I close my eyes. It’s weird that we’re having this conversation this way, half-dressed, messy from sex. “I can’t bear it.”

He laughs softly. Kisses my chin. My throat. “You will like it, gatita. I promise.”

In the end, I relent. He stays with me until it’s time for me to go to the airport, but we don’t talk a lot. Just sit in the quiet and look out at the rain, his hands in my hair.



I’m fine until the plane lifts off and circles, and I see the city spread out in yellow lights and carved bays below me, and it feels like my ribs are breaking, as if I grew long roots there in that place, like one of the Moreton Bay fig trees, and now I’m ripping them violently out, all at once. Why am I leaving?

What’s wrong with me?