When We Believed in Mermaids(18)
He holds up his clear tequila. “I prefer this myself.” He smells it, sips it, as if it is wine. “But only in small doses.”
I chuckle, as I’m meant to do, but a memory flickers in my mind, a vision of a boy in my ER last year who’d immolated himself in a bonfire as a gesture of love after drinking a bottle of tequila. Not exactly a story for polite company. To shift the image, I ask, “Was it divorce that sent you here?”
“No, no.” He waves a hand. “We have been divorced a long time, many years.” His dark eyes hold my gaze. “And you? Have you ever married?”
I shake my head, turn the glass one quarter. “It’s not really on my list.”
He inclines his head, surprised. “Marriage is not?”
“No. My parents gave me an example I never want to emulate.” In fact, I can’t bear to let people close enough for more than a five-minute relationship, never mind marriage.
“Ah.” He sips his tequila, the sip so tiny I wonder that he can even taste it, and I like him for it.
The music starts up with a sudden, thrilling strum of the guitar. The handsome Miguel leans into the microphone, making it difficult to talk. Javier and I settle into our seats, and it is impossible that we don’t touch a little. It feels companionable and heightens my awareness as the music fills the air. It’s heated, passionate, with songs in Spanish. My body sways, and I remember suddenly a guitarist who used to play on the patio at Eden when I was eight or nine, a slim-hipped man my mother flirted with shamelessly. Josie and I wore our dance gowns, two of my mother’s silkier nightgowns, old and worn, that she’d sheared off on the bottoms so we wouldn’t trip. We swayed and twirled under the wide, dark sky, our hearts bursting with love and wonder and things we barely knew existed.
Now that I’ve grown into my hungers, I look at Javier. When he feels my gaze and looks back, I see it in his eyes too, and his hand slides along my thigh, just above my knee. I hold his gaze and let the pleasure of anticipation rise. We’re adults. We know the dance. I let my guard down slightly, allowing myself to anticipate kissing that mouth, touching those shoulders without the impediment of fabric, the promise of him—
“And now, we would like to invite my good friend Javier Velez up to the stage to play.”
The crowd rustles and starts to clap. Javier squeezes my knee. “I will be back soon. Order another beer if you like.”
I nod and watch him weave through the tables. He moves as if he’s made of water, easily, smoothly, as if there is only one way to go, through this opening, then that, never pausing.
Onstage, he man-hugs Miguel, then picks up a guitar. It leans against him like a child. His posture relaxes, hands settling against the strings.
A sharp cascade of warning rushes through my overheated system. A swath of blue light cascades over his hair as he bends his head, moves the microphone close, and waits for some internal signal, eyes closed. The room hushes, breath sucked in, waiting.
I wait along with them.
Javier looks out over the crowd, then bends his head suddenly and strums a melancholic chord and, right after, quickly coaxes out a complex waterfall of notes. My arms prickle.
He leans close to the mic and begins to sing in a rich, low voice. It’s a ballad, a love song, which is evident even if I don’t know the words. His voice caresses each syllable, rumbles and whispers, his fingers on the strings keeping time.
A musician. And not a hobbyist. He has captured the room, captured me.
Sexy.
Tall.
Intelligent.
Wry.
And now a musician.
Javier Velez has made my very, very short No Way in Hell list. Never. Nope. Nada.
While he’s still singing, I gather my purse and my sweater and slip out of the club into the night, walking fast to burn off the spell he’s cast, the spell I’ve allowed to snare me.
Out in the night, striding up the hill toward my room, I’m aware of the prickling down my spine, along my palms. I’m disappointed. It’s been a while since my last short-term, completely inappropriate partner, a surfer a decade younger than me, wandered off to better waves. Sex is a biological imperative, and all sorts of systems are improved with regular intercourse. Sex for one is fine, and it can burn off a lot of bad energy, but sex for two is way more fun. Skin-to-skin eases the human animal.
I’d been looking forward to that.
People have stopped asking me if I’m going to settle down, find a husband. I’m not interested, though I was, once upon a time. It pains me slightly that I won’t have children unless I figure out what I’m going to do fairly quickly—I froze some eggs just after I turned thirty, so there’s that backup—but I’m feeling so restless in my life that I need to figure out my plan before I add a baby into the mix.
I don’t regret not having a long-term relationship in my life. It’s surprisingly easy to find men to be a partner for a while, like Tom, the buff surfer who’d kept me company over most of last summer and into the fall. At some point, as I age and become less sexually appealing, it might be more difficult. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
What I won’t do is allow myself to have sex with a man who has the potential to genuinely stir my passions. Living through the war that was my parents’ marriage, then everything my sister ever did, including getting herself killed, taught me to steer clear of intense liaisons.