When We Believed in Mermaids(44)
For once, my overactive brain is quiet. It’s cooler tonight after the rain, and it’s easy to see that it’s Friday night. The streets are packed with students and young professionals. Music spills out of the establishments we pass.
It’s getting dark. I don’t have much to eat in my apartment, and my dress is a mess. I’m getting very hungry. “Should we drag a pizza back? I don’t have anything but coffee and eggs in my room.”
“Are you inviting me over?”
I might have run away before but not tonight. I nod.
“I have food,” he says. “Would you like to come to my flat?”
“You cook?”
“I am a good cook. Are you?”
“My father would have expected nothing less.” I smile up at him, and that too is a luxury. So rare that someone is taller than me. “I’m an especially good baker.”
“What’s your specialty?”
“Cake.”
“We don’t make such sweet cakes in Spain as some places. Do you know Tarta de Santiago?”
“Yes. Almond, so delicious.”
“Do you know how to cook that cake?”
“I have never done it before, but I would imagine I could.”
“Maybe you will one day.” He winks. “For me.”
“Maybe so.” As if there are more than a scattering of days ahead of us.
At the hotel, we ride the elevator up, and he leans in to kiss me. “Will you let me cook for you?”
“Yes.”
I get off on my floor to shower and change, and he continues on. In the hallway leading to my door, I’m alone for the first time all day, and suddenly everything feels like a dream.
I slam back into my body all at once, and it feels sad and exhausting, and all my problems are piled up, waiting for me. The question of why my sister faked her own death, where she is, the strangely clear recognition now that I’m at a distance that I’m no longer happy in the ER. I wonder how Hobo is doing without me. I wonder if I should call my mom again, but it was only this morning that we talked.
It feels like so much longer.
I climb in the luxurious shower, washing away seawater and blood and rain from my body and my hair. The shampoo smells of tangerines. I close my eyes and work up the suds, enjoying the fragrance—
I’m back on the ferry, pressed against the railing as Javier kisses me, and I’m transported, his lush mouth, his exquisite skill, his way of holding my head so gently—
I snap my eyes open. Is this a good idea? Really?
Through the glass of the shower, I see my blurry reflection in the steamy mirror. I think of my admission that I haven’t had much happiness, and it suddenly seems ridiculous. What am I waiting for?
Maybe for once in my life I might like to get a glimmering of what that feels like. It seems that he might know how to access it, where to find it. If I can grasp a day or two of happiness, why not?
A soft voice of warning tries to tell me he’s dangerous to my equilibrium. I shush it, eager for once to enjoy something a little reckless. It’s only for a few days. Nothing too deep can take root in such a short time, surely.
So I dry my hair and leave it in loose curls and wear simple clothes that he can take off when it’s time, and I go upstairs.
He’s several floors above me, on a floor with fewer apartments. I stand before his door and pause for a moment, touching my stomach. Music plays quietly, and I hear the clank of a pan or dish. A scent of browning onions fills the air.
What am I doing? He is a lot more . . . everything . . . than I ordinarily let myself get mixed up in. I don’t date suitable men. Not the surgeon who pursued me for more than six months before he finally realized I really meant it. Not the fit colonel who came in with a snapped wrist and charmed me with his chocolaty eyes.
The men I sleep with—and let’s be clear that I am standing in this hallway with sex on my mind—are like the surfer from last summer, or the bartender at the restaurant I like to have dinner in a few times a month, or even the robust coworker of my mother’s, dark-skinned and charming and getting a bit long in the tooth for his dream of breaking into the music business.
If I compare Javier to Chris, the surfer, they’re not even the same species. Javier is a grown-up, a man so comfortable with himself that he makes moving in the world look easy. Every inch of my skin wants his hands. My ears want that sonorous voice. My mouth wants his lips.
And my belly, it reminds me, wants food. I raise my hand and knock. He opens the door and, with a flourish of a tea towel, invites me in.
“I was afraid you might change your mind,” he says.
I think of how long I stood in front of the door. “You promised me food. I very rarely turn that down.”
He brushes my hair over my shoulder, touches the side of my neck. “Is it the food you came for?”
I look up at him. Shake my head.
A smile edges his mouth, and with one hand, he brushes my cheek. “Good. Please sit down. Let me pour you a glass of wine.”
I wander more deeply into the apartment. This one is at least double the size of mine, with a separate bedroom and a proper, glitzy kitchen made all of aqua glass and stainless steel. The styles are different from what I’m used to. The taste of Aucklanders. His unit sits on the corner, and a balcony stretches from one set of glass doors in the living room around the corner to the bedroom, all overlooking the city center and the harbor beyond. “I love this building. It’s so . . . extravagant, isn’t it? I feel pampered.”