When We Believed in Mermaids(27)

“Oh my God,” I whisper against his ear, sucking the lobe into my mouth.

“Mm,” he agrees, and raises his head. For a long moment, he looks at me; then very gently he kisses me. “So lovely.”

And then we’re side by side, my body tucked up against his, which I ordinarily don’t like but feels good when I am so far from home, so far out of my depth. His body is bigger than mine at every point, and it makes me feel safe and sheltered, and because I’m so tired, I fall into a deep and dreamless sleep, far, far, far away.



Again the dream arrives.

I’m sitting on a rock in the cove, with Cinder beside me. We’re staring out to the restless ocean, and in the distance, Dylan is riding his surfboard, not even wearing a wet suit, only his yellow-and-red board shorts. He’s happy, really happy, and that’s why I don’t want to warn him that the wave is breaking up.

And then it throws him, and he disappears into the sea. Cinder barks and barks and barks, but Dylan doesn’t surface. The water goes still, and there is nothing to see but silvery water all the way to the horizon.

I jerk awake, glad of the weight of Javier anchoring me. My heart is racing, and I have to take a deep breath. Calm down. Calm down. Just a dream.

“Are you all right?” Javier asks.

“Yes. Just a weird dream.” My bladder insists on attention, so I toss back the covers and pad naked into the bathroom. My teeth are disgusting from the wine, so I squeeze a little of his toothpaste onto a finger and rub my teeth; then I swish it around in my mouth and pad back to the bedroom. Now that I’m up, I probably should really return to my apartment, but Javier tosses back the covers, and I slide in, happy for a glimpse of his bare hip, his navel. His hair is tousled and wild, and it makes me smile as I settle in next to him. One arm falls around me. I fall too into the quiet comfort of him next to me.



It’s dawn when I awaken again. Buttery light spreads across the water beyond the windows, splashes into the high-rises around us. Within, Javier is sleeping next to me, his arms flung out in front of him, his face in repose. Beneath the sheet, he is naked, and I lift it up to look. It’s a gorgeous body.

“Do you like it?” he says in a soft voice.

“Quite a bit,” I say. I glance at him but don’t lower the sheet, instead making a show of staring. It stirs me, and I can tell it’s stirring him too. I smile and drop the sheet. “Good morning.”

He narrows his eyes. “Are you cheerful in the mornings?”

“Not usually. I can be downright surly. How about you?”

“I have been working nights a very long time, and in Madrid that can be very late indeed.”

“You haven’t told me what you do,” I say.

He lifts up the sheet, looks at my body, and makes a soft ooof before he moves closer. He tosses the sheet away from us with irritation and goes back to his task. I let him, enjoying the tilt of his back, long and muscular as he examines me.

“Your body is a wilderness,” he says softly, and brushes his fingers over my ribs, my belly, slides between my thighs, kisses my belly button, continues down my leg. His buttocks, strong and high, are in my reach, and as he explores my curves, I shape my palm around his and slide down the back of his thighs, dipping between his legs to hear his rumbling. I laugh softly, and he rises up on his knees, offering himself.

I reach for him. “Full-frontal nudity. I like it.”

And now, we make love more playfully, taking time to stop and admire and ask with a glance or a sound if this or that, that or that, is the best thing. He lingers over my body, stroking and kissing, and as I imagined, his mouth is everywhere, all over me, and I return the exploration, and then we’re falling into each other as the sun slides into the room through glass doors.

Lying against him in the puddles of sunshine, thoroughly and deeply sated, I realize what I never understood about grown-up men is how much more they would have learned about women’s bodies on their journey.

Or perhaps it’s only Javier himself, who raises his head and leans on his elbow, brushing my hair out of my face with one hand, carefully tucking it behind my ears. An ache hits my chest at that, but I don’t move. Light cascades over his powerful nose and backlights his hair, and there are marks on his shoulder from my biting him. I touch one spot. “Sorry about that. I got carried away.”

He blinks slowly, moves his thigh against mine. “I don’t mind. It will warn the women away.”

“Do they come at you in droves?” I ask with some amusement.

“Not so much as when I was a little younger, but yes, still a lot.”

I give him a frown. “Are you being serious right now?”

He lifts one index finger and rolls sideways to pick up his phone, opens an app, and then shows me the screen. On it is an album cover and a photo of a man bending over his guitar. A woman in the shadows stares at him. The title of the album is in Spanish, but I can read the name, Javier Velez, and I recognize those hands. “This is the work that keeps you up late?”

He nods almost sadly.

I look around the enormous suite of rooms, recognition dawning. This is a very expensive suite. “Are you famous?”

“Not here.” He leans on his hand, splendidly naked, and I wonder if anyone from the office buildings is looking in, seeing his well-shaped behind.

I grin. “Are you famous somewhere?”

“Perhaps a little. In the Latin world, they know my songs.”

The idea sinks in slowly, and rather than making me nervous, it eases my worry. If he’s some big star, then I’m a distraction for him just as he is a distraction for me. “I suppose I will have to listen to more than one song next time.”

He dips a finger over my navel, draws a circle around it. “Will you come tonight?”

I rise up, pushing him backward and spreading my body over the top of his like icing on a cake, my hands on his arms. “I might have to shop for something nicer to wear.”

He lets himself be frosted with me, his eyes shining, his lips ever so faintly tilted into a smile. “I like the red dress.”

I kiss his neck. “I’ll find another red dress.” I crawl up to kiss him, long and slow, enjoying the plumpness of his lips, the scent of his skin. “You smell better than any man I’ve ever met.”

“Do I?”

Burying my face into his neck, I inhale deeply. “Like the ocean and dew and . . . something.” I try to figure it out, something spicy, but I can’t pull it in, and then we are switched, he icing the cake of my body, his hands in my hair.

“That is very sexy,” he whispers, and bends into my neck, inhales, and sucks my skin there, once, then again, and again, and again. And somehow we are making love again, slowly, tumbling one more time into each other, into pleasure.



A little later, I’m wrapped in a sheet, and he’s wearing a pair of boxer briefs. We’re drinking coffee he made in a French press and eating flaky pastries he produced from somewhere, along with little green fruits I thought were limes at first. “Feijoa,” he said, and sliced one open to reveal a medieval cross of seeds within a soft fruit like a kiwi. It tastes powdery and sweet, a little like a pear.

“Delicious.”

He scoops the fruit out of the skin with a small spoon, nodding. With a finger, he strokes the discreet tattoo on my inner arm, mermaid scales with little sister written along the outside edge. Josie has a matching one. “Will you tell me about your sister?”

I look out toward the harbor, where a sailboat is a crisp white triangle gliding toward the sea. “It’s hard to talk about her.”

He’s silent, giving me space to move forward or not. But I am soft and wide open from making love, my carapace dissolved for the moment in a tsunami of touch. I take a breath. “She was—is—two years older than me. I adored her when we were kids. My parents were not”—I sigh—“all that great at parenthood, so until Dylan arrived, Josie took care of me.”

He gives me a nod.

I sip my coffee, holding the cup between my hands. “She was a happy kid, honestly. Mischievous but never bad. She didn’t like school, but she didn’t get in trouble that I remember. And then . . .” I shrug.

“Then?”

“She changed. It’s hard to remember, exactly, but she started getting in trouble, stealing sips of drinks from customers, particularly the men, and then as we got a little older, she stole beers out of the bar and things like that.”

His fingers move on my ankle. “Your parents did nothing?”

“I don’t know if they even noticed.” My stomach burns a little, and I rub it, straightening my back. Amazing how much it still stresses me out. “They were fighting, very passionate fights, yelling, throwing things, all that, and they just didn’t pay any attention to what was going on with Josie.”

“And what about you? Who took care of you?”

“Dylan,” I say simply.

“The runaway. Like your brother?”

“Yes.”

“And he read to you. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

I smile. “Yes. And many others.”

“He took care of you and your sister?”

“Yes. He worked as a sous chef in the restaurant, but he lived with us.” I suck my lip into my mouth, thinking about how to explain Dylan. “He had some problems, but honestly I don’t know how we would have gotten along without him. He was the one who got us up for school, the one who made sure we had shoes when others got too tight. He always looked at my homework right when I got home from school, even if he had a girlfriend there, which was pretty much all the time.” I am filled with the ghost of the feeling I’d had on those afternoons, sitting with Dylan and Josie, who did homework only because she was forced, and whatever girl was hanging around at the time. I grin. “He was very handsome. The most handsome boy in the whole entire world.”