When We Believed in Mermaids(35)

After the slightest hesitation, his arms circle me. “Are you frightened?”

“No,” I say. “Not of the storm.” I lift my head. “I didn’t want to be alone in it.”

“Nor did I,” he murmurs, and kisses me, and then walks me backward toward my bed near the window. We fall down together and make love while the storm rages, the air smelling of chocolate and ozone.

This time it’s different. I find myself slowing down, tasting him, breathing in the scent of his skin, looking at him more carefully. His stomach is slightly soft and very sensitive, and I spend time there, kissing and tasting. His thighs are sturdy, covered with the hair I tried not to look at when he wore slightly more.

And he takes his time too, hands touching what his eyes see—my breasts and the sides of my ribs, my neck, which he kisses and kisses and kisses and kisses until I’m squirming and giggling, and then he captures my mouth and slides his fingers between my legs, and I have an almost instantaneous orgasm.

Afterward, we lie sprawled and open to the night, covering nothing. It feels lush and intimate, and a ripple of warning moves through me.

But there’s a built-in limit to this connection—we live on different continents and met on a third. That’s enough of a safeguard that I feel comfortable simply being myself.

After a little while, we get up to make ourselves plates and pour wine into the goblets I find in a cupboard above the sink. It’s a little chilly, so we carry it all back to the bed and curl up with the covers over us, propped against the pillows. Outside, the storm rages. Inside, we eat.

“Where did you get the tapas?” I ask, popping a roasted, salted pepper in my mouth.

“La Olla, where I took you.”

“Were you there?”

“We rehearsed there, and when the cyclone blew in, they gave us all plates of food and sent us home.” He plucks an olive from his plate. “Miguel wanted me to come home with him.”

I laugh, touching his foot with mine under the covers. “What did you tell him?”

A shrug. “Only the truth. That I worried about you being alone here.” With his long fingers, he plucks out a roll of ham. “I told him that you were coming to hear me sing. And that you promised not to run away this time.”

“Your holiday romance.”

“Is that what you are?” He cocks his head, looking at me with those dark, dark eyes. In this light, I can see the scars of long-ago acne in the hollows of his cheeks and the network of lines time has woven at the corners of his eyes. For a moment I’m captured, falling into a cool and fragrant atmosphere that fills the air around us, binds us.

But only until I straighten to shake it off. “How long are you staying in New Zealand?”

“I don’t know.” He sets his plate aside and takes my free hand, opening the fingers that are slightly clenched. He smooths them flat, revealing the heart of my palm, and strokes the center lightly before he presses his against mine. It is somehow a thousand times more intimate than all the things we just did to each other. A hitch catches in my throat. “I think, mi sirenita, that there is more here than a fling.”

I keep my gaze on our hands until he touches the tender area beneath my chin. I allow it, allow myself to feel the yearning, the sense of possibility. For one minute, or maybe two, or maybe as long as the storm lasts. Seeing my acquiescence, he smiles gently.

“Tell me something you loved as a child.”

“My sister,” I reply without hesitation. “We had our own little world, just the two of us—it was full of magic and beautiful things.”

“Mm,” he says, moving his palm lightly over mine. “What magic?”

“Mountain Dew was an actual magic elixir. Do you know Mountain Dew?”

He nods.

“There were kitchen fairies and mermaids who moved things around to make the grown-ups crazy.”

“Sounds happy,” he says.

“That part of it,” I agree.

“And your sister, what was she like?”

I take a breath. “Beautiful—not just pretty but really beautiful, with this amazing, bright light around her all the time. Everyone loved her, but none of them loved her as much as I did.”

He brings the hand he smoothed up to his mouth, kisses my knuckles. “You must miss her so very much.”

I nod and take my hand back on the pretext of wanting to eat. “Your turn. What did you love as a child?”

“Books,” he says with a laugh. “I loved to read more than anything. My father grew angry with me—‘Javier, you need to run! You need to play with the other boys. Go outside.’” He lifts a shoulder. “I only wanted to lie in the grass and think about other worlds, other places.”

“What did you read?”

“Whatever I could find—” He makes a psshting sound, sends his hand out in a gesture of circles through the air. “Adventure and mysteries and ghost stories. Whatever.”

“You still love reading, don’t you?”

“You don’t?”

“I like to read. I just don’t like to work hard to read. I like books that take me away the same way television or the movies do.”

“Like what?”

I frown and then reach for my phone, where all the books are listed in my reader. Scrolling through it, I say, “Okay, in the past few months I’ve read two historical romances, a mystery by a woman I like because I can trust her not to get too dark, and a cooking memoir.”

“Romance? Are you seeking love, gatita?”

“No,” I say definitively. “Passion ruined my family’s lives. I make it a practice to avoid it.”

“Love is not always destructive,” he says quietly, and slides a finger up my shin. “Sometimes love creates.”

I’m unexpectedly caught by something in his voice, a promise I can barely see, shimmering faintly on the horizon, and that scares me enough to throw out a gauntlet. “Tell me a time that love didn’t destroy what it first created.” He is divorced, clearly not involved with anyone. “In your own life,” I add.

He nods, stretching out sideways in front of me, close enough to touch my knee. I could press my palms to his shoulder, his head, but I don’t. I keep my arms crossed, one hand cradling the wine.

“When I was seventeen, a girl came to our neighborhood. She had the shiniest hair I had ever seen, and pretty ankles, and I could not find my voice to talk to her, but one day we met at the library, in the very same row. She was looking for the very same book I was.”

I’m tempted to brush the hair on his temple away from his face, but I don’t. “What book?”

“Stephen King, The Shining,” he says, and smiles up at me. “You thought it would be Don Quixote, yes?”

I smile. “Maybe.”

“We spent so much time reading and talking about reading. And soon we read each other, you know, both of us virgins.”

A ping snaps my chest, bringing me a memory of myself at seventeen, the first time I made love, to a boy I worked with at Orange Julius. James. How I loved him!

Javier continues. “With her, I learned about how easy sex can be.”

Something in my expression must give me away, because he says, “Who taught you that lesson?”

“It’s funny. I was just thinking about him before you came. A boy at school.”

“See? Love found you.”

“It broke my heart, though.”

“Sure.” He lifts his shoulders. “Me too. But you don’t die. You just . . . begin again.” He settles his hand on my thigh.

I take a sip of wine, aware of the winding promise between us. It feels dangerous and rich. “How many times?”

“As many times as life offers.”

A sharp, hard pain stabs my heart. I shake my head. “I don’t fall in love.”

His lips quirk, almost a smile. His fingers brush my knee. “You are falling a little with me.”

I smile. “Nope.”

“I see.” His hand curves down the length of my calf, around my heel and then my instep. I wonder briefly if he thinks my ankles are pretty. “How many times have you fallen in love, Kit?”

“Only once.”

“How old were you?”

I make a noise, exasperated. “That question again. Seventeen.”

“Seventeen,” he repeats. “Seventeen is generous and earnest.”

A memory of James and me, making love over and over, laughing and eating in that empty apartment, flickers through me. His long thighs, his tongue on me, everywhere. “Yes,” I whisper.

Javier reaches for the buttons on his shirt, which I am wearing over my nakedness. He unfastens the first one, and I let him. “What was his name?”

“James.”

He unbuttons two more, and his hand sweeps inside, between my breasts, stroking a line. “You were badly wounded?”

I nod, forgetting it all as he opens another two buttons and slides the fabric aside to show my breasts. Immediately my skin is alive from head to toe, every centimeter of it greedy for him. “Perhaps you can let him go after so many years, hmm?”

I’m mesmerized by his heavy-lidded admiration as he moves his hand over my shoulders, down the valley between my breasts, his fingers light as he brushes the curves, the tips, my belly, then back up.

“Maybe,” I whisper, and then his mouth follows his hands, and I’m gone.