Love, in English

  “I’m napping here?” I asked him, folding my arms.

  He gestured to the cushions with an exaggerated motion. “We are napping here.”

  “On the ground?”

  The corner of his mouth ticked up while he started to shed off his blazer. “Oh, Vera. You’ve taught me so many interesting words, the least I can do is teach you how to have a proper nap. All of Spain is counting on me.”

  I was barely listening. My mind was caught up in the sight of him taking off the jacket, the sky blue dress shirt underneath stretched across the fluidity of his muscles. How the hell was this guy thirty-eight? Granted, I knew that men aged slower than women did and that half the celebrity men I thought were sexy were in their late thirties and early forties. Hell, Johnny Depp was in his fifties! But Mateo’s age caught me by surprise.

  The funny was, I thought it would make me relate to him differently. I thought it would make things awkward—at least in my mind—or make me feel like I was hanging out with my beloved Uncle George or someone like that. But it didn’t, not at all.

  He took off the blazer and turned it around so that the back of the jacket was to the grass. Then he placed it on the ground, just below one of the cushions. He looked to me expectantly, brows raised. “There. For you.”

  I scoffed in surprise. “You can’t do that, you’ll get grass stains on it.”

  He merely shrugged. “So?”

  “So? That can’t be a cheap suit.”

  Another shrug, his head cocked to the side. “I don’t care.” He must have noticed the dubious expression on my face, that I was thinking he would just buy another one. “Clothes don’t have a life until they get dirty,” he explained. “A little dirt is good.”

  A valid statement—one my mother would have hated—though it was kind of an odd one coming from a man who, so far, had looked one hundred per cent put together. From his wing tipped shoes, to his Rolex, to his leather suitcase and tailored suit, everything about Mateo screamed “rich, discerning business man” and yet here he was telling me clothes were meant to live dirty lives.

  “Okay,” I said, still perplexed. I dropped to my knees, all too aware of what this could look like to a passerby, in fact I tried really hard not to stare at his crotch. I hastily flipped around so I was lying with my head on the cushion and my upper body on the jacket.

  Mateo stood over me, his body blocking out the sun. “Very good. You comfortable?”

  I stared up at him, seeing only shadows on his face. I felt totally vulnerable, just lying in front of him like this. “This seems like a lot of work for a nap.”

  I couldn’t tell if he smiled or not. He got down to the ground and lay down beside me, his head on his cushion and just inches away. I wanted to say something about how he was now getting the back of his nice silk shirt all dirty but I knew what he’d say, that he didn’t care.

  “So,” I said as I lay there, so totally conscious of how close he was to me. Was this silly? Inappropriately intimate? What was this?

  “Do you often talk in your sleep?” he asked casually.

  “Huh? I’m not sleeping.”

  “But you should be. It’s a called a little sleep.”

  So we really were just going to nap? No English lessons? No questions?

  “Rest your brain, Vera,” he said in a low voice that raised the hair on my arms.

  Easier said than done, I thought to myself. I adjusted my sunglasses so they weren’t digging in behind my ears and rolled my head slightly toward the left and away from him. I really did feel silly doing this, trying to take a communal nap in the broad sunshine, with chattering Anglos and Spaniards around me, with a man I’d only known for about twenty-four hours.

  But the sun really did feel good on my limbs and there was a sweet-smelling breeze in the air, a mixture of running water and fresh grass and some kind of flower. Before I knew it I was sinking in further and further into the soft ground and the comfortable satin of his jacket lining, the warm sunshine my blanket. I heard Mateo snoring softly and I grinned to myself like a total cheeseball.

  Then, I too was sleeping.

  “Vera,” I heard Mateo say, his voice cutting through the dark. Everything slowly turned blinding white beneath my fluttering lids. I opened my eyes and saw him sitting up and leaning forward, knees drawn, arms resting on them. He had rolled up his sleeves again, showing those tanned, thick-veined forearms that I now knew belonged to a total athlete. Even if Mateo no longer played soccer, his body still acted like it did.

  I grunted and licked my lips. “What? What time is it?”

  “Time for us to get down to business,” he said.

  I slowly straightened up, feeling tired and well-rested at once. I could have sworn only a few minutes had passed but I took out my phone and peered at it. Yup, it was five minutes to two. I’d been asleep for at least forty-five minutes.

  I looked at him shyly, suddenly glad for my shades. I’d never just slept with a guy without any of that other stuff involved. Even though we had napped apart and never once touched—and we had been lying down in public for all the world to see—the air between us felt fragile. New. It was like the morning after, but without all the guilt and shame.

  I cleared my throat, aware that I had just been staring at him. “Well that was fun.”

  He ran a hand through his hair and smiled up at the sun with his eyes closed. “Good. Now you’ll be able to stick around for the rest of the day. And next time you want to nap, you come find me.”

  I chewed on my lip for a few beats. As innocent as it had been between us, I wasn’t sure how innocent it looked. Again, we weren’t doing anything that kids didn’t do during nap time in kindergarten. But I had to wonder, just a bit, if anyone else here thought it was somewhat…wrong. I mean, though he didn’t look it and in some ways, didn’t act it, he was in his late thirties. He was a respected athlete and business owner. And I was a twenty-three year old astronomy brat with tats and an old movie star’s name. Everyone was probably wondering what he was doing.

  I wondered if Mateo Casalles knew what he was doing. Judging by his easy-going attitude, and his philosophy on clothes, he probably didn’t care what people thought. I think he was just a flirtatious man with his own ideas of fun. Damn if that didn’t make him more endearing.

  I think I needed to take up his philosophy. I thought that’s how I approached life too. But maybe not. Mine had too many cracks in it, where people could get to me.

  Minutes later, I was brushing the grass off of me while Mateo and I discussed where to have our business meeting. According to Jerry, this part of the day was less conversational and more about actual business situations and how to handle them in English. At breakfast we had been given a small loose leaf booklet that was full of scripts we could follow. All in all, it seemed like a pretty serious ordeal. There was the phone call, where he would go into his room and I would go into mine and we would call each other and go over a script. Mateo didn’t seem too sold on that, I guess because without visual clues, it was harder to speak.

  There was also a business group meeting and we’d have to find another pair to do that, or we could do a faux job interview, which could pretty much turn into any employer trying to hire someone or any company trying to sell.

  To my surprise though, Mateo eventually settled on the business call.

  “I fear it, so I should do it,” he said. I admired his reasoning. I took my script and went to my apartment. Sara wasn’t there, so I took a seat on the couch beside the phone and waited for him to call me. The booklet had everyone’s extension, which was kind of nice if you got bored and felt like wanting to talk to someone. Unfortunately, we were blocked from making long distance calls and I was pretty sure a collect call to my house would get refused. I told myself to run to the computers on my pre-dinner break so I could finally get in touch with my family.

  While I waited for the phone to ring, feeling like I was back in high school all over again, I poured myself a cup of clean
-tasting water from the tap and looked around the silence of the room. Aside from my early bedtime the night before, I really hadn’t had a place to myself in a week, not since I left for London. I was quite a private person, despite what most people would say, and really cherished my time alone. I liked having my own personal space to think and to dream. Perhaps that’s why I’d never made any really close friends over the years—I never felt I needed them.

  And yet standing in the kitchenette of the foreign apartment, surveying the cream couch and the iron chandeliers and the dark-wooded floors of the sparse room, I felt this strange gnawing in the pit of my chest. It was like I didn’t want the alone time, the time to think. I wanted to go back outside and be around people, soak up their personalities and their essence, like a dull-toothed vampire. This was very unlike me—one day at Las Palabras and I was changing. I wasn’t sure if I liked it.

  The phone rang, jolting me out of my thoughts. I ran over to it and snatched it up. “Hello?”

  “Vera?” Mateo said over the line. His voice sounded higher on the phone, crisp and professional.

  “Yup,” I said and immediately started toying with the phone line, wrapping it around my finger.

  A thick silence permeated the line. He cleared his throat. “You are supposed to go first. It says so.”

  Oh, right, the script. I flipped open the pages, feeling a bit nervous all of a sudden. There was something quite serious about Mateo’s tone, as if we’d stopped being friendly for a moment.

  The script was fairly straightforward. I was an investor who was calling about the business. My job was to ask Mateo the questions and he only had a brief word or two telling him what he should talk about without supplying him the actual script. He had to make that up on his own, pulling from his real life.

  It went okay, at first, but when it called for me to ask him “what are the advantages of investing in your company” he started to stumble over his words. He was saying them wrong, drawing a blank.

  “Merde,” he swore harshly into the phone. “Fuck. Fuck!”

  I was taken aback by his change in tune. I swallowed hard and said, “It’s okay. We can just start over. It’s a hard question.”

  “It’s a question I can’t even answer in Spanish,” he said bitterly. “How the fuck do I answer in English?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I continued to coil the phone line around my finger. I heard him sigh.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I am sorry, Vera.”

  “It’s okay,” I said in a small voice.

  “It is not okay,” he said. “But it has nothing to do with you.” He paused. “I will try and think of something to say about my company for next time. Do you mind…do you mind if we just talk instead?”

  “What about?” I asked.

  “You. Let’s talk about you. Vera Miles.”

  “I’m not very interesting.”

  “You say that, but I have many questions.”

  I smiled, my heart starting to beat a bit faster. “Okay…but if I tell you all my secrets, you’re going to find me boring.”

  “You? Boring?” he chuckled warmly. “Impossible. I only have twenty questions for you, like the game. You know the game, yes?”

  “Yes,” I slowly said. But I seriously didn’t feel like playing it with him. Now, if the game were reversed, that would be another story.

  “Well, I shall ask you one question a day. I am here for only twenty-one days, so on the last day you can ask me a question.”

  “That hardly seems fair,” I said. Still, if he had to ask me a question every day, that meant he had to talk to me every day. I couldn’t say no to that.

  “It is fair, to me,” he said simply. “First question is…did it hurt when you got that hole put in your tongue?”

  I laughed. “What? My tongue ring?”

  “Yes. Did it hurt? It looks like it would hurt.”

  Funny, I’d never seen him eyeing my tongue ring before. Usually it was quite noticeable when someone finally spies the silver inside your mouth. It’s not like I went around all day doing the Julia Roberts laugh.

  “Yeah, it hurt,” I said. “But I don’t mind a bit of pain.”

  “I see,” he said. “It suits you.”

  “Really?” All I’d heard from my mother and sister was that it made me look like a cheap tramp. I was sure to someone like Mateo, it was looked at as being gross and immature.

  “Yes,” he said. “When I was younger, I thought it was a cool look. I wanted one.”

  I couldn’t picture Mateo with a tongue ring—or any kind of ring, other than his wedding one. “I have to say, I can’t really imagine you with a tongue ring,” I admitted. “It’s not really your style.”

  “Oh, I was a fun person, when I was younger,” he said. “Now, I just get buzzzzzed. That’s it.”

  That was the second time he had said when he was “younger.” I wondered if being around him was like reliving the past. “You’re not old, Mateo,” I told him. “You’re not even forty.”

  “But I will be forty before you will be forty. You will only be twenty-five.” He sighed. “You will see. Sometimes you are stuck being the person you are and not the person you were. Or could be.”

  The somber quality to his voice filled the air around me, making the apartment seem shades darker, like the curtains had been pulled closed. It was scary how I totally understood what he was talking about, no matter what age I was.

  He cleared his throat and went on, his voice louder. “Well if you do not mind, Vera, I think I will need to make a phone call or too, a real one. I will see you tonight at the party, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said softly. The receiver on his end clicked off and I stared at the phone for a few moments before hanging it up. Through the littlest lapses in character, I was beginning to think there was more to Mateo than what met the eye. Though he’d be playing twenty questions with me, I was going to make sure I unravelled him first, silken thread by silken thread.

  Chapter Six

  “I’ll give you ten euros if you do it.”

  I put down my drink and gave Eduardo a steady look. “Are you serious?”

  “Of course,” he exclaimed and patted Angel on the back, hard. “Isn’t that right, Angel?”

  Angel, who probably spoke the least English out of everyone at Las Palabras, nodded. Like his namesake, he had a round face and a mop of curly brown hair. His thick-framed glasses and geek chic outfit made it hard for me to determine if he was a young hipster or a nerd in his mid-thirties. He worked for a software company in Madrid, which didn’t help.

  I plucked the cherry out of my screwdriver and held it in front of my mouth. I looked to Eduardo who was eyeing me with a big fat grin on his face.

  He and Angel were among the first people to show up at the party. I had gotten there early, not wanting to pull the same thing I did at dinner and get there late. I had gotten so wrapped up with catching up on Facebook and writing long emails to Josh and Jocelyn that I barely noticed everyone piling past me into the dining room. By the time I logged off, all the tables were taken and I had to sit with Edna, a retired teacher from Manchester who really didn’t seem to like me. She was here with her husband Nick and I recognized them as the people who had given me dirty looks on the bus.

  Luckily, the Spaniards I sat with were nice. There was quiet Cristina who barely talked and Yolanda, a hippie-ish woman with a toothy grin and really dark skin that looked like beef jerky. Yolanda loved to talk and show off the English she picked up from some yoga guru in Nepal. I don’t know what she was talking about, actually, but it prevented me from having to contribute to the conversation. I just concentrated on the wine and the food the whole meal, occasionally looking over at Mateo who was sitting with Wayne, Beatriz and a pretty blonde I think was named Polly. He had seemed to be chipper over dinner, laughing loudly at whatever Wayne was saying.

  “Well, do it,” Eduardo coaxed to me, bringing my attention to the task at hand. He was a cute guy, late twe
nties, kind of short and on the preppy side but he had flawless golden skin and really nice smile. He was also a bit of a pervert. Then again, so was I.

  “All right,” I said. I placed the cherry in my mouth and bit it off seductively. This part was for the show. Eduardo eyed my lips eagerly as I sucked on it for a moment and Angel seemed to blush right up to his roots. Then I smiled and swallowed it down. Time for the party trick.

  I placed the stem into my mouth and with deft concentration I slowly worked the two ends together with my tongue, trying to tie it into a knot. As sexy as it was supposed to be, it’s actually impossible to look good while doing this and I knew my face was contorted.

  It took a few seconds longer than I would have liked but eventually I opened my mouth and stuck out my tongue, the knotted stem displayed proudly.

  Eduardo pulled an impressed face.

  “Showing off your ring?” I heard Mateo say. A deliciously fresh ocean smell filled my nose and Mateo came into view, walking behind Eduardo and peering at me in curiosity. I promptly stuck my tongue back in my mouth and watched as his mouth curved up in a wicked smile.

  Angel nudged Eduardo. “Give her money.”

  I tore my eyes off of Mateo as Eduardo groaned and fished out his wallet. He slapped ten euros down into my hand and winked at me. “It was worth it.” He and Angel turned and walked off to the bar, which now had a line of people at it, the two women from reception now back there and popping off bottle caps.

  Mateo folded his muscled arms across his chest. Though he was still wearing his sleek blue dress pants from earlier, now he had a white linen shirt that was unbuttoned just enough to give a hint of groomed chest hair. Something about that made a lusty thrill run through me. Every guy I’d been with had been smooth and hair free as a baby. Mateo was one hundred percent the opposite of that, one hundred percent man.