Love, in English

  “Who is Josh?”

  I spun around in my seat to see Mateo standing behind me, scrutinizing my computer screen. Thank god I hadn’t written anything to my brother about him.

  “He’s my brother,” I said quickly, heart racing and head still thumping. Why was I so nervous all of a sudden?

  “Did you say anything nice about me?” he asked.

  What? I frowned.

  He shook his head, the grin spreading across his face. “I am just making fun. Come, let’s go talk. Where do you want to do it?”

  Um, on the floor, against the sink, in the bed?

  I shrugged and got out of my seat. “It doesn’t matter. Somewhere quiet. And with access to water. Or a toilet in case I vomit.”

  Smooth, Vera, real smooth.

  “You don’t feel so well also?” he asked. He put his hand on my lower back and gently guided me out of the room. It was crazy, the heat I felt from that, imagined or not. I never wanted him to take his hand away.

  He took me back outside and pointed to two wicker chairs in the shade of the building. “How about here?”

  We weren’t the only ones outside. Lauren and Sara were on the other side of the patio, trying to have a conversation. I smiled at Sara—she also looked worse for wear—but avoided Lauren’s eyes. I knew they wouldn’t be friendly.

  I collapsed into a chair, nestling in the cushions and trying to get in a comfortable position without the wicker imprinting lines on my face. Mateo did the opposite. He sat down, legs splayed, arms resting on the sides, the picture of total elegance. He stared at me, eyes lazy and subdued, like he was panther sizing up his prey.

  I hadn’t been anyone’s prey in a long time. And, despite how my body felt about it, it wouldn’t be a good time to start.

  I cleared my throat. “So.”

  “So,” he said right back, still staring. “Did you have fun last night?”

  I nodded, wondering how much he knew. “Too much fun, maybe.”

  “I didn’t see you leave,” he said.

  Good.

  “Though, I heard you did,” he added.

  Shit.

  I didn’t bother looking at him. Instead I brought out my sunglasses from my bag and slipped them on. Ah, much better. The world was less bright and headache-inducing and Mateo couldn’t see my eyes.

  When I didn’t say anything he said, “You should have come say goodbye.”

  “You looked busy,” I said, a little too quickly. “Dancing.”

  “That was nothing. You should have seen me dancing like Justin Timberlake.”

  I gave him a look he couldn’t see.

  He gave me a shit-eating grin. “That’s what I assume I look like when I dance. I could be wrong.”

  “I had too much grappa,” I managed to say. “What about you?”

  “Even a little bit is too much but perhaps that is why we drink it. Perhaps this is why I think I dance like Justin Timberlake.”

  This Mateo was like all Mateos—unflappable, calm and smooth. In charge of the ride. But for a moment I remembered the Mateo on the phone yesterday, the business man who freaked out because he didn’t know what he was doing—in either language. That Mateo intrigued me more than most.

  I wondered how to start pulling on the threads.

  “So, what shall we discuss,” I said.

  He smiled. “We’re already discussing. There is no script here. Let us just talk.”

  “Okay,” I said. He was right, of course. When you were with someone you liked during your one-on-ones, it was different. You were just hanging out. It was kind of genius when you think of it. I wondered if that’s why Jerry had the drunken party on the first night, so that people would break down the language barriers and get comfortable with each other.

  “Vera,” Mateo said. “Tell me, hour by the hour, what you did Tuesday last week.”

  I straightened up slightly in surprise. “Last Tuesday? Why?”

  “It is one of my twenty questions.”

  “I was in London…”

  “How long were you in London for?”

  “I think that’s more than one question.”

  “Do not be so literal,” he chided me. “Tell me about the last Tuesday when you were at home, in Vancouver. Tell me about that day.”

  I scrunched up my nose. “Why?”

  “Because,” he said, “I want to know what the average day of Vera Miles is like.”

  “Well, it won’t be that average because I wasn’t in school.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  He was persistent, I’ll give him that.

  I wracked my brain, trying to think back. I left on the Thursday, so what was I doing on Tuesday?

  “I got up,” I said. Good start.

  “Where did you get up?”

  “In my bed?”

  “Who do you live with?”

  I raised a brow. I was getting good at that. “Is this question an excuse to ask other questions?”

  He only smiled. “Go on.”

  I sighed and tried to get comfortable again. I closed my eyes and ran through that day. “I live with my brother and my mom. I woke up, around my usual time when I’m not at school. Like, ten am.”

  “That is quiet late, no?”

  “I like to sleep in.” I shrugged. “Anyway, I got up at ten and then I made myself breakfast…and then I did some research online about London, last minute shit.”

  “You took a last minute shit?”

  I burst out laughing. “No!” I yelled at him. “Sorry. I should stop swearing and using slang, it’s getting confusing.”

  “I like it when you swear.”

  “Well, it doesn’t do me any favors when you get it confused with the literal sense.”

  He stroked his chin in mock contemplation. I could hear the roughness of his beard on his fingers. “So, when you say things like ‘fuck me’ or ‘fuck you’, you aren’t really wanted to be fucked or to fuck another?”

  My god, the word fuck sounded so beautifully dirty coming from his mouth, especially when he pronounced with such soft emphasis.

  I breathed in deeply, trying to quell my raging hormones. “Do you mean it in that sense when you swear?”

  Mateo smiled carefully. “I don’t take fucking lightly.”

  Okay, so what the hell were we really talking about here? I stared at him, hoping my face was blank.

  “So then what did you do after you…looked up shit?” he abruptly continued on with the conversation, as if that weird moment had never happened.

  “Uh,” I fumbled for words. “I, uh, went on the drive for lunch.”

  “The drive?”

  “Commercial Drive,” I explained. “It’s a popular street near my house. Lots of artsy types, hipsters, hippies, bums. Good places to eat, and there’s an Italian section too.”

  “You met someone there?”

  I shook my head and looked down at my chipped fingernails. “No. I went to eat by myself. My brother was working.”

  I could feel his eyes on me but I avoided looking up at him. “Hmmm,” he said. “No friends to meet? No boyfriend?”

  I sucked in my breath, the questions grating me raw. “I have friends,” I said, quietly defensive. “I just don’t see them often. School is over. And my best friend, she’s in another province.”

  “And the boyfriend?”

  Finally, I had to look at him. “Obviously I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  He frowned, wearing a face of genuine puzzlement. “Why is that obvious?”

  I bit my lip for a moment. “I don’t know. I just thought it was. I don’t think I’d be here if I had one. I don’t think I’d be…me…acting the way I do.”

  What the hell was I saying? This hangover was making me talk way too much.

  “Very honest,” he said after a beat. “Do you like to be alone?”

  I shrugged. “I think so. It’s easy.”

  “Easy to be you?”

  “No. Easy to only worry about your
self.”

  He nodded and I could see his dark eyes churning with my words. “You are close with your brother, yes?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s pretty lame but I think he’s the closest person to me. Do you have any siblings?” I asked him, hoping to turn this onto him.

  “A sister,” he said simply. “Lucia.” He pulled the chair closer to me and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, the Rolex glinting in the weak sun. “Is it just your brother?”

  Back to me again. I exhaled noisily, to let him know that this wasn’t a fun subject. “No, I have an older sister.”

  “But you don’t get along.”

  “No, we don’t,” I said. “I mean, I’m nice to her and I make an effort. She’s just a bitch.”

  His forehead wrinkled. “That doesn’t sound like a nice thing to say about your family.” He seemed genuinely shocked by that.

  “Well, she is,” I said. “She’s always been that way but it got worse after…it’s a long story. My family is fucked up, that’s all you need to know, and I don’t care how that sounds. Every family needs a black sheep to call them out on their bullshit.”

  “And Vera Miles is the black sheep,” he commented. He leaned back. “But I don’t like that name for you.”

  “Vera?”

  “The black sheep. You seem more like a red sheep. Maybe a bright color, like your shirt.” His eyes traveled down to my chest, focusing there for just a moment, just long enough for me to feel a heat deep inside, melting the ice that had built up over the last few minutes.

  “I’m definitely not a sheep at all,” I said. “Black cat is more like it, I think. Maybe even a black hole.”

  “A black hole,” he said carefully. “That is in space, yes?”

  I nodded, relieved that the conversation was heading in astronomy’s direction. Now, this I could talk about and not feel weird about. I straightened up and shoved my sunglasses on top of my head, blinking at the sunlight. “A black hole is a star. Or, it was a star that collapsed onto itself. It’s a lot more, um, scientific than that but basically it keeps collapsing, eventually absorbing all light and other stars and matter around it. It’s fascinating, really, because we don’t know all that much about it. And it’s kind of scary, to me, anyway. And invisible.”

  “I learned about that in school, when I was a child,” he said, “though I knew it as agujero negro. But no, you are not a black hole, Vera. You are fascinating, but you are not scary and you are not invisible.” He said that with subdued passion, like it was a fallacy to even suggest it. “You are the opposite. What is the opposite? Estrella?”

  I raised my finger. “No more Spanish.”

  “A star, then.” He gestured to my tattoos, the shooting stars on my chest, the constellation on my arm. “You are a star. That’s what I shall call you. Star.”

  My heart flipped. “In that case, I think Estrella sounds better.”

  He fixed me with a satisfied smile. “Good. Then it is settled. Estrella,” he said, voice lower over the word.

  The world seemed to still.

  Our eyes stayed locked together, silence settling on us like silk, trapping in the heat between us. It couldn’t all be in my head, could it? This was a moment that had to be happening for him too. The look in his eyes was intense, practically carnal. They glittered darkly, searching me. People didn’t just stare at each other like this without meaning to.

  You’re hungover and delusional, my inner critic said, trying to muffle the butterflies.

  “May we join you?” a thickly accented voice broke through our connection. I looked away from Mateo, reality snapping me into place, and up to see Sara and Lauren peering down at us hesitantly.

  Well, Sara looked hesitant. Lauren had her arms folded and an accusatory twist to her lips.

  “Sure?” I said, trying to act nonchalant, like I hadn’t been ensnared in a heady, strange, moment with Mateo. I quickly made my face as impassive as possible and pointed at the chairs closest to us. “Pull up a seat,” I added breezily.

  “We thought it would be fun for the four of us to talk,” Lauren said, dragging her chair over, the sound on the tiles scraping the inside of my ears. Today she was wearing short shorts, a polo shirt and had attached a length of faux-pearls to her glitter glasses. She didn’t look like she could have any fun, period.

  My eyes quickly darted over to Mateo but he seemed as impassive as ever. He got up and pulled his chair closer to mine and pulled out his phone, seeming to scroll through things.

  Lauren narrowed her eyes at him. “What are you doing?”

  I sucked in my breath and glanced nervously at Mateo. As casual as this place was, he was still an older man, a professional and a stranger and she was talking to him like she was his teacher. I mean, she kind was, so was I, when you thought about it. But fuck her and her stupid fucking glasses. Where did she get the nerve?

  Mateo’s eyes slid over to her, appraising her coolly. “The dictionary on my phone helps me with my English.” He went back to the screen, not expecting her to argue with that.

  “So,” Sara said, a forced smile on her face. “I asked Lauren questions and she asked me questions and then she said we should talk to you and ask questions.”

  Oh great, more questions. Can we please talk about my crappy family and what a loner I am, a black hole?

  No, I corrected myself, steeling my doubts with Mateo’s warm words. You’re Estrella.

  “I’ll go first,” Lauren said, crossing her pale legs. She eyed Mateo and cleared her throat until he reluctantly met her gaze. “Tell us about your wife.”

  My chest constricted at the peculiar bluntness of the question. Mateo squinted his eyes at her and then passed me his phone for some reason. I gingerly took it in my hands and looked down at it, confused. The notepad was open and on it he had written Does this girl have a problem in her head?

  I nearly choked out laughing. Lauren was looking at me like she was about to demand we “share with the rest of the class” but Mateo brought back her attention.

  “My wife is a very lovely woman,” he said and though he was polite about it, there was that edge again to his voice. “She is very pretty, very smart and a very good mother.” Was I disappointed to hear that? Probably not. Then again, I was good at lying to myself.

  Lauren didn’t seem satisfied with that. “What is her name?”

  “Isabel,” he said and the name did funny things to me. Things like, making me feel the lightest lashes of guilt for fawning over the husband of Isabel Casalles.

  From the way Lauren was watching me now, I could tell that had been her intention with the question. She had noticed us together, our interactions, the way I stared at him without realizing it. She wanted to let me know that she knew and to remind me that he was married.

  Like I fucking needed her to remind me of that.

  While Mateo went on to tell her about his daughter Chloe Ann, I took the moment to quickly write under his message, that she was just a bitch. I handed it back to him without looking. I ignored the tingly feeling I got when our fingers brushed against each other.

  He grasped the phone in his hand and looked over at Sara, asking her to tell us about her husband. While Sara tried to find the right words, he looked down at the message I wrote and his brows furrowed. He looked back at me, as if to say what?

  I leaned over his seat and looked down at the notepad. Thanks to the wonders of autocorrect, instead of writing Lauren is a bitch I had actually written down Lauren is a bicycle. A guffaw escaped my lips and more giggles threatened to spill. The thought that Mateo had been eying Lauren and trying to picture her as a banana-seat cruiser with pearl streamers and made me feel like I had just ingested a crate of the sillies.

  “What is so funny?” Lauren asked haughtily. Mateo and I were both laughing now. His laughter was rich and reverberated through me, remedying me like a tonic.

  “It’s something that got lost in translation,” I managed to say.

  “Rig
ht,” Lauren said with a narrow-eyed smile. “Well, then let me ask you a question, Vera.” The way she said my name was accusatory, as if I were using an alias.

  I stared back at her expectantly, knowing that whatever was coming I probably wasn’t going to like.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked innocently. Too innocently.

  “Actually,” I said, with a wide fake smile, “I was just discussing that with Mateo. I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “Not even Dave?”

  My face fell. “What are you talking about? Dave? From here? No.” I tried to laugh but it felt hollow.

  “I saw you kissing him last night, that’s all,” she said, taking off her glasses and wiping the lenses on her shorts. “Thought he was your boyfriend.”

  The fuck. The fuck!

  I felt absolutely mortified, like she was instigating that I was some slut, and not in some funny ha ha way, but as in I was a terrible, unclean, easy person with no respect for herself. I didn’t even have the words to say anything back, all the snappy retorts I would normally have used had slipped away somewhere and I was slack-jawed and fumbling.

  “Is this your business to know if she has a boyfriend?” Mateo asked, leaning forward. The polite tone to his voice was totally gone.

  Lauren looked surprised but quickly covered it up with a lift of her chin. “I was just curious. Just trying to make conversation. That is our job here, isn’t it? I had seen Vera kissing him last night, so, naturally, I assumed they were together. I mean, why else should I think otherwise?” Her pitch went up at the end, as if to once again make it seem like an innocent question.

  “You must come from a very strange country,” Mateo said, “where women are not allowed to kiss men for their own pleasure.”

  Was Mateo sticking up for me, for the fact that I had kissed Dave?

  Lauren looked appalled. “I am from America. Women are better than men in America and we are allowed to do whatever we want. Frankly, I think you and your country is a little bit backwards, with your politically incorrect machismo and caveman mentality. Not to mention how racist and repressive you are toward the Moors and anyone else who emigrates from Africa.”