Love in English

Chapter Five
___
By the time lunch time rolled around, my head was spinning with a new kind of exhaustion. It felt tired, spent, rolling the squeaky, rusty wheels in my brain. My jaw was tired like I’d been giving a blow job for hours and my throat was hoarse and parched. Aside from the times that me and my brother would go to the park and get high, I don’t think I’d ever talked for three hours straight. Because that was the thing about the program so far—the Spaniards struggled with their words, they fought to be heard and understood, so you wanted to help them out. You wanted to supply words for them and you wanted to teach them and when you couldn’t, you had no choice but to just talk.
And so I talked like I’d never talked before. I told the kindly psychologist Jorge all about growing up in Vancouver and my tumultuous relationship with my sister, I told stoic, city worker Francisco (who insisted I call him Paco) all about my interest in the universe and what I was studying, and I told software designer Froggy about my tattoos and what most of them meant and how I felt like I never fit in. I talked about things I’d normally never ever talk about and all because they spoke another language. They both understood English and yet didn’t and in some weird, scary way, it felt like I could tell them anything.
By the time I stumbled into the dining hall for lunch, my face greasy with sweat and my lips desert dry, I started wondering if this program was going to be my new therapy. I’d certainly said more about myself in the last three hours than I ever did to the shrink I used to see.
I looked around for a table and saw nothing but similarly dazed faces. I also saw Claudia who was waving me over. I staggered to the table and plunked myself down.
“You look tired,” she said. “I am tired as well. It hurts to think.” She tapped the side of her head.
I raised my face off of the table and saw her pour wine from a bottle into a glass nearest me. I tried to focus and noticed that every table had two bottles of red wine. Red wine? At lunch? What kind of sorcery was this?
“Here have some,” Claudia said. “You drink wine, yes?”
I shook my head. “Not really. I mean I have had it, but I prefer beer.”
She laughed in the way that Mateo had at the same answer and quickly poured some for herself. “You will love wine in a few days, I promise. This is good. You will like it.”
“Do you always drink wine during lunch?” I asked, mustering enough strength to bring the glass to my lips.
“Not that way.”
I turned my head to see Mateo pulling out a chair. He looked to us in utter sincerity, brows raised. “May I?”
“Of course, yes,” Claudia said.
He looked at me and sat down. I raised the glass at him. “Not what way?” I asked, for some reason not surprised to see him here.
He quickly poured himself a glass of the garnet liquid then held it away from him. With the smooth twitch of his wrist, he moved the glass so that the wine swirled around and around.
“You take your time,” he said, eyes burning into me, as if I were the wine. “You give it time to breathe. You don’t rush it. Let it be what it is. Wine. Nothing else. Just wine. Let it interact with the world, with the air. Let it live. Just watch it, pay attention, appreciate.” He raised the glass to his face and stuck his nose in it. He breathed in sharply a few times before he pulled away. “Then you smell it. You take it in. Pay attention. Every wine is different, they are all trying to say different things, yes? This wine says it is calm. It is nice. It gets along with everyone.”
He got all that from the wine? I was kinda fascinated.
He then put the glass to his mouth and placed his full lips on either side of thin rim, wet and delicate. I swallowed hard, aware that I was watching him too intently and yet I couldn’t look away. He tilted the glass and the ruby streams slid toward his mouth. He opened his lips slightly and took it in. My god, I’d never seen something so mundane look so damn sexual. His cheeks moved in and out subtly as he let the wine sit in his mouth. He closed his eyes, lashes dark against his skin, and then slowly swallowed his Adam’s apple bobbing against his strong neck.
He kept his eyes closed even after he took the glass away. Then he opened them and grinned at me with a red-stained mouth. “This wine tastes like shit.”
If I had wine in my mouth, I would have spit it out. I laughed, loudly, like I was drunk but I was just drunk on him.
“Mateo,” Claudia scolded but she was giggling too. She took a sip. “It isn’t so bad. Vera, have some.”
“I don’t know,” I said warily, still smiling. I tried to do what Mateo did, albeit a speeded up version—swirl, smell, sip. It was very dry and a bit bitter, but then again that’s what most wine tasted like to me.
It also went straight to my head. I really should have waited but by the time the waiter put our lunch of rice and pork chops on the table (it wasn’t buffet-style this time), I’d had one glass and was grinning to myself. Shit, Spanish wine was strong.
“Are you buzzzzzed?” Mateo teased, leaning in close.
“No,” I said defensively and I picked up my knife and fork to cut into the pork chop. My eyes flitted across the table at Claudia and our new seatmate, Wayne. He was the man I’d first seen when I got on the bus, and though he wasn’t wearing a cowboy hat at the moment, he was an obvious Texan through and through. His bulbous nose was tinged with red and I wondered if he was feeling “buzzed” too or if he was just an alcoholic.
“You’ve got some interesting tattoos,” he said, eyeing my chest and arms. “I ain’t used to see a girl with so many.”
“You do happen to have a lot of tattoos,” Mateo mused, pretending to study me for the first time. “I am sure they all tell a story about you.”
“Do you have any?” I said, turning the question around on him.
He gave me a sheepish, adorable smile and shook his head. “I am not so good with needles.”
Claudia snorted. “Centre back for Atletico and you are afraid of needles?”
“What’s Atletico?” Wayne asked.
Mateo narrowed his eyes playfully at Claudia. “I did not say I was afraid, I said I am not good. We don’t…get along.” He looked to Wayne. “Atletico is a football—er, soccer, yes? A soccer team in Madrid.”
“He used to play for them,” Claudia said. “He was very good.”
“Was?” Wayne repeated. “What do you do now?”
“Me and my partner own a few restaurants.”
Wayne grinned. “No shit, Sherlock!” he said, pounding his fist on the table and making the wine splash around in the glasses. “I own bars in San Antonio and Austin. Texas.”
Mateo’s eyes lit up. “That is very intriguing. If we get a session together, I’m afraid I am going to—how do you say, pick your brain? Yes, pick your brain about that. I would like to expand the business overseas. I am very curious about the US market.”
“I look forward to it. How long have you been in the restaurant business?”
“Six years,” he said automatically, as if were counting the days.
“I remember when you left the team,” Claudia said between bites of her food. “And no one could understand why you were opening a restaurant. But, it was very good food. Still is. Better than this.” She waved her fork in small circles.
As she was saying this, I watched Mateo closely. His body stiffened just enough for me to know that the subject was a delicate one. Once again I wondered what had happened to him but I didn’t want to ask.
Wayne, on the other hand, wasn’t so good at reading people. “Why did you leave the team?”
Mateo sucked on his lower lip for a moment before he spoke, his voice measured. “I became injured. Tore my ACL. My knee. I’m fine now, but it was time for me to leave the game and do something else.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Eight years.” Another automatic answer. “I was thirty when it happened.”
Thirty-eight? Did I just count that right? Mateo was thirty-eight?
“You do not look thirty-eight,” I couldn’t help but say.
He gave me a smile that looked borderline grateful and focused his bewitching eyes on me. “What do I look like to you, Vera?”
A gorgeous, sensual, Spanish god. That’s what he looked like to me.
I crammed some rice in my mouth—so ladylike—and hoped I wasn’t blushing. When I swallowed, he was still waiting for an answer, his eyes never having left my face.
I dabbed the corners of my mouth with the napkin, my leftover lipstick staining it coral, and said, “You just look very young. That’s all. Like, thirty-two, maybe.”
“And how old are you?”
“Twenty-three,” I said slowly and in that moment I was suddenly aware that I was probably the youngest person in the program. Even Lauren seemed a year or two older than me, maybe because her bitterness and glitter glasses aged her.
“You got all those tattoos in twenty-three years?” Wayne exclaimed, as if it just blew his damn mind. “That is dedication.”
“That is dedication,” Mateo repeated in agreement, his eyes now raking over my arms and chest before they slowly made their way up to my face. He gazed at me intently like I was one of life’s greatest mysteries, as if I were utterly mesmerizing. I’d never seen anyone look at me that way and it glued me to my seat.
When I finally remembered to breathe, I poured myself another glass of wine and gulped it down. Luckily, Claudia had spoken up, telling us about a time she got a tattoo on her ass of her ex-boyfriend’s name and how she was trying to figure out how to into something funny, like Johnny Depp did with turning Winona Forever into Wino Forever.
While my brain got happily stuck on a tangent about Winona and Johnny and how weird it was that they dated and if it ever got awkward when they ran into each other, I finished my meal and another glass of wine. By the time we were all done, all the bottles at our table were empty and I was more than ready for a nap.
Seeing me yawn, Mateo pounced into action. “Come on, I’ll show you how to have a siesta. Sorry, little sleep. A nap.”
I looked at Claudia for her response but she just smiled coyly and shrugged before she got up with Wayne and said goodbye to us, leaving Mateo and I alone.
“Oh, don’t look so worried,” he said. He got out of his chair and held his hand out for me.
I eyed it with trepidation and gingerly placed my hand in his.
His fingers closed over mine, sealing us together with heat and heartbeat. He brought me up to my feet, flashed me a self-assuring smile, then gently let go of my hand. He pointed out the door. “Follow me.”
We walked out and as I passed by the reception I noted that one of the computers was free, though with the other four occupied by Anglos, it didn’t seem like it would stay free for long. This was the rare moment of the day where we could have free time and I really wanted to talk to Josh and let him know I was alright. And let’s be honest, I wanted to update my Facebook to say “Having a blast in Spain, bitchez! #notsohumblebrag”. But ex-soccer star turned restauranteur turned someone I wanted to keep being around was walking out the door and into the bright Spanish sun and my body was begging me to follow him and his fancy suit.
I’d made the right choice. The minute I stepped out onto the patio and was hit with the strength of the sun, my whole body tingled and relaxed. I fished a pair of sunglasses out of my purse and put them on while Mateo reached over two wicker chairs and plucked the cushions from them. Curiously, I followed him as he walked out onto the shorn lawn with the cushions in tow and threw them down near the shade of a small oak tree.
“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. “F*ck. F*ck!”
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 f*ck 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.