Page 45

45

Jonathan

I have never told anyone other than Mas what I do for a living. Up until now. I told Eva. She did not give a fuck. She was fine with it. It was hardly a speed bump. She is so much more twisted than I ever dreamed possible. It is starting to scare me, and it is really turning me on.

She smiles at me. She reaches for the door and she locks it.

“What should we do?” she asks.

“Get on the table,” I say. She did ask.

“But there’s—” There is food on the table, all different food in all different places.

“Get on the table,” I repeat.

She cocks her head. For a moment, I think she will not take direction—she has been calling most of the shots so far—but then she makes up her mind.

She smirks. She moves. Her sneaker slips slightly on the leather seat as she stands. She places her knee in the gap between the bread and where it’s buttered. She puts her hands out, sliding the little plates aside to make a place big enough for her.

“On your back,” I say.

She gets down and rolls over. The plates orbit her. She is the perennial sun.

I climb over her. I am not careful to move the plates first. They crack beneath my knees. I grab the waistband of her trousers and I yank their bright plastic button off as I strip her. It is messy work, but somebody has to do it.

I put on a condom. She grunts as I enter her. I start to move inside her. She tries to hold her place on the table. I thrust into her and her body jerks, trying to hold the impact inside that magnetic belly, trying to keep still, to keep the plates from falling.

“Oh! Oh! Oh God!” I am really moving now, thrusting inside her. I want her to remember this tomorrow. I want her to remember this forever.

She claps her hand over her mouth as the first plate drops. It cracks against the floor: a whole, perfect sound. The others are all going to go the same way.

The prawn shells. The olives. The little sausages wrapped in bacon. I am sorry it had to end this way. We are going to have to let you go.

“Fuck!”

The plates fall in droves.

Crack! Crack! Crack!

It is a natural disaster, a force of nature. The table is textured: Parts of it are swamped in oil; others are mountains of bread and broken porcelain. My palm slips on marinara sauce and finds purchase in the ropes of her dark hair.

“Fuck!”

Everything must go. If I am not careful, she will go, too.

This will take some fancy footwork, but luckily I am well studied in the gymnastics of physical extremes.

“Put your knees up.” She does and I lift her with me, backward off the table and thwack! onto the leather seat. I get an orgasm for my efforts. Girls love surprises.

“Oh… Fuck .”

I release myself inside her, too exhausted to carry on. My breath is pumping inside my chest. Hers does the same.

I lift her and place her beside me, somewhat overexerted by our efforts.

She tries to catch her breath, peering at me from between the fronds of her marinara-coated hair. She starts to laugh, deep in her belly. In a moment she is hysterical, doubled over, laughing infectiously.

“That was so, so naughty!” she exclaims.

“We should probably clean this up,” I say. The wreckage is spectacular. Her ass is printed in oil on the table. The broken plates on the floor have created an apocalyptic skyline that looks surprisingly like Barcelona.

“And leave a big tip,” she says.

“I’ve wanted to do that since the day I met you,” I confess. “No, from the moment I first saw you, on the sleeper train to Paris.”

“It’s probably a good thing you waited,” she says, zipping up her now-buttonless pants. “I don’t know if our seatmates would have appreciated it.”

“We’ll go back there someday, won’t we? And we’ll get our old compartment? The same train?” I have half a mind to drag her back there now.

“Someday,” she repeats, like she finds the phrase suspicious. She bites her lip and her brow crosses. “What exactly do you want from me?”

“I want you,” I say. “Just you.”

—

I am a little tipsy on the walk home. I do not normally drink, because I tend to go dark. Well, darker.

But I got caught up in the moment, in being with her. I started to think—in small moments, here and there—that I could be like everybody else. That I could drink for fun. Eat for fun. Live for fun.

Eva and I walk to the hotel along La Rambla, the main artery of Barcelona. I have walked this street dozens of times before, but I have a sense that this is the time, as if all those other times were in preparation for this moment. The lights, the trees and the cobblestones are all lit. My life before her was a dress rehearsal; this is the main event.

I am maybe more than tipsy.

She is holding my hand. Her fingers are tangled in mine. I can still taste her pussy on my lips from when I kissed it goodbye.

I am cataloging all of Eva’s parts—her skin, her moles, her lips—so I do not see him coming until it is too late.

Suddenly there is a man beside me with a knife at my ribs, demanding, in English:

“Give me everything .”

I admire his lack of specificity. Why ask for anything when you can have everything?

I am used to thinking on my feet, but I am not entirely sure how to handle this situation. You might think, You’re a contract killer! Kill him! But I do not like killing honest criminals. And it is not safe. When I kill people for work, I have a cleanup crew. I have killed people outside of work before, and I ended up imprisoned for my efforts.

I also do not want to offend Eva by knocking him out. I decide to calmly unsheathe my wallet. There is no reason we cannot all walk away happy.

Except the thief misreads my reaching into my coat—in fairness, I do have a gun in there. He stabs me—just lightly. It is practically foreplay.

That is when Eva takes him out.

It is objectively impressive. She hits him in just the right spot—her palm, the bar of his columella. The luckiest strike.

Crack!

“Oh,” I say.

Blood gushes down his shirt, then through his fingers, which are now stapled to his nose to stop the bleeding.

“You fucking bitch!” he says, then staggers away.

I start after him, but she stops me.

“He can’t talk to you like that,” I say, feeling a little heated.

She starts laughing, still holding me back. “Oh my God!” Her hand brushes my wound. “You’re actually bleeding.”

She spreads my coat and I am bleeding. Blood has never really bothered me. It does not seem to bother her either. She ties up my shirt to quell the wound.

“Thank you,” I say, catching her eyes.

She smiles at me. “No problem.”

We are both far too serene for people who have just been mugged.

“I’m glad you’re not an assassin,” I say. I slip my fingers through hers. I can feel her heartbeat through her palm. Feel her fast breath slowing as we start toward the hotel again. “I wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“You really wouldn’t,” she confirms.

La Rambla seems even more beautiful now, as if it has become an integral part of our story. The night she saved me.

“I can’t believe you’re real,” I muse. “It’s like you were made for me.”

“Excuse me—maybe you were made for me .”

“Okay,” I agree. “I like that better.” I do. I would much rather have been made for her than for what I originally thought I was made for: chaos.

Her existence is such a trip. It is rearranging my entire world—not to be dramatic.

Before this moment I thought I was wicked. I thought I was placed on this earth for my torture—and maybe a little for everyone else’s. But she is making me think, making me believe, that there is another, more playful reason.

That I am a little here for love.