Page 34 of Slanting Towards the Sea

THIRTY-ONE

AS WE APPROACH ZADAR, the traffic thickens and so do my nerves.

For all the kissing before we left Lovorun, neither of us has mentioned our destination.

Perhaps he expects me to drive him back to the hotel, but he hasn’t asked, and I’m afraid if I take him there, I’ll give the wrong impression.

That spending the night together is a given, when I’m not ready to do that.

But I don’t want to leave the flame between us unattended either.

I haven’t been held or kissed in years, the mere warmth of his skin against mine is a salve.

So, when we reach the outskirts of the town, the ugly part where all the car dealerships and warehouses are, I ask him if he’s hungry, if he wants to go sightseeing.

“Sure,” he says, and I flip on the turn signal to steer us toward the center.

We park in the lot at the neck of the old-town peninsula, near my old high school, and I take him through the dilapidated schoolyard.

We lean against a wall across from the yellow building that used to be a military facility before it became a school.

“My classroom was where those windows and air-conditioning units are.” I point to the middle of the first floor.

“Though there weren’t air-conditioning units back then. We had wood-fed furnaces for heating.”

He laughs. “When did you go to school, in the nineteenth century?”

“Ha-ha.” I elbow him with mock offense that’s hard to enact.

Playfulness brings out a side of him that’s so tangibly personable.

It’s like easing myself into a hot bath after a day of hard work in the grove.

“The school ordered chopped wood each fall and stored it on the ground level. We used to fight over who got to go on log duty—distributing logs throughout the school, especially if there was an exam to avoid. And this wall,” I pat the cement behind our backs, “is where we spent our recesses. Having a boyfriend from another school visit you during recess was the ultimate sign of commitment on his part.”

Asier reaches for my hand and pulls me between his legs. Bursts of heat flicker in my lower abdomen. “I bet you got to show off like that all the time.”

“Yeah—no.” I scoff. “I rarely had boyfriends, and none of them ever came to my recess.”

“So, I’m the first one?”

I twirl a button on his shirt, realizing that in all the years we’d been together, I never brought Vlaho here.

We passed my school many times by car and on foot, but we never stopped to admire it, to reminisce.

It comes as a surprise, that there are still firsts I could have with someone else, when it felt as though all my firsts had forever been consumed with him.

I touch the scarred skin on Asier’s face. “You’re the first one.” It’s strange but comforting, this sense of familiarity sprouting so fast between us. He stands still and alert while I trace the pockmarks with my fingertips. “This happen to you in high school?”

He nods, once. “It was bad for a while. Girls weren’t exactly lining up to go out with me, as you can imagine.” He closes his arms around my waist. I put mine around his neck. My body burns and crackles like kindling for holding him so close.

“Did it hurt?” I ask, meaning, the acne. Meaning, the girls rejecting him. Behind my back, a whole school filled with avatars of former schoolmates, four years of festered pain.

“It was only temporary. I knew I’d outgrow it sometime soon.”

The pragmatism of his answer strikes me as nothing short of brilliant.

After the schoolyard, I take him on a tour of the places in my town that are dear to me, instead of the usual tourist attractions.

The scruffy little cafe where Tara and I hung out after school, drinking our first macchiatos.

The hill in the middle of the park where Tara and I lit our first cigarette.

The bench on the riva, the white stone-paved sea promenade, where I used to go when the world became too much and I needed to step off for a moment.

We stop for lunch in a restaurant where they serve seasonal food, wild asparagus and artichokes this time of year. When our plates arrive, he says, “You’ve told me so many things, but none of it is recent history.”

Heat rushes up my neck, the kind that leaves hives.

He’s right. I’ve shown him only things from before my college years.

Unwittingly, I steered us away from the city hall, where I married Vlaho, and the courthouse, where our marriage ended.

And the Five Wells Square, where I introduced him to Marina, and the narrow alley where Marina and I took Italian together.

His perceptiveness takes me off guard, this businessman who lets nothing slip past him.

How laid bare I am to him without even realizing it.

Oddly, it’s not a completely uncomfortable thought.

“And meanwhile, we’ve spent hours talking about me, and I don’t know a single thing about you.” A cheap tactic to change the subject, but inside me questions about him multiply by the second.

I can’t quite pin him down. He has the aura of a practical guy, but people like that usually lean toward easy, uncomplicated conversations. And all the questions he’s asked so far have been of the probing kind.

Asier sits back. “Fair enough. What do you want to know?”

The things I want to know are, unsurprisingly, the very things I haven’t revealed about myself. “Have you ever been married?”

He laughs. “No beating around the bush, huh? And no, I haven’t.”

A knot loosens in my chest. “And… do you have children?” The question I loathe being asked, but can’t help asking, even though I don’t know what I hope he’ll answer.

It’s stupid, pretending his response has anything to do with me.

We are barely anything to one another, and where can the future take us but away from each other?

But if he says he wants children, whatever chance we have ends here.

He bides his time, and for the first time I feel like I’ve stumbled on a topic he’s not comfortable with. “I do have a son,” he says. “Iker. He’s fifteen. He lives with his mother in Bristol.”

A son. “That’s wonderful.”

“Yeah. He’s great. I don’t see him as often as I’d like.”

A vulnerable thing to admit, I note, but don’t say.

“I’m away a lot,” he continues. “And when I’m in London, it’s hard to coordinate with his schedule. There’s always school, soccer practice, friends’ birthday parties, camps he doesn’t want to miss. It’s that age, you know, when everything is more important than your parents.”

I nod, thinking about it, about age. About my mom who is now gone. And about that bottomless need inside me, still present now, at thirty-eight, for her and Dad to like me, love me, acknowledge me, take pride in me.

“What about you? Do you have children?” he asks.

I put the cutlery at the sides of my plate.

The question is a stage light shining down on me.

I could lie. I could pretend that I didn’t want kids, that I couldn’t care less if I had them.

Being barren defines you in a way no other medical condition does.

Infertility isn’t just an affliction; it’s a failure.

A failure to be a woman. A failure to reproduce.

A nod from good old Darwin telling you that if you—your genome, your personality, your very nature—weren’t so intrinsically flawed, you’d be allowed to procreate.

Asier’s looking at me with his austere gray-green eyes. A smart person would weigh her words, make herself more desirable.

This, I realize, has always been my problem. That I think I have a choice in what I’ll say, when in reality, it’s a compulsion. I’m a valve, not a semipermeable membrane, like most other people. I’m either open or closed. Either divulging too much, or nothing at all. “I couldn’t have children.”

Asier takes a napkin, presses it against his lips, allowing me the space to go on.

“I was married once,” I say. “I couldn’t have children and then I left my husband so that he could.”

Instead of going concave, my chest expands.

It’s so good to lay the truth out in the open, this truth I’ve never told anyone.

Not my mom, because she was dead by the time the decision was made.

Not Tara because she wouldn’t have understood.

Not Marina, because we never talked about men, until we couldn’t talk about the one man we both loved. And certainly not Vlaho.

“That’s… wow,” Asier says. “Having children was that important to your husband?”

Underneath his words, an implicit accusation of Vlaho. “No, he wasn’t like that. As a matter of fact, he still doesn’t know this is why I left him.”

“Did he end up having children?”

“Two. A boy and a girl.”

Asier nods, as if saying, Touché , and I can sense a distaste for Vlaho forming inside him, a hasty, unfair judgment of the man he doesn’t know. I want to dislike him for it, but really, this sort of protectiveness only endears him to me more.

When I drop him off at the hotel, I shut off the engine.

With his job of scouting done, he’s going away tomorrow, and that adds a layer of urgency to how we hold each other.

There’s something about the way he kisses that reminds me of Beethoven symphonies, the constant change of tempo, a buildup, a release.

Adagio, andante, presto. It’s making me a little lightheaded.

“Do you want to come up?” he murmurs.

I stop, my lips pressed to the soft skin below his jawline.

I know what he’s really asking, I should’ve expected it.

But finding Vlaho at nineteen means I’ve never done this before.

I’ve never had a one-night, or a second-night, or a third-night stand.

I’ve never even taken my clothes off before a man who wasn’t Vlaho.

It’s not only that I’m afraid I’m no match for a man as experienced as Asier must be.

That I won’t know how to hold him or touch him the right way.

It’s that if I do this, I will have erased Vlaho off me forever.

His touch and taste and the way his skin felt on mine will be washed away by someone else’s touch, smell, and taste.

There can be more firsts with someone else, it seems, but more losses to endure as well.

“It’s okay,” Asier says, pulling back from our embrace, and I realize I’ve let the silence linger too long.

The desire that still courses through my body is going bad on the inside for being locked in, having nowhere to go. “I want to come up,” I tell him, “but I didn’t… I don’t… I’ve never…” I run out of words.

“It’s fine,” he says, but I can tell he’s disappointed, maybe even thinks I led him on, kissing and touching him the way I just did.

“I have to go home and make dinner for my dad,” I say, my cheeks aflame.

He tilts his head, unsure if I’m telling the truth or using Dad as a pretext. He’d be right, either way.

But how can I tell him the full scope of the truth?

That I need more than attraction to take this leap?

Tara snorts whenever we talk about this.

“It’s the age of Tinder for God’s sake, and you’re letting cobwebs get caught down there.

Most women would die to be able to hook up with random sexy men,” she says, and I think of the substantial beer belly Stipe has grown over the years, while Tara, despite birthing three children, still looks like a Pilates star.

I can’t help it. It’s always rubbed me the wrong way, this fact that people will sooner share their bodies with one another than their thoughts or secrets.

Tara thinks I’m a prude.

But it’s not a matter of morals or conviction. It’s the valve thing. I’m either all in, or all out. “I need more time,” I say to Asier, then struggle to meet his eyes.

A smile gets away from him. “So you don’t really need to go make your dad dinner?”

“No, I do. But I’d love to come back to spend more time with you. High school style, since it seems to be today’s theme.”