Page 35 of Slanting Towards the Sea

THIRTY-TWO

LATER THAT EVENING, AFTER I’ve served my father dinner, I walk through the hotel lobby and climb up the stairs to Asier’s room.

He’s waiting for me at the door, kisses my cheek as he lets me in.

The room is as neat and tidy as everything about him is, a shirt folded over the back of the chair, no sign of a suitcase, no shoes scattered around.

Only a laptop on the desk in the corner, and a pen resting diagonally on a notebook next to it.

The smell of deodorant and shower gel wafts on the cloud of hot air flowing from the bathroom.

Instead of his usual button-down, he’s wearing a cotton T-shirt and a pair of jeans.

The domestic edition of a man who uses business as a playground.

He’s barefoot, his short hair damp from the shower, and I have the urge to inhale him to the bottom of my lungs.

“Make yourself comfortable,” he says, taking my raincoat. I unlace my Converse All Stars and slip them off as he opens a minibar and hands me a beer, then sits in the chair while he cracks open his bottle.

I sit on the bed, opposite him. He’s stiff and awkward, like we hadn’t kissed for over an hour in my car, or all around the town, under the tiramol strings with clothes drying on them, in narrow alleyways, in my old schoolyard.

Funny how not having sex makes people more uncomfortable than having it.

“Will you come over here?” I reach out my hand.

He gets up, walks toward me, stops between my legs.

I draw his shoulders, his face, down to me.

The kiss is slow and mindful, but it gets deeper and needier fast. We start undressing each other, all the way down to our underwear.

We explore each other with hands and lips, until there is no part of our skin that’s not covered with fingerprints.

Desire swells like a river after snowmelt, and just when it feels like the banks won’t be able to hold it in, we let it agonizingly recede.

The body is left heavy and impossibly alive, yearning, burning.

“You might be on to something, with this no-sex thing,” he says in one of the moments when the buildup of passion makes him pull away and throw himself on his back, panting. “I can’t remember the last time I wanted something this much.”

It almost makes me go back on what I said. “I know,” I say.

Hours pass. The night lulls us into a hush.

We’re bathed only in the light of the sickle-shaped moon flooding through the open balcony door, the sea rustling through the pebbles on the nearby beach.

I lay my head on his chest, and he caresses me with steady, gentle strokes.

It’s so lovely to be held like this again, so wondrous, this closeness of his warm, breathing body.

I can feel myself expanding to inhabit my own body more fully, closer to the edges of my skin, where I haven’t been in a while.

He eyes the ceiling, pensive. “Can I ask you something?” His night voice is raspy, whispering like the wind.

“Sure.”

“That husband of yours—”

“Ex-husband,” I correct.

“Was it a cultural thing? I mean, was that expected of you, to leave him?”

I take my time filling my lungs. “No. If anything, people here are traditional, and marriages are supposed to last forever. I left him because I wanted him to have a shot at having kids of his own.”

“Hmm,” he whispers.

“What?” I rise to look at him.

“Don’t know what to make of it. Either it’s the most selfless thing anyone’s ever done or…”

“Or?”

“An act of total cowardice.” Cruel words, but he delivers them tenderly, brushing my hair behind my ear with his fingers.

Heat rushes up my face, and I’m thankful for the dark room.

He’s right, of course. It was selfless and selfish at the same time.

An act of altruism, rooted in fear, as so many of my decisions have been.

I was so afraid of taking ownership, of taking up space.

Afraid of waiting for loss so much that I did the act of cutting myself.

The fact that Asier sees me with such clarity is both scary and riveting. “Tell me about your son. Iker?”

Asier’s gray eyes reflect what little light they catch in near dark. “Iker was two when his mother and I split up. She took him with her back to her hometown, just outside Bristol. He likes it there.”

“Does he stay with you sometimes?”

“He does, on occasion. I used to take him on weekends, odd birthdays, and Christmases. But then we stopped doing Christmases because let’s face it, the point isn’t to order takeout and not have a tree.

” He gives a brittle laugh. “We used to play soccer. Throw a Frisbee. You know, father-son stuff. But now, he’d rather spend time gaming with his friends than with his old man. ”

A harrumph escapes me. “You’re hardly old. What are you, forty-something?”

“Forty-four. You?”

“Thirty-eight.”

I lay my head back on the pillow, thinking about what he said, about his son having better things to do than spend time with him. The images rush through me, of the day I gave up on my mom. The day I closed off to her. The day I quit hoping that things could be different between us.

It seemed like such a final decision at the time, but it was anything but. In all the years after—even after she died, I still ached for a change. To think that Asier has a chance to do right by his child and is letting it slip through his fingers grips me like a muscle spasm I can’t let loose.

Asier tenses up as if he’s sensed my thoughts. “What?” he asks, looking at me.

“Nothing. I just… Nothing.”

“Clearly, you have something to say.”

“It’s nothing,” I say with finality. It’s not my place to offer opinions. I don’t want to ruin this evening by coming on too strong. I barely know him, let alone his son or what he wants. “You’re not prioritizing your son.” The words slip out of my mouth without permission.

Asier sits up, as if I’d whiplashed him. I sit up too and put my hand on his back to mitigate the blow. “You think he doesn’t want to hang out, that he always has better things to do. But I would bet Lovorun on this—”

Asier looks back at me and smirks.

“—he just wants you to try harder.”

He looks ahead, not moving, not saying anything.

Steeping in my words. The atmosphere shifts.

It’s not that he’s mad at me, I can feel as much.

It’s that I’ve mirrored back a version of him he doesn’t want to see.

To accept that you were wrong about something isn’t only to accept the mistake itself.

It’s accepting each time you acted on that false belief.

I can feel it inside him, this churning of all the moments when his son pushed him away and he took it at face value.

The tallying of all the losses—of time, of closeness, of memories that could’ve been—and him coming up short.

The conversation moves on somehow, but it’s not the same.

Asier is heavy, sodden with my words. So after a time, the amount that allows us to pretend that what I said didn’t ruin the night, I tell him I’m tired and that he too should go to bed, he’s traveling to London tomorrow morning, and he doesn’t fight me on it.

I gather my clothes and dress, and he holds me again as I’m about to leave and says he’ll call soon, but his bruised ego is dripping off him, wedging itself between us.

It’s only when I get inside my car that I see several missed calls from Marina and a text message saying, “where the hell are you? i’ve been trying to reach you all night. call me as soon as you get this. there might be a way for you to save the olive grove.”

But it’s way past two a.m. and of course I can’t call her back.