A Wedding in the Sun

Chapter 13

‘Share a brandy with me! No? Anis? Herbero? Tomorrow we’ll have sangria together, but tonight I am alone and not as mobile as I used to be.’

Adrián turned sharply to his old mentor at that admission. He shouldn’t look so old, should he? It was too early for him to lose mobility. He was only… seventy-something. Adrián grimaced as he appreciated how much older everyone had grown when, in his mind, no time passed in Spain while he was in London.

But he was torn, stealing glances in the direction of the corridor where the two guest rooms were located. Jo had disappeared through hers twenty minutes ago, emerging only to pad barefoot to the guest bathroom. She was angry with him and he appreciated why. He’d tricked her into coming along to this reunion. He only hoped she would forgive him.

‘A cigar? Share a cigar with me, gordito. I’m not supposed to have them any more.’

‘I don’t think you were ever supposed to have them,’ he pointed out. ‘And you definitely weren’t supposed to give me a taste for them.’

A door creaked open and the sound of Jo’s muted footsteps reached them before the door to her room clapped firmly shut. Adrián peered down the hall again, wondering if she was comfortable.

‘I was sorry to hear about Mónica. She didn’t know what she wanted after all, hmm?’

‘Something like that,’ Adrián mumbled, clenching his good hand into a fist. ‘It turned out we didn’t have what you and Esther had.’

‘Ah,’ Carles said with a pained smile that made Adrián regret saying anything. ‘She was a saint to put up with me for so many years.’

‘She was a saint,’ he agreed.

‘I only hope she’s found someone to gossip with in heaven. She could blabber like a marathon runner,’ he murmured with a smile. ‘Drove me crazy.’

Adrián frowned, distracted by the fact that marathon runners weren’t usually the most talkative sportspeople, but also wondering whether he’d ever heard Carles say anything less-than-glowing about his late wife. He managed a nod and a mumbled platitude that Carles flapped away with his hand.

‘How are you… getting on then, here all on your own?’

He gave a shrug. ‘My family is close. My niece comes to prepare food and clean for me – the angel. You remember my niece, Mercedes? She never married, so now she’s a blessing to me.’

‘I just remember you telling me not to talk to her in case her father got worried about a single man from outside the community showing interest in her.’

‘Ah, well, nothing to worry about this time, eh?’ Carles said with a meaningful glance in the direction of the guest rooms.

‘Oh, noooo,’ Adrián rasped, but snapped his mouth shut when he wasn’t sure how to respond. ‘I mean, I’m just a run-down, stressed-out father. No time for thinking about romance.’

‘You can’t fool me, Adrián. There’s something going on with you and Jo.’

Adrián couldn’t resist a twitch of a smile. If he couldn’t fool Carles, then he had to admit it. ‘Something,’ he confirmed quietly. ‘But not much. She doesn’t like me.’ Especially now he’d dragged her to his mentor’s house instead of letting her relax on her own in a hotel.

‘Go,’ Carles said gently. ‘I’ve invited my family tomorrow after siesta. You should rest tonight – unless you want to get a glimpse of the beach before you go to bed.’

Adrián blinked for a moment, wondering if Carles was giving him a hint or if it was his own desires producing the romantic image of him and Jo staring out over the water, her head on his shoulder – not that that would happen, given the scowls she had justifiably been sending his way since they got off the train. But Adrián rose and patted Carles on the arm in a fond goodnight.

‘I always sleep late these days,’ his former teacher called after him. ‘Merce will be here to make breakfast for you and Jo in the morning.’

‘Thank you, profe,’ he said with a smile.

‘I’m just glad you still know you’re not allowed to come to this part of the world without staying in my guest room. You remember the path?’

The old man was definitely giving him a hint and Adrián was keen enough to take it without question. ‘I remember,’ he assured Carles.

When he stood outside Jo’s door, he hesitated. What could she possibly want from him? Mónica had only found him satisfactory when he had a guitar in his hands, but Jo didn’t even appreciate that – to say nothing of the fact that his guitar was still one hundred kilometres away and his arm was in a sling anyway.

But she’d gasped at their first glimpse of the ocean from the car. She might not want him, but the sky was still light at this time of year. He knocked.

After several moments of rustling and more quiet footsteps, the door opened to reveal Jo in her reading glasses, wearing the same shirt, but the little shorts from Lourdes instead of her cropped trousers. He bit his lip to stop a smile. Her expression wasn’t exactly annoyed, but clearly expectant. It wasn’t the time to appreciate how inviting she looked.

‘Oh, you need help with your shirt!’ she exclaimed, tugging off her glasses and setting them on the dresser. ‘Here.’ She lifted her hands.

‘Actually,’ he forced himself to begin. ‘I wanted to apologise – and show you something. Will you come with me?’

Her expression clouded and he wondered if he’d done the wrong thing, opening this topic again when she’d seemed keen to bury her annoyance. ‘More surprises?’

‘Not a surprise,’ he said with a wince. ‘Now you’re here, I want to show you the beach. It’s ten minutes’ walk.’

‘So close?’ she responded. With a sigh, she nodded and retrieved a pair of socks and her sneakers. ‘What I wouldn’t give for my sandals right now. It almost makes me look forward to arriving in Penis-town.’

As she followed him onto the walled terrace and out of the gate to the dusty road, he could barely believe she’d agreed to come, but her smile at the view of the ocean suggested it had been the attraction of the sea rather than his company that had tempted her out of her room.

Carles’s house was run-down and not large, but the location made it magic: up in the hills amongst the scrub, with coastline in three directions. Above the orange rooftiles of the neighbour’s house stretched the dark blue sea, shimmering in the low rays of the evening sun.

‘We can go into Cadaqués tomorrow morning, but there’s a little bay not far from here. You can get there by road, but the footpath has nicer views. It has to be somewhere… there!’

‘Have you come here many times?’ she asked.

‘Not many – a few. Carles only bought this house fifteen years ago. His family lives in the area and nothing is more important to him than his family.’

‘His kids?’ she clarified.

Adrián shook his head. ‘Carles and Esther never had kids – but brothers and sisters and cousins and all of their families.’ He realised guiltily that she would meet them all – unless he gave her a way out. ‘To make everything worse before I apologise, I should warn you that Carles has invited everyone over tomorrow. I will help you find an excuse if you don’t want to come to a giant family party. Carles is from the Roma community, so it will be… a real party.’

Her brow knit. ‘I suppose I should be thankful that you’re telling me in advance this time,’ she grumbled. Tripping over a stone, she shook herself. ‘There’s no point in being annoyed, I realise. And I don’t know what kind of grand apology you had planned, but you can probably save it. I’m a bit mad, but I’ll get over it.’

He studied her. ‘You’re allowed to be mad. I should have asked Carles to take you to a hotel. You don’t have the same duty to stay with him that I do. I just—’ He paused, not sure how to continue.

‘Wow,’ she muttered under her breath, stopping abruptly. The path took a sharp turn here, but straight ahead was the rocky coastline, the sea breaking against jagged stone, shining in innumerable shades of blue: pale in the shallows, with gradients out to the deep Mediterranean.

‘Watch your step,’ he warned her, throwing out his good arm.

‘Gosh, this is… wow.’ A starling swooped over the bay and Jo’s eyes followed its progress. Her gaze moved slowly over the coastline, over the space of several breaths. Her hair lifted in the light breeze and the sun glinted off her array of earrings.

‘Come down to the water,’ he suggested, holding out his hand before remembering she was mad at him and they weren’t supposed to be holding hands anyway. He dropped it again when all she did was glance at it warily.

She trailed him silently down to the inlet with a small rocky beach at the apex. ‘Don’t you fall either,’ she called. ‘I don’t want to have to take you to hospital again.’

‘My dad used to say, “I’m not taking you to la Princesa,” when we were doing something dangerous,’ he told her with a faint smile. ‘That’s a hospital in Madrid.’

‘I hope he was joking – and that you knew he was joking,’ she commented. ‘Empty threats like that are such a parenting pitfall.’

‘Oh, God, you’re right,’ he replied, thinking of Oscar and his outbursts and stubborn idiosyncrasies. ‘Threats rarely work with Oscar anyway. The number of times I tried to send him to his room as punishment, but he just refused to go and I couldn’t carry him there and throw him in.’

He only heard her hesitant footsteps behind him and the warble of a nightingale overhead. Then she asked, ‘Did you find anything that does work?’

‘Not “work” exactly,’ he explained with a shrug. ‘But I know I have to take a lot of time – I have to give him time, wait for him, and stay with him, remind myself a thousand times that he’s not doing it on purpose. That helps – it doesn’t work.’

The pang that struck him was unexpectedly strong. He should have held Oscar in a hug several days ago. He should be there to show Mónica’s family how to treasure him.

‘We’ll reach them on Monday,’ Jo said from surprisingly close behind him.

He turned to give her some sort of smile in thanks, because he was feeling too much to say anything: guilt, love, homesickness for those little arms, another dose of guilt. She must have seen something in his expression because she reached out and took his hand before urging him towards the beach.

Staring dumbly at the rather sweaty clutch of their hands, he wondered what was going on here. Was she still mad? Had he even properly apologised? ‘You wouldn’t threaten not to take your children to hospital,’ he mused aloud. ‘You even said you didn’t want to have to take me – but you would, if you had to.’

‘Of course I would, Adrián.’

‘Even though I repaid you for looking after me by tricking you into coming here?’

She dropped his hand, her steps crunching over the shingle to the water’s edge. Tugging off her sneakers and socks, she sank her feet into the water and sighed. ‘Why didn’t you just tell me there was a beautiful beach here? That’s why you wanted me to come, right? To show me this? It’s hard to stay mad when the water is lapping at my feet and we have all day tomorrow to explore. You have no idea how long it’s been since I’ve had a holiday.’

He watched the starling playing in the evening updrafts and considered his words carefully. It might be helpful for her to assume those had been his motives, but he’d learned his lesson that day about being honest with Jo.

‘Actually, it’s not the reason,’ he said under his breath.

‘Hmm?’

‘I didn’t want you to go to a hotel. I wanted you to stay with me – to introduce you to Carles, walk to the beach with you, eat breakfast tomorrow morning. I thought if I told you where we were going, you’d refuse to come and that would be it: no more travelling companions. You know you could have continued on.’ He paused as the full consequences of his manipulation became clear to him. ‘You could go to Pe?íscola tomorrow, Jo. You don’t have to wait for the guitar. Dios, I was such a jerk. I didn’t even think this through – I just panicked. But you can go tomorrow. You don’t have to stay for some stranger’s party. You don’t have to stay for some stranger’s old music teacher’s party and a lost old guitar!’

How many times had Mónica accused him of passive-aggressively manipulating her? He’d just done it again, a knee-jerk reaction he had to stop.

‘Adrián.’ Her firm voice cut through the fog of guilt that had him thrusting a hand through his hair in agitation. He looked up to see her studying him with concern. ‘Do you want me to stay here?’

‘Of course! That’s the whole point! But I should have realised you wouldn’t— It’s not fair to you?—’

‘Adrián, if you want me to stay, I’ll stay. The others don’t arrive until Monday anyway. But maybe you should have asked me straight up?’

It took him a moment to process what she was saying. ‘What do you mean, you’ll stay? You were horrified on the train platform. You don’t even like me.’

‘I only dislike you as much as you dislike me,’ she said, dropping her chin and giving him a look that shivered over his skin.

He opened his mouth, distracted by the brightness in her eyes. ‘But I like you, Jo,’ he pointed out in confusion.

With a huff of a laugh, she glanced away and swallowed. ‘That means I like you, too, Adrián.’

‘But…’ Wow, this was not where he’d seen this conversation heading. He’d made a mistake and instead of railing at him for it and storming off, she’d pointed out how he could do better next time and then turned everything he’d thought about their relationship on its head.

‘You’re going to protest about that?’ she asked quietly.

‘No,’ he answered immediately. He took a halting step closer to where she was standing in an inch or two of water. ‘I know “like” doesn’t mean— Well, I know you weren’t admitting anything, but?—’

She turned to him, lifting her hands to his face and he forgot whatever he’d wanted to say, meeting her in the middle instead for a reckless kiss.

Thiswas why she’d kissed him last time: the firm sweep of his mouth against hers; his hand creeping up her back to hold her tightly despite his sling; the little hitch of breath that told her how much he was enjoying the kiss, too.

His hair was thick in her hands, his beard brushing her mouth just slightly at the edges. He felt so good under her fingers, she remembered what it had been like to enjoy intimacy without second-guessing her partner’s feelings. Because Adrián left no room for second-guessing. He groaned against her lips and kissed her again, tilting his head for more contact. She didn’t even know which of them deepened the kiss first. She only knew she was clinging to his shoulders, her bones turning to jelly.

His breath was harsh – or was that her breath? Hard, open-mouthed kisses built an ache that felt as though it were between them and not inside her. In the mess of motives and hurts, duties and responsibilities, the kiss was something new – untarnished. She clung to it, reached for it. Perhaps everything she felt when he was around should not have shone so brightly, but on that beach, in the last rays of the evening sun on one of the longest days of the year, she glowed.

Shifting her away from his bad arm, he stepped closer on the shingles and then broke the kiss with a start, wrenching away so quickly Jo stumbled.

‘Argh, my shoe!’ he cried, his voice high. ‘I stepped in the water. It’s soaked!’

Jo took a second to mourn the greatest kiss of her forties, before letting the moment go with a sigh. They shouldn’t have done it anyway. ‘Why didn’t you take them off?’

‘I can’t get them back on without taking off the sling.’

‘I would have helped you,’ she pointed out.

‘It just…’

He sighed and Jo wondered if they’d lost the ability to snipe at each other or if he enjoyed it as much as she did and might engage in it again just for fun.

‘It didn’t feel right to beg for forgiveness one moment and ask you to tie my shoelaces the next. It’s not very… sexy, is it?’

Her attempt to stifle a laugh came out as an unflattering snort that also wasn’t attractive. ‘Sorry, but honesty is actually pretty sexy.’

As his grin stretched and he nodded, his too-long hair picked up by the breeze, Jo had the disturbing thought that lots of little things Adrián did were sexy – even though she generally disliked the word and attraction was very low on her list of priorities right now.

He leaned down to untie his shoelaces and peel off the wet sneaker and sock, repeating the action with the other shoe. Then he stepped into the water next to her with a rough sigh, his shoulder brushing hers.

Jo had been away from the sea too long. She’d forgotten the calming power of the lapping waves, the endlessness of the horizon – the pleasant ache of one shoulder pressed to another as two sets of eyes soaked up the view.

‘So,’ he began, ‘are we going to kiss again?’