A Wedding in the Sun

Chapter 15

Jo had a tattoo on her left shoulder.

It shouldn’t have surprised Adrián, but he hadn’t been able to stop staring at it all afternoon, since he’d caught a glimpse of it over lunch in Cadaqués. It was one of those birds with a long beak that flapped its wings very fast. The artwork was nice, but faded enough to suggest she’d had the ink a long time. He wanted to ask her about it – and run his fingertips over it. And his lips, if he was honest.

Carles had been giving him amused looks as the older man’s family dribbled into the house with food and drink and the lazy, post-siesta time gradually turned into a fiesta. Adrián had been eating all day, but when in Spain, he could always eat a little more.

Although he noticed Jo texting Liss every few hours, she’d relaxed since their tense arrival yesterday. She smiled a lot, tilting her head as she listened to Carles’s relatives tell their life stories in stilted English. Her new dress was soft and flowing, but it wasn’t the pretty new clothes that attracted his gaze. It was the way her bare shoulders – with that tattoo – showed her emotions: rising for uncertainty, loosening when she was happy and dropping into laziness occasionally when she sat back sipping sangria.

‘You didn’t warn her you were coming here yesterday, did you?’ Carles asked in a lull in the conversation.

Adrián tore his gaze from Jo and wondered if he could pretend to misunderstand. He gave up and admitted, ‘No, I didn’t.’

‘She seems happy. Were you afraid she would react like Mónica?’

‘Mónica always wanted time with her own family,’ Adrián said, defending her out of habit. Looking at Jo was a little less comfortable as his skin prickled with uncertainty. Jo was happier here than Mónica had been – the one time she’d agreed to visit Carles. Time in Spain had been so limited and his ex-wife had always wanted to rush to Zaragoza. He’d understood how much she missed her family – he missed his parents, too.

He tried not to compare, to encourage the bitter beast inside him that still reared its head occasionally, but his mind latched onto the fact that Jo could have stayed somewhere else and she hadn’t.

‘That’s a very big sigh, gordito,’ Carles said, slapping him on the back as he called Adrián the nickname from his teenage years when he’d certainly been ‘gordito’ – chubby.

‘My life is a very big sigh,’ he muttered, grabbing another fried cod ball from the basket Carles’s cousin had placed between them. ‘I’m full of shit and self-pity – I know.’

‘You don’t deserve a fine woman like that,’ Carles added sagely.

‘Exactly!’ Adrián narrowed his eyes at his old friend, but found Carles’s twinkling with humour. ‘It doesn’t matter, anyway. How would we ever untangle… us… from the mess of our exes? I refuse to make life more difficult for her.’

‘Okay,’ Carles said, giving him a calming squeeze on the forearm.

‘This place is… different without Esther,’ Adrián commented carefully.

‘Rest her soul,’ Carles murmured. ‘I’m different without her, too, but we can’t choose how long we have. I’m still here – and so are you.’

The old man had known those words would hit him in the gut.

‘Joanito!’ Carles called out suddenly to his nephew. ‘Bring me a guitar!’

A shout of, ‘?Olé!’ rose from the someone in the family, making Adrián sit up in his chair. The nephew, Joan, came back onto the terrace with an instrument from Carles’s sitting room, carrying it in front of him like a sacrifice, which made Adrián smile. Carles had always had a flair for the dramatic.

Setting his cigar into a little tray, his old teacher took the instrument and plucked quietly at the strings. Adrián remembered Carles years ago telling him that tuning a guitar was like talking to it, getting to know it and coaxing it to sing – which only made him think of Jo again.

The first resonating notes filled the hushed courtyard as the whole family held their breath to hear the maestro. Adrián recognised the song immediately as a favourite piece by the Spanish guitar legend Paco de Lucía. Carles had taught him to play it when Adrián had been about eighteen and it had taken months of practice to master the quick tremolo picking.

The fingers of Adrián’s right hand twitched as Carles flicked the strings precisely, creating fullness in the silence and anticipation in each note. Goosebumps broke out on Adrián’s arms. The world narrowed to a single moment, to the minute changes in the air as the reverberation of the guitar strings disturbed the stillness.

He was still here.

As the opening strains of the song gave way to rhythm and movement, the terrace came alive with shouts and palmas – the handclapping that had lived in Adrián’s blood since his earliest music lessons with Carles. He brought his hands together, the rhythm organic inside him.

He wished he’d come back here sooner. It didn’t matter if he had fewer and fewer concerts and was barely paid for them. He was part of this music and that meant he would always have family.

Joining in the shouts with, ‘?Eso!’ at the end of the song, he received Carles’s clap on the back with a grin, his left hand clenching and unclenching against his chest.

‘Another guitar for my star pupil!’ Carles called, giving him a warm look.

As Adrián picked at the Velcro holding his sling together, he felt Jo’s alarmed gaze. He gave her a little shake of his head and a reassuring smile, which seemed to be all she needed to sit back in her chair again. When the neck of the guitar fell into the valley between his thumb and forefinger, it felt like waking up.

He’d played since the separation – of course he had. But he hadn’t played, forgetting the world, forgetting who he was and living through the strings. He’d been fixated on his own failure and forgot how little that failure actually mattered.

A tug of pain in his shoulder made him adjust his stance, but he found a position where he could reach the frets and minimise the ache. He took a deep breath of the sea air, scented with wild thyme and lavender, and he reclaimed who he was with his fingers on the strings.

Jo had learned an array of new things that night: it was still stifling hot on the terrace at ten in the evening; sangria got tastier the more of it you drank, and the guitar was the sexiest instrument on the planet.

There were four guitars out, now, held in four pairs of hands, playing alternately together and solo. She’d expected Adrián to be good. He performed concerts. But she hadn’t appreciated what ‘good’ meant to her body. She couldn’t keep still with the rhythms washing over her and she couldn’t take her eyes off him.

When someone had first placed a guitar in his hands, the transformation had been instantaneous – not just in his posture, but in his expression. That intensity she’d come to associate with him escaped just his eyes and took over his body. The chaos in him quieted to make way for the expression of the music.

He smiled and frowned, punctuated the songs with shouts. Jo changed her mind about his hair: it wasn’t too long. It was the perfect length to fly sharply into his face as he bobbed over the body of the guitar, his right hand moving furiously and the fingers of his left flying over the frets. He must have bought a shaving kit because he’d tidied up his beard and looked like the rakish musketeer from the flight.

Someone had tied a bandana around his forehead an hour ago to keep his hair back and he had a cigar hanging out of his mouth and she should have been laughing at him, the lovechild of Rambo and the Godfather strumming a fierce, soulful song.

But she wasn’t laughing; she was captivated, so thankful it was his left arm he’d injured and not his right, feeling privileged to be here witnessing the music – the family, the bond.

She felt uncomfortable – and was more than a little tipsy – to admit she’d understood Mónica’s reasons for wanting a divorce, but now she was learning the woman’s reasons for marrying him in the first place.

He took another break – he’d regularly rested his shoulder throughout the evening – and Jo celebrated the opportunity to breathe again, until he approached and stretched out in a wicker chair beside her. She felt the way Liss must have when she’d lined up to see Dua Lipa sign autographs; gosh, teenage feelings were ridiculous at her age and she needed to snap out of it.

His smile dimmed as he studied her. ‘You okay? They’re a bit much if you’re not used to it.’

‘No! They’re wonderful – friendly. I just… got caught up in the music. Is this flamenco?’ she asked as one of the older women – Carles’s sister-in-law, Jo thought – raised her hands and stamped across the floor to a chorus of, ‘?Hassa gitana guapa!’ She didn’t dance for long before giving a wide grin and returning to her seat, her long skirt in her hands.

Her husband opened his mouth to sing a crooning melody in the minor key and Adrián joined in the rhythmic clapping, which was both intrinsically structured and laced with free expression.

He leaned close to whisper in her ear, ‘Yes, this is flamenco – this song is tangos.’

Jo should have been asking him if the music made him think of Mónica and what they’d lost, but sparks scattered down her skin from where his breath feathered her ear and she couldn’t concentrate.

‘You are allowed to get up and dance,’ he said, studying her with a smile.

That was when she realised her shoulders were moving to the beat and her feet were tapping. ‘I wouldn’t have the first clue how to.’

‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said in that rough voice of his. ‘This isn’t a stage. It’s Carles’s courtyard. Or you could sing something. Pick a song and I’ll accompany you.’ His smile lit up as he suggested it. ‘Yes! They’d love that.’ She eyed him. ‘I would love that,’ he added freely, as though he had no idea his words sent shivers of confused longing through her.

She hadn’t sung in front of an audience for… more than twenty years. She wasn’t that girl who had looked forward to the music school’s proms night more than anything else all year – or the university student who had dragged her girlfriends to karaoke every other weekend. Jo hadn’t been that woman since… since she’d hidden that identity from earnest Ben. Well, shit.

‘Just let me get another drink,’ she murmured, rising to refill her glass and grab a piece of bread topped with artichoke and a tomato-based salsa – and another crunchy fish croqueta would help soak up the alcohol, too.

‘Here,’ Adrián said, coming up behind her with a glass of water that she downed thankfully. ‘What do you want to sing?’

‘What songs will they know?’

‘We have English music in Spain too, you know. Whatever you want.’

That was how she found herself singing an acoustic karaoke version of ‘Alive’ by Pearl Jam under the late-night sky with a group of Spanish strangers gawping at her while Adrián ad-libbed the iconic riff on a flamenco guitar with a little too much gusto.

She didn’t know if they were just being kind when they whooped and clapped at the end of the song, but more suggestions of songs from the nineties quickly followed, although Carles rolled his eyes. Mercedes insisted on Jo joining her to sing ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ and Jo felt something like bandages falling away as she laughed and sang and laughed some more, occasionally getting up to dance, especially when the music changed back to Spanish guitar.

A group of cousins crooned a catchy old song called ‘Bésame mucho’, which she gathered meant ‘kiss me a lot’. The middle-aged men serenaded their wives and the chorus of the gently rhythmic song was so memorable she found herself singing along, teasing Adrián with a wink.

Yes, the alcohol contributed, but the courtyard, the eclectic mix of music, the hospitality were the true catalysts – and the spark in Adrián’s eye. The Costa Brava was her alternate reality, after all, where joy seemed to flow from her own body and it didn’t matter that the actual reality was out there somewhere, with Ben and Mónica waiting in it.

When the first guests rose to go with what sounded like profuse apologies – and equally profuse censure and insistence from the visibly tired Carles – Jo began to feel exhaustion knocking at the edges of her mind too and a scratch in her throat from all the singing. But she was too mellow to mind.

‘Work tomorrow! What a poor excuse!’ Carles muttered to her. ‘I’m sorry to end the party so early.’

‘It’s past midnight!’ she pointed out.

‘And?’

Adrián came up beside her and she wanted him to drape an arm casually around her and give her a squeeze. Of course he didn’t. ‘We live British hours these days, profe,’ he explained. ‘And we have a lot to do tomorrow.’

Jo’s smile slipped at the prospect of the following day. Carles’s cousin was lending them her second car, which would get them quickly to Pe?íscola, but she didn’t want to think of anything that came after tonight. She’d start thinking about Ben and he was no fun.

After Carles shuffled off to bed on his side of the house, Jo and Adrián dawdled to their hallway, their arms bumping. It might have been her fault, but she couldn’t bring herself to care when she was rewarded with the brush of his skin on hers.

‘You can have the bathroom first,’ he offered.

Whether Jo was just too tipsy or not in her right mind, even those words, in his rough voice, shivered through her. Brushing her teeth, her skin felt hot and she was restless and her thoughts refused to focus. The words of that song in Spanish played on repeat in her mind, making her think about kissing.

Back in her room, while she pulled on the spaghetti-strap vest top she’d bought as pyjamas, she suddenly realised he might not be able to get his shirt off. She was unexpectedly buoyed by the thought.

Hearing him coming out again, she leaned on her doorway and asked, ‘How’s your shoulder?’

He had the sling off already. ‘Aches a bit,’ he admitted, grimacing as he rubbed it gingerly. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have played so much.’

‘Want some… help with your shirt?’

‘Ehm, I can get this one…’

His Adam’s apple bobbed and her gaze fixed on the neat line of his beard under his jaw. His black hair was peppered with a little grey and Jo bit her lip, for once thankful that some men were even more attractive in their forties.

He reached for the buttons of his shirt, popping two as she stared, her mouth going dry. ‘See? I can manage this one,’ he said, his voice tight. He fumbled the next button and gave her an awkward smile that caught her in the ribs. ‘At least, I think I can manage it.’

He didn’t protest when she took over, opening the buttons for him. As the soft material of his shirt fell open, her thoughts scattered. She stepped close to help him peel the shirt away, her heart beating an out-of-control rhythm. Then she couldn’t seem to draw back again.

Her palms touched down on his chest, feeling rather than hearing his groan. Warm skin, rough hair, shared breaths. Her head spun, so she clung on tighter.

‘Adrián?’ she whispered, no idea what she meant to say. So she kissed him instead.