Chapter 5
chapter five
Natalia
14 months ago
My bedroom was a disaster. Which wasn’t saying much, because my apartment was always kind of a disaster. It was an organized mess. I knew where everything was, but to someone else it might look like I was a hoarder who wore the same socks over and over again because I couldn't tell which laundry was clean or dirty. Some nights I slept under unfolded clothes, and other nights I moved said unfolded clothes to what I liked to call "the chair" in the corner of the bedroom. “The chair” also doubled as my sleep paralysis demon whenever I dozed off for an afternoon nap.
Up until a few days ago the mess wasn't an issue. There was no one coming upstairs into my apartment to see it. My parents never stopped by because they never left Palm Park unless for an extravagant vacation, and my sisters couldn't be arsed to meet me out for a drink, let alone have a sleepover. Now, the very real potential of a very real man, with cute little dimples and shiny brown hair, who filled out a shirt like a mannequin and smelled like what a candle company would call “driftwood”, was minutes away from my door.
This first date sent me into full-on crisis mode earlier in the day. I spent half of it ripping apart my closet and pairing skirts with tops and shoes with belts, and then decided to hell with it and ran to the outlets to pick out something completely new to wear. I had no idea where we were going; he hadn’t even hinted when I asked. All Mateo said was he'd pick me up at seven.
I posed in the standing mirror, opting to keep it safe in trendy sneakers and my favorite jeans, a lilac figure-hugging tank and layered gold jewelry from my ears to my fingers. The Neighbourhood played while I fluffed the roots of my hair, applied a clear glossy lip balm, and checked the time on my phone.
Any minute.
I fought the urge to tidy up a bit, only closing a few drawers and kicking a lonely heel under the bed. Because I was not going to sleep with him. Not tonight. I didn't want to fuck this up. I didn't want him to think that was all I was good for, or that he didn't need to try with me, or that he could add me to his roster because a girl who gave it up so easily couldn’t possibly be the one . He was an older guy, more experienced; the last thing I wanted was to not be taken seriously.
My phone lit up with a call. Mateo didn't text; the straightforward confidence was so disarming it made my stomach flip.
"Hello?"
"Ready for me?"
Fuck.
"Mm-hmm," I said sheepishly.
"Good, I was getting bored of doing circles around the block so I didn't freak you out by showing up too early."
My heart tripped over itself. I moved toward the window and opened the curtain. A black pickup truck was sitting at the curb below and I could see Mateo through the windshield with his phone to his ear, one hand gripping the steering wheel.
“I'll be right down."
The call disconnected and I spun on my heel, taking one long look around the bedroom with my hands on my hips before I shoved every last thing I owned into the closet.
Just in case.
Mateo was waiting for me on the curb, very cool in dark-black jeans, a Henley, and a sandy corduroy jacket on top. I noticed the Catholic cross chain he wore around his neck when we first met. I wasn't religious, my family never went to church, but they liked to preach about the values it instilled anyway. Like they were too busy to visit God at home, but they’d send a Christmas card.
Mateo pulled me in for a hug immediately, one of those half hugs that felt professional instead of intimate, and dropped a coy greeting kiss on my cheek that was more skin than lips. He held me out by my hand at arm’s length so he could freely let his eyes roam down my body.
“All right, give it a spin." He twirled me slowly and I ducked under our outstretched arms, flattered and giggly. I came to a stop facing him and he ran a hand down his face and grinned. "God, you are something."
My cheeks flamed and I instinctively looked to the concrete, kicking at the loose black mulch windswept onto the sidewalk.
"Really, Natalia. You're making me nervous again."
"I doubt I'm making you nervous if you're telling me I'm making you nervous." Mateo opened his passenger door and helped me up into the dark interior of the cab.
"I become brutally honest when I'm nervous. It just flows out of me like there's no filter there. You'll see. I've already done it twice tonight."
"I think it's charming," I said.
Mateo grinned and walked around the car. The engine purred and the mumblings of a song on the radio played as he stepped up on his side and closed us in. He was so much bigger beside me in such a confined space, so broad in the driver’s seat, his smell concentrated. It took everything in me not to let my eyes flutter shut and breathe him in.
Instead of putting the truck in drive he turned toward me and my chest tightened.
"How was your day?"
I blinked. "My day?"
A corner of his lips parted into a sideways, amused smile. "Well, I already know how mine went."
He was asking about my day? I was used to dinner with one-sided small talk and a lousy go between the sheets before I saw myself out the door. To which I would then call Ophelia and we would trade horror stories from our somehow identical dating scenes despite her being across the country in Colorado. It was becoming a competition at this point.
"Yours was probably way more interesting than mine," I deflected. Yeah right. Three hours of my day were spent with a tentacle the size of my forearm suction cupped to the refrigerator in my kitchen. "Just…work," I answered.
For the first time, “work'' gave me a hot, itchy feeling at the back of my neck. Because I knew if anything were to go anywhere with a guy, the extremely prominent and promiscuous side of my life would have to be revealed. I couldn't quite gauge yet what Mateo might think of it, but the possibility of rejection unnerved me already.
His smirk remained despite my dry answer.
"I'll loosen you up, Natalia Russo."
I wrung my hands in my lap and allowed a shy smile. "So, where are you taking me?"
Mateo's hand disappeared, digging into the pocket of his jeans and pulling out several rectangular pieces of cardstock. He read through what was scribbled on them, sorting them quickly. "Let's find out."
I laughed, bubbly and girlish, a sound that felt very childlike, or maybe youthful and distant because I hadn't heard it in so long. "I'm intrigued."
"It was too hard for me to narrow it down, and I didn't want to pick something you didn't like. So I figured if I put down a bunch of different options, and then had you blindly choose from them, you couldn’t blame me for a shitty date choice. Plus it's a little spontaneous and fun, so…" he trailed off, shuffling the cards. "It's a little weird though, now that I'm saying it out loud."
"It's perfect." I stopped him from tucking the cards away. "I love that."
"Yeah?"
"Come on, then."
He fanned a few cards face down in front of me and I plucked one from under his thumb.
"I hope it's the couple's ashiatsu massages," Mateo joked.
"Why pay someone to walk on you when I'll do it for free?"
"I didn't know that was an option." Mateo playfully grabbed at the paper in my hand. "Give that back, I need to do some modifications."
I held it close to my chest and flipped it over, two words scribed on it in that universally manly all caps style of handwriting.
"Roller skating.”
"Roller skating," Mateo repeated with a touch of disbelief.
"Yeah." I laughed, though my cheeks burned beneath the blush I was wearing. "Did you forget you wrote this?"
"Not at all," he said, straightening in his seat. "Have you ever roller skated?"
I paled. "No."
Mateo's tongue perused the inside of his cheek, gaze ping-ponging between my eyes then down to my mouth so briefly I wouldn’t have never noticed if I wasn't so attuned to everything he did.
"It'll be great," he said abruptly. "Seatbelt, please."
The one roller rink in the area was old and oval-shaped, from the outside as well as in. There was a long handicap ramp and vertical beige vinyl siding with a sign outside hanging by a thin thread, the letters off-kilter and dimly lit.
High Roller. Or, H----oller.
Inside, the carpet was the kind of black that had turned gray over time, smooshed into a thinner, matted material by shoes and skates. It smelled like dust and burnt popcorn, a little bit like stale piss and mothballs.
Despite it, the glossy wooden rink in the center of the place was packed with people. Friday night dance-skate was in full swing, and a neon light show dotted and waved across the walls and floor.
I found a sticky plastic bench to sit on while Mateo rented the ugliest tan and orange wheeled skates for us to wear. Across from me three teenage boys were fighting over the joystick on a claw machine. Another stood at the side of the glass box coaching his friends in the direction of an iPad that I'm certain was glued to the base of the thing.
"This place is a shit hole." Mateo dropped the pairs of skates on the ground in front of me.
"How is it that no one has given it an update since 1986?" I laughed.
"I don't even think they've hired anyone new since ‘86," he said, nodding at the old man behind the skates counter. "Guy smells like rotting leather."
I kicked off my sneakers and tucked them under the bench. Before I could reach down, Mateo sank to a knee and grabbed my ankle, bringing my foot to rest on his thigh. My skin prickled to attention, and a swallow got stuck halfway down my throat. I’d been so deprived I was losing my mind over the muscle in his quad that I could feel through the thin layer of my sock.
God, his legs. He was stretching that denim to its limit, tight across his lap, but I wasn't looking… No, I was definitely not looking.
"I'm…I'm probably going to embarrass myself out there," I said to fill the silence as Mateo guided my heel gently into the skate. He pressed his thumb into the toes, testing the size, like a parent to a child with new shoes, and when he must’ve been satisfied, he started on the laces.
"That's okay." He smiled. "Embarrassment is a state of mind. I'll be with you every step of the way."
His fingers made quick work of the thin brown strings, weaving them all the way up and around the back of the skate once before giving me a double knot. We swapped ankles. This time, his thumb crept higher under the seam of my jeans, rubbing against skin. It was so inconsequential, he probably hadn't even realized he'd done it, and yet I was pleading silently that he’d planned that secret touch and knew exactly the effect it would have on me.
He laced the other skate up just as fast, twisting it into a knot that cinched at my ankle and giving me two pats of approval. "You're nice and tight."
My mouth twitched and Mateo caught it.
"And cheeky," he added.
"I'm trying to be good," I admitted. "First impressions and all."
"Don't be good," he said. "Be yourself."
"All right." I nodded. "I wasn't going to say anything but you probably caught chlamydia from that carpet."
"That’s all right. I like the view from down here."
My lips parted and warmth settled low in my stomach. "Who's cheeky now?"
He clambered to his feet again, rubbing dust off his jeans and clapping it from his hands. "I can tell that you and I are just scratching the surface."
The rink itself was surrounded by four-foot walls, little slats of empty space to enter and exit back onto the safety of the rug. I hobbled from our bench to the wall a few feet away, one skate in front of the other, and swiveled back around. Mateo was still sitting on the bench with his skates tied, his hands clasped and elbows on his knees.
"Coming?"
"I have a secret." He scratched the back of his neck.
"Oh?"
"Yeah, it's nothing cool. It's actually more of a confession than a secret. But depending on how the rest of tonight goes, it might be a secret for us."
"That's quite the burden to bear. It better be good."
"Now"—he lifted his finger to no one, conducting his own dialogue like I'd noticed he often did—"you have to promise me, okay? That this stays close to your chest."
"God, the suspense is killing me."
Mateo took a long breath, filling his cheeks with air and blowing it out. "I don't know how to roller skate."
A short laugh burst out of me. His expression remained flat and I recouped. "Wait, what?"
"Never been."
"Mateo." I was still catching up to reality. "Why did you put that on the cards?"
He shrugged. "What were the odds of you actually choosing that one out of all of them?"
"Pretty fair," I said. "As good as anything else. You could have told me to pick a new one!"
"I could have." He stood slowly, wobbly knees quaking beneath his stocky build. I reached a hand out for balance and Mateo grabbed it. "But that wasn't the game. It was you pick the date and we do it, not you pick the date and I approve it."
That was a very hot way to put it. Mateo was more aware of himself than any other guy I'd dated. I liked that he was honest, and blunt, and somewhat abrupt; it was invigorating to be kept on my feet. He made me laugh without trying to. I glanced toward the rink, busy circles of people leaving a breeze as they flew past. "We have to try. You didn't get me all booted up for nothing."
"Oh, we're going." The toes of our skates clacked together. "I'll be the first man to take you roller skating even if it kills me." At that, he tugged me to the cusp of the rink, timid like jumping into a swimming pool for the first time. Our fingers interlaced and we leapt off the rug together.
And immediately ate shit.
Like, a theatrical amount of shit eating. Arms pinwheeling, legs swept out from under both of us, four skates pointed at the ceiling. But we never let go of each other's hand.
A low groan rumbled out of his chest. "Holy fuck, I think I did just die." Slowly he sat up, bringing my limp, windless body with him as I was too busy shaking with laughter. There was nothing that could have prepared me for that. "Are you okay?"
Skaters swerved around us like we weren’t even there. "I think I broke my ass."
"That would be a tragedy," he said, miraculously getting back to his feet and extending a hand to hoist me up. This time we were more careful, smaller baby steps instead of the very optimistic stride the first time. I bent my knees and glided along beside him until it was like I was a sidecar holding on by a shaky hand.
"There we go, just needed some adjustment time. It's all about assessing and adapting."
"Do you approach everything like a video game map?"
"Everything in life can be navigated," he said. "I've been doing it for fifteen years. It's like second nature now. Another reason I didn't veto the date card you pulled. I figured if there was a will there was a way. I'd figure it out."
"Look at you now, Roll Bounce ."
"If they put on a little disco I'll start doing spins." Mateo moved as if he was going to twirl us in a circle and I squealed in protest. His skates flared out and he did a balancing act of running in place to stay upright. "Maybe not quite yet."
"Save it for next time."
"Next time?" Mateo raised a brow and smirked. "Am I impressing you enough with this to get a next time already?"
I'd exposed myself. I wanted a next time, of course. I wanted a third time and a fourth to get to know him, and that scared me. Knowing him more meant letting him know me more.
"I'm optimistic," I said. "The night is young."
"So I will take you roller skating," he started, "and then wine and dine you at that glorious concession stand with a stale pretzel and a Coke the size of your head."
"Oooh, this is really stacking up." A laugh floated out of me.
"Then I'm going to take you over to those sticky, disgusting arcade games and win you enough coins for a bamboo finger trap of your choice, and we're going to forget that I'm in my mid- thirties and pretend we’re meeting for the first time as nineteen-year-olds, and this is the first day of the rest of our lives."
My cheeks were starting to hurt. "God, I was such a bitch when I was nineteen. You probably wouldn't have liked me."
"I would have followed you around like a fucking puppy on a leash."
"Shut up." I nudged him playfully.
"On the other hand, you wouldn't have given me a second look at nineteen," he said. "Scrawny kid with buzzed hair, fresh face, little Bronx accent. I’m glad we're meeting now."
"I was going through a rebellious phase," I mentioned. "I wanted out of my parents’ house more than anything. They couldn't stand that I was going to a state school instead of a private college. So when I left in August I only ever came back for long holiday breaks. Even stayed in Colorado for most of the summer with my best friend and lived with her."
"We have that in common." Mateo had picked up our pace and went from stomping along to actually coasting.
"Family is a bit of a sore subject for me," I said candidly. "They’re the only thing in the world that has the power to hurt me worse than anything but I can't stop loving."
"Because it feels like you're the one who's wrong for it." He nodded. "Like, how dare you not love something that you came from."
I breathed out a squeak of relief. “Yeah. Exactly."
His thumb grazed back and forth lightly across mine, and that simple touch woke up my nerves all the way to my shoulder.
"Why are we having such a deep conversation?" I cut the swallowing silence in half. "This is our first date. We're supposed to be talking about stuff like our careers and our favorite TV shows."
"I already know what you do." He chuckled.
My stomach hollowed. "You do?"
Mateo tilted his head, confused. It took me a second to remember that he’d met me at the bank, and to him, I was still a normal, average, unassuming woman who sits behind a desk all day.
"Oh, fuck. Right, you do."
"Did you hit your head when we fell?"
No, I was just paranoid that you knew I was a sex worker and this entire date was a farce and a ploy to sleep with me after watching me perform online. I was careful, but my biggest fear was being recognized and pursued in real life, and I didn’t know if I’d ever shake it.
"Tell me something less deep," I blurted.
"I don't think I'm capable of having regular conversations with you. I'm either sharing too much, or worrying about sharing too much and then doing it anyway. Like now. I'm doing it right now."
"Tell me about your childhood pets," I suggested.
"I had a one-eyed schnauzer named Peppy. He was the ugliest dog I'd ever seen. My brother found him under a shed looking like he'd been run over by a car and when he got home my mother thought he'd grabbed a rat off the street."
"A rat that big?"
"Oh, pretty girl, you've never been in a New York City subway have you?"
I twisted my lips into a shy smile. Hearing him call me something so endearing so nonchalantly was nothing like what I was used to. It rolled off his tongue, like he was the only man on earth who could say that and get away with it.
"What else do you have for me?" Mateo poked.
"Where were you when you found out Michael Jackson died?"
"Afghanistan."
I choked up a laugh. "Oh. That sucks."
"I had to sob quietly in the barracks." He sighed. "Listen to ‘Billie Jean’ on repeat on my iPod and pretend like everything was okay. Like MJ hadn't hee'd his last hee."
I crackled with laughter. My bottom lip was worn raw by my teeth and the constant clenching to tamper down a smile. "I was at little league softball practice," I countered. "Also sobbing because my dreams of going to Neverland were crushed forever."
Mateo bellowed out a hearty, rumbling laugh. His light brown eyes twinkled beneath the neon stripe of light, his teeth beaming even brighter and straighter than before. "I think you might have dodged a bullet there."
"I was in crisis for weeks, watching all of his music videos on repeat on MTV. I started wearing a fedora."
"Natalia." He said my name like a sweet warning. It spread something cool and lingering through my body, and gave me the kind of chills that made my hair stand on edge and my bones vibrate in anticipation for what was next. I was hanging there by a thread to hear it again.
"You know, no one ever calls me Natalia, really. My dad. But mostly in a scolding way. It's nice to hear it said with a smile."
It healed something small. A stitch into a wound.
"Does anyone call you Tally?"
"Tally?" I hummed. "No."
He hesitated. "Well, what if I did?"
I'd bite. I thought the name over and over again in my head and it felt foreign and a bit silly, but also like a new identity. A person I was only with Mateo. "I'm not sure." I shrugged. "Test it out."
He cleared his throat as we rounded the curved end of the oval rink. Skating had become involuntary. "I think you are absolutely breathtaking, Tally."
A seed planted in my heart and started budding.
"Sounds all right," I lied, my face giving it away.
"Okay.” He smirked. “How about, 'You are smart, and deep, and funny, Tally.'"
He let go of my hand and slid it across my lower back, inching us closer together.
"I am?" I couldn't take a compliment for the life of me. I felt averse to it, undeserving, even if what he was saying was true. I didn't know what to do with it.
Mateo’s tongue drew across his bottom lip, and my throat went dry. "I'm going to do that honesty thing again with you now."
"Okay," I said quietly. I was scared of how much more honesty he had in him. Because I knew what I would be doing if I were honest with myself at this moment and it wasn't anything near innocent.
"I am trying so hard to be respectful, Tally," he drawled. That low sweep of an accent curved around me. "So hard to be a good boy, you know? You are easy to forget my manners around, and I don't want to lose my gentleman card on a first date."
No one around us had a clue, not a damn idea that heat was sinking low in my belly and my legs felt an instability that had nothing to do with the skates. The music was drowned out by the pounding of my pulse in my ears as my senses gravitated in the direction of the man in front of me.
"Well for…let's say research , so I can confirm or deny"—I found my courage—"what would you say if you weren't trying to be so respectful?"
A muscle in his jaw rippled; yellow-brown eyes darkened to umber. He pulled me closer again, impossibly closer, feathering his fingers against my hip, and the tip of his nose dipped into my hair so his mouth sat just behind my ear. God, everything in my body was thrumming.
"Tally, for every good, pure, adoring thought I've had about you since you walked your tight little ass outside and sat in my car tonight, I've had another just as wicked and ten times more raw. Because I can tell you you're beautiful all night, but you know that about yourself, don't you?"
He looked at me. My mouth had parted silently; my eyes had drooped. He pinched my jaw between his fingers and made me nod back in agreement. His touch lingered.
"But, Tally,” he whispered. “I want to tell you how beautiful you are with your mouth full.” Those same fingers swept across my bottom lip and a sigh fell out of me. "You have such pretty fucking lips," he added. "So pretty that if I was being disrespectful I might even think about kissing them."
"But you're definitely not." My gaze flitted to his plush mouth, the stubble of hair framing it so perfectly. “Being disrespectful.”
"I couldn't." He leaned in. His breath fanned across my mouth and it was pure warmth and mint. “I wouldn't want to screw this up.”
I let my eyes close.
And then I caught an edge. Or he caught an edge. Or both of us leaned too far in one direction at the same time and my skate dipped behind his. Either way, we were on our feet one moment, the next in a tangle of flopping limbs on the cold, hard wooden floor for the second time in one night.
Mateo groaned, holding his side. I stared up at the perforated ceiling tiles like they were the stars in the sky. "This is what I get for being disrespectful. It's all my dead relatives keeping me in check."
I laughed. I laughed, and laughed, and went willingly into his arms when he picked me up off the floor and dragged me off the rink.
It was past ten when he walked me to the door of my apartment. The air had a bite to it. Early November coolness washed over us like the dim overhead light that cast a white circle onto the concrete.
That almost kiss had lingered for the entire drive home. It was like an unanswered question. A blinking cursor begging us to finish the sentence. In my head he was backing me into a wall and claiming me, but in reality, Mateo's hands were resting comfortably in his pockets while I scraped at an invisible line in the sidewalk with my shoe.
"Do you?—"
"This was?—"
We spoke over one another.
"No, you—" I started.
"Go ahead," Mateo offered, putting a hand out as if letting me have the floor.
"I had a lot of fun with you."
His smile widened, and he looked up at the sky, clearly thinking about something. It gave me a chance to admire how handsome he was in another light, the sharp angles of his chin still so prominent when basked in darkness, his full lips, the freckles on his neck that brought my eyes down to the dips in his collarbone.
"Do you ever howl at the moon?"
I blinked up into his soft stare. "Howl at the moon?"
"Yeah, like tonight. It's a full moon. It kind of makes me feel like a kid again, hearing all those myths about wolves and the moon. I would pretend I was a wolf sometimes with my brother, because that was a very cool, manly thing to be." He was pacing in a small line. "What I'm trying to get at here is that the moon reminded me of being a kid just now, and how things were really simple and fun, and how there wasn't so much stress back then. Or even if there was, we could still pretend we were wolves and howl at the moon and that stuff disappeared for a little while. That's how the last few hours have felt for me, at least. Like being a kid again."
That seed that was planted in my heart earlier was growing a stem, I could feel it stretching itself out in my chest. He thought nothing he said was making sense but it did perfectly. He was describing healing. I didn’t know everything about the man in front of me—in fact, I knew next to nothing—but I wanted to. I wanted to know what he needed healing from, too.
I didn't think about it. I just took a long balancing breath, and howled.
There was no one else outside, but a light switched on a few buildings down, and I swore I saw a rogue curtain rustle in a window. Mateo's eyes widened, and a shocked, almost saccharine grin spread across his face.
My breath tapered out and I sighed. "You're right, that felt good."
He brushed his palm down his face. "Yeah? Fuck it."
Mateo howled louder than I had, his neck stretching toward the full bright moon. It tinged him in blue and he looked even more dazzling than ever. Everything about this date was entirely unexpected. It was an unsolvable puzzle. It was new and fun and made me wish it would never end. I wanted to keep opening doors with Mateo. I wanted to keep guessing what was next.
"Look at where my honesty has gotten us now," he finished, laughing. He took a step toward me, leaving little more than a finger of space between us. His body heat radiated through my thin top, and I wondered without looking down if my even thinner bralette was exposing something different.
"Can it be my turn to be honest?" I asked.
His throat bobbed as he swallowed. Another inch closer now, pressing our hips together. "Of course."
"I wasn't going to sleep with you tonight."
"I wasn't expecting anything."
"But if I kiss you, and send you on your way, it's just going to be me and my vibrator upstairs for the rest of the night."
"Fuck’s sake," he sighed out, pressing his palms against the front door on either side of my head.
"Wishing it was you being very, very disrespectful instead."
He tucked a fallen strand of hair behind my ear. "Well, what are we going to do about that, Tally?"
I turned and unlocked the entryway, falling into my small foyer that led up a flight of stairs. I didn’t look back but I left the door open as I climbed slowly to the second floor with my lungs and my heart in my throat. There was a very strong possibility that I’d just blown it. Coming on too hard, too strong, overconfident. I’d have to live with it whether I liked it or not.
I’d almost reached the top step when the door slammed shut behind me, stopping me in my tracks. Followed by Mateo’s footsteps trailing me upstairs.