Chapter 27
twenty-seven
RODRIGO
There are things a man tells himself when he is standing almost totally-naked in the lobby of a four-star hotel in Madrid, covered in newspaper and what I’m fairly certain is part of a kebab wrapper, trying not to look at the gorgeous woman beside him who is also covered in newspaper.
Things like: you are a gentleman. You are a professional.
You have been in worse situations than this.
That last one is a lie. I have never, in thirty-five years of living, been in a worse situation than this.
The hotel is called the Astoria Grand, or something with the word “Grand” in it— I can’t read the sign because I’m too busy pressing a crumpled edition of Madrid a Diario against my torso to keep from traumatizing the elderly couple exiting through the revolving door.
They see us. They see all of us. The woman clutches her husband’s arm and quickens her pace in a way that I would find funny if I had any dignity left to laugh with.
I stare at the chandelier. I stare at the marble.
I study the veining pattern of the floor tile as if it is the most fascinating geological phenomenon I have encountered in my entire life, because if I look two degrees to my left, I will see Billie Harper, and if I see Billie Harper right now, wrapped in nothing but the international news section I fashioned into a makeshift skirt— Dios mío— I will lose the last remaining thread of composure holding me together.
I have already seen too much. Not in the way that sounds.
When we were stripping off the glow-in-the-dark clothes in that alley five minutes ago, I caught one single flash of Billie’s bare shoulder in the streetlight, and it landed in my chest like a fist. Just her shoulder.
The soft slope of it, the freckles scattered there like someone had flicked a paintbrush.
I turned away so fast I nearly tripped over a newspaper stand, which is where I found the sports section that is currently preserving what remains of my modesty.
She hasn’t looked at me either. I think. I hope. I genuinely cannot tell because I am committed to examining this chandelier for the rest of my natural life.
Alana, meanwhile, walks through the lobby like she owns it. As far as she’s concerned, she is a guest. An important one. And the young man behind the front desk, in his pressed uniform and his careful little name tag, is going to treat her like one.
“Hi,” she says, leaning one elbow on the counter, her pink-manicured nails— still intact, somehow, after everything— tapping twice on the marble.
“I need three rooms. Actually, I need whatever you have. Tonight. I also need clothing purchased and delivered to the rooms by tomorrow morning. Make the clothing sent to my room pink and like, designer. Just bill them to the room. No questions. Oh also, make sure there’s no phones in the rooms.” She turns and winks at us, clearly communicating that she doesn’t want us making any calls.
Then, she turns back to the man: “Can you do that?”
The concierge blinks. His eyes travel from Alana to me, to Billie, and back to Alana. He opens his mouth.
“Also,” Alana adds, pulling her small crossbody purse around— the only item she managed to keep— and extracting a stack of bills with the casualness of someone pulling out a stick of gum, “this is two thousand euros for you. That should cover the inconvenience of whatever you’re about to say, plus whatever discretion costs in this city.
I’m guessing it’s less than that, but like, keep the change. ”
She sets the money on the counter, placing it next to her shiny new passport, courtesy of Tamor. The concierge looks at the money. He looks at Alana. He looks at the newspaper clinging to her décolletage. I can actually see the moment his professional training overrides his survival instincts.
“Madam,” he says carefully. “I would be happy to help you. However, we only have two rooms available this evening. One is our premier suite on the seventh floor. The other is a standard single on the fourth.”
“Perfect,” Alana says.
“The standard room has— it is quite small, I should mention?—”
“That’s fine.” She’s already holding her hand out. He places a key card in it. She takes the one for the suite, obviously. “This one’s mine.”
She turns to face us. Me and Billie, standing there like two people at the world’s worst costume party, and Alana’s calculating, Barbie-doll eye flick between us with a look I have learned to recognize as cruelty disguised as indifference.
“You two can figure out the other room,” she says. “I’m not sharing with my ex-boyfriend and my ex-best friend in the same night. I have boundaries.” She says the word boundaries the way someone might say vision board— sincerely and without a trace of irony.
Then she walks to the elevator. The concierge watches her go. I watch her go. Billie watches her go.
There is a small silence. The kind that fills a space when someone like Alana leaves it, like the air rushing back in after a door has been sealed.
“So,” Billie says.
I finally look at her. I shouldn’t. I do.
She is clutching the newspaper against her chest, her brown hair falling in messy waves against her bare shoulders, and she is looking up at me with those eyes— those enormous, bambi, tell-me-your-secrets eyes— and she’s got a piece of newspaper stuck to her collarbone, and she looks mortified and brave and ridiculously, painfully beautiful, and I think, very clearly: Estoy perdido.
I’m lost.
“I’ll get the key,” I say, because it is the only safe sentence in any language.
The concierge hands it over without commentary. He has earned his euros.
Billie and I walk toward the elevator in silence, leaving a small trail of newsprint behind us on the marble floor. Somewhere above us, Alana is already settling into her suite, probably ordering room service. Probably ordering champagne.
The elevator doors open. We step inside. The mirrored walls show us exactly what we look like— two grown adults wrapped in newspapers, standing three inches apart, not touching, not speaking, headed to a room that I am now almost certain contains one bed.
Dios me ayude.
* * *
The room is exactly as small as the concierge promised.
One bed, a window with gauze curtains that glow faintly from the streetlights of Madrid below, and approximately four square feet of floor space that I am already mentally claiming as my sleeping territory.
There is a bathroom, thank God, and two white robes hanging on the back of the door, and I have never in my life been more grateful for terrycloth.
We take turns changing. That is to say, we take turns going into the bathroom to shed our newspaper armor and put on the robes, and when Billie emerges, hair loose, face washed, wrapped in white cotton that is three sizes too big for her, I have to look at the crooked lampshade and think about construction permits.
“You take the bed,” I say. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”
“Rodrigo.”
“It’s fine. I’ve slept on worse. I once slept on a concrete slab in Valencia because my cousin locked me out of his apartment.” This is true. My other cousin— Esteban is not a generous man, unlike Benny, who is a degenerate, but a thoughtful one.
“There’s like two feet of floor space,” she says. “You’d be sleeping under the bed, not on it.”
“I’m flexible.”
“You’re six foot one.”
“Six foot two,” I correct, which is not the point but feels important to clarify.
She sits on the edge of the bed and looks at me with those eyes.
They are enormous, in a way that is incredibly unfair.
“I won’t be able to sleep,” she says, “knowing you’re down there.
I’ll just lie here feeling guilty, which means neither of us will sleep, which means tomorrow we’ll both be exhausted and useless, which means Alana wins. ”
I consider this. The logic is, annoyingly, sound.
“I can be a gentleman,” I say, really wishing I didn’t have to be.
“Then problem solved,” she says. And the way she says it— not teasing, not testing, just certain— does something to the center of my chest that I am not prepared to examine.
So we share the bed.
It is a queen, which is generous for the room, and we lie on our backs with a careful six inches of neutral territory between us, staring at the ceiling like two people who have been placed in a psychological experiment.
I can hear her breathing. I can smell the hotel soap on her skin.
Outside, a tram rumbles past, and Madrid hums its late-night hum, and I think: I have been in gunfights that felt less dangerous than this.
“Can I ask you something?” she says, after a while.
“Sí.”
“Why Alana?”
I exhale. It’s the question I’ve been asking myself for months, maybe years, in one form or another.
“Because she was bright,” I say. “Dazzling. Like fireworks.” I pause.
“I have a history of this. Falling for the brightness. The spectacle. Someone walks into a room and everything changes, and I think—that’s it, that’s the feeling— and I give myself to it completely.
I build the person in my head before I’ve seen who they actually are and then I project this person on to them.
I fill in the gaps with who I want them to be. ”
The ceiling has a small crack in it, running from the light fixture to the corner. I follow it with my eyes.
“I did it with Alana. I did it before her, with a woman in Sevilla who turned out to be married. I did it before her, with a woman in Madrid who was kind but we had nothing— nothing real between us. I just wanted it so badly that I invented the connection.” I swallow.
“I’m good at building things. Structures, houses.
But I’ve been building people, too. And that— that is not something anyone should do. ”
The silence that follows is not uncomfortable. It’s the kind of silence that holds space.
“I know what you mean,” Billie says quietly.
“Not the building part. The opposite, maybe. I’ve spent my whole life letting other people build me.
Or— not build me. Overlook me. I’m always the one who does the work and never the one who gets the credit.
The one who stays late. The one who remembers the details.
And people just—” She stops. “They take it for granted. They take me for granted. Like I’m furniture. Useful, but not worth noticing.”
I turn my head on the pillow. She’s looking at the ceiling too, and in the dim light from the window, I can see the gold flecks in her brown eyes, and the freckles on her cheeks, and the small, honest curve of her mouth, and I think that anyone who has ever overlooked this woman must be profoundly, catastrophically blind.
“I can’t imagine,” I say, “anyone overlooking you. You are impossible to miss.”
She turns her head. We are looking at each other now, on the same pillow almost, and the six inches of neutral territory has become four, maybe three.
“You don’t really know me,” she says. But it’s not a deflection. It’s an offering. She’s giving me the chance to agree, to retreat.
“Perhaps,” I muse. “But I have run from gunfire with you. I think that makes two people know each other quickly.”
“Maybe,” Billie offers.
She needs more. She does not believe that I truly see her.
So I add: “I know that you are the most honest person I’ve ever met.
You couldn't hide what you feel if your life depended on it— and believe me, lately, it has. I know that you choose what is right in the face of great danger. I know that you are powerful, but that you don’t believe it. ”
She almost laughs. Almost.
“But what if—” She hesitates, and I watch her gather the courage, and it’s like watching someone step to the edge of a high place. “What if the way you see me is just you getting swept up again? Projecting onto me instead of seeing me?”
It’s a fair question. It's a brave question. It’s the kind of question that Alana would never ask, because Alana would never care about the answer.
I take a breath. “No,” I say, and I can answer this confidently, because I’ve wondered the same thing. “And I’ll tell you why.”
The tram passes again outside. The curtains shift.
“Because you can’t be a lie, Billie. You don’t know how.
Your face— tu cara— it tells everything.
Every feeling, every thought, it’s right there, like a window with no curtain.
And that is the opposite of what I’ve been chasing.
I spent years falling for the performance.
The dazzle. And then I would build a person underneath it— a person who was kind, and funny, and real, and who actually cared about the world beyond herself— and she was never there. She was never the person I invented.”
I turn onto my side. She does too. We are close now. Close enough that I could count her freckles if I wanted. I want to.
“But you,” I say. “Tú eres esa persona. You are that person. The one I kept imagining. The one I kept looking for inside everyone else. You’re not a projection. You’re the thing I was always projecting.”
Her eyes are shining. Not with tears, exactly, but with something I recognize— the look of someone who has just been told they are worth something, and is trying to decide whether to believe it.
“Rodrigo,” she whispers.
I close the distance. Or she does. Or we both do, meeting somewhere in that last inch of space, and when I kiss her, it’s not like fireworks.
It’s not like anything bright or loud or spectacular.
It is like finding the room you've been looking for in a house you’ve been building your whole life.
It is like the door was always there, and you just finally turned the handle.
It is the easiest thing in the world. The most natural thing.
She kisses me back, and her hand comes up to the side of my face, and her fingers are small and warm, and I pull her closer, and she lets me, and the robe is too big on her anyway— it’s been falling off her all night— and when I reach underneath it— a plain white thing, simple, nothing designed to destroy a man and yet here I am, destroyed— she doesn’t stop me.
She lifts her arms, and I pull the robe off of her, and she is looking at me with those enormous, bambi, tell-me-everything eyes, and I think:
She is not the firework. She is the sky behind it. She is infinite, and she was there the whole time.
I pull her against me. Madrid hums outside the window. The crooked lampshade watches from its post. And whatever happens next— whatever happens next is ours.