Chapter 21 The Performance #2
“Hurry up. We’ll wait up for you,” Loren declares, giving us his blessing.
Marín and I look at each other.
“What should we do? Go for a swim?”
“Don’t chicken out now,” we hear Blanca call as they move away. “Gus?”
“I’m trying to decide whether I wanna swim.”
“You don’t wanna swim,” Loren declares warningly. “Trust me on that. If you get in the pool, within fifteen minutes we’ll all be handcuffed in the back of a patrol car.”
We hear him spluttering until we lose sight of them. When I look back at Marín, he’s heading into the darkness, into the most cloistered part of the pool. When he gets there, he pulls off his shirt and focuses on unbuttoning his pants. Thank you, patron saint of idiots, for this gift.
I yank off my sweater, unbutton my jean shorts, and kick off my dirty white Converse so fast they almost fly into the water. Marín is looking at me, amused, with his pants hanging open, barefoot, shirtless.
That’s right, life. That’s right.
We drop our clothes onto the same chair, and as he slips into the water in his gray boxers, I wonder if Gus and Aroa are getting suspicious of us. Well, of me. Is my secret about to be vox populi?
“Come here, come on.” Marín reaches out his hand with a smile. “You have no idea how good it feels.”
I can guess how good you’d feel, eating you until your eyes roll back in your head. I’d suck your life out like a dementor.
“Come on!” He laughs. “When you drink, you turn into a dummy.”
No. Not a dummy. It’s just that when I drink a little, it gets harder to stifle the Coco who’s dying to kiss you.
Am I going to make my life even more messy?
I mean, isn’t it a disaster already anyway?
This strange flirting, this strange “What’s going on here?
” has to go somewhere, and there are only two directions: Either we discover that it’s mutual and love wins, or I have to find another apartment.
So basically, I was already planning that. I have nothing to lose.
The water is the perfect temperature, and my skin soaks it up gratefully. I look at Marín, who flashes a dazzling smile back at me. He’s happy to be doing this and doing it with me. I can tell. I go closer, and we both swim over to the side in silence, under the shadow of one of the slides.
“So now what?” I say with raised eyebrows.
“Should we go down the slide?”
“You’re nuts! They’ll hear us!”
“I know, Sardine. I was joking.” He laughs. “It makes me laugh how gullible you are. Were you the same in school?”
“Exactly the same,” I reply, mocking myself. “I really don’t know how I didn’t end up smoking or doing drugs or—”
“Having five kids.”
I get the giggles and dunk under the water so no one hears me cackling. A bubble floats to the surface, and he yanks me up.
“Sardine, you don’t have gills.”
“That’d be cool though,” I say stupidly.
“Cool? You wanna be even weirder?”
“Am I weird?”
“No offense,” he says, stifling a smile. “But you are pretty weird.”
“I’m not mad. What makes me weird according to your criteria, Mr. Marín?”
“All your favorite songs are at least twenty years old. Most of them are from before you were even born.”
“I like the classics,”
“You dream about time traveling all the time, and you’re convinced that if you were a university student in May of ’68, you would’ve died.”
“Of an acid overdose.” I nod, teasingly. “I would’ve thought I could fly.”
“You love your dirty Converse, but every day when you leave the house to go to work, you look like Anna Wintour…pure elegance. If you told me you had a duke’s papers in that horrible bag you wear to go out, I’d believe it.”
“My bag is horrible?”
“Horrible.” He laughs.
“What else?” I want to change the subject because, it’s true, my bag with the zippers is the ugliest bag any chic woman would be appalled by, but I’m attached to it and it’s the perfect size.
“You open beer bottles with your teeth. That’s weird. And you have the same fucking underwear in twelve different colors.”
“Hey! You do too.” I lift my chin toward his boxers, which are part of his uniform. “White, black and gray, gray and white,”
“I’m not finished. Respect your elders.” He puts his finger in my face, demanding my attention. “You would eat soup eeeeevverrry day, even in the summer. Coco, that’s weird. Plus, you’re called Coco! Like a Muppet!”
“None of this seems that weird to me, babe. Maybe you’re the weird one.”
“You’re weird. You don’t have ticklish feet.”
“Feet are my erogenous zone,” I lie.
“I thought it was your ears.” He raises one eyebrow.
Oy, oy, oy.
“Do you have any more irrefutable proof that I’m weird? Because the ear is an erogenous zone for everyone. If you said, I dunno, my elbow, then maybe.”
“Having your elbow sucked turns you on?”
“I don’t know. Should we try?”
Marín leans back against the edge and bursts out in laughter that ricochets off every night-cloaked surface. I launch myself onto him and cover his mouth with my dripping hand.
“Shh,”
“Shh,” he imitates me, prying my hand off.
Okay. I’m really close. I’m sitting on his knees, which he’s keeping flexed in the water.
“They’re gonna kick us out,” I say, trying not to focus on where I’m sitting. “Me, the weird one, I don’t like getting kicked out, you know?”
He doesn’t answer. He looks at me. He’s looking at me with an indecipherable expression, like an unsettling smile, which is neither serious nor fun.
It’s like those ancient Greek sculptures, the kouros, where the hair was represented simply by a few almost geometrical lines with old-fashioned undulations and the smiles they wore were distant.
Right now, Marín is in control of the situation.
This is no longer a battle between equals, and I don’t know when I lost control of my army.
“What?” I ask him, not moving, pretending this new dynamic isn’t affecting me.
I don’t think I know this Marín.
“Nothing.” He shrugs. “What?”
Restrain yourself, Coco. Restrain yourself. Don’t kiss him. It’s important that you don’t kiss him. You’ve only had three weak drinks. That much alcohol just turns you into a chatterbox. Yeah? Yeah. So let’s talk.
“We’re not gonna talk about it?” I say.
“About what?”
“About last night.”
The crickets’ chirping suddenly seems deafening. That and the way our bodies are making the water gently lap around us.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks. “I was avoiding it because—”
“Because you’re mortified,” I reply confidently.
“Because you didn’t seem uncomfortable. If we can make like it was nothing, why talk about it, right?”
“To check whether you were asleep or not, for example.”
“Ah.” He raises his eyebrows. “Is that a complaint? Was I not participating enough?”
“Oh, oh.”
I swing my arm out to swim away, but he grabs my wrist and pulls me back to where I was. God. Don’t touch me too much.
“Are you mad?” I ask.
“No. But you brought it up, right? So talk.”
“It was dawn… We… It’s weird, right? I mean.
That is weird. What we did and what… I dunno.
Just completely out of the blue and everything.
Just like, savage. We’re not like that. We don’t do things without thinking them through…
At least, not that kind of stuff. You know what I’m talking about, right? ”
“Yes. How you touched my cock.”
He’s staring at me as he says it. I wish he were drunk. Or tipsy at least.
“And you…” I splash out again, pushing myself away. There’s no need to force it. I feel like I’m on very thin ice with shoes that are on fire. “You squeezed my boob.”
“Own it. If we’re talking about it, we’re talking about it.”
My God. Who is this guy? Because he turns me on even more than Marín…
“Well, look.” I twist a little and my bra pops up over the water. “You put your hand under my pajama top. You grabbed this boob”—I point to it—“you put my nipple between your fingers and squeezed. Hard.”
“Did I hurt you?”
I look at him with a smile on my lips that can be read as Are we really gonna go there? Jeez, Coco, considering you’re so in love with him, you’re being kind of a prude. No, that’s not why. It’s just that I don’t want to go overboard.
“Come on, tell me. Did it hurt?”
“It made me pretty horny, to be honest. But you already know that.”
“Yes.” He nods. “Just like you know how hard it made me.”
“Very. Right against my ass cheeks, by the way.”
“Between the cheeks,” he corrects me. “Up and down.”
Jesus fucking Christ. What is this?
“Up and down and a little right in the middle,” I repeat, sinking into the water up to my neck again.
“Sardine…” he scolds me, but like he wants it to be part of a game. I’m the naughty student. He’s the professor who’s trying to hold back in the face of temptation.
“Anchovy…”
“You’re the one who wanted to talk about it, so…go for it.” He leans back on the edge of the pool and looks at me. “I’ll answer anything you wanna know.”
“I don’t have any questions, sir. I just want to make sure that…” That you want to do it again. No. You can’t say that, Coco. “That it’s not gonna be a problem for us. You know?”
“There’s no problem. At least for me. What about you?”
“No,” I lie again, but this time it’s a lie by omission. It’s not a problem as long you keep doing it and make me finish. And I make you finish. Either with your mouth or…
“So why does it feel like it is a problem for you?” he probes.
“Because I look at you and I think…” I start edging closer, gradually, but not too close, “that I’ve had your cock in my hand, you know?
And we were there, rubbing against each other like dogs.
You’re my roommate…” I avoid saying best friend because I don’t want to make him think about the friend zone.
“Well, good thing it’s never gonna happen again,” he points out. “Because I want to keep being that.”
“Well, yeah, good thing,” I add.
“It would be super awkward.”
“Totally.” Give me an Oscar already, please.
We fall silent. Both of us. An uncomfortable silence crosses both of our faces, and we look away. I kick away again.