Chapter 24 #2
She walks toward her room—1216, three doors down from mine. I watch her go. She doesn’t look back.
I unlock my door and step inside. Close it. Lean against it.
The room is dark except for the light from the hallway seeping under the door. I don’t turn on the lights. Just stand there, breathing.
My phone buzzes. Fernando, checking in about dropping Izan off tomorrow. I respond automatically, then toss the phone on the bed.
I should shower. Should order room service. Should do something productive.
Instead, I lie down on top of the covers, still fully dressed, and stare at the ceiling.
I’m happy with my life.
I said it. Meant it.
Didn’t I?
Before Jade, yes. Contentedly settled. Happily routine. Saturday dinners and park walks and helping Diana with little Carmen.
Now I’m in a hotel room in Geneva, lying to myself.
I wanted to kiss her in that elevator. I wanted to pull her close and tell her I think about her constantly. Tell her that watching her with patients makes something in my chest ache. That this past week of cold professionalism has been awful.
Before Jade, I never would have had this screaming, aching desire.
But I told her the truth: my life is settled, simple, good.
She’s leaving.
What would I even be offering her? Disrupt your life in Austin for a complicated long-distance thing with a grandfather?
No.
The distance is right. Necessary.
I’m protecting both of us.
So why does it feel like I’m losing something vital?
I pull out my phone again, look at my lock screen—Carmen’s face, all gummy smile and bright eyes.
This is my life. This is what matters.
“I’m happy with my life.”
I repeat it like a prayer.
Like a lie.
I close my eyes and see Jade’s face in the elevator—the moment when she realized I was rejecting her. The way her expression closed off.
I fall asleep still dressed, my phone clutched in my hand, telling myself it’s better this way.
And dream of citrus-scented hair slipping through my fingers.
The next night, I arrive home from work and settle onto the couch. The weather is nasty outside, howling. Summers are usually dry and hot, but this is the second summer in recent memory where we’ve gotten a dangerous deluge. At least it’s not hail like it was last time.
Izan puts his chin on my knee and grumbles. His walk was abbreviated, a quick potty stop, and he’s cranky about it, as if I control the weather.
I take a picture of the old man’s face and send it to Jade.
Jade
Ugh, that looks cozy. I wish I had a nice warm dog to snuggle up with right now.
Carlos
Where are you?
Jade
I am currently sharing a baguette with a man named Ernesto just inside the entrance to the Lavapiés Metro stop.
I forgot my umbrella.
Me
Don’t move.
I put on my jacket. I find my umbrella by the door—a large one, built for actual weather—and take the Metro south.
It takes me twenty minutes. By the time I reach the Lavapiés exit, the street is running with water and the air smells of wet stone and something green and sharp. I scan the small crowd sheltering under the awning.
Jade is leaning against the wall with her laptop bag clutched to her chest and her shoes already dark and wet. Next to her, a man holds a baguette bag.
She looks up when I approach. Something moves across her face—surprise, and then, quickly, something more careful.
“You came,” she says.
“I said don’t move.”
I open the umbrella and hold it out over us both. It’s large enough but only just, and when she steps in close to fit under it the smell of her shampoo hits me—citrus, warm, familiar in a way it has no business being.
We walk.
Lavapiés is not what I expected, which is foolish—I’ve lived in Madrid for thirty years and know this neighborhood perfectly well, or thought I did.
But I’ve never walked through it at Jade’s pace, which is slow and observant, even in the rain.
She points out a mural on the corner of her street, tells me it appeared one morning last November and nobody knows who painted it.
She nods at the bar where the clerk teases her about her Spanish.
“Here,” she says, stopping at a door.
The building is old, the kind with a heavy street door and a dim tiled entry and a lift that runs on its own schedule. We take the stairs. On the third floor she finds her keys and lets us in.
Her apartment is exactly what I would have predicted and nothing like what I imagined. Small, yes—one main room with the kitchen along one wall and a window overlooking the narrow street. The corkboard on the wall is dense with Polaroids. A few scattered used coffee mugs.
But it’s also warm. Lived-in in the way that takes intention—the ceramic bull from El Rastro, the Metro map she never took down, the string of lights above the window that aren’t on yet because she didn’t know she’d be coming home to company.
“Sit,” she says, dropping her bag by the door and shaking water from her hair. “I’ll get towels.”
I fold my umbrella and set it by the door.
Through the window the rain is still coming down hard, the street below running silver.
Madrid isn’t a city used to rain, especially not this intense.
Traffic, buses, even the Metro will be affected on a day like today.
So will the people of Madrid. Rain makes us sad, or at least reflective.
I don’t sit. I look at the corkboard.
I find the Valencia ones quickly. The one of the four friends I’ve heard about.
A selfie with the man I recognize from the time we bumped into each other at the sex shop.
And two I recognize—the one she took of me in the evening light, and the one I took of her in the cathedral, eyes direct, a smile she doesn’t always let people see.
She’s kept them at the center.
Jade appears with two glasses and a bottle and a slightly damp towel over her shoulder. She stops when she sees where I’m looking.
Neither of us says anything.
“You might be here a while,” Jade says. “Wine?”
I look at the glass. At her. At the Polaroids behind her on the corkboard—the ones I recognize, kept at the center.
“I should go,” I say.
Something flickers across her face. She covers it quickly, the way she’s gotten very good at covering things. “The rain—”
“I have an umbrella.” I pick it up from where I left it by the door. “Thank you for the offer.”
She walks me to the door. In the narrow entry we’re closer than we’ve been in weeks, close enough that I see the flecks of gold in her eyes.
“Carlos.” Her voice is careful.
“Goodnight, Jade.”
I take the stairs. On the street, the hail has softened back to rain. I open the umbrella and walk to the Metro and tell myself, the whole way home, that I did the right thing.
I almost believe it.