Chapter 33 Claire
Claire
Madrid was beautiful in the dark, its landmarks illuminated like glowing beacons, and Claire and Matías walked and talked all the way until dawn. He never touched her, although she could tell he wanted to—a reach here, a lean there, before he remembered her request to be old-fashioned, and then he’d pull back with a sheepish, lopsided smile on his face.
As the sun rose, Matías sighed happily as he watched the sky shift slowly from purple to pink. “I love this time of morning. It’s like you can feel the world turning.”
Claire smiled to herself. She knew exactly what he meant, but in a different way. She was closer to his soul than she’d ever been before—even in New York—and it felt like something in their universe was shifting. Slowly, but in a good way.
As the sky grew brighter, they slipped into El Retiro, a vast green park in the middle of the city that used to be the private playground of the royal family but now belonged to all of Madrid. It was huge, one of the classic-style European parks on which New York’s Central Park was modeled. Claire would spend forever here with Matías if she could keep him. There was a lake for rowing boats, a building made entirely of glass called the Crystal Palace, and innumerable paths and gardens galore.
“If it were later and the boathouse were open, I’d take you out on the water,” Matías said.
“Can’t. I get seasick,” Claire said. Besides the fact that she couldn’t let him row a boat, because he couldn’t hold the oars. “Do you think we could find a place to sit down for a bit? My feet could use a break. I don’t think I’ve walked that much since…ever.”
In truth, she probably could have fallen asleep standing. Claire sometimes pulled all-nighters at the firm, but even then, she was in a chair or she could curl up on the sleeping bag she kept under her desk for a minute or two. But it was worth it to walk all night if it meant keeping Matías close.
“Let’s go to los Jardines de Cecilio Rodríguez,” he said. “It’s like a fairy tale garden. And there are peacocks there.”
Claire arched a brow. “Really?”
“Yes, really. But you don’t have to believe me. You can see for yourself.”
The entrance to the Cecilio Rodríguez gardens portion of Retiro Park was like a vast, tiled checkerboard, and Claire smiled, recalling the time Matías took her to the art collective in the forests outside of New York. There she’d felt like Alice crossing into Wonderland, and the sensation was magically similar here, too. Straight ahead of them was a path flanked by ornate iron lamps and tall cylindrical hedges. On either side of that were pergolas with rows and rows of white columns swirled with deep green vines of ivy.
As soon as Claire stepped onto one of the checkerboard tiles, a sapphire blue peacock crossed the path right in front of her. It stopped to look at Claire, its jeweled plume like a cascading bouquet; then it tilted its head and looked straight at Matías.
“Buenos días,” Matías said, grinning.
Claire didn’t laugh. Could the peacock see him?
It strutted off before she could scrutinize its gaze further.
“Bench or grass?” Matías asked.
“Definitely grass,” she said. The benches were made of stone, and after having stone and tile and concrete beneath her feet all night, she wanted something squishy to dig her toes into.
They found a spot and Claire sighed happily as she pulled off her shoes. The grass was still cool from the night and a little damp from morning dew, but she didn’t mind at all.
“Ohh, that feels so good.” She lay flat and stretched her arms over her head, elongating her spine and moaning at the satisfying little pops and cracks of releasing the tension from her back.
Matías, on the other hand, stared at the exposed strip of skin between the hem of her blouse and the top of her jeans and made a small noise of his own.
“Dios mío. Las cosas que te haría si pudiera…”
She laughed and pulled her top down to cover her stomach.
His eyes went wide. “Did you understand what I just said?”
“I know a little bit of Spanish.” She didn’t tell him that he said those very words to her every time before they made love. My god. The things I would do to you if I could…
And she would always answer, Puedes. You can…
They held each other’s gaze, and the unseen ribbon that connected them tightened just a little.
Matías flushed. “I’m sorry. That was not very gentlemanly ofme.”
Claire sighed, still lost in the memory. But then she gathered herself and turned toward him, smiling. “It’s okay. It was probably what Mr. Darcy was thinking all those times when he looked at Elizabeth Bennet.”
Matías chuckled. “So I am forgiven?”
“Just this once.”
“I will be on my best behavior from now on,” he said, putting his hand over his heart.
That’s too bad, she thought. But it was also necessary.
They lay side by side on the grass for a while then, almost but not quite touching and watching the sun rise. People often thought of a sunrise as the launch of the day and the sunset as the end of one, but for Claire, last night’s sunset had been a start, and this morning’s felt like another, different start. Time with Matías was full of continuous beginnings.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, both of the sky and the idea that Matías somehow made the world never-ending.
Until she thought about how he was in a coma. And how things could definitely come to an end.
“You’re frowning,” he said.
“Yeah…um, it’s nothing.” She forced a smile. “Tell me something good. What should we do next?”
“You’re not tired yet?”
“Only a little,” Claire said, even though her eyelids felt as if they weighed ten pounds each. “Are you?”
“Not at all,” Matías said. She wasn’t surprised, though. He didn’t have the constraints of a physical body that demanded sleep.
He turned his face back up to the clouds. “Have you ever been skydiving?”
“God, no.”
Matías laughed. “You seem very sure about something you’ve never tried.”
“I…like control,” Claire said.
“You should give it up.”
“What?”
“Control.” The corner of his mouth curved up a little.
She knew that look. One part amusement, one part dare. It was how Matías prodded her limits. In the early days of their relationship, she’d given in, but in the past few months, she’d dug in her heels for her stable status quo. After all, one of them had to be the practical partner.
And if she had come on the original trip to Spain with Matías, she could have insisted that he and his friends not drive the speedboat like Hollywood stuntmen, or hell, not even get on the thing at all.
“Skydiving is out of the question,” she said.
“Why?”
“It’s too dangerous.”
“Not if you go with someone experienced,” Matías said. “Besides, if you think watching the sunrise and sunset from the ground is beautiful, free-falling as the sun goes down is a masterpiece. You must try it.”
“Matías—”
“Tonight, 9 p.m. We’ll fly with Nubes Aladas, Clouds Like Wings, at Oca?a Airport. They have the best instructors and you can dive tandem with one of them. And I will be right beside you.”
“No.”
“Think about it.”
“I did. The answer is still no.”
Matías sighed. “You’re missing out…But I think I will go, regardless. Now that we’ve talked about it, I realized I want to do this one more time before I leave Madrid. I’m sure the sunsets in New York are nice, but there is nothing like the Spanish sun. If you change your mind—”
“I won’t.”
“You know where I’ll be.”
Claire thought about lecturing him on the dangers of dropping out of a plane from thousands of feet in the sky and banking your entire life on a flimsy, fluttery piece of tarp. But then she remembered that it didn’t matter, because the real Matías was already in life-threatening danger, and a soul couldn’t be hurt by clouds and air.
She’d have to go back to the research she did on her computer for activities she and Matías’s soul could do that didn’t involve her jumping out of an open airplane. In fact, maybe she could remember her list now. Her brain was foggy from lack of sleep and food, but if Claire just closed her eyes, she might be able to envision what she’d written…