Chapter 41 Claire
Claire
When their feet hit the ground, Esmeralda congratulated Claire, and Claire responded but didn’t remember what she’d said, because all she was focused on was Matías, windblown and ruddy cheeked.
Claire couldn’t stop grinning, even as they walked across the field toward the hangar to return their gear.
“That was fun, wasn’t it?” Matías said.
“It was. I didn’t think I could like something like that. Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For helping me feel safe so I could let go.”
Matías stopped in the middle of the grass, smiling shyly. “Really? I did that?”
“Yeah,” Claire said. “You were exactly what I needed.”
—
After Claire changed and returned her gear, she met Matías outside the hangar.
“Well,” he said. “The last time we spent an evening together, I showed you Madrid. I think it’s your turn. What are we going to do next?”
Claire laughed because it was an echo of her demand after they’d walked through the grounds of the Palacio Real and Sabatini Gardens.
But the smile fell quickly off her face because she knew what she really had to do.
“Matías…There’s something I have to tell you.”
“Shoot. Did I dump my green jumpsuit into the bin meant for purple ones? Or did I put my gear in the wrong cubby?” He started to turn back toward the skydiving office, then stopped short. “Wait. Why am I worried about that? I don’t…I’m not the kind of person who even notices there are specific bins for each color.”
Claire twisted her purse strap around and around her finger. “Yeah…That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.”
He raised both hands, like he’d just been caught red-handed. “I did warn you when you came to my studio that I can be messy.”
She smiled a little. “I know. Or, really, I already knew.”
Matías cocked his head, confused.
“On the plane, you asked if it would be strange to say that you felt like we knew each other in a different life. Well, the thing is…we sort of did.”
“What?”
“Maybe you’d better sit down for this.” Claire pointed to a bench a short way off, in front of the empty airport parking lot.
So they walked over, and Claire told him, as gently as she could, about the accident. About how they had been together for the eleven months and one week before that. And about his injuries and how they were running out of time now. That Abuela Gloria had convinced Claire to tell him because he needed to return to his body.
When she finished, Matías sat with his head in both hands. He didn’t say anything for a long while.
Finally, he exhaled. “That’s…hard to believe.”
Tears started to well in Claire’s eyes. If she couldn’t convince Matías to return to his body, he would die. Either now, because his soul would sever his connection to his body and no longer be tethered to this world, or soon, because Matías’s body was nearing the end of its ability to hold on to life.
“But…” Matías said, and Claire’s breath caught in her throat.
“Even if it’s hard to believe,” he said, “I feel it. When I kissed you in my studio, I already knew your mouth. I knew the shape of your body against mine. I somehow remembered—without ever having experienced it yet—the little sound you would make if I brushed my lips against your throat.”
Claire involuntarily made that sound now.
“That,” Matías whispered. “Yes, that.”
They were quiet for a few minutes.
Finally, he asked, “So I’m really not supposed to be here with you?”
She bit her lip and shook her head. “No. Not like this.”
Matías jammed his hands into his hair. But then he shook them out and instead, turned and cupped her face gently.
“I’m scared, Claire. What if try to go back, and it doesn’t work? Or what if it does, but my body is too damaged to recover?”
“No,” she said. “That can’t happen. It won’t.”
“But it might.” He swiped away a tear falling on her cheek. “So before I go, I want only one thing.”
“What?” she asked, her voice barely audible.
“To make love to you, Claire. Just in case it’s the last time.”
—
Claire found an Airbnb close by, and because 10 p.m. was not considered late in Spain, the landlord—who was just sitting down to dinner—approved the rental right away.
She and Matías took a taxi the short distance, and Claire didn’t care if the driver thought she was drunk or delirious because it seemed like she was talking to herself in the backseat. He dropped them off at a beautiful stucco home surrounded by trees, with a fountain out front and stone paths leading to the front door and a wrought iron gate on the side.
“This way,” Claire said to Matías, indicating the second path. “We have the studio bungalow in the back; there’s a remote-entry keypad at the door.”
She took his hand and led him past the house, past the patio and the garden lit with fairy lights, her heart pounding against her ribs.
He didn’t let go of her as she entered the code on the keypad. She heaved open the thick wooden door, and they stepped inside.
“This is beautiful,” she said. The room was cozy, with walls painted vivid cerulean and yellow. There were two leather armchairs and throw blankets in Spanish prints, and a small kitchenette stocked with cookies, a bowl of berries, and coffee, tea, and honey. A speaker played gossamer piano music, and in the corner stood a wood-framed bed topped with a cloudlike feather duvet.
“Look at this,” Matías said, their linked hands bringing her with him as he wandered over to a stack of blank canvases and paintbrushes on a side table. “There’s a note from the owner—‘Welcome to La Casita de la Inspiración. Please feel free to use these art supplies during your stay if you feel inspired.’ Did you know this would be here?”
Claire shook her head. There hadn’t been many rentals available in this area on such short notice. She’d chosen this one just because it was a standalone, private place rather than a room inside someone’s home. “Kismet, I guess.”
“Maybe so,” Matías said, but he was no longer looking at the paintbrushes. He was looking only at Claire.
And unlike in the past, when she would be scared of his looking too close, she didn’t hide anything and let all her emotions show. Her love. Her fear. But most of all in this moment—her want.
The warm sconces in the kitchen behind him lit Matías up like he was glowing, the black waves of his hair tipped as if aflame. He was like one of his own paintings, rendered in lush, accurate detail but for one small whimsy.
Matías de León, always a little more than reality.
Claire took two steps toward him, so they were mere inches apart.
He stilled completely.
“ Bésame, Matías.” Kiss me.
He leaned in and kissed her neck, his mouth ghosting against the sensitive skin at her throat as she gasped. Even if he wasn’t entirely here, he almost was, and because her nerves had to work harder to feel him, their sensitivity was dialed up impossibly high.
Every look was starlight.
Every breath, the forerunner to a hurricane.
And every touch felt like fiery autumn leaves, skittering across her skin.
She let out a small moan, and he pressed his thumb, on her lips, gently until her mouth parted. Claire ran her tongue over the tip, and sucked, just once. Matías gasped.
“Dios mío,” he said in a low rumble. “Las cosas que te haría si pudiera…”
The things I would do to you if I could…
“Puedes,” Claire said. You can.
He led her to the bed. As she lowered herself onto it, he said, “Wait here.”
Matías went back to the art supplies and scooped up the paintbrushes, or at least he thought he did. He didn’t seem to notice that he hadn’t actually picked them up; maybe he had taken the souls of them instead. Likewise, he went to the kitchen for the honey, bowl of berries, and some plates. He returned to the bed and set his invisible bounty down next to Claire.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I am going to paint you,” he said.
“Oh…” She didn’t need to ask more. Because he had done this before, in New York. Made his own colors from strawberries and blackberries. Painted her like she was a masterpiece. Then kissed every inch of his work.
“I don’t want my clothes to stain,” Claire said, reaching for the hem of her shirt and taking her time lifting it up. First, she revealed her stomach, then the slight trim of lace on her bra. By the time she pulled the shirt over her head, Matías had stopped moving, nearly stopped breathing, just to watch her.
“You might want to be careful with your jeans, too,” he said, barely audible. “Berries are notoriously difficult to wash out.”
Claire rose onto her knees on the mattress and undid the top button of her jeans. Then the next. Slowly. And the next. Matías’s breath came faster as she slipped the pants off her hips, then tugged them off completely, leaving her in only the panties she’d bought here in Spain, the ones with the tiny satin ribbon on the front.
“Your turn,” Claire said.
He smiled, almost shy for a second, that hint of boyishness she loved that was usually concealed behind the man. But then he pulled his shirt off in one motion, and now it was Claire who couldn’t breathe, taking in his broad chest, the muscled arms that had carried her across her apartment so many times, the dusting of golden hair below his stomach that matched his eyes, not his head. But even if that wasn’t how he’d look in the future—if his body was weak and covered in scars from the accident and the surgeries—she would still love him, still want him. She would kiss every last one of those scars because they would be reminders that Matías had survived.
She watched as he made his paint, mashing phantom strawberries on one plate, blackberries on another. She couldn’t see the colors themselves, but somehow she could smell them, a hint of fruit perfuming the air.
They shed the rest of their clothes simultaneously until there was nothing between them but summer heat and wanting.
“Lie down,” he said.
Claire was used to being in charge, but with Matías, she didn’t mind taking orders.
He sat on the side of the bed beside her and dipped a brush into one of the plates. The bristles skimmed her neck, where he had kissed her before, and Claire sighed into the scent of strawberries and closed her eyes to concentrate and feel the barely there touch.
The next, long stroke caressed the side of her throat, across her collarbone, then down and around the swell of her breast. She heard Matías pause and swallow to gather himself before he reached for a different brush.
With blackberry, he painted a mirroring curve. Then with both brushes at the same time, he swept down from just under each breast, across the softness of her stomach, and out to her hips, drawing spirals like the body of a cello.
She arched up, yearning for him.
“Not yet,” he said as softly as the skimming of his paints.
He unscrewed the jar of honey, its sweetness blossoming into the air. When he touched his brush to Claire this time, it was to the inside of her ankle. And even though it wasn’t real, the honey was warm and thick as the brush trailed up, along the side of her calf. Up, past her knee. Up, across the pale skin of the part of her thigh that rarely saw the sun but that was feverish now, burning, as the sweep of honey stroked the crease where her leg met her core.
Torturously, Matías painted her other leg with honey, too, and by the time he was done, she was begging him. “Please.”
“Please what?”
“Please touch me. Everywhere. Make me yours.”
He bent over her neck again and kissed her, hungrier now, tracing the swoop of strawberry down her throat, her collarbone, the heat of his mouth on her breast. He did the same to her left side, murmuring her name, ending with his tongue hot on her nipple.
In the background, the piano music sped up, no longer languorous. Claire’s breath came quicker, too, matching the tempo.
Matías worshipped the curves of her stomach and her hips with his mouth. She arched toward him again as his lips completed the second cello swirl.
“Almost,” he whispered.
Instead of kissing her ankles, though, he wrapped his hands around both, his thumbs in the honey. Then he began to glide up, inch by slow inch, a massage along the interior of her legs that felt alive, like the buzz of electric against her skin. Ankle. Calves. Thighs.
Slowly higher and higher…
Until his thumbs met.
“Dios mío,” Claire gasped.
He spread her open and slid himself inside.
“Oh, Claire…”
It didn’t matter that he was only a soul. She remembered her Matías, and this version of him was not that far removed from the one she had met at the Rose Gallery, the Matías who had brought a picnic dinner to her firm, then made love to her in the shadowed law library. This soul—who was only one year removed from the present—was the same Matías who would later wake Claire up in the mornings with tender kisses and gentle entanglement in the sheets. He would also fuck her against the wall in his Greenwich Village studio. And on the paint-splattered floor. And one time, in the elevator with the emergency switch pulled.
So now, with eyes still closed, Claire blended her memories of the past with the man in the present, and she felt Matías’s hands in her hair, her body pressed hard against his, her hips meeting his movements. She could feel the stickiness of the honey and fruit on their skin even though they weren’t really there. The drumming of his heartbeat in his chest against hers.
Their muscles tensed.
Breathing synced, shallow and fast.
She bit his shoulder as the eddying storm inside them grew wilder and wilder.
And then the tempest unleashed, exploding in a beautiful fury of colors and shards of Claire and Matías, of blinding lightning and thunder so loud it rendered the world without sound. She was Claire, but she wasn’t, because nothing as mundane as a mere person could exist in this moment. Even time seemed to hitch.
Afterward, she swam for a while in the drowsy bliss of its aftermath.
But eventually, her heartbeat slowed close to normal, and Claire’s eyes fluttered open.
“Matías?”
But she was alone on the bed. In the room.
Claire bolted upright.
“Matías?”
He was truly gone.
Oh god .
Had he returned to the sleeping half of him? Could he?
Or was it already too late?
Claire scrambled for her phone and stabbed at the screen, failing several times before she managed to call a taxi. While she waited for it to arrive, she tried the hospital, but they wouldn’t release any information to her. None of the de Leóns answered their phones, either.
As soon as the taxi pulled up, Claire flung herself into it before the driver could even park.
“Madrid,” she said, her heart in her throat. “Hospital Universitario La Paz. ?Rápido, por favor!”