“Vera,” Mateo said. “Tell me, hour by the hour, what you did Tuesday last week.”
I straightened up slightly in surprise. “Last Tuesday? Why?”
“It is one of my twenty questions.”
“I was in London…”
“How long were you in London for?”
“I think that’s more than one question.”
“Do not be so literal,” he chided me. “Tell me about the last Tuesday when you were at home, in Vancouver. Tell me about that day.”
I scrunched up my nose. “Why?”
“Because,” he said, “I want to know what the average day of Vera Miles is like.”
“Well, it won’t be that average because I wasn’t in school.”
“Tell me anyway.”
He was persistent, I’ll give him that.
I wracked my brain, trying to think back. I left on the Thursday, so what was I doing on Tuesday?
“I got up,” I said. Good start.
“Where did you get up?”
“In my bed?”
“Who do you live with?”
I raised a brow. I was getting good at that. “Is this question an excuse to ask other questions?”
He only smiled. “Go on.”
I sighed and tried to get comfortable again. I closed my eyes and ran through that day. “I live with my brother and my mom. I woke up, around my usual time when I’m not at school. Like, ten am.”
“That is quiet late, no?”
“I like to sleep in.” I shrugged. “Anyway, I got up at ten and then I made myself breakfast…and then I did some research online about London, last minute shit.”
“You took a last minute shit?”
I burst out laughing. “No!” I yelled at him. “Sorry. I should stop swearing and using slang, it’s getting confusing.”
“I like it when you swear.”
“Well, it doesn’t do me any favors when you get it confused with the literal sense.”
He stroked his chin in mock contemplation. I could hear the roughness of his beard on his fingers. “So, when you say things like ‘fuck me’ or ‘fuck you’, you aren’t really wanted to be fucked or to fuck another?”
My god, the word fuck sounded so beautifully dirty coming from his mouth, especially when he pronounced with such soft emphasis.
I breathed in deeply, trying to quell my raging hormones. “Do you mean it in that sense when you swear?”
Mateo smiled carefully. “I don’t take fucking lightly.”
Okay, so what the hell were we really talking about here? I stared at him, hoping my face was blank.
“So then what did you do after you…looked up shit?” he abruptly continued on with the conversation, as if that weird moment had never happened.
“Uh,” I fumbled for words. “I, uh, went on the drive for lunch.”
“The drive?”
“Commercial Drive,” I explained. “It’s a popular street near my house. Lots of artsy types, hipsters, hippies, bums. Good places to eat, and there’s an Italian section too.”
“You met someone there?”
I shook my head and looked down at my chipped fingernails. “No. I went to eat by myself. My brother was working.”
I could feel his eyes on me but I avoided looking up at him. “Hmmm,” he said. “No friends to meet? No boyfriend?”
I sucked in my breath, the questions grating me raw. “I have friends,” I said, quietly defensive. “I just don’t see them often. School is over. And my best friend, she’s in another province.”
“And the boyfriend?”
Finally, I had to look at him. “Obviously I don’t have a boyfriend.”
He frowned, wearing a face of genuine puzzlement. “Why is that obvious?”
I bit my lip for a moment. “I don’t know. I just thought it was. I don’t think I’d be here if I had one. I don’t think I’d be…me…acting the way I do.”
What the hell was I saying? This hangover was making me talk way too much.
“Very honest,” he said after a beat. “Do you like to be alone?”
I shrugged. “I think so. It’s easy.”
“Easy to be you?”
“No. Easy to only worry about yourself.”
He nodded and I could see his dark eyes churning with my words. “You are close with your brother, yes?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s pretty lame but I think he’s the closest person to me. Do you have any siblings?” I asked him, hoping to turn this onto him.
“A sister,” he said simply. “Lucia.” He pulled the chair closer to me and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, the Rolex glinting in the weak sun. “Is it just your brother?”
Back to me again. I exhaled noisily, to let him know that this wasn’t a fun subject. “No, I have an older sister.”
“But you don’t get along.”
“No, we don’t,” I said. “I mean, I’m nice to her and I make an effort. She’s just a bitch.”
His forehead wrinkled. “That doesn’t sound like a nice thing to say about your family.” He seemed genuinely shocked by that.
“Well, she is,” I said. “She’s always been that way but it got worse after…it’s a long story. My family is fucked up, that’s all you need to know, and I don’t care how that sounds. Every family needs a black sheep to call them out on their bullshit.”
“And Vera Miles is the black sheep,” he commented. He leaned back. “But I don’t like that name for you.”
“Vera?”
“The black sheep. You seem more like a red sheep. Maybe a bright color, like your shirt.” His eyes traveled down to my chest, focusing there for just a moment, just long enough for me to feel a heat deep inside, melting the ice that had built up over the last few minutes.
“I’m definitely not a sheep at all,” I said. “Black cat is more like it, I think. Maybe even a black hole.”
“A black hole,” he said carefully. “That is in space, yes?”
I nodded, relieved that the conversation was heading in astronomy’s direction. Now, this I could talk about and not feel weird about. I straightened up and shoved my sunglasses on top of my head, blinking at the sunlight. “A black hole is a star. Or, it was a star that collapsed onto itself. It’s a lot more, um, scientific than that but basically it keeps collapsing, eventually absorbing all light and other stars and matter around it. It’s fascinating, really, because we don’t know all that much about it. And it’s kind of scary, to me, anyway. And invisible.”
“I learned about that in school, when I was a child,” he said, “though I knew it as agujero negro. But no, you are not a black hole, Vera. You are fascinating, but you are not scary and you are not invisible.” He said that with subdued passion, like it was a fallacy to even suggest it. “You are the opposite. What is the opposite? Estrella?”
I raised my finger. “No more Spanish.”
“A star, then.” He gestured to my tattoos, the shooting stars on my chest, the constellation on my arm. “You are a star. That’s what I shall call you. Star.”
My heart flipped. “In that case, I think Estrella sounds better.”
He fixed me with a satisfied smile. “Good. Then it is settled. Estrella,” he said, voice lower over the word.
The world seemed to still.
Our eyes stayed locked together, silence settling on us like silk, trapping in the heat between us. It couldn’t all be in my head, could it? This was a moment that had to be happening for him too. The look in his eyes was intense, practically carnal. They glittered darkly, searching me. People didn’t just stare at each other like this without meaning to.