You’re hungover and delusional, my inner critic said, trying to muffle the butterflies.
“May we join you?” a thickly accented voice broke through our connection. I looked away from Mateo, reality snapping me into place, and up to see Sara and Lauren peering down at us hesitantly.
Well, Sara looked hesitant. Lauren had her arms folded and an accusatory twist to her lips.
“Sure?” I said, trying to act nonchalant, like I hadn’t been ensnared in a heady, strange, moment with Mateo. I quickly made my face as impassive as possible and pointed at the chairs closest to us. “Pull up a seat,” I added breezily.
“We thought it would be fun for the four of us to talk,” Lauren said, dragging her chair over, the sound on the tiles scraping the inside of my ears. Today she was wearing short shorts, a polo shirt and had attached a length of faux-pearls to her glitter glasses. She didn’t look like she could have any fun, period.
My eyes quickly darted over to Mateo but he seemed as impassive as ever. He got up and pulled his chair closer to mine and pulled out his phone, seeming to scroll through things.
Lauren narrowed her eyes at him. “What are you doing?”
I sucked in my breath and glanced nervously at Mateo. As casual as this place was, he was still an older man, a professional and a stranger and she was talking to him like she was his teacher. I mean, she kind was, so was I, when you thought about it. But fuck her and her stupid fucking glasses. Where did she get the nerve?
Mateo’s eyes slid over to her, appraising her coolly. “The dictionary on my phone helps me with my English.” He went back to the screen, not expecting her to argue with that.
“So,” Sara said, a forced smile on her face. “I asked Lauren questions and she asked me questions and then she said we should talk to you and ask questions.”
Oh great, more questions. Can we please talk about my crappy family and what a loner I am, a black hole?
No, I corrected myself, steeling my doubts with Mateo’s warm words. You’re Estrella.
“I’ll go first,” Lauren said, crossing her pale legs. She eyed Mateo and cleared her throat until he reluctantly met her gaze. “Tell us about your wife.”
My chest constricted at the peculiar bluntness of the question. Mateo squinted his eyes at her and then passed me his phone for some reason. I gingerly took it in my hands and looked down at it, confused. The notepad was open and on it he had written Does this girl have a problem in her head?
I nearly choked out laughing. Lauren was looking at me like she was about to demand we “share with the rest of the class” but Mateo brought back her attention.
“My wife is a very lovely woman,” he said and though he was polite about it, there was that edge again to his voice. “She is very pretty, very smart and a very good mother.” Was I disappointed to hear that? Probably not. Then again, I was good at lying to myself.
Lauren didn’t seem satisfied with that. “What is her name?”
“Isabel,” he said and the name did funny things to me. Things like, making me feel the lightest lashes of guilt for fawning over the husband of Isabel Casalles.
From the way Lauren was watching me now, I could tell that had been her intention with the question. She had noticed us together, our interactions, the way I stared at him without realizing it. She wanted to let me know that she knew and to remind me that he was married.
Like I fucking needed her to remind me of that.
While Mateo went on to tell her about his daughter Chloe Ann, I took the moment to quickly write under his message, that she was just a bitch. I handed it back to him without looking. I ignored the tingly feeling I got when our fingers brushed against each other.
He grasped the phone in his hand and looked over at Sara, asking her to tell us about her husband. While Sara tried to find the right words, he looked down at the message I wrote and his brows furrowed. He looked back at me, as if to say what?
I leaned over his seat and looked down at the notepad. Thanks to the wonders of autocorrect, instead of writing Lauren is a bitch I had actually written down Lauren is a bicycle. A guffaw escaped my lips and more giggles threatened to spill. The thought that Mateo had been eying Lauren and trying to picture her as a banana-seat cruiser with pearl streamers and made me feel like I had just ingested a crate of the sillies.
“What is so funny?” Lauren asked haughtily. Mateo and I were both laughing now. His laughter was rich and reverberated through me, remedying me like a tonic.
“It’s something that got lost in translation,” I managed to say.
“Right,” Lauren said with a narrow-eyed smile. “Well, then let me ask you a question, Vera.” The way she said my name was accusatory, as if I were using an alias.
I stared back at her expectantly, knowing that whatever was coming I probably wasn’t going to like.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked innocently. Too innocently.
“Actually,” I said, with a wide fake smile, “I was just discussing that with Mateo. I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Not even Dave?”
My face fell. “What are you talking about? Dave? From here? No.” I tried to laugh but it felt hollow.
“I saw you kissing him last night, that’s all,” she said, taking off her glasses and wiping the lenses on her shorts. “Thought he was your boyfriend.”
The fuck. The fuck!
I felt absolutely mortified, like she was instigating that I was some slut, and not in some funny ha ha way, but as in I was a terrible, unclean, easy person with no respect for herself. I didn’t even have the words to say anything back, all the snappy retorts I would normally have used had slipped away somewhere and I was slack-jawed and fumbling.
“Is this your business to know if she has a boyfriend?” Mateo asked, leaning forward. The polite tone to his voice was totally gone.
Lauren looked surprised but quickly covered it up with a lift of her chin. “I was just curious. Just trying to make conversation. That is our job here, isn’t it? I had seen Vera kissing him last night, so, naturally, I assumed they were together. I mean, why else should I think otherwise?” Her pitch went up at the end, as if to once again make it seem like an innocent question.
“You must come from a very strange country,” Mateo said, “where women are not allowed to kiss men for their own pleasure.”
Was Mateo sticking up for me, for the fact that I had kissed Dave?
Lauren looked appalled. “I am from America. Women are better than men in America and we are allowed to do whatever we want. Frankly, I think you and your country is a little bit backwards, with your politically incorrect machismo and caveman mentality. Not to mention how racist and repressive you are toward the Moors and anyone else who emigrates from Africa.”
He shrugged and ran his hand through his hair. Though his face was neutral and pose relaxed, I could see his chest heaving slightly, as if this was getting him angry. I couldn’t fucking blame him.
“Lauren, please,” he started. “With all respect, I do not think you know what you are talking about. Every country has bad, it doesn’t make the people bad and you can not fully understand something else, whether it is another person or a whole country, without being in the shoes. You, being an American, should at least relate to that.” He spoke in a calm and measured voice and a small part of me found myself falling for him. This wasn’t just a physical thing anymore. The man had strength of self and character and damn if I didn’t love it.
“I don’t understand how being an American has anything to do with it,” she stated. Meanwhile, Sara’s eyes were volleying back and forth between the two and she was sitting on the edge of her seat like it was a tennis match.