Lessons in Gravity (Study Abroad #2) (19 page)

We take a sip. The wine is very good, fruit-forward, jammy on my tongue. Warm.

“You like it?” he asks, hopefully.

“I love it,” I say. Of course I love it.

An awkward beat of silence passes between us. I finally pull my hand from Javier’s, tucking the money back into my wallet.

“So how’s the writing going? The thesis?” he asks.

I nod. Take another sip of wine. “It’s going well. Really well, considering all the material I’ve seen at the monastery. At this rate, I’ll be able to put together a pretty amazing paper. If, of course, all goes well with my research.”

“I’ll do everything I can to see that it does.”

I tuck my hair behind my ear and look at him. “C’mon, Javier, you
have
to stop being so fucking great.” He’s sitting close now, so close I can smell the cinnamon on his breath. My gaze flicks to his lips. Oh, those lips. I remember what those lips can do. “It’s getting a little annoying.”

He’s grinning again, his dimples making a delicious appearance. “Sorry not sorry. I like helping you.”

Oh, God, it’s like an arrow right through my heart.

“You help me, too, you know,” he says. “The fact that you like my nameless band so much keeps me motivated. I’ve written more songs in the past few weeks than I have—well, ever.”

I feel like I’m going to cry.

Stop it stop it stop it right now
.

“Your new band is awesome, Javier,” I manage. “I will be first in line to buy the album.”

He looks at me. “I know.”

He pours us each another glass of wine. So much for the one drink thing.

“And how are things besides?” he says, his voice low. “With you. With your family.”

I look at him. And look at him. It overwhelms me, suddenly, the need to tell him. To share with him what I haven’t shared with anyone else. I can’t keep pretending; it’s exhausting, for one thing, and it’s not fair to Javier for another. He’s been so good to me. So patient and understanding.

He already knows I’m hot a mess anyway. That’s certainly no secret, not after I tumbled out of his bed in tears following a horrible conversation with my dad.

Javier is kind. He is a good listener. And he cares. I don’t get it, I don’t understand
why
he cares. But the fact that he does makes me feel…safe, I guess.

And if telling him my deepest darkest fears somehow blows up in my face, it really doesn’t matter, does it? I go back to the states in a month. Even if I am lucky enough to come back to Spain for graduate school, Javier will probably be married to Carmen by then. Whatever the future holds, I’ll never see him again.

That thought makes my heart twist painfully inside my chest.

I set down my wine and I take a warrior breath and I face him.

And then I tell him everything.

***

Javier

As I listen, I resist the urge to slide my palm beneath the curtain of Maddie’s hair, to wrap my fingers around the warm nape of her neck, gently, a reminder that I’m here, that she’s safe with me, that it’s okay to cry.

But I don’t want to scare her. She needs to tell her story, and I am more than happy to listen as she does.

I watch her struggle not to cry, to stay strong as she tells me her heart’s been ripped out and stepped on and torn to pieces by her pendejo of a father.
You don’t have to be strong with me
, I want to tell her.
You don’t have to pretend with me
.

Maddie talks, I listen. It all makes sense now. She’s not looking for “happily ever after” because it doesn’t exist in her world. She thought it did. She thought her parents found happily ever after. But they lost it when her dad betrayed their family. Maddie lost her sense of self—her sense of worth—when her dad treated her like a piece of shit.

What’s that saying? It’s better never to have had something than to have it and lose it?

Maddie had everything, her family had everything, and then she lost it all.

I can’t imagine how eviscerating that loss must be for her.

Disappointment seeps into my chest, a wet, cold weight. Maddie is far too young, and far too lovely, to believe her dreams are dead. I hate the idea of her closing herself off to the world, to the possibility of happiness, just because her parents didn’t find it with each other.
 

I hate that she won’t give me a chance to prove her wrong.

My heart feels made of glass, suddenly; and Maddie—Maddie keeps coming at me with the hammer of her sadness and loneliness and anger. I’ll let her shatter my heart, I will, if only because I can’t stand the idea of her being heartbroken alone.

“Is this why your thesis is so important?” I meet her eyes. “Your way of running from home? Getting into a graduate program in a foreign country so you don’t ever have to go back?”

A single tear spills over the ledge of her thick, dark lashes. Maddie lifts her shoulder, dashes it across her cheek. “Something like that. The opposite of what you’re trying to do, basically, after being on the road for so long. I’m trying to get away from home. You’re trying to get back.”

Her words hang between us. She might as well be saying,
See? See why we’d never work?

It makes sense. We’re looking for wildly different things. I believe in home. Maddie doesn’t.

Why, then, do we get on so well? Why do I want to wrap her in my arms and hold her right here, in the middle of a crowded bar?

And why does she have to fall in love with my world when she can’t—she won’t—fall in love with me?

I dig a hand through my hair, giving it a good tug.
 

I want a cigarette. Badly.

“I’m sorry,” I say when she finishes. “I don’t know what to say except that I’m really fucking sorry that you’re going through this. You don’t have to do it alone, you know.”

“I know.” She finishes her wine. I pour her another glass. “But I want to. I should. For God’s sake, Javier, do you not see what a mess I am? No one deserves to be subjected to all this baggage I’m carrying around.”

“You deserve some help with that baggage,” I say. “Everyone deserves some help from their friends. Their family.”

She shrugs, sipping her wine. She doesn’t believe me, but I don’t want to press her. Not when she’s so vulnerable.

“Anyway.” Maddie sighs, her shoulders slumping. “Thanks for listening. I really appreciate it, Javier. You’re a really, really wonderful friend.”

I furrow my brow. “Whoa whoa whoa. Don’t get ahead of yourself, cowgirl. We’re
friends
now?”

“Yes.” She nods. “Friends with a mutual interest in Spanish history and good music.”

I look at her from the corner of my eye. “As long as that music isn’t country.”

“Just you wait,” she replies, the sadness in her eyes replaced by a mischievous gleam. “I’ll make a believer of you yet.”

I grin. “We’ll see. In the meantime, let’s order some food—your stomach’s been growling for half an hour.”

“Oh!” Maddie wraps her arms around her middle. “Oh,
eff,
that’s embarrassing. I forgot to eat lunch. Which worked out, actually, because otherwise I would’ve narfed all over your plane.”

“Narfed,” I say. “That’s one I haven’t heard. It’s like barfed, right, but better?”

It’s her turn to grin. “Exactly.”

***

The restaurant is close to Maddie’s apartment, so we walk the few blocks to Calle de Villenueva
together, huddled against the cold. The city has come alive for the holidays, the avenues decked out in twinkling lights that form a cathedral-like ceiling above our heads.

“You guys really go all out for Christmas,” Maddie says, teeth chattering.

I move a bit closer to her, and I bite back a smile of surprise when she curls closer to me, too, our breath mingling in a pale cloud in front of our faces. I pop a few more mints in my mouth, chewing through them in half a second.

“It’s brilliant, isn’t it?” I say.

“It is,” she says. “More than that. It’s magical.”

My smile widens. She really is head over heels in love with Madrid. The place I come from, the place I love, too.

We slow our pace when we reach her street.

“Javier,” she says softly. She loops her arm through mine, burying her face into the sleeve of my jacket. “I appreciate you listening tonight. That was really awesome of you. I understand if you want to run away screaming, though. It’s…a lot, I know.”

My heart begins to pound.

“I mean,
you
practically ran screaming from
me
. So I guess it’s only fair if I return the favor,” I say.

I resist the urge to wince at my terrible joke. I’m a fucking idiot.

But Maddie just laughs. “Seriously, Javi, I wouldn’t blame you.”

Javi
. She’s never called me that before. I like the sound of my nickname on her lips; it’s what my family calls me. My good friends, too.

It rushes over me then, a tidal wave of lust and like and holy fuck I want to reach out and pull her to me and kiss her until the tears come, tears of release, of overwhelmed relief.

I want to hear that name on her tongue again, this time breathless, a plea.

My heart turns over in my chest, and in that moment I know, I
know
, that I’m in over my head. It isn’t supposed to happen so fast, and it isn’t supposed to happen with someone who’s on the run.

But it’s happening between us, me and Maddie, and there is nothing I can do to stop it.

She draws to a stop a few feet from her door. The soft light from a nearby street lamp gilds her skin, turns her eyes into translucent pools of blue. Tonight they’re very full. More beautiful than ever.

A hand grips my heart and squeezes.

Maddie is still curled close against me.
 

Come home with me tonight
, I want to murmur into her hair.
Be with me, Maddie. Let me have you. Let me in.

She looks up at me. “Thanks again for today. I had a really, really great time. Whenever you want to lose gravity again, you know who to call.”

I let out a half-hearted scoff as I meet her eyes. “Is tomorrow too soon?”

“I have class,” she says, smiling. Her mouth is inches from mine. My body throbs with the desire to pull her to me, claim those lips as my own.

That’s right
, I say in Spanish.
I forgot today is Sunday.

Maddie bites her lip.
You’re using your Spanish. What are you trying to do, seduce me?

The laughter fades from her gaze as I look down at her.

“No. No quiero seducirte, Maddie.”
I don’t want to seduce you
.

She wrinkles her forehead. “Then what
do
you want?”

I search her eyes.

And then I take her face in my trembling hands and duck my head and cover her mouth with mine.

This.

This is what I want.

Chapter 14

Maddie

My pulse blares through my body, a sensation that fills my ears, my limbs, my lips. My thoughts scatter in a thousand directions, my mind captured by the rush of his kiss.

Javier’s kiss. It’s slow and it’s patient and it’s thorough, not at all like the hurried, almost violent kisses we shared the night we hooked up. This kiss is different.

This kiss makes my heart sing.

There’s a tug in the back of my head, a warning that I shouldn’t let Javier kiss me like this. I definitely shouldn’t kiss him back.

But I do. Oh, I do, I sink into his kiss, I surrender to the gentle pull of his mouth and the press of his lips and the sting of cinnamon on his tongue.

His hands are shaking on my face. I reach up, cover them with my own, curling my fingers into the crook between his thumb and forefinger. They stop shaking, his hands.

Javier smiles against my mouth, pulling back. He brushes his nose against mine. I suck in a breath as a shiver moves through me, a tremor that tightens the muscles in the small of my back.

“Gracias,” he murmurs.
That’s better.

Much
, I say, and touch my lips to his, slipping my tongue into the velvet seam of his mouth.

His kiss is kind but deep; considerate but hungry. His stubble scratches my chin as he angles his head, but I don’t care, I am losing myself in him, forgetting all the things that weigh me down, forgetting the hurt and the dread that sits like a stone inside my chest. His kiss makes me feel light.

He makes me feel like I can fly. And considering I’ve crawled my way through these past few months, that’s a heady proposition.
 

Keep kissing me
, I beg with my lips.
Please, Javier, please don’t stop.

I know the things happening inside my head and my heart are dangerous. I haven’t allowed myself to feel them for a while now, and there’s a reason for that. Many reasons, all of them good.

But I couldn’t stop kissing Javier if my life depended on it.