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

I’ve always thought your twenties were all about finding yourself.

But at almost twenty-one, I feel more lost than ever.
 

My one saving grace this semester is that I’m four thousand miles away from the broken place I come from. Madrid, thank Dios, is the perfect distraction; the perfect place to escape, for a little while, the ever-expanding universe of hurt inside me. It’s all about long, lingering meals with my friends, the Madrileñas
,
that always include too much vino and talk of penises; an awesome library at San Pedro University that I’m using to put together some ideas for a thesis proposal; and a hedonistic club culture that encourages anonymous encounters with handsomely Eurotrash Spaniards.

Encounters I am
all
too happy to partake in. After crushing, disastrously, on Rafa, I realized a relationship wouldn’t do this body good anyway. I don’t need a boyfriend. I need a hook up—many hook ups—where the only faith required is in a guy’s ability to make me come.

And oh, are Madrileños good at that.
 

From her perch in the corner, Vivian glances over her shoulder and meets my eyes. She grins, the kind of grin that lights up her face, and that happy-squidgy-best-friend feeling fills me to the brim. It never gets old, does it, the happiness you feel seeing someone you know and love across the room?

“Hey lady!” she says, her grin widening to a smile as I wrap her in a quick hug. “Holy shit you’re cold. We gotta warm you up with some liquor.”

Rafa leans over the table, pressing the standard Spanish
kisskiss
into my cheeks. “Buenas noches, Maddie. How are you feeling?”

Viv and Rafa look at me, hopefully, as they wait for my answer.

Vivian has been
my
shoulder to cry on this semester. Aside from our little snafu with Rafa, she’s played her BFF role with aplomb. Granted, I haven’t told her everything. She knows my parents are splitting, and that it’s pretty nasty. But she doesn’t know about my dad cheating or him blaming me for ruining the family every time we talk.
 

It just hurts too much to talk about, especially the part about me catching my dad in the act; the part about him threatening me, telling me it would be
my
fault if our family fell apart. I haven’t told her that my mom takes a handful of pills every morning just to get through the day.

I don’t want to think about the consequences of me telling my mom about dad and his secretary, and I
definitely
don’t want to talk about it. Even Vivian can’t help me get over my secret fear that dad treats me like shit because I
am
shit. I mean, maybe I don’t deserve respect. Or love. What kind of daughter ruins her mother’s life and destroys what was once a happy family?

No, I don’t want to talk about these things, even with someone as cool and understanding as Viv.

I swallow, hard, and pull my lips into a smile. “I’m feeling good. A little tired, but better than last week. How about you guys? What’s new and exciting?”

“I hope you don’t mind,” Rafa says. “But I invited my uncle, Javier, to join us. For one drink only, he says the weather is very good tomorrow so he wants to fly.”

My eyes flick to the illuminated shelves of liquor on the far wall. “Fly? Is he, like, a pilot or something?”

Rafa nods. “He has his own plane, too. Little plane, but it is still very fun. He is just back from a long trip for business, and he hasn’t been able to fly for many months. I am excited for you chicas to meet him. He asked me and Vivian to fly with him, but we’ve got tickets to the fútbol match tomorrow.” Rafa offers me that lady killer grin of his. “Maybe Maddie can go with Javier?”

“That wouldn’t be awkward at all,” I say, “being alone on a tiny little plane with your uncle who I’ve never met.”

“You’re going to like Javier. He is not like other uncles.”

I shrug. Even if Javier has George Clooney’s salt-and-pepper smexiness, mature guys aren’t exactly my thing at the moment. I’m into dudes who are young, and eager to please. It’s shallow and it’s stupid, I know, but hey, they get the dirty job done. I’ve slept with quite a few wonderfully foreign dudes in the past month, and I have yet to be disappointed.

I order a gintonic from the bar. It’s delicious, and it is fuerte—strong, the only way Madrileños like their liquor drinks—so strong I already feel the gin working its black magic on my sluggish brain.

My body and my mood begin to thaw.

I offer Viv a small grin. “I like this little Saturday night tradition. You guys take care of your third wheel, and I appreciate that.”

She reaches across the table and flicks her thumb across my top lip, wiping away a stray chunk of lime. The gesture is so sweet, so familiar, I have to look away. “Wouldn’t be Saturday night without you,” she says. “We started that tradition freshman year, remember? Just because we’re in Spain—”

“And just because you sleep over at your super hot Spanish boyfriend’s apartment,” I say.

“Right. Just because things are a little different doesn’t mean the tradition has to change.”

Rafa sets his drink on the table and leans down on his elbows. “I guess I’m the third wheel, then, aren’t I? I should be thanking
you”—
he looks at me—“for letting me crash
your
Saturday night with Vivian.”

I’m about to make fun of Rafa for being such a relentlessly cute cheeseball when a gust of cold air hits me. Skin prickling with goose bumps, I glance toward the entrance hall.

A broad-shouldered guy strides into the club, hands tucked into the pockets of his bomber jacket. The collar is turned up against the cold; the leather is lovingly scarred, distressed in a way a machine couldn’t replicate.

I can’t see his face—he’s looking away from us, searching the other side of the bar—but something about the way he’s built, the dark scuff that covers the square lines of his jaw, catches my wandering eye.

He’s built like a quarterback, deliciously thick about the shoulders and arms and chest. Not huge, just the
very
right side of athletic. But his chocolate brown hair—cropped close at the sides, a combed swoop of longer hair at the top—along with all that scruff scream hot hipster. His clothes are somewhere in between: dark fitted jeans, tidy suede boots, the hem of a button-down shirt peeking from underneath the bottom of his jacket. It’s like he’s part Madrileño, part rookie NFL player, part hipster country music star.

I’m intrigued.

Who are you
, I wonder.
What is your story?

And would you like to get naked with me tonight?

He turns his head and our gazes collide. I look, and he looks, and we both keep looking.
 

My stomach does a backflip. He is
so
handsome. Hot. He his handsome
and
hot—he walks that fine line with finesse. His eyes, light brown, burn amber in the red light of the bar.

I know in the space of a single heartbeat that I am going to fuck this delectable Madrileño tonight. I am shameless in my pursuit. When I want a guy, I have him.

And I
want
this man. Badly. My blood warms as I imagine the way he’ll move. The way he’ll taste.

I imagine the blinding, forceful blankness of my orgasm.

Hell
yes
. He’d be my hottest conquest yet.

“Are you okay?” Viv is asking me.

I don’t need to answer her. She glances over her shoulder and she, too, is rendered speechless by this guy’s hot-handsomeness.

My stomach flips again when señor NFL hipster hot body flashes a smile of recognition and starts walking toward us.

No way. He can’t be.

No way this guy is—

“Tío!” Rafa stands and gathers his
uncle
in a hug.

I blink.
This
guy is Rafa’s uncle? It doesn’t make sense; they’re practically the same age. From what I can tell, Javier is twenty-four, maybe twenty-five, tops.

Viv turns around and meets my eyes. She’s thinking it, too.
How is this Uncle Javier? And how is he so ridiculously good-looking?

He’s related to Rafa, that’s how. The Montoyas must have a pretty sick gene pool to make such handsome babies.

Rafa introduces Javier to Vivian, who, like me, is still staring at him in mute adoration-slash-confusion. He smiles, a blinding, half goofy, half devastating thing that works two grooves into the stubble on either side of his mouth.

“Wow,” she says at last, standing. “Just. Um, wow. I gotta be honest, Javier, you are not at all what I was expecting.”

“Javier is more like a brother to me,” Rafa explains. “It is a joke, yes?, that I call him uncle, really, because we are almost the same age. My grandfather, he married again when he was very old to a younger woman. They had a small family. Javier is part of that family.”

Viv’s brows snap together. “How much younger are you than Rafa’s—”

“Father?” Javier says. His voice is deep, a little gravelly. A lot sexy. “I am twenty four now, so that is, what, Rafael, twenty two years between me and my brother?”

“Wow,” Viv says.

“
Wow
,” I say, getting up.

Javier’s turns his gaze on me. A rush of tingly awareness moves from my head to my toes. It’s powerful, his gaze, not because it makes me feel like he can see what I’m wearing underneath my clothes (a lacy bra and no underwear; I always come to Ático prepared).

It’s powerful because there’s something honest about it. A little playful.

Granted, I’ve only been ogling him for one and a half minutes, but he’s got this easy, masculine confidence that makes me think Tío Javier isn’t one to hide what he’s feeling.

I like it, his straightforward masculinity; the virile energy simmering behind his brown eyes.

I like it a lot.

I step around the table to stand beside Viv, in front of Javier. “Javier, this is Maddie Lucas, my best friend,” she says.

Before I can do the awkward American thing and offer him my hand, Uncle Javier leans forward and greets me in the Madrileño way, pressing quick kisses into either of my cheeks. The stubble of his beard brushes my skin; the scent of cinnamon mints trails in his wake as he pulls away.

I love a lot of things about studying abroad in Spain.

The double-kiss greeting, though, has to be the thing I love most.

“Maddie,” he says, my name a pleasant rumble that rolls off his tongue. “Encantado.”

It’s the Spanish equivalent of “nice to meet you”, but when Uncle Javier says it in his husky, come-hither voice, it sounds like an invitation to join the mile high club in this plane he supposedly owns.

I am so,
so game. I’ve never done it on a plane before. I bet it’s fantastic.

I meet his gaze head on with the sauciest smirk I can muster. “
Very
nice to meet you, Javier.”

He nods at my empty glass. “Might I get you another drink, Maddie? What is that, a G and T?”

His English is better—much better—than Rafa’s, and tinged with a British accent. Hearing a Spanish dude speak the Queen’s English gives me a sense of cultural vertigo, but I mean that in the best way possible. Europe—the world, really—can be such a cool melting pot.

“Yes,” I say. “It’s a gin and tonic. Another would be great—thank you very much.”
 

“Vale,” Uncle Javier says. I love that word, so particular to Madrid, and one Madrileños use to glorious excess. It can mean everything from “okay” to “cool” to “fine by me”.
 

Javier shrugs out of his jacket, revealing more of that physique that is
definitely
fine by me. I watch, pulse throbbing, as he rolls back his shoulders and shrugs out of his bomber jacket. He’s wearing a white button-down that hugs the rounded slopes of his shoulders and arms; he cuffs his wrists in his hands and slides the rolled sleeves up his arms, baring tan forearms ridged with sinew and vein.

I don’t bother to hide my grin of appreciation.

He catches me checking him out. He holds my gaze for one beat, then another. I bite my lip. He looks away. He runs a hand down his face, trying—and failing—to hide a small, enticingly secret smile.

“C’mon, Rafa,” Javier says, his eyes flicking to meet mine. “Let’s grab those drinks—I do believe Maddie is quite thirsty.”

Oh, yes.

A million times yes.

I am definitely going to fuck Javier tonight.

Chapter 2

Maddie

I watch Javier’s broad back disappear into the crowd. My body still rings with the memory of his lips on my skin. Just that brief touch—along with some serious eye fucking—and I am hornier than I’ve been in a long time.

“Do you know how often Javier’s in town?” I ask, turning back to Viv.

“I don’t. Not often, from what I hear.”

I bite my lip. “Perfect.”

She pins me with a look.

A look I’ve come to know and loathe.

“What?” I say, jabbing my straw into the ice at the bottom of my glass.

“You’re going to sleep with him, aren’t you?”

“I hope so. He’s ridiculously hot.” I meet her eyes. “C’mon, Viv, I haven’t fooled around with someone in more than a week! I’m practically dying over here.”