Lessons in Gravity (Study Abroad #2) (6 page)

“Was I right?” he says. He ducks down and takes my nipple in his teeth.

The breath stalls in my throat. “Right? Right about what?”

“Your orgasm was better while I was inside you, wasn’t it?”

“Oh. Oh, hell yes. Although all the orgasms you’ve given me were pretty…” I give him the
ok
sign.

Gently he guides himself out of me. “I could feel it. You came
hard
.”

“Now you’re just bragging.”

“I am. I work hard to make that pussy happy.” He pecks my lips. “And now I’m starving. Any chance I could convince you to stay for breakfast? I make pretty solid tortilla, and even better coffee.”

I turn my head on the pillow and look away, focusing my gaze on the enormous windows at the other side of the room. I’m hungry, too—sex with Javier is a workout—and a tortilla, Spain’s version of an omelet with potatoes and veggies, sounds seriously yum. So does a giant cup of café.

But when I look at Javier from the corner of my eye, meeting his kind, sated gaze, panic flutters inside my chest. I don’t like this intimacy. I don’t want this. I don’t like the way it makes me feel.

Suddenly I can’t breathe, and it has nothing to do with orgasms or the delectable bulk of Javier’s body.

I gotta get out of here.

“I don’t do breakfast,” I say, untangling my legs from the sheets.

“You should,” he says. “It’s the most important meal of the day, right? Might soak up a bit of that gin we drank, too.”

“Ugh. Just hearing you say that word makes my stomach hurt. I’m good, thanks.”

He props himself up on his elbow and grins down at me. “What about a shower, then? I’ve got a lovely shower. Big enough for two.”

My eyes trail over the bulge of his bicep, the long, lean muscles in his chest and stomach. I’m tempted. Oh, am I tempted. It could be a repeat of last night. Only this time we’d be doing it up against the wall of his shower, hot water and steam and soap everywh—

We both jump at the sound of my phone. My ringtone blares, filling the quiet, intimate space between us with a garbled country song.

A familiar knot of dread tightens in my belly. That is dad’s ringtone; I set it after a concert we went to together last year. It’s early here, a little before noon if I had to guess, which means it’s
really
early—like five A.M. early—back in Atlanta.

Dad’s called me at this time before. He was a fucking disaster then, and I have no doubt he’s just as messed up this time around.

Shit
.

“Sorry,” I say, attempting to reach over Javier. “I gotta get that.”

Javier extends one of his well-muscled arms and grabs the squalling phone from the nightstand, knocking a handful of opened foil packets to the floor.

He hands me the phone and presses a kiss into the hollow just beneath my ear. “You stay. I’ll go start the shower.”

For a minute I stare at the screen of my phone. My heart hammers in my ears; a lump forms in my throat.
Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry
.

Javier climbs out of bed. I slide my thumb across the bottom of the screen, willing my voice to remain steady. It doesn’t.

“Hey, dad,” I say. I’m aware, vaguely, of the spurt of water as Javier turns on the shower.

“Where the hell have you been?” Somehow dad manages to spit and slur his words all at once. He sounds violently accusatory.

The lump in my throat swells.

“Dad, I’ve been sleeping.”

“I called your phone ten times, Maddie. I’m paying for the goddamned thing. When I call you, I want you to answer. Immediately.”

I sit up, pulling the phone away from my ear.
 

No missed calls. Anger rises in my chest. Anger and a potent, sharp sadness.

“You’re drunk,” I say.

About a month ago, my dad went crawling back to my mother, apologizing, telling her that he was an alcoholic and that he needed help. I knew my dad was a drinker—he was religious about having his two or three bourbon cocktails after work every night—but being away at college for the past few years, I had no idea how out of hand his habit had gotten. He went to his first AA meeting a few weeks back. According to mom, he’s been doing very well.

Until now, I guess.

I remember, with sudden, heartbreaking clarity, the cocktails I saw on the kitchen counter that day I walked in on my dad with that woman. One was half-full, the other empty, finished.

Dad’s had to be the empty one.

“I called your señora,” he says. “She told me you were out with a friend.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I was with Vivian.”

“You’re not with some piece of trash Spaniard, are you?”

My anger flares to new heights. “You know what, dad, that’s none—”

“Hey, Maddie!” Javier calls from the shower, his deep, rumbling voice filling the room. “I hung a clean towel for you on the door. Hurry up!”

My insides turn to ice. Dad would have to be deaf not to hear Javier. Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God.

“Ah,” dad says, smacking his lips. “So I got it wrong.
You’re
the trash. You’re trash, and you’re a slut. I knew sending you to Spain was a bad idea.”

I blink back the tears. They’re angry tears, hot and thick, choking me.

Slut
. To say I hate that word is an understatement. I know dad is blitzed out of his mind, but in my book, it is never,
ever
okay to call someone a slut. Especially when that someone is your daughter. My sex life is and always has been none of his business.

And really, who the hell is he to call me out for sleeping around? He’s a hypocritical son of a bitch, and I don’t know if I’ve ever been angrier with someone, more upset, in my life.
 

I swallow, hard, and lower my voice so Javier won’t hear me.

“That’s rich, coming from you,” I bite out. “Screw you, dad. Seriously screw you. You can’t say shit like that to anyone, least of all me. Don’t call me again when you’re like this, or so help me I’ll record everything and give it to mom’s lawyers.” I swallow, hard. “What is
wrong
with you?”

And what is wrong with
me
that’d make you treat me like this?

“If you hadn’t gone and ratted me out to your mother,” he says, “this divorce would’ve never happened, Madeline. Our family would still be a family.”

I wish I could keep it together, but I’m really crying now, my voice wobbly, unsteady.

“I hate you, you know that?” I say. “I really fucking hate you right now.”

***

Javier

I clamp the doorknob in my hand, brow furrowed as I listen to Maddie cry through the crack in the door.

The water in my massive—and massively sexy, it must be said—shower has finally gotten hot, and, wild from imagining her body swollen and slick under the showerhead, I’d been about to scoop Maddie out of bed when I heard her voice. A voice that wobbled and broke.

A voice that couldn’t be more different from the sexy purr I’d had the pleasure to witness a few minutes ago.

It’s a struggle for her to get the words out. “It’s unfair—it’s so unfair of you to take it out on me,” she says.

My grip on the knob tightens. The bathroom has begun to cloud with steam. The half chub I’ve been sporting in anticipation of my aquatic adventure with Maddie disappears.

I hate to assume—obviously there’s quite a bit going on here—but Maddie’s father sounds like a dick. What in the world is he saying to her to make her upset like this? What happened between them?

I don’t understand. This Maddie, this broken girl pleading with her father on the phone, can’t possibly be the same girl who so suavely picked me up last night and blew my mind with some of the best, most carelessly fun sex I’ve had in a while.

This
girl cares. She cares enough to fight back instead of just hanging up; she cares deeply enough to be hurt by whatever is going on with her father.

Maybe she cares too much.

This girl is vulnerable in a way the Maddie I spent last night with wasn’t.

There’s a pause in her end of the conversation. I lean forward, straining to hear. She sniffs, sighs.

“Stop,” she says at last. “Go to bed, dad. And please,
please
don’t call me again when you’re like this. I don’t have the time—I just. I gotta go.”

 
I hear the
click
of her phone as she blanks her screen, hanging up. I haven’t a clue about the situation, I know, but still, I have to squash the desire to go to her and grab her phone and call her father myself so I can give him a piece of my mind. Nothing she could’ve done merited the way he’s made her feel.

Nothing.

Peeking through the crack, I see Maddie wipe her face with the pads of her fingers and reach for her clothes, which are in a pile on a nearby chair.

Behind me, the shower is still on.

Damn it.

Quickly wrapping a towel around my waist, I duck into the bedroom.

“Hey,” I say, softly. “Everything all right?”

Maddie looks up, startled, her eyes full of hurt. My heart turns over in my chest.

“Maddie—”

She turns away from me, guiding her dress over her head.

“What did you hear?” she says. Her voice is flat, dead almost.

“A few things.” I venture a step closer. “Are you okay?”

She grabs her phone and stuffs it in her purse, jamming her feet into her high-heeled shoes.

“I’m fine,” she says, moving toward the door. She doesn’t look at me. “Thanks for last night, Javier. I had fun. See you later.”

For a second I just stand there, dumbfounded, as Maddie exits my room and clomps down the stairs. The 180 she just pulled is making my head spin—she went from hot and soft to cold as ice in the space of five minutes.

I don’t know what to do.
 

“That’s all you have to say after—after last night? After what I just heard?” I follow her, blinking at the onslaught of late morning light as I descend the staircase and hurry into my kitchen. “Maddie, you’re not all right.”

She doesn’t respond, she just keeps moving through the kitchen into the tiny foyer.
 

“Maddie,” I say as I catch up to her, grabbing her arm. “Wait, please. At least let me give you a jacket—”

“You and your damn jackets,” she mutters and twists out of my grasp. “Really, I’ll be okay.”

“No you won’t.” I tug open the coat closet beside the front door. “It’s twenty degrees outside and your dress is…hardly a dress. Here, take this—”

But she’s already out the door, disappearing into a stairwell before I can so much as blink.

“Maddie!” I call after her, but I know she’s already gone.

What
the
fuck
?

Chasing her would be a waste of time—it’d just make her angrier, more upset, and that’s the last thing I want to do—but still, it’s hard to close the door on her.
 

Tugging a hand through my hair—yikes, I’ve got some serious bed head going on—I close the door, slide the lock into the bolt, and hang up my bomber back in the closet.

My hangover hits me all at once. My head throbs; my dick hurts. Maddie and I fucked too much, if that’s even possible, and now I’m tired and hungry and confused as hell.

The shower is still on.

I can’t stop thinking about her as I pad back upstairs to my bedroom. What is her story? What tore her family apart? Why does her father blame her for what happened?

And how can someone so confident, so sexy and fearless, be so
vulnerable
at the same time?

I pull the charger from my phone and scroll through my contacts.

Rafa picks up on the third ring.

Hello Javi,
he says in Spanish. His voice is thick with sleep. Shit, I hope I didn’t wake him up. But this can’t wait.
Everything okay? It’s kind of early.

“Tell me about Maddie,” I say.

Chapter 5

Javier

One Week Later

A bell jangles above my head as I step inside the café. My stomach rumbles at the homey smells of steamed milk and freshly baked pastry. You couldn’t have paid me to go out to the discotecas last night—if I wasn’t into clubbing before the whole Maddie thing happened, I’m definitely not into it now—but you’d think I was a maniac on the dance floor for how hungry I am this morning.

Rafa waves to me from the counter. I smile. I love this, meeting some family for coffee on a Saturday morning. It’s amazing how much better you feel when you’re surrounded by familiar faces. Faces that belong to people who have known you for your whole life.

We order espresso and croissants, and Rafa leads me to a big table near the windows that overlook the street. It’s only November, but already the sidewalks bustle with holiday shoppers. This is my favorite time of year—the anticipation, the excitement, the way Madrid looks all decked out for Christmas. Really gets me in the spirit, I guess.