David
When I saw her going through security, I couldn’t believe it. What exactly? I don’t know. I felt lucky and stupid. Those sad eyes, the saddest in the club, were shining, and…I felt like I had something to do with it. For someone who had never done anything important, it was very refreshing.
She was wearing low-waist black pants, a black shirt with colorful embroidery, huge sunglasses that she had definitely forgotten she still had on, a jean jacket, and a bag whose logo I didn’t recognize but I would bet cost more than rent on a place I could never afford anyway. But that was part of her charm. She didn’t care how much what she was wearing cost; it wasn’t important to her. What was important to her was looking into your eyes and asking you what songs you would listen to on a desert island. I had never met anyone who wanted to fade into the crowd more than her, and she wasn’t even aware of it.
When I got her message telling me she had changed her mind, all I could do was smile. The night before, just as I was falling asleep, she texted me and said that might happen.
My sister smells a rat. Send me a message when you have everything figured out, and if I answer that it’d be better to let it be, ignore it. I’d never say that through text. It’ll just be so Candela leaves me alone, okay?
Margot said she wasn’t pretty enough or smart enough, but it seemed to me that she didn’t even know what she was capable of. She was convinced that what everyone else said was true and that her opinion should lie dormant, but something was starting to wake up.
Domi and Ivan lost their minds when I said I was going to Greece with her. Ivan got a little freaked out and warned me, pretty awkwardly, that accepting things in exchange for sex was prostitution. The guffaw that slipped out made him blink, taken aback. Domi, on the other hand, seemed excited.
“Is it bad that I accepted?” I asked her, a little worried.
“She can afford it, David.”
“But how do we know that? I mean…”
“She has a Louis Vuitton bag, Chanel sandals, and a six-figure engagement ring. David, whoever this girl is, she can afford it.”
“But I probably shouldn’t have accepted, right?”
“Money can’t buy everything.” She smiled sadly. “What if she needs someone who helps her feel like you make her feel? What if this trip doesn’t make sense on her own? What if she convinced herself that she matters for what she has and not who she is? Go to Greece and enjoy it.”
At the risk of being a boy toy. At the risk of turning into the temporary plaything for a loaded girl. At the risk that I might be wrong about Margot and she might turn out to be an insane whore…yeah, I would go. And I would enjoy it. And yet…for now I didn’t want to announce it on the WhatsApp group chat from the village because I didn’t know how to explain it without sounding too off-the-wall.
During the flight, while she drank champagne, I glanced over a guide she had downloaded on her iPad, and she told me how we were going to arrange everything in the hotels so we didn’t “raise suspicions.” I found myself thinking this wasn’t so bad. I will say, though I would deny it in front of anyone, that she was beautiful in a way that only those who are beautiful both inside and out can be. Her huge brown, slightly sad eyes were a reflection of the little girl still curled up inside her, waiting for a hug. Her lips, tiny and soft, looked even prettier when she smiled. Her body, which, despite its somewhat helpless appearance, revealed the anatomy of a woman whose weapons I didn’t yet know, was starting to catch my attention a little too. She had a super tiny waist, which launched out into round hips, and two breasts that weren’t very large but were proud and perky.
“Are you listening to me?” she asked, punching me on the arm.
No, I was thinking about her topless.
But don’t get it twisted. I respected her. Fuck, I really respected her. I didn’t know what that girl had done to me, but she made me serve her my life on a silver platter so she could organize it and transform it into what she would consider more satisfactory. I trusted her blindly… Is there more honest proof of respect?
When we got there, I was surprised by the Athens cityscape; I hadn’t been expecting something so…Mediterranean. Pretty stupid of me. Well, not that or the uniformed guy who greeted us, taking charge of our luggage.
“Margot…” I whispered. She was looking at her phone.
“Candela is flipping out.”
“Margot…” I repeated. “All this must be pretty expensive.”
She looked at me, surprised. “Why are you thinking about that? Don’t worry about money. It’s all paid for already, and, anyway, it’s not important.”
“But Margot…a private transfer and everything?”
She sucked her teeth, sighed, put a hand on her hip, and said: “Well…it’s a company car. They didn’t pay for the trip, but…let’s just say I have access to certain perks, okay? In reality, it’s…let’s say free.”
“It’s not free, don’t lie. Someone has to pay this gentleman…”
“David.” She put her hand on my face. “It’s a business expense, and don’t worry because I already handed over my whole life to pay it back.”
I don’t know if she convinced me. All I know is I wanted to stop thinking about it. I wasn’t in it for the luxury, just the experience, and I should have focused on that, right?
When we went into the hotel, a bellhop ran out to grab our bags. But separately, of course. We pretended not to know each other despite the fact that we had just gotten out of the same car. Why? Well, I didn’t know much about Margot’s life at the time, so I thought it was just pure paranoia. One more cute quirk. We stood at the reception desk with our passports, side by side, and snuck each other smiles as they helped us.
I got the feeling we had the best rooms in the whole hotel. Especially when staff saw our reservation and then changed their behavior, suddenly becoming downright obsequious. I don’t know if I felt uncomfortable because these people deduced they should behave like this with guests like us or because I was actually a guest like us. I was reassured by the fact that Margot didn’t look delighted either.
“It’s just a formality,” she whispered in a muffled and discreet way.
“Girl…what the hell do you do for a living?”
She didn’t answer; she just hung her head while they made out the key to her room to the name of one Ana Ortiz. I was completely lost. I would have bet I had gone on a trip with the daughter of a fucking mob boss…
The hotel seemed typical to me: the kind of typical they always showed in movies, where people with money come and go, the types people like me normally opened doors for. As we walked through the corridor in silence, all the words Idoia had said to me in our breakup were echoing in my head. And everything that could be extrapolated from them: mediocre, starving, thrown away, no future. Maybe she was right. I couldn’t afford any of this, and let’s face it, Idoia liked luxury. She wasn’t like Margot, who seemed to come by it naturally. Idoia always said she liked expensive things. Every two months or so, she would make what she called “an investment,” which boiled down to her buying a bag with a price tag I found offensive.
“Are you okay?” Margot asked softly.
“Yes, but I feel like…like I’m scamming someone. I didn’t earn this. I don’t know if that makes sense.”
“Of course it makes sense.” She smiled at me. “I feel like that every day.”
“I never thought I’d travel like this.”
Margot stopped at the door to her room, the door next to mine. She looked around us in case our luggage was already being brought up, but there was nobody in the carpeted hall. She held her hand out to me, and I grabbed her fingers.
“Who cares how we do it? The destination is all that matters.”
“And the company,” I added.
“I don’t want you to judge me based on the details of this trip.”
“I won’t.”
“We’re not what we have. We’re just what we feel.”
“And what we do.”
I went over and kissed her forehead, putting my hands on her head. It was a slow movement. Somehow it felt intimate, very intimate.
We opened our respective doors just as footsteps announced the bellhop’s arrival.
The room had hidden treasures. Money doesn’t just pay for gold and luxury finishes but also air and views, judging by what you could see from the small balcony; the majestic and imposing Acropolis was right there. I got a lump in my throat and had to swallow it, I admit it. Well, actually I had to stifle a huge desire to cry that made me feel embarrassed. I clung to the railing, took a deep breath, and took out my shitty phone to take a picture, though, just like the moon, the photos could never do it justice.
I only unpacked three or four things from my suitcase before I snuck down the hallway to Margot’s room. She opened the door with her phone pressed to her ear, in what seemed like a work call, one of those tense and cold ones you want to hang up from as soon as possible. But I soon found out it was actually a mother-daughter chat.
“It’s nobody, they’re just bringing in my suitcases.” She took a deep breath, and I closed the door carefully. “Yes, yes. The flight was good. The hotel too.” She paused. Rolled her eyes. “Okay, Mother. Goodbye.”
“You guys have such a sweet relationship,” I said sarcastically after she threw the phone on the bed.
“My mother is a hemorrhoid.”
I let out a chortle and sat on her bed. The room was exactly like mine: huge, a little tasteless, but gleaming and with incredible views. I glanced at the opulent white-marble bathroom, where Margot had already unpacked a few toiletry bags.
“I know we’re going to wander around the city now, but…all I can think about is getting in there,” I said, pointing to one of those rain showers.
“David…you want to take a shower? Take one!” She smiled. “This is a vacation, and on vacation you can eat breakfast at three in the afternoon and drink wine at eleven in the morning.”
I imagined how her face would look if, following her advice, I stripped naked right there and jumped into the shower. I laughed.
She laughed too, and I thought her laughter was just a reflex, but she quickly made it clear that she knew me better than I thought: “I was talking about yours, you sketchball. Don’t even think about it.”
We ate moussaka, drank beer, and had ice cream for dessert, lost in the alleys of a city that didn’t belong to us and that seemed chaotic and full to the brim with people like us, who usurped the place for photos, toasts, and souvenirs. I hate how tourists stain every place we tread with compulsive footprints, even if we don’t realize it. Even though we link arms with the person walking next to us, following their ankles and feet in those black Converse that were already getting a little dirty. Margot’s.
It was hot…very hot. We walked a lot, checking which ruins we were stumbling over on our phones. And as much as I have tried to conjure the memory of what we did or what we talked about, I can’t. The only things that come to mind are the image of Margot laughing, complaining about the heat, pointing at something with awe, chugging a whole bottle of water in one go, holding my arm so she wouldn’t trip. I think I was overwhelmed. No one had ever given me something so big. And I don’t mean luxuries, though it’s good to realize you never needed to be picked up in a nice car at the airport or have your bags carried for you. I mean what money really buys: time. But for yourself.
The next day, very early, we had planned to visit the Acropolis, and between walks and pit stops for a drink, we had already seen a good chunk of everything Margot had written down for the first day. We would only be in Athens for one more day before we left for Santorini, but she turned to me, smiling, and proposed: “Why don’t we go back to the hotel and go for a swim?”
Maybe we should have forced ourselves to be good tourists and consult the guidebook, but all the places they proposed on lists of “what to see in one day” fell by the wayside because Margot and I wanted to go for a swim.
The rooftop had a restaurant and a pool surrounded by sun loungers, but they were all taken when we arrived, so we left our stuff in a corner and peeled off our clothes. We had stopped by the room to change, and I was already wearing my bathing suit, a slightly faded red one, so all I had to do was take off my shirt. She had put on a simple black dress like a long T-shirt, and when she took it off, I understood why she had laughed at the sight of my bathing suit: hers was the same color. We hurled ourselves into the glass-walled pool and let out a yelp that was covered by a couple of children who were racing and ducking down. The water was weirdly freezing considering how hot the city was.
“Hello?” Margot said with her eyes wide. “Can you explain this frostbite?”
I felt weird looking away, but her nipples were showing through her bathing suit, and it was hard for me to look at her face. I felt like a dick for noticing them…small and dark, crowning two breasts that seemed to have shrunk in the cold water.
“Two free chairs!” I exclaimed, looking behind her.
I backed away with the excuse of grabbing them before anyone else saw them, but really I had to get away because I didn’t want to look at her like that. No. I just wanted to look at Idoia like that, and thinking about Margot like that would be dirty.
She ordered a bottle of cold white wine without even looking at the price list, and we lay down while the sun set over the city. In silence. Occasionally tossing peanuts to annoy each other.
I watched her settle in her lounger, close her eyes, sigh…and I wondered what her life was really like. Was she used to these luxuries? How could I feel so comfortable with someone so different than me? What were we, Lady and the Tramp? Maybe I shouldn’t have accepted this trip.
Then Margot turned back toward me and looked at me. I don’t mean she glanced over at me. No. I mean she looked at me. Like I was glass and she could see through my skin. Like my thoughts had traveled to her lips in the form of a question: “Do you regret coming?”
“No,” I said quickly, but for the moment I wasn’t ready to say anything else.
“No, but…?”
“But it scares me,” I added.
She sat up a little, holding her wineglass, and a worried look appeared on her face.
“What scares you? Me? It’s not about…the money?”
I shook my head, even though the cost of the trip definitely worried me.
“You’re scaring me,” she whispered. “If you don’t want to be here…I mean…if you’re bored and you think traveling together wasn’t a good idea, it’s fine. I’ll give you your tickets, the name of the hotels, and everything else. You can keep traveling on your own, David.”
“Margot.” I stretched my hand out toward her. “Dummy. That’s not it.”
“So?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe I’m scared of going back to real life when this trip ends.”
“That’s not it either.” She raised an eyebrow but with a smile. She seemed relieved suddenly. “It’s something you’re embarrassed to tell me.”
And…yes. It was something I was embarrassed to even accept myself: I was scared of not being enough, of my presence there not making up for the money she had invested. Fuck. We only met…what, two weeks ago? What happened if she realized I was just a mediocre, poor, scatterbrained dude, like Idoia said? Idoia was such a bitch, for fuck’s sake. But seriously, what a bitch. I don’t think I had ever stopped to think about it until that moment. How could she refuse to give me a chance just for being broke as a joke when I loved her so much?
I turned back to Margot, who was waiting impatiently for my answer, and I did what I knew best, pretended everything going on inside me was the symptom of a very basic need.
“I’m hungry. Actually, I’m always hungry.”
“And you think that’s going to be a problem on this trip?”
I nodded, shoving all the peanuts that were left into my mouth while she laughed and climbed off the sun lounger.
“I’m going to take one last little ‘ice’ dip. Then we can go watch the changing of the guard at the Syntagma Square and have dinner. Sound good?”
“Sounds good.”
She took a few steps toward the pool, but at the last second, she turned back to me. She twisted her fingers in my hair in a way she never had treated me before that moment. I looked at her, pushing the hair off my forehead, and she said with a smile: “I’m scared too, but I feel better when you’re with me. You don’t need to hide things from me. Ever.”
“I don’t know if I’m worth all this money,” I confessed. “I’m scared I’m not up to scratch.”
She sat opposite me, her hand still in my hair, but now stroking my temples. I did the same. I stroked her hair too. I wondered what we must look like to the other guests. I wondered what Margot saw in me when she looked at me. I wondered if she had realized that ever since I had met her, I had separation anxiety when we were apart.
“Two fools,” she whispered. I guess we were. I guess she knew.