David whispered and stroked me gently to wake me up. I opened my eyes and saw him dressed and smiling.
“It’s not even seven yet, but you have to get up.”
“What are you talking about?” I moaned, letting my eyes droop shut again.
“Hey, hey…Margot. Trust me…please.”
I sat up in bed. I was still in my panties, and the sheet draped over my waist left my tits in plain sight, but I covered them up, embarrassed.
“My girl…” He laughed. “That’s not necessary. All I need is another half hour and I’ll have them memorized.”
“That’s not very gentlemanly on your part.”
“That’s good because I don’t believe in that stuff.”
“What do you believe in?”
“In a relationship between equals. Get up, please.”
When he winked at me, I thought of Filippo…who opened the door for me in every restaurant, who closed my car door, who sent flowers with beautiful notes, who paid the bill and once proclaimed himself the alpha in the relationship. Did I need it? Did I need chivalry? Did I really know what that term implied? In fairy tales, it’s always a given that the princes are always gentlemen and the princesses…little ladies.
“What’s your favorite Disney movie?” I asked him, expecting him to tell me he hadn’t seen any.
“Brave.” He came over and leaned over me with an arched brow. “Are you getting up, darling?”
I snorted, pushed off the sheets, and, with one boob in each hand, hurried into my bathroom, where someone had left a bikini and a beachy dress.
“These don’t go together!” I called out.
“Do you think I care?”
I started to laugh.
After a quick shower, I came out dressed but with a sleepy face, and I bumped into him with his backpack hanging from his shoulder and my beach bag packed at his feet.
“Where are we going?”
“You’re going to have to wait and see. But don’t worry. I packed everything you need. And forgive me, I had to go through some of your stuff. But this way…it’s a surprise.”
A surge of affection. The urge to kiss him. The urge to scream. The feeling of being able to fly. A catapult landing a ball of regrets in my stomach.
“Have fun!” the girl from reception waved us off when she saw us going out.
“Thank you,” I mumbled, surprised.
“What did she say?” David asked me, taking out the keys to the bike.
“Does she know where we’re going?”
“Ah, yes.”
“When…?”
“I got out of bed at five thirty, and when I came to look for help, she was already there. You won’t believe it, but we managed to understand each other. We have to leave her a good review so her boss can see.”
He climbed on, put my bag between his legs, and gave me the backpack to put on my back. Then he patted the back of the bike.
“Come on, Margot, adventures don’t live themselves.”
I was pretty slow to recognize the direction we were heading in when we were already in the last turns leading down to the port. When we got there, David locked the bike and waved me into an old building, where we went straight into a line.
“Wait, where are we going?”
“Take this.” He pulled a box of Dramamine out of the outer pocket of his backpack and a bottle of water from the hotel out of the main pocket.
“What’s this for?”
“Do you know they sell them in supermarkets?” He smiled. “The one from the other day had a pharmacy section.”
“You bought this?”
“Yes. I guessed we were going to take another boat before we left, and I didn’t want to become a human piñata again.”
“You know, I thought you bought condoms?” I laughed.
“Oh, those too. Dramamine, condoms, and a box of tampons. You can imagine the checkout guy’s face, right?”
He smiled like a saint. I swallowed my two pills, drank a little water, praying I wouldn’t choke on everything (the surprise, the condoms, his attention), and handed over the bottle so he could take his.
“Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise, sad eyes.” He came a little closer to me, and his innocent smile was wrapped in that kind of complicity you only have after you know each other’s skin.
He didn’t kiss me, but he left me wishing he would.
We got on a ferry, still yawning, but I still had no idea where we were going, since this same boat made stops on many surrounding islands before going to Athens.
Unlike on our journey there, we were tourists this time, but at that hour the deck was practically empty. He bought me a latte and a bun, and we had breakfast while we played a game: I was trying to guess our destination by asking him yes or no questions. No, I never guessed it.
We got off at the first stop: Ios, another island more or less the same size as Santorini, an hour-and-twenty-minute ferry ride away. I was freaking out that he had organized all this.
We walked about two minutes under the morning sun until we reached a two-star hotel that was above one of those old-fashioned travel agencies where tourists hired excursions and maritime activities. We were given only one room (of course) on the second floor, small but clean, everything in its place, but it had a monastic modesty: a double bed with a heavy wooden headboard, flanked by a small table, two chairs, and two bedside tables. We also had a terrace where two plastic beach chairs and a table held court. The railing on the terrace was painted a blue that stood out because everything else was whitewashed and almost blended into the dark sea in the port opposite the room.
David put our stuff in the room and the bathroom while I watched the boats swaying. I didn’t hear him come back in, and I jumped when I saw him.
“It’s not very nice, but…”
I went over and hugged him. I hugged him the way two people who have much more than friendship hug, true, but I didn’t want him to see it as a couple-y gesture. Just a thank-you.
“It’s beautiful. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, please. It was the least I could do…”
I pulled out of the hug to look at him. Sometimes, eyes can tinge words with emotions that wouldn’t fit in any sentence. He had incredible eyes…two brown eyes had never held so much inside them…galaxies hidden in tiny golden streaks. Doubts. Emotion. An imperfect story.
No. He didn’t kiss me then either.
“Come on…” he said, taking my hand, taking a step back and tugging me along. “I’m going to take you somewhere incredible, you’ll see.”
We walked over to one of those seedy rent-a-car places you see in every beach town, and David tried every which way to get the guy working there to understand him, but I had to step in when it became obvious he had no desire to understand.
“Tell him, please, that we need a small car for the day.”
“Wait, where are you taking me?”
“To kill you in some remote corner of this island, where I’ll take photos of your body and abandon you in the trunk. Come on, please…” He pointed at the attendant.
It was the first time I had seen David get exasperated.
He insisted on paying, but as he did so, he launched into a speech about the reasons he was doing it, which had nothing to do with the patriarchy.
“You see, it doesn’t matter to me if you’re a woman, a man, Medusa, or a tropical cockatoo, when it comes to paying. But I can’t let you pay for everything.”
“Do you feel like a whore?” I teased.
“No. I feel like a freeloader. And I haven’t been working since I was sixteen to end up feeling like that with you.”
“You know I have too much, right?”
“Nobody has too much money.” He waved his hand scornfully toward me as we headed over to the white C2 we had been assigned. “You just have more than you can spend.”
“No, David. I have too much,” I insisted.
He stopped walking toward the car and looked at me with a furrowed brow.
“And why are you telling me that now?”
“Because I don’t want you to worry about that when you’re with me.”
“And I don’t want you to think everything has to be how you want it and what you’re accustomed to just because you have too much money.” He smiled teasingly. “Your millions can blow me, queen. Tonight you’re going to sleep in an inn.”
I couldn’t do anything but laugh.
He didn’t give me the option to drive, and…I would have liked to because watching him do it was actual torture. Why was a cute guy so much cuter behind the wheel? Every time he changed gear, my head filled with his expression when he came while his fingers rubbed me. I liked that he wasn’t one of those guys who treated you like you had Ebola or you were dying when you had your period. I don’t think Filippo and I had had sex of any kind when I was on my period. Was that weird? Was it normal? With Idoia, did he…?
“What?” he asked, taking his eyes off the road for a second. “Your face looks like you’re doing calculations.”
“You’re such hot stuff.”
He smiled, but then his smile faded slowly. “I’m actually pretty cold stuff.”
Should I say it? Or not say it? Come on, we came here to play. “You didn’t seem cold at all to me last night.”
I studied David’s reaction, intrigued. His eyebrows moved almost imperceptibly, and then he licked his lips.
“You didn’t seem like it either.”
Silence.
I felt a surge of violence. What if David wanted to forget what happened in his bed last night? I turned to look out my window.
“Did you reply to the message?” he asked.
“What?”
I looked at him, but he wouldn’t look anywhere but straight ahead.
“Filippo. Did you reply to his message?”
A slap in the face would have had a less devastating effect. I felt completely wounded. Yeah, I know just a second ago I was thinking about Filippo myself, but to hear it coming out of David’s mouth…I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all. I might not have had the most mature reaction in the world.
“Ah…” I bit my lip and turned my eyes back to the window. “So that’s how we’re gonna play…”
“What the…? What do you think I’m playing?”
“I already know last night meant nothing. You don’t need to bring Filippo into it.”
“Seriously?” He looked at me with a furrowed brow. “Margot, I have zero passive-aggressive tendencies. I promise you if that were the plan, you would already know.”
“Hey, aren’t you getting pretty cocky?”
“Me?” His eyes widened. “I just wanted to know if you replied to the message from a dude who, up until two days ago, you wanted to get back.”
“Exactly,” I declared.
He let out a sigh.
“Do you feel bad?” I asked him. “Is that it?”
“I have nothing to feel bad about. I’m single, and as far as I know, so are you.”
I opened my mouth, but I had no idea what to say to that because he was right, though I didn’t exactly agree with the nuances.
“I don’t know this side of you,” I muttered finally.
“I guess there are a lot of sides of me you don’t know.”
I couldn’t believe the audacity, and I scoffed to let him know.
“Hey, Margot. What do you think I’m saying to you? Seriously.”
“Well, you sound like a typical misogynist running your mouth. Next you’ll have your dick in your hand telling me to calm down, to not get all hysterical, that this means nothing.”
He raised an eyebrow. It was the first time I had seen that expression. He was very serious.
“A misogynist running his mouth. Uh-huh. It could also be read as genuine interest about how you’re planning to do things with your ex-fiancé now that I’m implicated in this mess in one way or another, but fine…why not just assume I’m being hostile?”
“I don’t know, David. We were talking about last night, and suddenly you bring up Filippo.”
“Well, sorry if it seemed inappropriate to you, but it made sense in my head, okay?”
“Well, explain to me how it made sense at least.”
“For fuck’s sake…” He sniffed.
“Don’t worry about it, David. It’s easy enough to include what happened last night in the temporary insanity that made me invite you.”
“You’re really starting to piss me off.” He shot me a side-eye.
“I’m really starting to piss you off?”
“Now, on top of pretending that nothing happened, you’re saying bringing me on this trip was a fuckup, right?”
“I’m not saying that.”
“What are you saying then?”
“How would I know! I don’t understand shit!”
David pulled over to the side of the road (which couldn’t be called a highway), where the tall yellow grasses seemed to provide a reprieve for the landscape, and slammed on the brakes. It scared the shit out of me.
“What are you doing?”
“I can’t argue and drive at the same time. I’m not that good of a driver.”
“That’s enough, David. It doesn’t matter. Everything’s very clear.”
“What’s going on with you?”
“With me?” I yelled.
“With you, of course with you. If you had asked me about Idoia, would you understand if I reacted like this?”
“That’s the whole point: I didn’t mention Idoia.”
“Wanna know what I think is happening? You feel bad, right? About what happened yesterday, for running off with me. When you think about it, you’re like what was I thinking?”
“What are you talking about?” I raised my voice.
“I know that compared to Filippo I seem like a little schoolkid, that’s pretty clear, but if you feel bad, it’s better if you just tell me. What happened to the trust we had?”
“I mean, you’re the one who probably feels bad. Because Idoia and I aren’t exactly even from the same species. But don’t worry, you never have to do it again. You can go back to Madrid and you’ll have her eating out of your hand, which is what you wanted, right?”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “And don’t you worry either, as soon as you set foot in Madrid, your prince will sweep you up in a horse-drawn carriage. So in the end, look, we can both get a grip, right? Everything’s going to be fine. You’ll get back with Filippo, and I will with Idoia. And it doesn’t matter because we just got caught up in the heat of the moment. It was just a momentary attraction.” David looked at my mouth, almost panting. “A summer fling that…”
I tugged on his shirt, and he had the wisdom to unbuckle his seat belt before he pounced on me with his mouth already half-open. We moaned in relief again as David reached down between my legs and pulled the lever that threw my seat back, and I turned the little wheel that tilted it back even farther. He climbed on top of me. I have no idea how he managed it in such a small car or how we contorted ourselves, I just know he got himself between my two legs as easily as two puzzle pieces fitting together. In less than two minutes, our hands were under each other’s clothes and our mouths were drenched.
“You get on top,” he ordered.
We turned over, and in the process, I banged into the hand brake and the gear stick and hit my head on the roof. But I liked it. I liked having him under me, looking up at me with his mouth open, panting, touching everywhere he could. He struggled with my dress until he left the straps slumped around my arms and managed to pull both breasts out of my bikini, while I gave him a hand job with my hand folded into his swimsuit. Just like that. Very prim and proper, huh?
We weren’t comfortable, but…we were hot. Very.
“Fuck…” he started to moan. “Fuck…keep going, keep going…”
His cock was throbbing in my hand and his fingers were gliding all over the place, unrhythmically between my legs, over my bikini. I was about to tell him where and how he could do better in that position, when we heard skidding and suddenly, we could hear honking and two kids yelling God knows what out of another car in who knows what language. And I was sitting there with both tits out.
Leaning against the hood of the car, we silently smoked a mental cigarette, with our clothes back in place and our eyes lost in the sea of parched grasses stretching out in front of us. He was the first to speak.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.
“Me too.”
“Seriously, I didn’t have bad intentions when I did it. I didn’t even think about it. You said that thing about being hot while I was driving, and I thought about Filippo and…” He rubbed his eyebrows. “That guy is like the Iron Man of fiancés.”
I went around to stand in front of him and pressed my stomach against his. He sighed.
“I don’t want to pretend nothing happened,” he confessed to me. “It doesn’t work for me.”
“Me either.” I shook my head.
“But I want to get back together with Idoia.”
I felt a pang of anguish that I didn’t understand.
“And I want to with Filippo,” I declared honestly.
“So?”
I shrugged, and he tucked my hair behind one ear.
“We’re jerks.” He sighed, looking at the skin on my neck that his fingertips were grazing.
“Maybe we just want to have fun, like you said the other day.”
“Or maybe we’re hurt as hell and we want to get revenge.”
“It’s not a good plan,” I admitted. “But, honestly, I don’t think that’s it in my case. I’m not hurt by Filippo. He’s the one who should be. I just…I don’t know. I’m opening my wings.”
He looked at me and bit the inside of his cheek.
“Well, you should feel free to fly,” he insisted.
“You too.”
“What if…?” he proposed.
“If…what?”
“If we let ourselves get swept up in it.” He raised his eyebrows. “Just stop thinking. Like two friends who like each other. Because…it’s obvious I like you, but I don’t want to lose you.”
“I don’t want to lose you either. But I don’t know if what we want to do is possible.”
“I don’t feel like worrying about that right now.” He made a face.
I shot him a side-eye.
“Me either.”
I watched him close his eyes when he leaned in to kiss me. It was a good kiss…the kind that happens when you want to get out of your own head.
“Eh, eh, eh…” I stopped him, drawing back.
“What if we don’t worry about this?”
“How would we do that?”
“You want to get back with Filippo and I do with Idoia, right? Fine. These things aren’t mutually exclusive…they’re not here.”
“David…”
“When we met…well, we saw something in each other that hasn’t disappeared just because something happened between us.”
“You sound exactly like you’re offering to take me on a quest to find the philosopher’s stone.”
“It’s not that deep, Margot. Think about it. Let’s do it, and then we’ll see.” He tried to smile and put his arm around my waist. “We’ll talk about them when it comes up, and we’ll try to find a natural way to let what’s happening between us and what’s happening between them happen in parallel.”
“You’re just saying that because you have blue balls.” I pressed my hips against his, and he nodded, grinning.
“You don’t want to?”
“I don’t want to what?”
“Repeat last night, have a roll in the hay, find out what it would be like to fuck each other…”
“Seems complicated.” I wanted to play, even though I yearned for it as much as he did.
“What if we put an expiration date on it? Knowing beforehand will make it easier, right?”
“Are we going to be lovers?” I teased.
“Love-friends, for vacation.” He smiled. “Until we get back to Madrid.”
“Well, when we get back…we’ll have to have some time apart to get back to normal, right?”
“Okay. When we get back, we’ll focus on getting our partners back, and we’ll see each other when that’s done. Then we can be friends and nothing more.”
“I’ve never been friends with an ex.”
“Well…there are always arguments with exes, but if we already have a breakup date set, it’ll be easier, right?”
I nodded. I don’t think either of us believed what we were putting out there, but human beings are curious when it comes to finding excuses to justify what they feel like doing in that moment.
“Do you want to?” he asked.
“Just sex?”
“Intimacy.”
We smiled. I wanted to say that ever since we had met all we had done was be accomplices in an intimacy I had never felt with anyone, but that thought scared me. Intimacy, he said, and I feared I knew what would happen: the day we got back to Madrid, it would break my heart a little because, in some way I couldn’t explain, I had already begun to love David. We’d say goodbye at the airport, and I’d get in a car and cry all the way home, where I’d have to get a grip and do something about my fucking life, which seemed to be going down the drain by the minute. I was there to find myself, but I ended up finding something else. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I never wanted to lose it.
Even so, we sealed the deal and…we didn’t exactly do it with a handshake. We made out for fifteen minutes until we forced ourselves to stop and give the agreement the go-ahead.
We arrived at Magganari Beach about twenty-five minutes later. That was the surprise destination. The beach was practically empty, and I wasn’t surprised because the road to get there was winding and stomach-turning. It was a long beach, with fine sand (very fine) and crystal clear water. The beach was divided into two sections by an invisible line: an untouched side, where a few couples had put down their junk, which was like a hidden paradise, and the part farthest away from us, which had chairs for rent and the Christos Taverna bar, where there still weren’t many people but there was movement. David asked if I wanted to rent a chair. I replied that all I really wanted to do was canoodle with him in the sand.
That’s basically how we spent the whole day. Lying in the sun, we always found some excuse to come closer to each other and silently nibble on each other’s mouths. I loved kissing David. Suddenly, as if I had been bewitched, he seemed like the most desirable man in the world to me, given that he was just some twenty-something guy. A handsome one, with a good body, a clear and sincere smile, and a great cock. Can’t argue with that.
But we did much more than kiss, of course. That’s the problem. As well as the kissing, touching, rubbing, whispering in each other’s ears the things we wanted to do to each other, we talked. And there was so much calm between us when we talked, it was the closest thing to being at home.
“I shared an apartment with a guy and a girl, near Tirso de Molina. The landlord suddenly told us he’d sold the house and we had a month to get out. My roommates looked for another apartment,” he told me, stretched out beside me, playing with the sand, “and they found one with three rooms in Lavapiés, but…I told them no.”
“When was that?”
“A little over six months ago. I had been with Idoia for nearly four months, and I was so hung up on her that I thought that, if I moved into that apartment, it might close the door on the possibility of encouraging her to let me live with her. Ivan and Domi had just had a baby, and I was already helping them out every once in a while, so Dominique offered me their couch for as long as I needed. And time flew by.”
“So it’s not really about freedom, is it?” I asked.
“I guess not. It was pretty clingy of me, to tell the truth. I wanted to be free so I could run after Idoia whenever she asked me to. But I’ve been thinking…you made me think, actually, and I think September is a good month to move.” A lopsided grin spread across his face, as he convinced himself.
“What if Idoia offers to let you move in?”
“Ah, well…” He shook his head. “It’s clear now we have to wait to do that. Our thing is still…”
“On thin ice,” I said in English. He raised an eyebrow. I translated for him.
“Exactly. Such a know-it-all,” he teased.
I lay back and sighed.
“Why are you sighing?” he asked.
“Yes, I replied,” I confessed. “To Filippo.”
“I figured.”
“I answered him secretly, I don’t know why. I was embarrassed, I guess.”
“And what did you say?”
“That this summer apart was the best thing we ever could have done for us, and…I sent him back a song.”
“What song?”
“‘Sola Con la Luna’ by Anni B Sweet.”
He sat up and furrowed his brow.
“What?” I asked when I saw his reaction.
“Nothing.”
“No. What happened?”
“It’s just that…” He flopped back, face up, letting himself fall next to me, and this time I was the one who sat up so I could see his face. “The night we met, when I saw you, I thought of that song. Your eyes were screaming it.”
I straddled him and whipped off his sunglasses, and he wrapped his arms around my hips.
“What are they singing now?” I asked him.
“‘True’ by Spandau Ballet.” And a teasing smile spread across his face. “Uh, uh, uh, uhhhhh,” he crooned.
I leaned on his chest and jabbed my fingers into his side as I cursed him out. He was laughing out loud and raising his knees to playfully tap my ass and distract me from tickling him when someone’s shadow drifted over us and momentarily blocked our sun.
“David?” a feminine voice mumbled.
Both our heads shot up, surprised. We had spent so many days immersed in that liberating feeling of not being tied to anything around us, and we didn’t expect to find anyone familiar there. But there she was. Tall, thin, wearing a beautiful bathing suit, trendy, tattooed.
“Ruth?” David asked, stupefied.
I climbed off him, and he sat up, uncomfortable, smoothing his bathing suit, probably so his half chub would be less obvious. They greeted each other with two kisses, but she threw an arm around his back and hugged him. You guys will know how dumb this is, I had so little information they could even be family, but I was seething with jealousy. With Idoia, fine, but…now there was a new one?
“What are you doing here?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing. I saw you from afar, and I thought…it can’t be him.”
“Well…uh…yeah. It’s me.”
“What are you doing so far from Madrid?” The girl looked at me with obvious suspicion.
“Vacation.” David glanced back, looking for me, and reached out his hand to me. “Ruth, this is Margot…”
Dunn-dunn, dunn-dunn, dunn-dunn. Tense, suspenseful, and terrifying music played in the pause after my name, leaving his friend to deduce my title.
“Margot,” David stuttered, clearly uncomfortable. “My girl?”
We’ll overlook the semiquestioning tone.
“Ohm.” She smiled, also seeming awkward.
“Hi, Ruth. Nice to meet you.” I waved when I saw she had no intention of giving me two kisses.
“I guess she didn’t tell you,” David mumbled, playing discreetly with my fingers.
“No. Not a word,” this Ruth girl replied.
“We broke up last month. Well…she broke up with me.”
Mystery solved: she was Idoia’s friend.
“I had no idea. I called it. You never seemed like a bastard.” She smiled a little sadly. “Too bad. I mean…” She looked at me, holding her palms out toward me, like she was apologizing. “It’s not too bad because I can see you’re doing fine and…you know, you guys…”
“Yeah, right.” David scratched his neck.
“But I liked you for Idoia. You calmed her down. Weird…I thought she was crazy about you.”
“Well, now you see: she wasn’t.”
I could see David’s Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he let go of my hand and crossed his arms over his chest, visibly unnerved.
“I don’t get it,” she muttered.
“It’s Idoia. Who knows what’s going on in her head?”
“Sometimes she loses it.” It seemed like this girl genuinely appreciated David or, at least, what he meant for her friend, but…she was pretty tactless. “Maybe she went all in and…she lost the hand.”
“More like the whole game.” David cleared his throat.
She stared at us for a few seconds and finally tutted.
“Well, I won’t keep bothering you. Have a great time. Both of you. And good luck with each other.”
“Thanks. Send my love to everyone.”
“Everyone except her, I guess.”
“We’re still in touch,” David explained nervously. “It didn’t end badly.”
“I’m glad. Hope to see you soon.”
“Yeah.”
As the girl walked away, David seemed to deflate. I stroked his back and perched my chin on his shoulder.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.” He turned back toward me and his eyes roved my face before he wrapped me in his arms and snuggled me against his naked chest. “With you, yes.”