I made the face again.
And the damn sneeze still wouldn’t come.
Seriously? There’s a man between my breasts—a sexy, chiseled Adonis worshiping my boobs, and I’m staring at him withthatface.
The corners of Alex’s mouth turned up as he took a strand of my hair and tickled my nose with it. I let out an explosive sneeze.
“Better?” he said, as I stared remorsefully at his sneeze-spattered chest. “I think we need to get you out of here.”
Which was how we ended up on the roof. I slipped into his T-shirt, he slipped into a pair of boxers, and we raided the linen closet. Dragging every quilt and pillow we could find upstairs, we made a makeshift bed under the crisscrossing clotheslines. The flat roof had a half-wall around its perimeter, lined with re-purposed containers—olive oil buckets, tins of canned tomatoes, rice buckets, flour buckets, ice-cream containers—all spilling mounds of fragrant herbs and flowers.
“What’s your favorite childhood memory?” I asked.
He propped himself up on his elbow and traced my jaw. “You really want to know?”
“I do.”
“My favorite memory…” Alex ran his fingers up and down my palm. “My mother, peeling an orange and bringing it to my room while I was studying. She never said a word. She’d come in, put it on my desk, and leave. Sometimes I didn’t even know she’d been there until I saw the plate. She had this way of flipping each segment inside out, with the flesh arched out, so I didn’t have to bite through the stringy white fibers. Mountains of orange spikes waiting to be scraped off with my teeth. Nothing says love like a plate of cut fruit left silently for you.”
Our fingertips touched and held. It felt like a soft, buzzing rope—binding me to him slowly, hypnotically.
“And you?” Alex asked. “What’s your favorite childhood memory?”
“Flying a kite.” I smiled. “I can’t remember where I was, or who with, but I remember the feeling. Running barefoot, looking at it over my shoulder. That feeling of delight when it finally took off. Up, up. Higher than I could ever fly.”
My eyes shut as I recalled the tugging of the string in my hand, the way the kite soared and danced in the sky. I lay in Alex’s arms, watching the child in me run down the beach, against the endless expanse of the horizon.
I don’t know when I drifted off, but the world was blue when I opened my eyes. Blue sky. Alex’s blue jeans hanging on the line to dry. A blue bowl next to me, with a note:
Can’t believe you conked out on me. Some blueberry yogurt in honor of my blue balls.
I laughed and swirled the spoon in the yogurt. Sitting cross-legged on a sea of quilts, I settled the bowl on my lap and licked the spoon. I could hear the gong of tiny bells and the bleating of goats. In the distance, the sea sparkled with the promise of a new day. A rhythmic, metallic sound came from the garden below. Snip, snip, snip.
I walked to the edge of the roof and looked over. Alex sat on a plastic chair under a trellis of grapevines, getting his hair cut by his father. Shirtless under the sun, his skin took on a warm, bronzed hue. Bare arms, bare chest, bare throat. My cheeks flamed as locks of thick, dark hair collected on the patio stones. I sat on the half-wall circling the roof, observing their ritual.
Every once in a while, Vasilis would stop, take a puff from the cigarette Alex held for him, and step away from his handiwork like a painter assessing his masterpiece. Then the comb would come down and off he’d go with the scissors again.
All through the garden, dozens of CDs were strung, row after row. They dangled over elephant-eared zucchini plants and reflected off buckets spilling the most brilliant red geraniums.
A sudden burst of white light blinded me. I held my hand over my eyes and squinted.
“Kalimera,asteri mou.” Alex flashed a CD straight in my face. “Sleep well?”
Sleep? I flushed, only remembering the feel of my nipples swelling like ripe berries in his mouth. Then I double-flushed because Vasilis had caught me in nothing but Alex’s T-shirt.
“Kalimera.” I waved to them both, tugging the shirt over my knees. “What’s with all those?” I gestured to the CDs sparkling in the sun.
Vasilis tugged the string holding them up, making them jingle and jangle like little mirrors. “They keep the birds from eating the vegetables.”
“Clever,” I said, finishing the last of my yogurt. Then I gasped as he cut a big chunk of Alex’s hair. “How much are you taking off?”Bye, bye, Man-Bun.
Vasilis shrugged. “I keep going until he says enough. I’m the only one he’ll let cut his hair. Since he was a baby. This time he’s been away too long. I have been cutting and cutting, and still…” Vasilis lifted Alex’s hair to illustrate his point. “This time his hair is like Dimitra’s.”
I stifled a snicker. Nothing about Alex was like a woman. Not his hair, not his hard, bronzed chest, and certainly not his blue balls.
I folded the quilts and headed to the kitchen. It was a sun-filled room with a window opening to breathtaking views of the windswept hill and beyond it, the Aegean Sea. I could hear the low hum of conversation between Alex and Vasilis as I washed the blue bowl. Its hand-painted markings were time-softened, but still a beautiful shade of cobalt. I held it up, the suds trickling down to my elbows, studying the border—a row of spiny fish following each other around the rim.
“It belonged to Mrs. Tavoulari,” Alex said.
