Taking possession of him, or starting to.
Making him fly high with the sunlight toasting our skin.
And in that moment, in his arms, I found my wings.
35
Lucas fell asleep with his head on my chest and I ran my hands through his hair. In the window, motes of dust floated in the air. The room was silent apart from his deep respiration.
I bent down and looked at him: his face, the constellations of freckles. They were adorable, as were his nose, the arches of his eyebrows, the shadows his eyelashes cast over his cheeks, the little wrinkles on each side of his lips from smiling.
I pushed aside my thoughts and let myself feel. I refused to analyze what was happening, what consequences that might have. I didn’t want to understand it; I just wanted to enjoy it, to be carried along, guided by instinct. I wanted to get to know the person I was becoming. The person I had always been, but hadn’t allowed myself to be.
Lucas cleared his throat, yawned, stretched like a cat—a huge cat that covered my body and buried its muzzle in my neck as it purred. “Hey,” he whispered next to my ear. Then he left a trail of kisses that led to my breast.
The clock on his nightstand read nine o’clock.
I wanted him, I wanted to melt into him again, but I didn’t want to be late to the florist’s. And I was sore in places I hadn’t known could be sore. It was a sweet aching, but an aching nonetheless.
“Lucas,” I murmured, resigned.
I could feel him tense up as he responded, “Don’t. Don’t say it.”
“What?”
“That what happened was a mistake. That we’re roommates. That this makes things too complicated. I don’t know! Just don’t say it, OK!”
“I wasn’t going to say anything like that.”
“No?” He raised his head.
“No, I was just going to ask if you’d take me to work. I’m not sure I’ll make it on the bike.”
With an almost exasperated look, he said, “Obviously I’ll take you to work. Don’t freak me out like that. What’s wrong with your bike, though?” That was a dumb thing to ask, it should have been obvious that it was me, not the bike. When he realized that a second later, he nodded. “Ahh, sorry. I understand. Sorry.”
I slapped him softly and told him not to laugh at me, and he swore he wasn’t. But his weak attempts at suppressing a grin told me otherwise. “Idiot,” I said, trying to push him off of me.
He stood and grabbed a pair of pants off the chair. “You shower first,” he said. “I’ll make breakfast.”
I went to my room for some clean clothes and saw everything I’d bought next to the bed. I took my pointe shoes out of the bag and looked at them, whispering to myself, “What the hell are you doing?”
I looked around and saw that my room there was mine in a way nothing in Madrid ever had been. I had two jobs, so I had some stability. I’d found a place for myself in that big family of people in the villa, and I’d hooked up with a guy I liked a lot. And he liked me too, and he’d asked me to stay.
I was building a life for myself!
And now I was getting scared of losing it.
36
“Maya, dammit, I don’t know what to tell you. You went to that town to talk to him and find out the truth,” Matías reminded me on the other end of the line.
“But what if I open my mouth and I ruin everything?”
“Why would you ruin everything?”
“I don’t know. There’s all kinds of reasons, and I’m scared.”
I finished putting the roses in a vase and leaned on the counter, grunting, because he was supposed to be encouraging me. At least about this one thing.
