Page 35 of Cava with My Colleague

“How many do you have?”

“Two shoeboxes. Decades of them.”

He’s quiet for a moment, looking at the developing photograph in my hands. “They are all of you?”

“Mostly me. Some people I met.” I tuck the photograph into my bag, into the inside pocket where I keep the ones I want to protect. “I travel alone a lot. So.”

“How do you get photographs of yourself if you’re alone?”

I smile. “I ask someone. That’s how I make friends,” I say. “You’d be surprised. You ask a stranger to take your picture and you get thirty seconds of them focused entirely on you. Sometimes that’s all it takes.”

Carlos looks around the square—the tour groups, Spaniards going about their workday, the pigeons. “And you asked me.”

“I asked you,” I agree, and Carlos leads us out of the square.

We find a restaurant near the water that Carlos knows.

We order. Carlos raises his eyebrow when I ask for a cava, no doubt thinking the same thing Manny does—what are we celebrating? I shrug. “What is it you like about this restaurant?”

“The sofrito,” he says.

“Of course.”

“You can taste when it’s been rushed.” He sits back, more relaxed than I’ve ever seen him outside of a work context. The afternoon light suits him. “Most places rush it.”

“I will trust your sofrito instincts,” I say, “and I want that noted in the tally.”

“How many is that now?”

“Three.” I fold my napkin in my lap. “All food-related. Makes me wish maybe I should have been stealing your lunch all along.”

I worry for a moment that it’s too soon to joke about it, but Carlos shakes his head and chuckles in a self-deprecating way, and I like that.

The paella arrives. He was right about the sofrito. The base of the paella—the garlic, red peppers, tomatoes—is practically caramelized and packs a punch of flavor.

He’s also, I realize while watching him eat—relaxed, unhurried, completely at ease in this city and this afternoon—probably somewhere in his mid- to late fifties. Which I already knew in the abstract. Somehow it hadn’t registered as a real number until just now, with the sun on his face and his sleeves still rolled up and the laugh lines deepening at the corners of his eyes when the waiter makes him smile.

I’ve dated older men before. Preferred them, mostly. But there’s a gap and then there’s a gap, and sixteen-ish years is edging toward the latter.

I pick up my fork and move a whole shrimp from the big pan in the center of the table to my plate. Carlos’s age doesn’t seem to matter, sitting here.

We eat and the afternoon stretches out, unhurried. He tells me about a visit to Valencia when he was a teenager. I tell him about a bar in Tokyo where I spent an entire evening with a man who spoke no English and I spoke no Japanese, and we communicated entirely through pointing at menu items and making faces.

“He had very strong opinions about sake.”

“You make it sound easy, making friends.”

“It’s easier than people think.” I take a sip of my cava. Carlos ordered a Merseguera, a local white wine that I’ve never heard of before.

“People are mostly just waiting to be talked to.”

He considers this. “Not everyone.”

“No,” I allow. “Not everyone.”

A small silence, not uncomfortable. The restaurant moves around us.

“Your family,” Carlos says, carefully. “Where are they?”