the cold.
He squeezed her tighter as she shivered again, and his voice curved around her stiff shoulders. “We should go.”
Not yet. Please. “Just wait.”
“We’ll be too tired tomorrow to see anything if we stay up until dawn.”
“Then let’s be tired. Who cares if we don’t see anything tomorrow?”
“I don’t understand. You always want to see everything.”
She imagined that wine grapes in a press felt like this, crushed under an ever-tightening weight that squeezed the life out of her. This waiting for that other shoe to drop, for the moment when the way she lived proved too much for this man, was deadly. He wanted to be the one to give her so many things. How long could they last with her not doing the same in return? Everything felt like coded language to her now.
She pushed some coins across the bar to the old man and shook her head when he asked with a pointed finger if they wanted another round. They hadn’t finished their first.
“No, gracias .” She slid off her seat.
“ Espere, si quiere ver algo especial .” Wait, if you want to see something special .
Her Spanish was just barely good enough to understand him. Javi had already taken two steps towards the door. She shifted her weight to her toes, an ounce of pressure away from following. Too late. It was too late. Besides, how special could it be at what, three or four o’clock in the morning in a nearly deserted bar in the barrio ?
But this was what she did. Paused in a moment as it arose, to see something special.
“Javi.” He turned to her, eyebrows up. We’re leaving, yes? She raised a hand to the bartender, two fingers up. “Wait.”
Javi’s sigh carried from where he stood by the door, and his steps dragged on the flagstone floor as he trudged back. The room, even quieter than when they arrived, settled into a moment of stillness as a large man, bigger than her husband, stepped away from the tall table in the corner. The bartender slid their glasses across the rough wood, and she wrapped her fingers around the tumbler, not wanting it but needing the anchor for her hand, a focus for her tension.
The giant of a man stopped in the middle of the room, his brush of coarse black hair nearly scraping the low beam and plaster ceiling of the bar. His barrel chest sloped to the mountain of his belly. No one spoke, though all heads turned, quiet smiles on some faces.
“Magdalena—” Javi, at her side. She reached up with her fingers and pressed them to his lips.
“Shhh.” Wait. Just be, for once. No agenda. No itinerary. Nowhere else to be and nothing more to want but this moment with me. No next steps to worry about.
The man let the silence settle on him like a cloak. He opened his mouth.
The first low tones hummed in her bones and she shivered. Ever reliable, Javi shifted to stand behind her and wrap an arm across her chest. She held herself away from him though, refusing to relax into his embrace. This comfort didn’t belong to her any more.
“Nessun dorma . . .”
The tenor filled the room, an expanding cloud of sound that pushed against the walls and filled every corner until they were all surrounded with the ringing bell of his voice. It pressed at her ears and pushed on her heart and filled her bones with sound until she shook. Tears spilled and ran down her cheeks until even Javi behind her noticed that his arm was getting wet as the man opened his throat and sang about keeping secrets through just one more night. And she waited for Javi to pull away and whisper at her, demanding to know what was wrong, what he could do to fix it, any of a dozen questions that would take her out of this moment, this perfect moment. That would make her something else on his list to plan, to problem-solve, to fix. Her spine stiffened and she braced herself.
But it didn’t come. He took a step backward, arm still wrapped around her and hitched himself up on a bar stool. Then he drew her back between his spread thighs and
Gay Hendricks and Tinker Lindsay