“That is not true.” My body is starting to relax a little after the adrenaline rush. “Tell me why you really came to New Zealand.”
“Not just to visit?”
I shake my head, go with a gut feeling. “I don’t think so.”
“You’re right.” He looks out toward the horizon, back to me. “A very good friend of mine, one of my oldest friends, killed himself.”
Damn. The lake of my memories ripples, threatens to spill. A flash of Dylan’s dead, still self washes out of the lake, but I’m a master at ridding myself of those images. I sit up straight, taking refuge in my professional training. “Javier, I’m so sorry.” In compassion, I wrap my hand around his. “I shouldn’t have pushed.”
He turns his palm upward, captures my hand close. “We had been friends since we were small. Very small. I felt I should have seen. Done . . . something.” His face darkens as he focuses on the horizon. “I just . . .” He sighs. “After, I found it difficult to take up my work, and Miguel invited me to come here for a time.” He brushes his thumb over my fingernail.
“Suicide is especially difficult for survivors,” I say, and it’s too much my ER voice. I force myself to be more human. Personal. “You must miss him terribly.”
“I keep wishing for it to make sense.”
“It doesn’t, always.”
“I suppose you see it often, in your work.” He gives me a sideways look, still holding my hand.
I swallow back another confession. “Yes.”
“Is it difficult?”
He’s raw and seeking a comfort that doesn’t exist, at least not a comfort I can offer. “It’s unsettling when a person dies violently in any form.”
He waits quietly, and I have opened the box, this heavy box I’ve been dragging around with me. “Drugs and alcohol. The stupid, stupid things people do.” I shake my head. “So many kids. And gangs. Good God, sometimes they’re so young they don’t know how to kiss, and they’re carrying guns.”
“Mm.” His thumb edges over the top of mine.
Into the quiet, I say something I have only thought, never spoken aloud. “I’ve been thinking about leaving the ER. It’s wearing me down.”
“What would you do instead?”
I focus on the shape of his fingers, the tidiness of his nails. Well-tended hands. “I have no idea.”
“Something else is calling you.”
“Maybe. My interest as a teen was in marine animals, but it might be too late to return to that. I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t even the job as much as the place. Maybe it’s time to escape Santa Cruz.” I feel disheartened, as if I’ve wasted a lot of time. “Tell me about your friend. If you want to.”
He takes a breath, lets it go. “It’s all a tangle still. It hasn’t been very long, only a month. He had a bad time. His wife left him, and he was drinking too much, and—” He shrugs. “There are seasons of darkness, yes? Loss and sadness all around.” He tightens his grip. “But if you are patient, the circle turns, and then there is happiness all around, everything good, everyone happy.” He flings a hand out, palm up, as if scattering glitter. “My friend, he just forgot that happiness is part of living too.”
“That’s a lovely thought.” I smile sadly. “But I’m going to admit something terrible”—and I know I am doing this to skirt around the other things I could be spilling—“but aside from when I was a child, I don’t know that I’ve had those happy times.”
“Never?”
I run through the years of my life mentally, trying to find a cycle that was particularly outstanding. “Not really. I mean, I was glad to get my degree and get out of school and go to work, but . . .”
A small frown wrinkles his brow. “Perhaps we are not talking about the same thing. I mean those times when your family is well and you have work you love and maybe you fall in love and feel good. Those times.”
“I’m happy right now.” I sip my beer, look at the water. “I’m in this beautiful place and enjoying the company of an interesting and”—I raise one brow—“quite good-looking man. I’m not dealing with work or my mother or any of my daily things. That’s happiness, right?”
The ferry is beginning to move, and a gust of wind makes me close my eyes and put my hand in my hair. When I open them again, Javier has raised his glasses to look at me. “That is a little happy. Not big, not the kind that fills you up and makes you want to laugh.”
“Yeah, I don’t know that I’ve had that.” It’s unnerving to realize it, unnerving how much I’ve revealed to this man. And yet I can’t stop. Something about him—his kindness or his warm voice or something I can’t even name—softens the carapace I’ve carried around for so long.
He asks, “When you fall in love?”
I shrug. I don’t want to say aloud that I don’t do that, because then he might think it’s a challenge, and it isn’t. I just don’t want all the drama.
He inclines his head, puzzling over me, then captures a lock of my hair and tucks it behind my ear. His mouth turns up on one side, activating that ridiculously charming dimple. “Now I am convinced that you have not known the right men.” He settles his beer on the ground, then takes mine. “I have been thinking today about kissing you.”
“I’ve thought of that too.”
One hand runs up my arm, and he follows the motion with his gaze. “I thought of it in the bookstore, when you looked so sad, but it was not quite right.” His hand moves over my shoulder, up to my neck. “And as we came out of the café, you smiled up at me, and your throat looked long and golden.” His fingers alight against my throat, slide to my clavicle. All the nerves in my body rustle to life, and yet I’m enjoying the slow caress.
“When you leaped over the railing, my heart squeezed so hard I could not breathe, because what if”—now he touches my ear, my temple, my wet hair, and pulls me closer—“what if I had lost the chance?”
I lift my face, and he cradles my head as our lips join. And then I forget to keep my guard up or shield myself with cynicism, because his mouth is as lush as plums, and he shifts slightly to fit us together more perfectly. My head is in his palm and the front of my knee against his thigh, and it’s like a fragrant smoke surrounds us, makes me dizzy. Behind my eyes, the world is faintly rose. I reach out a hand to brace myself, holding on to his upper arm, and as if I’ve asked permission, he opens his lips slightly and invites me in, and I go, I go, reach for his tongue and it reaches mine, and then I’m lost in it, a kiss so perfect it might be a poem, or a dance, or something I’ve dreamed.
With a little gasp I pull back, covering my mouth with my hand as I look up to his dark eyes, eyes that crinkle a little at the corners. He smooths back my hair from my forehead. “Is that happiness too?”
I let go of a soft laugh. “I don’t know. Let me try again.” And I pull him closer, lean back, and invite him to press into me as the ferry chugs across the water and the family nearby shrieks over raindrops that start to fall. I’m aware of a big drop that splashes on my forehead and a pair that plop on my hand, but mostly what I’m feeling is Javier’s mouth kissing me; and Javier’s body close to mine; and Javier’s graceful tongue, which I want on me everywhere; and Javier’s back, which I want naked.