Page 15 of When We Believed in Mermaids

His voice is sonorous, vibrant, a musical instrument. I let myself take another long look at his face. Strong features—Roman nose, almost too aggressive to be attractive, large dark eyes. “Yes,” I admit. “But I still don’t remember.”

He touches his chest, hand over his heart. “You have forgotten me already.” He tsks, then tilts his head with a smile. “At the elevator.”

The moment pops back into my head. “Oh yeah. Thede nadaguy.”

He laughs. The sound is robust, full of life. I sip my wine, assessing. It wouldn’t be so terrible to have a roll in the hay. It’s been a while.

“My name is Kit,” I say.

“Javier.”

I pick up the antipasti plate and offer it to him. “The salami is very good.”

He gestures toward the seat across from him. “Would you like to join me?”

“No, thank you. If we each stay where we are, we can both watch the street.”

“Ah.” He helps himself to a mozzarella and a salami and deposits them on his bread plate. “I see your point.”

“We might as well be at the same table anyway,” I say, indicating the narrow space between our chairs. He’s close enough that I can smell his cologne, something vaguely spicy.

“What brings you to New Zealand?” he asks.

A shrug. I’m going to have to come up with a way to answer this question. It’s a long way to fly for no reason at all. “It’s not like anywhere else, is it?”

“No.” He sips his wine, and in profile his face is quite powerful. Beautiful. Maybe he’s ticking a few too many of my No Way rules.

We’ll see. “How about you?”

His shrug is somehow sad, and that ticks another box. No tortured men. They always want saving, and given my childhood filled with broken people, it’s an impulse I have to constantly fight. “My old friend invited me. It seemed time for a change. Perhaps I will move here.”

“Really?” I eat some cheese, break some flatbread, offer the plate to him again. “From where?”

“Madrid.”

“That’s a big change.”

He nods, smooths his hands together, palm to palm. “I’m weary of politics.”

I snort laugh and have to cover my mouth. “Yeah. It’s been a weird few years.”

“Decades.”

“Yeah.”

We watch the people walk by. Couples in love, old marrieds, the happy-hour crowd heading home. My body is soft and quiet for the first time in ages. Maybe I’d needed to get away more than I knew. My hand reaches automatically for the ghost of the phone that isn’t there, and I open my palm on the table instead. “What are you reading?”

He holds it up to show me.One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s in Spanish, of course. “I’ve read it many times, but I love to read it again.”

I nod. Literary too, which isn’t on my No Way list, but it speaks to a great mind, and that is.

“Have you read it?” he asks.

“No.” I surprise myself by adding, “My sister was the literary one.”

“You don’t like to read?”

“I do. I just don’t readimportantbooks. That was her thing—all the great poets and writers and playwrights.”