Page 68 of Cava with My Colleague

Jade

Ugh, that looks cozy. I wish I had a nice warm dog to snuggle up with right now.

Carlos

Where are you?

Jade

I am currently sharing a baguette with a man named Ernesto just inside the entrance to the Lavapiés Metro stop.

I forgot my umbrella.

Me

Don’t move.

I put on my jacket. I find my umbrella by the door—a large one, built for actual weather—and take the Metro south.

It takes me twenty minutes. By the time I reach the Lavapiés exit, the street is running with water and the air smells of wet stone and something green and sharp. I scan the small crowd sheltering under the awning.

Jade is leaning against the wall with her laptop bag clutched to her chest and her shoes already dark and wet. Next to her, a man holds a baguette bag.

She looks up when I approach. Something moves across her face—surprise, and then, quickly, something more careful.

“You came,” she says.

“I said don’t move.”

I open the umbrella and hold it out over us both. It’s large enough but only just, and when she steps in close to fit under it the smell of her shampoo hits me—citrus, warm, familiar in a way it has no business being.

We walk.

Lavapiés is not what I expected, which is foolish—I’ve lived in Madrid for thirty years and know this neighborhood perfectly well, or thought I did. But I’ve never walked through it at Jade’s pace, which is slow and observant, even in the rain. She points out a mural on the corner of her street, tells me it appeared one morning last November and nobody knows who painted it. She nods at the bar where the clerk teases her about her Spanish.

“Here,” she says, stopping at a door.

The building is old, the kind with a heavy street door and a dim tiled entry and a lift that runs on its own schedule. We take the stairs. On the third floor she finds her keys and lets us in.

Her apartment is exactly what I would have predicted and nothing like what I imagined. Small, yes—one main room with the kitchen along one wall and a window overlooking the narrow street. The corkboard on the wall is dense with Polaroids. A few scattered used coffee mugs.

But it’s also warm. Lived-in in the way that takes intention—the ceramic bull from El Rastro, the Metro map she never took down, the string of lights above the window that aren’t on yet because she didn’t know she’d be coming home to company.

“Sit,” she says, dropping her bag by the door and shaking water from her hair. “I’ll get towels.”

I fold my umbrella and set it by the door. Through the window the rain is still coming down hard, the street below running silver. Madrid isn’t a city used to rain, especially not this intense. Traffic, buses, even the Metro will be affected on a day like today. So will the people of Madrid. Rain makes us sad, or at least reflective.

I don’t sit. I look at the corkboard.

I find the Valencia ones quickly. The one of the four friends I’ve heard about. A selfie with the man I recognize from the time we bumped into each other at the sex shop. And two I recognize—the one she took of me in the evening light, and the one I took of her in the cathedral, eyes direct, a smile she doesn’t always let people see.

She’s kept them at the center.

Jade appears with two glasses and a bottle and a slightly damp towel over her shoulder. She stops when she sees where I’m looking.

Neither of us says anything.

“You might be here a while,” Jade says. “Wine?”