Page 57 of One Year Ago in Spain
“Unbelievable.” Claire smiled fully now.
“Yeah. Wow.” Matías shook his head. “Anyway, I want to show you more. Come this way.” He darted left of the worktable, expecting her to follow. But moving around a studio where she couldn’t see anything was easier said than done. How wouldClaire know if she was running straight into a chair or another easel that wasn’t in the same place as the ones she could see? Or if he’d left mahl sticks or big metal safety cans of used solvent in the middle of the floor?
But did it really matter? She would walk right through the things that weren’t really there now. It would be fine as long as Matías didn’t see her do it.
Still, she tried to keep on his heels without getting weirdly close.
Matías stopped in front of the eastern wall. Claire came up beside him.
“I want to take these with me,” he said.
“Mm,” Claire said, because she had no idea what they were looking at.
“But my sister, Aracely, says I shouldn’t because they will only make me homesick.”
Ah.Claire suspected this was his “Homage to Spain” series. Part of the exhibit at the Rose Gallery had been dedicated to it: the chef sprinkling tiny hearts onto paella. A flamenco dancer on a beach who, instead of castanets, performed with clacking seashells. A matador extending a bouquet of flowers rather than a sword at a black bull.
“I think,” Claire said, “that your home country will always be with you, whether you have the paintings or not. Living in the States will never change that.”
He crossed his arms as he contemplated both the work and what Claire had said. Since she couldn’t really see the paintings—other than in her memory—she watchedhim. And what she saw, she’d never noticed before. There was a sadness in Matías’s eyes, like part of him was reluctant to leave this place. By thetime Claire had met him in New York, he’d been there a week already and had thrown himself with the usual Matías enthusiasm into experiencing everything there was to offer there. Any hint of regret never showed.
But right here, this Matías hadn’t left yet, and that meant the future was a vast maw of the unknowable. At the same time, his heart was still raw from Vega’s breaking off their engagement and telling him to go ahead and move to the other side of the planet without her.
“You should definitely bring these paintings with you,” Claire said. She knew he would anyway, because she’d seen them at the Rose Gallery. But it also seemed like the right thing to say as he stood on the cusp of a monumental change in his life. For Matías, art had always been both wild exploration and security blanket. She knew what having a piece of home with him would mean.
He nodded slowly. “Thank you. I think Iwillpack these.”
Matías showed her around the rest of the studio, identifying the other pieces he had selected for his first exhibit in New York. Talking about art animated him, and Claire relished seeing Matías so vibrant, his eyes like fire, the tanned muscles of his arms flexing as he pointed out this and that in his paintings.
He was so different from his pale, drugged and battered counterpart at the hospital who was growing thinner and weaker by the day.
Lost in thought, she didn’t notice when Matías veered to the right to avoid something she couldn’t see.
“Claire, no!”
Matías lunged toward her, knocking her away from whatever it was he saw there. Momentum threw them against the wall,but her head didn’t hit, because Matías instinctively cradled his arm around her and took the impact.
He held her pinned like that for a long moment, chest to chest, her face tucked into the crook of his neck. She could feel his quickened breath across her hair, his heart pounding against her body.
Claire gasped.
She wasn’t supposed to be able to feel him.
Matías was not exactly solid, but he wasn’tnotthere, either. His touch was theimpressionof him, like when Claire had closed her eyes and pressed her lips to her palm and it had felt like Matías was truly there. She’d been able to imagine the pressure of his mouth so viscerally—the velvet of his lips and the strong lines of his jaw—that it had felt almost real.
Just like right now. He was holding her, her back against the wall, and she could feel the phantom weight of his body against hers. He was warmer than the air in the rest of the studio, and that heat made Claire flush with the memory of other times when they had held their bodies so close.
In the humid greenhouse of the New York Botanical Garden. Pressed against a stone arch at the Met Cloisters. Behind a cotton candy stand on Coney Island.
But in the privacy of a studio, they could do even more. She wanted to kiss Matías’s neck, run her hands down his back, slide them down and unbuckle his belt, and do the things she knew would make him have to brace himself on her shoulders.
“Claire,” he whispered.
“Yes?”
He tilted her chin up with a finger. She met his molten gaze.
And then his lips met hers, his kiss a summer storm. If she closed her eyes, Claire could feel him, like wind and sun grazingher mouth. She recalled the taste of his tongue from their first kiss—almonds and brown sugar—and as she kissed this version of Matías who was not yet hers, she also missed the one who was, and tears streamed down her face, mixing salt with the memory of sweetness.
