Page 8 of Meet You Half Way
“No, I’m fine,” he said but that didn’t stop him from stealing another. And then another.
“So, you’re an architect?” I asked, recalling the name of the firm we’d arrived at earlier this evening.
“No,” he replied with a short laugh. “You could say I work as a drafter but without any formal qualifications.”
“Ah,” I mulled. “I thought you were going to say you were a model or something like that.”
Mateo laughed again, the sound soft and vibrant but gone as quickly as it began. “I do actually work as a model too. Just a part time thing at present.”
“Now that I can believe,” I grinned, seeing the way his cheeks flushed at my soft compliment. “Have you always lived on the South Coast?” I asked after a lull in the conversation.
“Since I was thirteen,” he nodded. “And you?”
“Coming up about six years,” I told him. He said nothing to that so I decided it was time to push a little, see where things lay. “I actually moved down the coast for my boyfriend originally.”
Bingo. He looked up at me then, eyes showing far more interest as they slid down my chest, across to my biceps almost as though he couldn’t help himself from looking. I knew I hadn’t been imagining the interest back at the hospital.
“What happened with the boyfriend?”
“Same old story,” I shrugged. “We were on fairly different pages of what we were looking for out of a relationship. But we were both young and it was probably for the better.”
“And you never left the coast?”
“Nah, fell in love with it I guess,” I smiled. “It was a better match for me than my ex-boyfriend at any rate so I’ve never left.”
“It has that kind of effect on people.”
“That it does,” I replied.
“Anyone else fill the gap?” Mateo hedged, feigning disinterest as he took a bite of his wrap.
“One or two but no one right now,” I told him, not quite feigning the same level of disinterest. “You?”
“Nope,” he replied simply and that was that.
We talked and we ate and Mateo polished off my entire bowl of fries and I watched as he slowly opened up, kind of like prying off a stubborn lid from a jar but worth it in the end. I got a couple more of those simmering smiles too, the ones that lit up his dark eyes and made me think I could fall in love with him right thenand there in that red velvet booth in the middle of the roadside diner.
“Did you always want to be a paramedic?” he was asking. There was no reason for us to still be seated here in the middle of absolutely nowhere. We had both long since finished our meals and yet there was absolutely nothing prompting me to shift away from this incredible guy and his equally nice company.
“Not quite,” I laughed. “Originally I wanted to be the stereotypical fireman. Like most boys I suppose.”
“Not all boys,” he chuffed and I sure liked that sound.
“No? What did you want to be when you grew up?” I asked.
Mateo mulled his answer. “I remember going on this international flight with my parents when I was five or six and I thought the air hostesses were the most beautiful and glamorous things I’d ever seen. I told my parents I wanted to do that when I grew up and they told me it was a stupid thing for a boy to want.”
“Yikes. That’s rough,” I returned.
“Yep. So I changed my mind on that but then I picked up a magazine one day and saw all these incredible photos with all these beautiful models and I knew that was what I wanted to do. I kept that quiet to myself though. I knew better by then.”
“Sounds like it. Also sounds like you’ve been able to follow your dreams.”
“Yeah by spending all my days in an architects firm doing a job I barely tolerate,” he laughed but there was an undertone there that made me want to ask more but before I could he cut me off. “You didn’t finish your story.”
“Oh, right. Yeah so the dream was to be a firefighter but when I was a kid, maybe same age as you were, my grandad had a nasty fall off a ladder when we were staying at his house. Ended up with a punctured lung, three broken ribs and a broken arm. The paramedics turned up at the house and I just rememberbeing so in awe of them, how they turned the whole situation around and made everything better. I thought they were heroes.”
“That’s really cool,” Mateo said. “And I agree with that sentiment by the way. About the heroes.”
