Girls Who Travel Read Free

romantic foreshadowing or dumb hope or mere coincidence.
    â€œAre you?” I laced my tone with playfulness.
    We walked around the city for hours that day. He had noclue where he was going, but that didn’t matter anymore. I never did find those flamenco fans.
    Instead, he taught me how to pronounce his name (
Lok-lun O-Ma-hoon
) in the animated Boqueria market. We talked of the cities we had come from while eating sugared churros on the steps of formidable churches with gargoyles for chaperones.
    I had just come from Latin America and had a few months of travel left. But Lochlon, a serial backpacker, had just started a new journey and would be on the road for at least a year. He traveled until the money ran out, went home to Ireland to work, and then went back on the road. He was Peter Pan with dirty jeans and a brogue.
    By the time night fell, we were talking of the places we would go to next while slipping through the side streets and back alleys of Barcelona’s underbelly. I don’t remember where we were going that night, but I can still remember the buzzing rush low in my stomach whenever I think of it.
    The next week we would be on a train to the Pyrenees together, the pastoral countryside tumbling past us. Fallow yellow fields; stone ruins; farmers’ cottages; dusty soccer games; sky, sky, sky. It was the beginning of a four-month-long “roadmance” where we traveled and, in effect, lived together. If he was Peter Pan, then I was Wendy.
    After Spain, we went on to jump turnstiles on the Paris Métro; got kicked out of a glitzy, ritzy bar in Monte Carlo; and spent nights kissing over bottles of cheap Chianti in dreamy Florentine piazzas.
    In Rome, he taught me it was okay to be a tourist and take pictures with the men dressed as gladiators. “If you act like you’re above it, you’re going to miss out,” he told me. And he was right.
    We splashed fully clothed in a public fountain in Zurich,
La Dolce Vita
style; climbed trees in a Berlin park, skinning our knees; and stayed up all night playing poker on an overnight diesel train to Greece with teenagers from Israel. We made love for the first time, hot and desperate and carnal, in Istanbul; and played “Never Have I Ever” on a budget airliner to Mumbai. He first admitted that he was hiding something from me on the Konkan Railway down south to Goa.
    â€œThere’s stuff about me that you don’t know, Kika,” he told me as the train wheezed and jangled us along the thin railroad tracks that drew a line between the Arabian Sea and the Sahyadri Mountains. We had been on the train for five hours, and we still had more to go.
What is it about long journeys that breeds confessions?
I wondered then.
    The sun shone through the window highlighting the freckles on my thighs. “Like what?”
    â€œI’ve done some things in my past that I’m not proud of,” he whispered, staring out the window greasy with fingerprints. Sweat oiled his temples.
    I shrugged. “So has everyone.” His words didn’t worry me. By this point I had already made up my mind about him. This wasn’t just vacation sex; he was really someone to me. And it would take a lot to change that.
    But he creased his forehead seriously.
    â€œNo, you’re not understanding me. You’d not be able to look at me in the same way if you knew.” He looked deeply uncomfortable and tented his sweat-stained T-shirt off his chest.
    â€œWhy don’t you tell me and let me decide that,” I said without flinching.
    But then, it was as if an emergency alarm had been pulledin my brain. A warning image of my mom’s face flashed in the speed of a strobe light:
Caution! Caution! Caution!
    â€œYou’re not married, are you?” I blurted, abandoning all casual coolness. My insides rippled at the thought.
    That was mom’s one rule: Don’t fall in love with a married man. She had that rule because it