The Rain in Spain Read Free Page A

under the untucked white button down, his hands wrapping around his glass, fingers overlapping to the third knuckle, fingertips white. He wanted to push, she knew.
    She held her breath.
    The last of the sun slipped below the horizon. The pigeons had flown away to roost for the night, safely pressed breast to breast in the eaves of the cathedral perhaps.
    “Yes.”
    Her exhale was audibly shaky. “Did you like it?”
    “People have a strange idea of what belongs in a museum there.”
    He’d been perplexed and almost insulted by the living room that looked like Mae West in the Dali Museum two days before. His engineer’s brain understood paintings in frames or statues on pedestals, but balked at the idea of a sofa as a pair of lips and framed pictures of cloudy skies for eyes. She’d watched the families passing through, parents kneeling down next to small children to point and direct their stares, and had loved it.
    “But did you like it?”
    “I am glad to have seen it.”
    Right there.
    That was it.
    Her breath hiccupped in her chest, catching right under her breastbone with a sharp pain. “You can check it off your list.”
    “Yes.” His eyebrows lowered as he spoke slowly. He knew something about his lists bothered her, but didn’t understand what it was. And that was what would break them, she feared. She couldn’t help wondering what list had had her name on it.
    The wind picked up. At last. Hot air fluttered the hem of her skirt against the back of her knees, a butterfly touch. She lifted her face and let it flow over her cheeks instead of tears.
    “You like lists.”
    He hesitated, staring at her. She wondered if everything felt like a trap to him. “I don’t want to miss anything.”
    “But you can miss so much , looking ahead to the next item on your list.”
    “It’s just a list.”
    But it wasn’t. It was everything. Because she wasn’t the last item on that list. She knew that. And being with her, the wanderer, home for one week and then gone for two, made so much of what she knew he wanted impossible.
    A fat wet drop splashed against the back of her hand. The warm water beaded up and ran down her wrist. She looked up. Clouds blotted out the stars everywhere except a slice of the sky to the west.
    “I think it’s—”
    Deluge.
    The rain fell like a hot, wet hammer, soaking them to the skin in moments, pushing her full glass of tinto de verrano to the brim. She yelped and sprinted for the tiny awning over the door to the interior. A second behind her, Javi also crowded under the scant protection, shirt molded to his broad trapezius muscles and plastered over his chest. Dark strands dripped in front of his eyes until he slicked his hair back with one hand, grinning as she laughed and held her dress away from her chest with one hand, wiping rain out of her eyes with the other.
    “The rain in Spain—” she began.
    “Falls mainly wherever we are,” Javi finished for her with a twist of a smile.
    Misquoting My Fair Lady had become a running joke on their trip.
    Their legs were still getting soaked, the rain falling so hard it bounced off the rooftop and splashed them up to their knees. Gusts of wind shifted the faint silver curtain of rain off the vertical. Her chest heaved with the deep breaths of an adrenalin rush. They’d both abandoned their drinks in their race to shelter. She had her straw bag, contents mostly dry, but—
    “Oh, no.”
    Javi looked at her. “What?”
    “Nothing.” Her hat sat on the chair, the last guest at a party who refused to take the hint that it was time to go home, getting pounded by the rain. She shrugged. It wasn’t going anywhere. She could retrieve it later. Javi nudged her with his elbow, then again when she didn’t say anything. “It’s just my hat.”
    He looked down at her. She shrugged. He lifted a hand, fingers curved, and for a moment she thought he was going to touch her, push her wet hair back behind her ear or grab her by the back of the