I chewed on my lip for a few beats. As innocent as it had been between us, I wasn’t sure how innocent it looked. Again, we weren’t doing anything that kids didn’t do during nap time in kindergarten. But I had to wonder, just a bit, if anyone else here thought it was somewhat…wrong. I mean, though he didn’t look it and in some ways, didn’t act it, he was in his late thirties. He was a respected athlete and business owner. And I was a twenty-three year old astronomy brat with tats and an old movie star’s name. Everyone was probably wondering what he was doing.

I wondered if Mateo Casalles knew what he was doing. Judging by his easy-going attitude, and his philosophy on clothes, he probably didn’t care what people thought. I think he was just a flirtatious man with his own ideas of fun. Damn if that didn’t make him more endearing.

I think I needed to take up his philosophy. I thought that’s how I approached life too. But maybe not. Mine had too many cracks in it, where people could get to me.

Minutes later, I was brushing the grass off of me while Mateo and I discussed where to have our business meeting. According to Jerry, this part of the day was less conversational and more about actual business situations and how to handle them in English. At breakfast we had been given a small loose leaf booklet that was full of scripts we could follow. All in all, it seemed like a pretty serious ordeal. There was the phone call, where he would go into his room and I would go into mine and we would call each other and go over a script. Mateo didn’t seem too sold on that, I guess because without visual clues, it was harder to speak.

There was also a business group meeting and we’d have to find another pair to do that, or we could do a faux job interview, which could pretty much turn into any employer trying to hire someone or any company trying to sell.

To my surprise though, Mateo eventually settled on the business call.

“I fear it, so I should do it,” he said. I admired his reasoning. I took my script and went to my apartment. Sara wasn’t there, so I took a seat on the couch beside the phone and waited for him to call me. The booklet had everyone’s extension, which was kind of nice if you got bored and felt like wanting to talk to someone. Unfortunately, we were blocked from making long distance calls and I was pretty sure a collect call to my house would get refused. I told myself to run to the computers on my pre-dinner break so I could finally get in touch with my family.

While I waited for the phone to ring, feeling like I was back in high school all over again, I poured myself a cup of clean-tasting water from the tap and looked around the silence of the room. Aside from my early bedtime the night before, I really hadn’t had a place to myself in a week, not since I left for London. I was quite a private person, despite what most people would say, and really cherished my time alone. I liked having my own personal space to think and to dream. Perhaps that’s why I’d never made any really close friends over the years—I never felt I needed them.

And yet standing in the kitchenette of the foreign apartment, surveying the cream couch and the iron chandeliers and the dark-wooded floors of the sparse room, I felt this strange gnawing in the pit of my chest. It was like I didn’t want the alone time, the time to think. I wanted to go back outside and be around people, soak up their personalities and their essence, like a dull-toothed vampire. This was very unlike me—one day at Las Palabras and I was changing. I wasn’t sure if I liked it.

The phone rang, jolting me out of my thoughts. I ran over to it and snatched it up. “Hello?”

“Vera?” Mateo said over the line. His voice sounded higher on the phone, crisp and professional.

“Yup,” I said and immediately started toying with the phone line, wrapping it around my finger.

A thick silence permeated the line. He cleared his throat. “You are supposed to go first. It says so.”

Oh, right, the script. I flipped open the pages, feeling a bit nervous all of a sudden. There was something quite serious about Mateo’s tone, as if we’d stopped being friendly for a moment.

The script was fairly straightforward. I was an investor who was calling about the business. My job was to ask Mateo the questions and he only had a brief word or two telling him what he should talk about without supplying him the actual script. He had to make that up on his own, pulling from his real life.

It went okay, at first, but when it called for me to ask him “what are the advantages of investing in your company” he started to stumble over his words. He was saying them wrong, drawing a blank.

“Merde,” he swore harshly into the phone. “Fuck. Fuck!”

I was taken aback by his change in tune. I swallowed hard and said, “It’s okay. We can just start over. It’s a hard question.”

“It’s a question I can’t even answer in Spanish,” he said bitterly. “How the fuck do I answer in English?”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I continued to coil the phone line around my finger. I heard him sigh.

“Sorry,” he said. “I am sorry, Vera.”

“It’s okay,” I said in a small voice.

“It is not okay,” he said. “But it has nothing to do with you.” He paused. “I will try and think of something to say about my company for next time. Do you mind…do you mind if we just talk instead?”

“What about?” I asked.

“You. Let’s talk about you. Vera Miles.”

“I’m not very interesting.”

“You say that, but I have many questions.”

I smiled, my heart starting to beat a bit faster. “Okay…but if I tell you all my secrets, you’re going to find me boring.”

“You? Boring?” he chuckled warmly. “Impossible. I only have twenty questions for you, like the game. You know the game, yes?”

“Yes,” I slowly said. But I seriously didn’t feel like playing it with him. Now, if the game were reversed, that would be another story.

“Well, I shall ask you one question a day. I am here for only twenty-one days, so on the last day you can ask me a question.”

“That hardly seems fair,” I said. Still, if he had to ask me a question every day, that meant he had to talk to me every day. I couldn’t say no to that.

“It is fair, to me,” he said simply. “First question is…did it hurt when you got that hole put in your tongue?”

I laughed. “What? My tongue ring?”

“Yes. Did it hurt? It looks like it would hurt.”

Funny, I’d never seen him eyeing my tongue ring before. Usually it was quite noticeable when someone finally spies the silver inside your mouth. It’s not like I went around all day doing the Julia Roberts laugh.

“Yeah, it hurt,” I said. “But I don’t mind a bit of pain.”

“I see,” he said. “It suits you.”

“Really?” All I’d heard from my mother and sister was that it made me look like a cheap tramp. I was sure to someone like Mateo, it was looked at as being gross and immature.

“Yes,” he said. “When I was younger, I thought it was a cool look. I wanted one.”

I couldn’t picture Mateo with a tongue ring—or any kind of ring, other than his wedding one. “I have to say, I can’t really imagine you with a tongue ring,” I admitted. “It’s not really your style.”

“Oh, I was a fun person, when I was younger,” he said. “Now, I just get buzzzzzed. That’s it.”

That was the second time he had said when he was “younger.” I wondered if being around him was like reliving the past. “You’re not old, Mateo,” I told him. “You’re not even forty.”

“But I will be forty before you will be forty. You will only be twenty-five.” He sighed. “You will see. Sometimes you are stuck being the person you are and not the person you were. Or could be.”

The somber quality to his voice filled the air around me, making the apartment seem shades darker, like the curtains had been pulled closed. It was scary how I totally understood what he was talking about, no matter what age I was.