Safe in Clua

THIRTY-SIX

Felix

Laia sinks down into the warm water and lies back against my chest. Her hair in its usual knot on the top of her head, tickles my chin as she makes herself comfortable.

“Is this the kind of treatment I should expect every night? Bubble baths and back rubs?”

“Maybe.” I take a sponge from a shelf built into the wall and squeeze water over her shoulders, watching the bubbles snake over her sun-kissed skin. “It’s been a rough couple of days.” Shifting beneath her, I lift my leg and rest my foot on the edge of the tub to give her more space. It’s a big bath, but I’m not exactly small. Can’t say I was thinking about sharing it when I fitted it.

A comfortable silence settles around us. I like having her here. In my home. I like picking her up from work, knowing she’s safe. Having her with me.

Closing my eyes, I allow myself to drift and just enjoy her skin against mine and the feel of her fingers trailing over my leg. Being with her like this may not have been in either of our plans, but I’m having a hard time thinking of anywhere else I’d rather be.

“You never did tell me what this means.” Laia’s question breaks the quiet, her fingers following the lines of the tattoo on my calf.

“I think we should get this,” Rosa says in her musical lilt, holding up the picture she’s pulled from the printer in the library.

I shake my head and take the paper from her. “I thought you wanted to get something that means something. This is our wedding gift. I don’t want some ancient crap.” I turn the paper upside down. “Come on. No one even knows for sure what it means.”

“No, you come on, Fee, this does mean something—look.” Pulling her waist length black hair over her shoulder, she nudges my arm up so she can sit on my lap. “Look at this part here…” She lifts the paper so we can both see. “These two lines, see how they curve and bend with each other?” She runs a finger along the two thick black lines that run from one side of the image to the other. “To me, they are us.”

I still, watching her face light up the way it always does when she talks about art.

“And these dots and swirls, the way they fit perfectly into each other on either side, they’re our friends and family. It’s us Felix. I think we should get this.”

Nuzzling my face into her neck, I breathe in the citrus-fresh scent of her perfume. “How can I say no to that?” I press my lips over the gentle thrum of her pulse. “If you say they’re us, then I guess they’re us.”

“It was Rosa’s wedding gift to me.” I cough to clear the roughness to my voice. “She had the same design on her ribs.”

Laia stops tracing my skin and turns just enough to catch my stare. “Felix, you don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to. I understand.”

I know she does. And for the first time ever the memories are there, still sad, still painful, but the emptiness that usually accompanies them is less. Way less. Like this little woman with the big green eyes and dark blonde curls is filling that space. Replacing the emptiness with her grins and her fidgeting and her pies and her kisses. I skim my finger along her jaw and tilt her head so I can see her face. “She was an artist. Did you know that?”

She shakes her head before she lies back down against my chest, her hair tickling my nose again. “I didn’t.”

“She could look at any image and find meaning in it. It didn’t matter if the meaning she found wasn’t what the artist had in mind. To her the best thing about art was that it’s meaning was objective, completely unique to each person.”

Laia lifts my hands and links her fingers through mine. “She sounds cool.”

Pressing a kiss to her shoulder, I rub my thumb over the pulse in her wrist. “She was. You would have liked her.”

“How did she … what happened to her?” Laia’s body instantly tenses against mine, her ears flushing pink, her head shaking against my chest. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked that. Don’t answer.”

I suck in a lungful of steamy, vanilla-scented air then release it. These thoughts do hurt. I doubt they’ll ever stop. “I’m surprised you’ve not been told already.” Dropping her hand, I urge her forward so I can stand, the memories too painful to sit still with. “She was hit by a car on her way to work. Died instantly. In one second my whole world was turned upside down. It was like one minute I had everything I’d ever wanted, the next I had nothing. She was twenty-one. We’d just signed the papers on The Beach Hut.”

Laia’s shining green gaze watches me as I climb out of the tub and grab a towel. She pulls her knees up to her chest. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have pried.”

The towel wrapped around my waist, I bend forward, my hands on the edge of the tub. “The road you were driving the day we met.”

Her mouth falls open then slams closed again. “I had no idea.”

“Laia, meeting you has…” I squat down until my eyes are level with hers. “I didn’t think I would ever find this again. Didn’t think I wanted to. Meeting you has made me—fuck. I don’t know—it’s made me give a shit after a decade of feeling nothing. Meeting you has changed everything.”