Page 48 of Beautiful Lies
“Dinner? I brought you a taco.”
He shook his head. “Not what I had in mind.”
“What do you need?” I asked warily. If he was talking about sex, the answer was no. Absolutely not. No sex with the ex.
“An invitation.”
12
Connor
There were four women in the class, but I had no interest in watching the others. I was only here for Ava. I leaned against the wall, out of the way. Multi-colored silk ropes hung from the rafters of a double-height ceiling. Ava was wearing Lycra leggings and a sports bra, her toned stomach on full display. She was all lean muscle, she’d always been in good shape, but this was the fittest I’d ever seen her. Christ, she was strong and so flexible it got me thinking about things I shouldn’t.
She was trying to forget I was here, so she could get in her zone. But every now and then she glanced over at me then shook her head a little like she needed to stop doing that. I didn’t want to mess up her class or ruin her concentration, so I fiddled with my phone for a while and Googled random things—glass blowing, the graffiti on the Berlin Wall, and Rio de Janeiro. I scrolled through photos of Christ the Redeemer, arms open wide above a sprawling city. Sandy beaches and rolling green hills, colonial architecture, the carnival. The vibrant street art in a city riddled by crime, inhabited by the wealthy and the wretchedly poor. It seemed like my kind of place, a city with a heartbeat, heat, color, and contradictions.
When the first notes of Muse’s “Undisclosed Desires” started playing, I pocketed my phone and tipped back my head, looking up. Ava had climbed to the top, a turquoise silk wrapped around her ankle, her hands holding the silk tie taut, back arched and her body suspended upside down and high above. I could tell by the look on her face that she was fully in the moment. Everything around her had ceased to exist. I couldn’t say what she was doing. I didn’t have the names for her moves. All I knew was that it was brave and daring and so fucking beautiful. Flying and dropping down in a free-fall. She made it look effortless, her flexible body bending to her will. Fluid and graceful. Her moves synchronized to the music.
Ava, my muse, my inspiration. She would be my art.
She didn’t notice when I snapped photos on my phone. Or the way I stared at her, in shock and awe. Fragile, my ass. This girl wasn’t made of glass. She was forged of malleable steel.
If Ava were a tree, she’d be a willow. They bend, but they don’t break.
When the class ended, I waited for her to come to me. She dressed in her hoodie and Nikes, said goodbye to the others, and walked toward me with a smile that was just for me. I recognized that smile like a song I hadn’t heard in a long time but still remembered all the lyrics.
“You amaze me.”
“It’s not easy to amaze you,” she said. “With your short attention span.”
True. I had a low threshold for boredom, but Ava had never bored me. I found her endlessly fascinating. “You always manage to keep me entertained.”
“Empanadas?”
I laughed and took her backpack off her shoulder and slung it over mine.
“I brought my iPad,” she said, following me out to my bike. “We can make a plan. I also have a roll of quarters and a huge appetite.”
“You should have been a Girl Scout. Always prepared.”
“I wouldn’t have lasted a day. I don’t play well with others, remember?”
I laughed. Her second-grade teacher had written that on her report card and it still bothered her. “That’s because you were still playing your perfect princess role. You left that girl in the dust years ago.”
“Right about the time I met you.”
“I ruined you for all others,” I said.
“You did.”
“What about Zeke?” I asked.
“What about him?”
I was about to put her helmet on for her, but she took it out of my hand and did it herself. “Let’s go,” she said. “I’m hungry.”
On the short drive to the diner, I tortured myself with thoughts of her and Zeke together. What could they possibly have in common? Besides working together. And sleeping together. Fuck. I needed to let it go, but it was hard.
When we were seated in a booth with menus in front of us, she smashed the roll of quarters against the table edge and spilled them onto the table. “We can play quarters with our papaya juice.”
