Maid in Barcelona

I woke up before he did, which surprised me, because in my experience men who sleep over always wake first and start making noise in the kitchen like they're claiming territory. Mateo hadn't moved. His arm was lying heavy across my ribs, not holding me exactly, just resting there the way an arm rests on a fence rail, and I could hear him breathing slow behind my shoulder.

The bed in this rented room is narrow. I'd chosen it that way on purpose, a single mattress against the whitewashed wall, because I wasn't planning on sharing it with anyone and a narrow bed is easier to make. Now there were two of us in it and my hip was pressed against the wall and one of my feet had lost its blanket, and still I didn't want to move. That was the strange part.

Here's a thing about me. I've been cleaning other people's houses for a living since I was thirty-one, thirteen years of it now, and the first rule of the job is you leave no trace of yourself. You wipe down the sink after you use it. You take your shoes off at the door. You fold your own mess small and carry it out with you. I have cleaned up after myself in hundreds of kitchens and bathrooms and I have never once left a coffee ring behind, and lying there with Mateo's arm across me I realized I did not want to clean up this morning at all. I wanted the night to stay spilled all over the room. The condom wrapper in the bin by the dresser. Both our shirts on the floor in a pile, his blue one and the grey blouse with the button that never sits right. I wanted to look at all of it from the bed and not touch it.

* * *

It had started, as these things apparently do, with tapas. I'd been in Barcelona nine days, over from London for a month of housekeeping jobs I'd lined up through an agency, and Thursday night I'd gone into the old part of town for dinner because the pinchos place near my room had a queue and I couldn't be bothered to wait. I was sitting at the bar with a plate of patatas bravas and a glass of something red when a voice behind me said my name in that careful, over-pronounced way people say it when they learned it in a classroom.

And it was him. Mateo, from my Wednesday night Spanish class at the adult education centre in Kennington, eight years ago. He'd been one of the quiet ones at the back, the Spanish man taking the course for no reason anyone could work out, since he already spoke the language, and he'd told us once he just liked hearing it explained, the grammar of his own mouth laid out on a whiteboard. I'd been thirty-six then. I remember because we'd worked out our ages one night after class over a drink we never got to have, him being two years younger than me and shy about it in a way I found funny.

He didn't look that different. A little grey coming in at the temples, same long face, same way of standing like he was waiting for permission to take up space. He'd said something about how he never expected to see me here, of all places, and I told him the truth, that I was a housekeeper now, over for a month of it, and I watched his face do something I didn't expect. Not pity. Something softer and more curious, like I'd told him a fact about myself and he wanted the whole story. We ended up at a second bar, then a third, and at some point I said something bold, because I am bold after two glasses, and he went red to the ears, and the next thing I knew we were in a taxi going somewhere that wasn't my room until it was my room.

None of that was the plan. My plan for this trip had been written in a notebook, actually written, jobs listed by address, and nowhere in it was there a line for this.

* * *

Behind me Mateo stirred. He mumbled something in Catalan, half asleep, words running together, and I caught maybe one vowel of it.

"Que?" I said.

He laughed into the back of my neck before he was even properly awake, that low laugh you could feel more than hear, and said, "Eight years and you still say that."

It was a joke from class. Our teacher, a woman from Valencia, used to say que to us when we mangled a question, and it had gotten passed around the group like a coin until it stopped meaning anything. I'd forgotten I knew it. He hadn't.

"You sleep on your side like a letter folded in thirds," he said. His voice was rough with sleep and his English was slower in the mornings, I remembered that too.

"I'm conserving heat. Your bed-hogging left me a corridor."

"There was no corridor. I apologised in advance for the corridor."

I laughed and he did too, and then for a while we just lay there, and I listened to the courtyard below, where someone, the same someone as every morning since I'd arrived, was hanging laundry. The wooden clack of pegs against the rail, the wet slap of a sheet shaken out. In this building it happens at all hours and it means the day has started whether you've joined it or not.

"Do you want coffee?" he asked. "There is a machine downstairs, or I can go out, there is a place on the corner that does it properly."

"Yes," I said. "Coffee, yes."

But he didn't get up. That was what I kept noticing. His hand had moved and he was tracing the line of my hip with one finger, slow, following the bone the way you'd follow a line on a map you were thinking of walking someday. A man who was going to leave would have answered the question with his feet. He'd have rolled off the bed, found his trousers in the pile, done the coffee as a way of making the exit. Mateo stayed exactly where he was, warm