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my lips, something he’d said to me recently, which I’d pretended to ignore and later checked in my dictionary: “Te quiero mucho.” And I meant it—meant that I loved him.
    How had this happened? In eighteen years I’d never fallen in love with anyone, and now, just six months after I’d fallen in love with Graham, I was in love with someone else. It was different, but it felt definitive. Did love open up your heart, so that you became more susceptible to falling in love again? I wondered at the elasticity of my own feelings. I didn’t think that this second love contradicted the first. I didn’t even think Graham would begrudge it. For one thing, my love for Graham was the clearest feeling I’d ever had. It didn’t
seem vulnerable. For another, it seemed that to love me, as Graham did, also meant wanting for me the things I wanted for myself, and what I wanted, at the moment, was to experience life, to discover its pleasures and excitements. No, Graham wouldn’t withhold this from me. Graham and Pepe were not even relevant to one another. They were in different languages, and I was a different person with each one. They belonged to two separate worlds.
    The thing I couldn’t quite figure out was when, exactly, I’d gone from mild annoyance at Pepe’s advances to genuine affection. Nor why this had happened. I understood that sex could result from love. But it hadn’t occurred to me that love might result from sex. Was that what had transpired? Or was it our accumulated time together that had led me to feel this way? Or was I just grateful for what he was doing, taking me around the coast? My heart wasn’t as reliable as I’d thought.

    I’d been dimly conscious of physical risk. One night we ran across Pepe’s sister Nuria in the cathedral plaza, after everything was closed, with a male friend of hers. They’d been in a fender bender and she said she was okay, but seemed shaken as she recounted the story. Pepe touched her shoulders like she was a delicate doll, and asked over and over, ¿Estas bien? He glared at her friend, the erstwhile driver. Yet Pepe liked a drink before he hit the road, liked to speed, liked to get high on cocaine. Twice we did wheelies. I held his back on the motorcycle as he took on the straightaway south of town. He picked up speed, then picked his front tire up clear off the ground. The pitch of the engine rose to a whine, air whipped my cheekbones, and I squeezed my arms and legs for life. Afterward, my eyes teared from the sting of the air.

    There was a popular brand of clothing called Pepe Jeans, and Pepe semi-ironically wore one of their T-shirts, which bore his name in big rose-colored letters across the front. He knew I coveted the T-shirt, and near the end of the summer he gave it to me, freshly laundered and folded. I placed it reverentially in my suitcase. I was still in Spain, still able to see him. And yet I was already anticipating my own nostalgia, looking forward to the moment when I would look back. I learned the meaning of echar de menos and used the phrase regularly to tell Pepe that I would miss him, and ask if he would miss me.
    A few nights before I was to leave I stayed with Pepe in his apartment until dawn, at which time he drove me home on his motorcycle. After I got in, Maria José came to me, infuriated. “Oye, Eleesabet,” she said, and I thought she was finally going to call me out for my ridiculous hours. Instead she told me that Toni had just called from the office: On his way to work, he’d passed Pepe and me on our way home, and observed that we weren’t wearing our helmets. “I’m serious,” she said, “you two really need to smarten up.”
    Physical injury, though, was the least of my concerns. My idle adventuring had become an attachment, and now the letting-go loomed. Pepe had slipped into my affections when I thought the risks lay