Postcard: Barcelona

An unexpected summer shower glossed the streets. She attempted to keep her sandaled feet balanced on the slick cobblestones as she and her companions darted through a narrow courtyard. The hum of the music a magnet guiding their way. Once inside, skin held the dewy sheen as long hair shook out rivulets of water.

Drinking cool glasses of Rias Baixas, the women turn from the bar and watch the crowd move in hazy waves.

An hour passed easily as the sway and heat mixed in the dusky club. He came straight on without warning. Removing the glass from her hand, he set it on the bar. A hand slid down her arm and pulled her onto a dance floor already crowded with bodies. No talking needed, she didn't feel the least compelled to ask a name. Neither did he.

Multiple songs laced with Spanish guitar wrapped around them. And after dancing in a very deliberate way, he kissed her. The kind of kiss that makes a girl want to acquiesce all of her morals immediately. Lips surrounded by an unshaven face against her pale mouth.

They never spoke but as time lazily sauntered by, the percussion in the room sent morse code to both of them. And as day was beginning to yawn awake, he said, "Come home with me."

She considered. Two hour's worth of filthy thoughts condensed into a five second vignette. She held that look and only said, "I can't." But words unsaid burned in her throat.

He paused, if not for consideration of his campaign, then to determine her commitment to this decline. His departure following a final brush of mouth across the inside of her hand.

Not regretting, but certainly supplying savage thoughts throughout the day. And possibly other days as well.

For him, perhaps a distant and infrequently recurring Dior-scented daydream. Permanency not intended, but rather an increasingly opaque memory and a now tattered postcard of Barcelona.