Mancora After Dark

Ariam said the church was the safest place in Máncora to do something like this, and I believed her because I was twenty-four and stupid and hard in a way that made thinking optional.

We'd met Iván two nights before at the restaurant where he waited tables, the one with the plastic chairs and the ceviche that made your mouth burn for an hour. He'd brought us beers we didn't order and stood at the edge of our table like he had nowhere else to be. Ariam noticed him first. She always notices first. She said his hands were the kind that knew what they were doing, and I laughed and told her she was drunk, and she said being drunk had nothing to do with it.

Now it was Tuesday, his day off, and we were walking behind the church where the sand turned to gravel and the tourists didn't bother because there was nothing to see except a wall and some weeds and the backs of buildings that faced the ocean on the other side.

He was already there when we arrived. Leaning against the wall, smoking, wearing a white shirt that was too clean for someone who'd spent two days serving fish and rice to strangers. He dropped the cigarette when he saw us and stepped on it with the heel of his sandal.

"You came," he said.

"We said we would," Ariam told him.

"I know. But people say things."

I watched his face when he looked at her. There was something careful in it, like he was doing math he didn't want anyone to see. He was older than us, maybe thirty, with the kind of body that came from carrying trays and crates and not from any gym. His forearms had veins that stood out when he moved his hands, and he moved them a lot when he talked, which he did with the nervous energy of someone who wasn't sure he deserved to be in the room.

Ariam walked up to him and kissed his cheek. Just the cheek. But she let her hand rest on his chest when she pulled back, and I saw his throat move when he swallowed.

"You're nervous," she said.

"A little."

"Don't be."

I stayed back, watching them. The sun was going down behind the buildings and the light that made it through the gaps was orange and thick, the kind of light that makes everyone look better than they are. Ariam's hair was pulled up and her neck was bare and I could see the small mole below her ear that I'd known for six years. Iván looked at her like he was trying to memorize something.

"You two," he said. "How long have you been friends?"

"Since we were eighteen," I said.

"That's a long time."

"It is."

He nodded like that meant something to him. Maybe it did. Maybe he was thinking about his own friends and how none of them would be standing behind a church in Máncora on a Tuesday with him and two women he'd just met. I didn't ask. I wasn't there to ask questions.

Ariam kissed him again, but this time not on the cheek. She took his face in both hands and pulled him down to her and kissed him like she'd been waiting two days to do it, which she had. I watched his hands hover at his sides for a second before they found her waist, and then they weren't hovering anymore.

I felt something turn over in my stomach. Not jealousy. Something else. The same thing I'd felt the first time I watched her kiss someone else, years ago, at a party in Lima. A kind of heat that started low and spread.

Iván's eyes opened while he was still kissing her, and he looked at me. Just for a second. Checking. I held his gaze and didn't look away, and he made a sound low in his throat that I felt in my own chest.

Ariam pulled back and turned to me. Her lips were red and her eyes were bright.

"Come here," she said.

I went.

Iván touched my face when I got close, his fingers rough from work, and I leaned into it before I could stop myself. He smelled like cigarettes and soap and something underneath that was just him. His thumb traced my jaw and then he kissed me, softer than he'd kissed her, like he was asking a question.

I answered it.

Behind us, Ariam made a small sound. When I opened my eyes she was watching us with her arms crossed and a smile I'd seen a hundred times, the one that meant she was exactly where she wanted to be.

"This is weird," Iván said when we broke apart. "Right? This is weird."

"Only if you make it weird," Ariam told him.

"I'm not making it weird. I'm just saying. I don't do this."

"Do what?"

"Whatever this is."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. He looked so serious, standing there with his clean white shirt and his nervous hands, like he was about to give a speech.

"You don't have to do anything," I said. "We can just stand here."

"I don't want to just stand here."

"Okay then."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked at Ariam. Then he looked at the ground, and when he looked up again something had shifted in his face. The nervousness was still there but it was underneath now, covered by something else. Want, maybe. Or decision.

"Okay," he said.

Ariam walked past both of us and sat down on the low wall that ran along the side of the church. She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them and looked at us like we were a movie she'd already seen and wanted to watch again.

"I'm going to watch," she said. "Is that okay?"

Iván nodded. He didn't say anything. He just reached for me and pulled me toward him and kissed me harder this time, with his hands in my hair and his body pressed against mine and the wall at my back, and I forgot about Ariam watching and the sun going down and the fact that I didn't even know his last name.

His mouth moved to my neck and I tilted my head back and stared at the sky, which was turning purple at the edges. I could hear the ocean somewhere behind the buildings, that constant sound that you stop noticing after a few days. I could hear Ariam breathing. I could hear my own heart.

"I want to touch you," Iván said against my throat.

"Then touch me."

He did.

Later, when the light was almost gone and the air had cooled and I was sitting on the ground with my back against the wall, Ariam came over and sat beside me. She put her head on my shoulder and I felt her hair against my cheek. Iván was a few feet away, lying on his back in the dirt, staring at the sky. His shirt was somewhere. His chest was rising and falling like he'd been running.

"I told you," Ariam said.

"Told me what?"

"That his hands knew what they were doing."

I laughed and it hurt a little. Everything felt raw and open. The way it does sometimes after.

Iván sat up and looked at us. His face was different now. Softer. Younger, somehow, like something had been let out of him and he hadn't expected it to feel this way.

"I have to work tomorrow," he said.

"We know."

"Can I see you again?"

Ariam lifted her head from my shoulder. She looked at me. I looked at her. We didn't need to say anything.

"Yes," she said.

He nodded and got up and found his shirt and shook it out and put it on. He didn't ask for our numbers. He didn't ask where we were staying. He just looked at us one more time, both of us sitting there in the dark, and then he walked away toward the street.

I watched him go until he turned the corner and disappeared.

"He's going to think about this all night," Ariam said.

"Probably."

"Are you okay?"

I thought about it. The question deserved a real answer.

"Yeah," I said. "I think so."

But I wasn't sure. There was something in my chest that hadn't been there before, something small and sharp that I couldn't name. It wasn't about Iván. It wasn't about Ariam. It was about the way the two of them had looked at each other over my shoulder, in the middle of everything, like they were seeing something they recognized.

I stood up and brushed the dirt off my legs and held out my hand to help Ariam up.

"Let's go get a drink," I said.

"Okay."

We walked back toward the lights of the town, and I didn't look behind me at the church or the wall or the place where we'd been. But I felt it there, behind my ribs, that small sharp thing, and I knew it wasn't going anywhere.