I didn’t turn toward him.
“Yes,” I replied, taking another sip. “Just don’t touch me. I don’t like being touched.”
“I won’t,” he said quickly, almost reassuring. “Are you here with someone?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I couldn’t have come here alone, obviously.”
A soft hum of amusement.
“Male or female?”
That question made something in me sharpen.
Not anger exactly.
“Why should that matter?” I asked, tilting my head slightly toward his voice. “Are you planning to ask me out or something? You should know I’m married.”
A short laugh left him, unbothered.
“Many married women come around here,” he said casually, like it was a statistic rather than a boundary. “So... who might your husband be? Barcelona is a small world. We all tend to know each other in these circles.”
That sentence should have made me uncomfortable.
It did.
But not in the way he expected.
BecauseRafaeldid not belong to “these circles.”
I smirked faintly, lifting the glass again.
The rum slid down easier now—less burn, more blur at the edges of thought.
I drained the rest of it in one slow sip.
I turned back toward the bar, fingers tightening around the now-empty glass as if it was the only stable thing left in a world that kept shifting under me.
“Please give me more,” I said, voice quieter now, less guarded than I intended.
A pause.
Then—
“Okay, ma’am.”
The bartender’s voice was professional. I felt the glass lifted from my hand carefully, replaced by the faint sound of liquid being poured.
The refill came back to me moments later, sliding across polished wood with precision.
I wrapped my fingers around it again.
Anchoring.
“You seem lost in thought,” Marcelo said beside me. “If something’s troubling you, you might feel better talking about it.”
I let out a small breath through my nose.
A humorless sound.
