The Rain in Spain by Amy Jo Cousins

Chapter One

    T he pigeons circled La Giralda again, flickering with every orbit like animations on the corner of a page in a flip book, bright when catching the setting sun, dark when backlit. Sipping a tinto de verrano at a tiny table in the rooftop bar on top of her hotel, Magda faced the tower at a matching height. The cathedral’s bells tolled the hour, vibrating in her bones from across the square.
    Only forty-eight hours in Sevilla and already today she’d needed space. Time alone without Javi breathing down the back of her neck about train schedules or hours of operation at the next tourist trap. Traveling together was meant to shore up their relationship, and she could tell that he was trying, but she feared this one-year anniversary trip—what Javi called their belated honeymoon—wouldn’t be able to fix what was wrong. Certainly a day alone touring gardens of the Alcázar hadn’t made her feel any better.
    The heat was immense, pressing down on her, a weight on her perpetually damp skin. Storm clouds had threatened all day but no rain fell. The fluttery sundress and wide-brimmed sunhat had done their best, making her feel like a movie star from the thirties, but nothing could save this day from being a miserable, sweaty mess.
    She deposited the hat on the seat of the matching chair across from her, and the sweat trapped in a line across her forehead cooled her skin in an evaporating stripe.
    Not that she was complaining about the Alcázar. The photos and notes she’d taken would form the basis of a glossy spread in a travel magazine, a post to drive traffic on her blog, and would add further depth to her stock photo portfolio. Plus, the royal palace wasn’t on Javier’s carefully planned itinerary until tomorrow, so visiting it today had felt like ditching class to make out with her boyfriend in the empty auto shop classroom. Daring, semi-public adventure. Kinda sweaty too.
    Pretty much exactly like a high school make-out session, minus the teen boy hands creeping up my shirt.
    She dragged a fingertip through the puddle of condensation pooling around the base of her skinny, ice-filled glass. Not that she’d have pushed Javi’s hands away last night. Or if she’d known him back in high school either, for that matter. She was an enjoy the moment to its fullest kind of girl and the intimacy of fucking made for some of the most intense moments. His physicality was one of the first things that had drawn her to Javier after all. She’d never been into worshipping at the altar of big, manly muscle boys, always more interested in what was going on in a man’s brain than whether or not he could bench press a small car.
    But she could spend all day licking each sharply defined ridge and curve of Javi’s body.
    Seriously. All day, her mouth, his body.
    Not that Javi’s timetable would allow her to waste a whole day on something that couldn’t be checked off a list in Rick Steves’s guidebook. She lifted her glass and pressed the cold surface to her cheek. Their belated honeymoon was a disaster. Javi had spent so much time planning this trip with her, and he’d been so sweet with his eagerness to make the trip special, that she hadn’t had the heart to remind him that she preferred to wander. Making jokes about his list of sights to be seen during the first seven days of their trip had grown less and less funny as she’d watched him draw lines through each item in order, watched him check his notes on transit times to the next scheduled activity or vista, while she tried to show him the one right in front of them. Make him see .
    For seven days, she’d been as invisible as the items on that list.
    She didn’t understand it. When she’d first met Javi on a beach in India, he’d been following a Southeast Asia itinerary so tightly scheduled she wanted to cry. But he’d chucked it in a heartbeat upon learning that she wouldn’t be leaving Goa until she felt like she knew it. Until she’d seen it as the