Playing God (Helford #2)

(10) Gem

By the time we arrived at our location, I knew that agreeing to be here hadn’t been my greatest idea to date, but it didn’t feel wrong. Jonathon was a puzzle that I couldn’t figure out how to solve, such a new person that I wasn’t sure how and where to begin understanding him. We barely spoke as he drove us here, and now we were walking up a side street in the direction of a crowd, our hands shoved into our pockets despite the temperature. Neither of us seemed to know what to say, and I couldn’t help but to wonder why he had invited me along at all.

“It’s called La Rambla,” Jonathon spoke for the first time. I looked up at him, startled to hear his voice as we started through the crowd. “It’s a street, about a mile long. I stumbled into it when I was here my first week—it’s one of my favorite places to go in the entire city.”

I glanced around, my breath catching. As far as my eyes could see, there was everything—cafes and galleries lined the streets where tourists and natives alike walked. On the curbs were artists showing and selling their work, and I could see a woman dancing to a soft flute ballad not five feet away from a large statue of a man, immortalized in old-fashioned attire, the plaque beneath his feet the only indication as to whom he might be. There must have been a garden or a florist nearby because women were walking by with large bundles of fresh flowers of all colors and sizes.

This boulevard was filled with color and people and lives being lived, so much unlike my perspective’s stormy gray London that it was laughable. I breathed in the smell of pastries and flowers and I breathed out the weight that had been crushing down my shoulders every time I looked at Jonathon. At least he always had somewhere intoxicatingly lively and happy that he could go to if he ever felt like the world wasn’t turning fast enough.

I couldn’t help but to be happy that Jonathon had managed to find a slice of happiness here if he wasn’t happy about anything else. It was a morbid thought, I suppose, but all I wanted was the best for Jonathon. I just wanted him to be okay.

And I think that was the main reason that I came here in the first place. I think I just wanted to be reassured that Jonathon was going to be okay.

I couldn’t help the smile that passed over my face, the weightlessness that swelled in my chest and made me feel as though I could float away. For a moment, I just glanced around with wide eyes, wanting to see and live it all. I think this eagerness, this awe, was what it felt like to be a child.

I snapped out of it when I heard Jonathon chuckling softly behind me. I turned my body and found him glancing around at the place he had called La Rambla, a smirk on his face.

“What?” I demanded. “What are you laughing at?”

He shrugged, laughing lightly again. “I guess I’m just glad that someone else had the same reaction that I did. No one else I’ve met seems to think this place is as special as I do.”

I considered that for a moment, the street full of movement that my eyes automatically kept flashing to, before I answered. “I see a place full of life that I haven’t truly felt in a while, and you might see it for another reason completely. They might see it like a gypsy craft fair for all I know, they might think that it’s a waste of their time—it all depends on perspective. It’s hard to find someone who sees the world the same way that you do.”

I hadn’t meant to get so deep, so personal—I had almost wanted to completely close myself off from Jonathon, as if that would somehow be able to help me—but that plan was decidedly moot after my philosophical lesson of the day, and I nearly winced. I kept my eyes on the crowd, seeing Jonathon but refusing to meet his gaze head on like the coward I am.

Jonathon regarded me with surprise, as if he had never fathomed that I would have a reasonable and somewhat philosophic head on my shoulders. He looked impressed, and I was going to comment on the look sarcastically until Jonathon stumbled back a step, attempting to get out of the way of a pedestrian talking animatedly on a cell phone in Spanish, paying everyone else around him no mind. Automatically, my eyes followed the man as if he was a personal threat, keeping note of him as he made his way through the crowd.