Edward

There was a time in my life, before I turned thirty years old and way before my daughter was born, in which I thought that my professional success would guarantee my realization as a person, as if the eight hours a day that I spent at the office, could assure the happiness of the other sixteen. Everything revolved around my work, from my personal relationships to my way of dressing. It had to represent the young business woman I pretended to be and for that, every detail had to be measured, controlled and validated. That’s what Mr. Cuevas, my boss, told me the day I went to his office to present him with a contract proposal with some English clients.

- Elena, every time you face a negotiation or simply a business meeting, you need to be clear that you are playing, from the start, with a disadvantage. First of all, because you’re a woman and second of all, because you’re young. – he said that looking at me over his metallic glasses, sitting on a leather chair that was disproportionately large, with the pen between his hands and the window blinds of his office, closed. The picture window behind him, in front of a four star hotel, did not offered the privacy he wanted. –in the ninety-nine percent of the cases – he continued – in front of you, you will have men that are older than you, sirs that when they look at you they’ll think <<but she’s just a girl...>> and the will despise you because of your age and your gender. Unfourtanately you will always have to demonstrate twice as much as your men coworkers, although I know very well that you are a thousand times better than any of them – that flattery did not made me feel any better – Take care of your appearance, your gestures, your words... and punch the table whenever its necessary.

I had been working for him for two years. Mr. Cuevas had been the star signing of our company. We both begun working on the same month of October, with barely two weeks apart. He arrived before and I was the first job interview that the new Executive Director did in his brand-new office.

Ever since I finished the career of Business Administration and Management, three years ago, I had lived on the tight rope of temporary jobs and the desire to eat the world. I worked as a pollster in the airport of El Prat, book saleswoman, phone operator and congress stewardess. I looked for temporary jobs to dispone of money and time, because one without the other was in imposible ecuation to resolve. I traveled a lot and cheap. I often got lost in unknown cities with the desire to discover what tourist maps didn’t indicate. I enjoyed every second, I got drunk, I was irresponsible, I lived... until one day I got tired of playing as the young carefree girl that I actually never was and decided to focus on my professional career. To be the woman of success I always dreamed of being. I recycled myself, reinvented myself and started to look for a job, a “real” job.

Unfortunately, for a long time, the stars did not align to my favor and mi résumés must have ended in hundreds of recycling bins throughout the city of Barcelona and its periphery. The phone did not ring and my dreams were slowly accumulating dust next to my university degree. <<Elena Bas, bachelor in Business Administration and Management>>. What a pretty phrase, so useless back then.it seemed that the letters where crying for my failure. One thick sheet framed in my green walled room, the one I painted when I entered my adolescence, the one that still smelled of tobacco and gin, to that part of me that got away during that hang over morning, like a long graduation party that lasted the right amount of time to have fun and get bored after.

The day a placement agency called to offer me a job interview at three in the afternoon of the next day, I didn’t even jump of excitement. I thought it would be just another one of those absurd job proposals, as a pyramidal saleswoman or a fake organizator of sports events that actually sold matresess. It was not the first time that after going through a job interview, I was facing a ridiculous day of testing surrounded by young people, deceived and consumed by their own ambition. Boys and girls of my same age that worked from sunrise to sunset, wanting to believe that a person, behind the wooden table and their enmoquetated office, promised them the day they signed a contract as false autonoms and turned into slaves of their own greed. They thought themselves as future stars of the world economy while loosing time, friendships and a good part of their life.

Luckily my ambition was limited and I did not fall in the traps of a laboral world that is not apt for romantics and dreamers but I begun to think that my future would be the sum of temporary jobs.

When I arrived at the door of the cristal building, the one that corresponded to the address given to me by a nice lady on the other side of the phone the day before, i got on the elevator up to the second floor. The receptionist, a very elegant woman of about sixty years old, politely invited me to wait seated on the only black leather couch of a living room that made sometimes of a lobby. The place smelled of vanilla, there were no magazines, ni books over the table in front of me, just a painting with abstract lines sketeched from one part to another of the rectangular figure. While I waited, alone in the room and under the attentive stare of the secretary, I thought that maybe that was a serious company, that maybe, finally I could aspire to a real job, a contract (undefined where bigger words) and a salary of four ciphres at the end of the month.

I begun to worry having arrived with empty hands, for not having references or a printed résumé, for not having ironed my black pants and instead I was wearing those decolored jeans, for wearing sandals instead of shoes and for not having a pen in hand just in case the stars had aligned (it was about time) and I could sign my first serious contract of my short and colorful job life. The frustration and the despair with which I attended to that appointment, had led me to not prepare for the interview, I didn’t even nokw what the company dedicated itself to and I was not able to remember the name. it was in English, that I remembered. It started with the letter B, that too.

- Miss Bas - the receptionist said to me while I was trying to put my ideas in order and save the situation with dignity. -Come with me.

I followed her, as if only she could know the luck of my destiny. I later discovered that her name was Nanda, short for Fernanda, that every morning she drank a large coffee with no sugar in the same cup and that she had three more years before retiring.

We crossed a long carpeted corridor of light brown color. The tables, each one with their own computers, folders, documents, family photographs and coffee cups, outlined the involuntary corridor through which we both walked, more than thirty years apart and with an opposite security. In the background, a wooden door broke the transparency of an office closed by two large cristals and two windows facing each other. They were almost a reflection.

That office looked like a step towards the infinite. The beyond that was waiting for me behind a silver lock of its door.

I did not start to sweat until question seventeen. My personal information I knew very well, my academic resume I remembered without efforts but my work expectations came out in an improvised and unknown succession to me.

- Work is one of the most important parts of my life – I said to an attentive Mr. Cuevas -. Here, in this company, I’m going to spend at least one third of my day and my personal satisfaction will depend at least a thirty percent of everything that happens here. That is why I am always going to give the best of myself, because is not just a job that’s at stake, eight hours a day or a salary at the end of the month, my happiness is at stake and maybe, the rest of my life.

I released it like that, fluidly, without thinking, as if a had spent years preparing a speech and finally somebody had given me the opportunity to say it. Where the hell was that speech coming from? I didn’t even know if I really thought so.

The fact that my mother was from Norfolk had always been a point in my favor. Until I turned three years old, I did not pronounce a single word but when I did, I knew how to distinguish with no difficulty the language en which my mother was talking to me, English and the ones that to me were “the others”. I mean, Catalan and Spanish.

I grew up being trilingual in a country that boasts of about having an average level of English in their academic-professional curriculum but quite disastrous at street level. Therefore, my command of the anglo-saxon language was always an advantage.

- Do you think that your familiarity and the affection that I imagine you have for the British island, can harm when it comes to closing commercial agreements? – question seventeen.

- Excuse me, but I don’t see how my mother’s birth place may be harmful to me. – I begun to sweat.

- Forty percent of our clients have their offices in the United Kingdom – good, I thought – so you would have to be constantly in contact with people that, in a way, are your countrymen – I nodded -. Maybe this last thing makes you feel... how do I say it? – Mister Cuevas took a few seconds until he found the word he was looking for – Twinned. My question is, in a negotiation, what would be your principal interests?

- The companie’s. – I answered.

- Are you sure Miss Bas? – he always did that. When he wanted to study a person, to see beyond their words, to listen to what the person in front of him was really thinking, mister Cuevas, would approach his body a few centimeters towards his “oponent”, he would tilt his head to the right and breathed slowly, letting the silence to uncover the truths that could not be told.

- Yes – I answered bluntly -. Part of my family is british, part catalan, andalusian... I have an uncle in Uruguay and the mother of my paternal grandfather, was born in Prague. My genealogic tree does not sign the contracts or closes the agreements. My company’s interests will be my own and the nationalisms I leave for whoever wants to live with them.

We kept talking for more than twenty minutes about negotiations, real estate values, types of clients, investements... until he got up from the table, adjusted his pink and white checkered shirt under his pants, turned the computer screen off and offered me a glass of water.

He came out of the office. I saw him talking to a woman of maybe forty years old, big, tall, corpulent... at plain view I would have guessed she was german. They both looked at me carelessly. The receptionist gave him my glass of water and mister Cuevas went back to his office, walking slowly, letting my nerves to boil in the slowlyness of his steps, in his eyes hidden behind fine metallic galsses. He entered in silence, placed the glass in front of me, he settled into his big chair observing the gray day behinf the windows of the room the traffic of a Wednesday in Barcelona, the life of the last day of the month of September and ask:

His laughter resonated in the crystals, the books, the dozen pens tighted in an aluminum bowl, the calculator and the last drops of my glass of water. I still don’t know how I had the courage to respond to him like that, but I did and I was not afraid.

- Look Elena, I have many years in this profession, more than twenty – he said staring at the photograph of two kids between ten and fifteen years of age whom I imagined were his sons – and I am going to do something I have never done – drumroll

- You are hired.

I wanted to hug him, kiss his face the way every grandmother in town do it to kids after a long winter of absenses. I wanted to jump, dance, shout...

- Thank you so much mister Cuevas – was all I said. With a smile that was a breath of tranquility, the satisfaction of my first job agreement closed. That interview had been my first negotiation and I had just won it.

- Don’t thank me, show me that effectively, you are the best.

And I did, of course I did... the next Monday I premiered as a worker of Beauty Building Company, a company that was dedicated to purchase and restructuring classic buildings to rent later to international hotel chains. I belonged to the department called Product Procurement Specialist, a role that was harder to pronounce tan the task i had to do. Basically, I was in charge of relationships with distint real estate agencies or private propiertors with which I negotiated the purchase of one or several buildings on behalf of BBC (beauty building company). My work supposed few office hours, a lot of Blackberry hours and a lot of weekly trips to europen cities to meet with our suppliers.

I got used to infinite meetings right away, high heels, the frenetic ruthm of an office that never ceased, the postponed sleep in front of a monitor, ciphres to match, increase, improve. Foreign objectives that became my own.

The hours of waiting in the airports, the flights and solitary hotel nights, were the only time where I could allow myself to read one of the many books that traveled with me from one place to another, from one country to another, wthpout finding a stable spot on my night stand. I liked my job, I knew I was good in it and that made me feel powerful. My personal insecurities were hiding in the shadows of my professional accomplishments, those which both society and me believed were the most important. I only dated people related to my job, I studied an online master in negotiation during my little free time and when I arrived home, in the solitude of a little room with a broken windiw and the same furniture the seller had when he put the “for rent” sign, I watched movies with subtitles in german, to improve my poor knowledge of the language. I never bothered in arranging the house I was living in, I spent so little time in it, just the necessary. I understood later that my house would be one day, my temple, but I hadn’t gotten there yet. Was I happy? I don’t know, I did not have the time to ask myself that.

London was one of the cities where I traveled most frequently, whether it was for pleasure or for work. I had always had a love-hate relationship with it. Every time I went there, my experience and my vision of the British capitol was so different from the last one that I was having trouble in deciding if I loved it or if I hated it, but some strange magnet was always pulling me to her, and at least two times a month, I slept there, in a hotel in Paddington.

One strangely sunny morning in January, one of those days when Londoners, unaccustomed to light, ignore the five degrees marked by the thermometer of the nearest metro station and invade the terraces, parks and any public space of more than ten square meters to gather and enjoy those few rays of sun that once in a while, on rare occasions, decide to cheer the city up, the country, with its presence, I left the hotel dressed in my work uniform.

The day before, even before I left my luggage in my room, I had walked through various shops in Oxford street in search of a black pencil skirt. It had to be high enough to cover my navel and long enough to reach my knees without touching them, without passing them, just underlining them. The stockings that would accompany the outfit had to be dark, elegant and the shirt had to break the mourning that I wore from the waist down. I bought a lot of shirts of that same style in a shop near Hyde Park, but on that sunny morning, I chose a fuchsia with ruffles on the neck that enhanced my office pale office tan. I also wanted to be a part of that early spring that had taken the city by surprise.

I came near the Starbuck in the train station in a hurry, as usual, and ordered a caffé latte that burned my tongue. I was always saying – Not too hot – but I never got them to serve me a coffee that did not numbed my tongue for the rest of the day. I had twenty minutes of subway until Holborn stop and I spent the majority of my time opening the plastic lid of my take away breakfast to blow, one, two, three, four, five times and check that it was still too hot.

I had to meet with mister Edward Becher in the reception of a Georgian-style building, owned by a local hotel chain, on which they had a restructuring plan and wanted to know the sales options. Mister Becher had contacted me by email just a week before inviting me to meet him to know that <<precious white structure, with columns at the entrance and seventy-two windows typical of his architectural style>>. That’s how he had defined it. Apparently, always according to what mister Becher wrote in his several emails, the building had many more possibilities of hotel exploitation than the current ones and the intention of the owners was to reinvent or to sell. Mister Becher, who signed always as Marketing director, insisted in knowing my opinion and my company’s opinion, and to reach an agreement of collaboration during the process of restructuration.

I had received emails of that kind many times, office directors, marketing, sales, promotion, that claimed to own buildings with great opportunities of remodeling that turned out to be abandoned heirlooms of the city’s great old fortunes that had been auctioned and bought by new rich without trade nor profit. This one did not seemed to be the case. The Gregorian-style building with columns at the entrance and seventy-two windows typical of his architectural style, was already an operating hotel. Three stars, but operating. Plus, an express trip to London, I would only be there for two nights, it was a good plan to break in half the boring office week. It was Tuesday.

My calculations, the ones I’d made that morning looking at a map of the city, were wrong regarding the distance between the subway and the columns of the entrance of the Gregorian building, and the little fifteen minute walk I had to take from one point to the other turned out to be a half an hour with a final sprint. I was late and breathless, - we’re off to a good start – o thought, but I arrived. While I was stretching my skirt with my hands and my feet were recomposing inside my high heels shoes, the crystal doors of the hotel opened and at the end of the staris, seven y calculated, in front of the reception desk, I saw who I supposed was, Mr. Becher.

- Miss Bas, I suppose – he said upon intuiting my entrance by the noise of the heels against de marmot at the entrance.

- A pleasure, excuse my delay.

That was me, Elena Bas and him, Edward Becher had nothing to do with the “Mr. Becher” I had imagined behind the emails I received on my computer and my blackberry, indistinctly. He was young, maybe thirty-two years old, and that was something I did not expect. To me, by that time, if a man signed as Mr. Becer, he was telling me that he was or soon to be fifty years of age, that he was married, that had a lot of sons, one of them would be a teenager and a house with a yard. That is why when I saw Mr. Becher, without a ring, without a tie, far from fifty, probably with no children and a brown beard with red hair, I was disconcerted.

- Don’t worry, you are in what could be called the Spanish punctuality – I kid.

If Mr. Brecher, hadn’t sided his smile the way he did, if the expression in his eyes hadn’t had that ironic touch, complice, attractive, almost sexy, that answer with the typicall british humor would have been the lousy start of a commercial relationship that would have started to die with the first handshake. But it wasn’t.

- If it’s alright with you, we start the visit from the fifth floor, where we have two suites and we’ll go down from there.

- Ok – I nodded.

It was nine past ten in the morning, I was carrying my golden jacket folded over my right arm, the same arm that was holding an enormous skin purse invaded by dozens of “indispensable” things that I couldn’t leave in the hotel room and be freed of the weight. The phone, its charger, my address book, a notebook to take notes, the foldable umbrella, the wallet with the company’s money, my personal coin purse, a book, tooth brush, tooth paste, a hair comb, paper tissues, a four colored pen, one blue, one black, a yellow highlighter, the subway map and a bottle of mineral water, no gas. Edward, who since that first smile had stopped being Mr. Becher to be simply, Edward, extended his arm towards me, inviting me to follow him to the end of the hallway. In doing so, with the tips of his fingers he caressed, in a light almost imperceptible way, the part of my part where the shoulders are high up and the waist is still a bit down, in a gesture that would result slightly inappropriate for a man like Mr. Becher, but that it did not seemed rude to me for a young man that was Edward, just as.

We went through the five floors of the hotel on foot, while he was explaining far more things than I was interested in and as I was writing in my address book, with the blue pen, far less data than he would have liked. I nodded with my head for every detail, professionally, as if the heat system of that Gregorian building and the state of the cauldron was what I really wanted hear about. I wished, instead, that in between all that professional information, something personal would escape him, but I forgot that in front of me I had an English gentleman who would never allow himself such “impudence” of that kind. I resigned, therefore, to pay attention in the square meters of the rooms, the safety measures, the height of the balconies, and the electric system, waiting that at some moment, an informal conversation would start that would break the ice of the strictly professional. But it did not happen. Not even when we went inside the narrow service elevator, some kind of lift truck that forced us to bring our bodies closer than what British courtesy would have considered appropriate. I felt then, his odor for the first time, that perfume so common in any other man and so special on his skin.

- It has been a pleasure Elena – he said squeezing my hand strongly to get closer to me and give a light kiss on my cheek.

When the meeting was over and I said goodbye to Edward, I went straight to my hotel, to work on that micro office with an ancient wooden table against the window and a green velvet chair. I had to monitor the emails, answer to lost calls that were accumulating on mi phone, which had been in silence mode for a few hours, and write the inform about the viability of the project I had just visited. I knew it wouldn’t be the best of our deals. Beauty Buildings worked with much more charismatic buildings than the Gregorian of Holborn, but Edward had known how to sell well the project, even better than what he could have imagined. I wanted to see him again and for that, for the first time, I was going to use my job.

I would skip the number one rule in bussineses; not to mix bussines with feelings. That was a rule I did not learned in the university, that Mr. Cuevas never set when he hired me but I knew it, as a matter of logic and professionalism, that it was a huge mistake. Actually, in Edwards case, I wasn’t even mixing my feeling, since I had just met him, but he planted in me such curiosity that I wanted to resolve, at least with second meeting, and for that, I needed yes or yes, to use the project of Holborn as a pretext. So far, nothing else united us and for the first time I would cross the line of the “number one rule”.

I knew beforehand that it was a mistake and of course, that lack of professionalism was very unworthy of Elena Bas, but I was twenty-eight years old and I wasn’t any more than a young lady in an executive custome. At that age, men would attract me more from a physical perspective than a sentimental one. I was not very gicen to romanticisms, mayve because of the lack of time or simply of interest. I was into secure men, the ones who didn’t go around anything, the ones who knew what they wanted and didn’t ask for explanations later. I didn’t have time to make the conquests, the gifts, the weekends in a rural mountain house... and much less to justify my trips, to endure the reproaches of my absences and to apologize every time I got on a plane. Since I started to work for Beauty Building Company, my love life had reduced itself to my sex life and sincerely, I was fine that way.

Edward fitted perfectly to the prototype of men I was interested in at twenty-eight. Successful professional, smart, cult, educated, with some taste when it came to dressing up, attractive and sure of himself. That os why I thought about writing him an email thanking him for his time and informing him that he would hear from me soon. It was totally unnecessary but I wanted to know more about him, even if it hadn’t been more than a few hours after the extension of that handshake turned into a kiss on the cheek. Of course, he hadn’t been at all professional about that gesture. In bussines, physical distance is primarily, unless on a first encounter and a closeness like his did not proceed. Then, why did I had to measure my acts? Hadn’t it been him who first crossed the line between professionalism and personal that was separating us? Besides, it was just an email, yes, unnecessary, but a work email in the end.

Thank you so much for your attention and your time. Soon you will have news from me regarding the “Holborn” project.

A ring from my mobile phone alerted me that an email had entered my inbox. It could be publicity or one of those hundred emails I received throughout the day, but it was not one or the other, it was Edward, who responded within a few minutes of my contacting him with the first pretext I could think of.

I hope impatiently for news from you. I wish you enjoy your London afternoon, the sun has come out for you.

A kiss? Had I signed with a kiss? I jumped out of the chair and began to walk, barefooted, through the damp carpet of the room. (In the English language, the letter “X” is used as a written abbreviation of the word “kiss”). I was moving from one side to the other, reading and rereading that email, that finale, that kiss. I was not the only one that day with the intention of skipping rule number one. I had in my hands a game that could result dangerous, was I ready to face the consequences? I picked up my purse, I went down the stairs from the third floor where my room was to the hotel lobby and went out to the street. Edward was right, the sun had come out for me. At least that’s how I felt.

O walked with the weird sensation of seeing him on every corner, with the pleasure of knowing that perhaps, the city, was not so big, that maybe, his routine and my necessity of fresh air, would accidentally meet in front of the door of a Hindu restaurant, Thai or Italian. I walked until I resigned, until reality draw the way back to my hotel, to that London room that since a few years ago had become like my second home.

When I returned to Barcelona, the first thing I did when I walked in my office at nine in the morning, was to present to Mr. Cuevas the Holborn project. Right away I could tell he was not in the mood. If I hated Tuesdays, my boss, incomprehensibly, hated Fridays. Even more, if he hadn’t had his coffee and I suspected, walking into his office, by the way he looked at me, that he hadn’t.

He didn’t even bother to read the dossier. He gave it a quick glance, looked at the final numbers, the ones that really mattered to him, and gave me his approval.

I walked out of his office satisfied. Not only by the confidence Mr. Cuevas was demonstrating once again in me, but because his words meant that soon I would be seeing Edward again. The game begun.

I am pleased to inform you that the project has been approved. Some point next week I will be giving you the details of the agreement.

I signed with an “X”, sent it and covered my face with both of my hands. Suddenly, I felt ashamed for knowing that I had just made a mistake, that I was initiating a game that would surely end badly, but I couldn’t stop, I didn’t want to stop.

I got up from the chair, turned the monitor off and went to the coffee machine. – you are so unprofessional Elena... - I told myself while drinking a bitter expresso - Hey, but life is more than work, isn’t it? I have to live! – I answered myself-. That phrase should have been the alarm sign that was letting me know of all the changes going on within me. Three days ago, before my trip to London, before my encounter with Edward and long before that “X” goodbye, I wouldn’t have said that life was more than working. My life was my job, and I was happy like that, or so I thought.

The alarm sign was supposed to inform me that maybe that kind of happiness was not as such, that if I needed to play was because a was bored, that if I needed to run that risk was because I needed to feel alive, to feel like for once I would lose control of the situation. Of my situation, of my life.

The alarm signal should have warned me, but it didn’t and when I got back to the little paradise that was my table in my office, with my blue address book, all my pens and my mobile phone, I turned on the computer screen with the fear of finding his answer there. I knew that X had ratted me out. I had accepted the game and I was sure that’s the way he understood it.

I would like to tell you that tonight, a beautiful evening awaits for me in the company of my friends, whom I have not seen in a while, and that later we will go for a drink to some fashionable place, surely in the central zone of the city’s port, where we will be catching up until late evening hours and that I will be arriving home late, tired and happy, but the reality is that my plan for this Friday night is to stay at home, order a pizza and watch some movie in the company of my couch blanquet,

It was true, I hated the cold. Since I was little, even though I spent my Christmases in Norfolk and fifty percent of my blood was British, I hated the cold and the winters I dedicated them to hibernate. I only went out to the streets for necessity and when I didn’t have a choice, I mean, when I wasn’t working or traveling. The rest of the time I locked myself home, with the heather on, my flannel pijamas, the blanket and take out dinner.

Luckily in Barcelona, cold weather doesn’t last long and in march I could recover my normal rhythm.

It is a shame that your stay at home plan sounds so good, because I am in Barcelona and I would have loved to invite you out for a drink before I return to London tomorrow. But I understand that your couch blanket might feel abandoned, even jealous, if you accept my invitation, so, don’t feel guilty if you decide to turn me down, I understand you motives ;).

Why had I stopped smoking? I needed a cigar, fifteen puffs of smoke that would let me think with clarity. Edward was in Barcelona, Edward was in Barcelona... Edward was in Barcelona! I would accept his invitation, there was no doubt about that, but where would that date lead me? Because, obviously, it was a date. Holborn bussines was closed and although we could talk about the terms on which our agreement would be based, he, Mr. Becher, regarding work, didn’t need to make a fuss or ask me out for drinks to convince me of anything. He’d already done it, barely three days ago back in London, the city of the thousand faces, the one that with each visit showed one of its many costumes, the one that without a doubt, that week, had shown me its most interesting side.

I’m afraid that you are right, mi blanket and my couch will take take to forgive this treason of mine, but as I am Barcelonist, I am obligued to show you my city. I wouldn’t want you to pass as any other tourist.

P.D.= I´ll be waiting for you at five o’clock in the cafeteria in front of my office. Try not to get lost ;)

I thought that meeting Edward in the cafeteria in front of my office, at the exact time I got out from work, would take away certain pressure to that unexpected date. I didn’t know if he had planned it or simply took advantage of my email to propose to ask me out. If I hadn’t written him that afternoon maybe my only date that Friday would have been with the pizza delivery guy, or maybe not. He may have found a pretext to write me and propose, after several emails, to see each other that same night. I didn’t know, as I still don’t know now, but I preferred not to think about it, to end my work, cross the street and enter the cafeteria en which the waiters knew me and act as if what was about to happen, was actually something normal. As if the nerviousness I was beginning to feel, the sweat in my hands, the reflex of looking at myself on every mirror, comb my hair, paint my lips and looking at the clock every five minutes, weren’t an irrefutable proof of my intentions. The same ones I suspected, wished, that Edward had.

On that moment I didn’t know why I let Edward Becher come into my life, or why, me, Elena Bas, decided to mingle in that story. I understood sometime after and the answer was simply. Illusion.

We people need illusion to be happy, we need something that gives us ilusions to overturn our wishes and concerns. For some people, illusion is a sport, to others, a hobby. To me, for many years, it was my work until one day, that also became part of my routine. I had reached the limit of my professional career, making my relationships, my passions and most of my life to revolve around it. I had enjoyed learning from new challenges, the trips, the power that my new position gave me, Product Procurement Specialist. I ceased every opportunity that was given to me and I did not lose time. At twenty-eight years old I had more personal and professional baggage than many people double my age. But every novelty has its date of expiry and mine arrived without my noticing that winter.

My job had turned to be just that, a job. It didn’t surprise me anymore, it didn’t attract me, it didn’t cause me the adrenaline of my first contracts and I searched for a new solution that kept me alive, Edward. To be with him was risky, exciting, wrong... it was just what I needed. It was perfect.

When I entered the cafeteria, with ten, strategically studied and controlled, minutes late, the place where I had breakfast every morning, the same one in which several times a month I met with my job partners with the intention to unplug, or even to keep working, seemed bigger, darker. I doubted every step, as if nerves had wiped of my memory and had made me incapable of remembering where I was. I wanted to see him firstly, to go to him without doubting between the tables, with my stare lost between known faces, empty beer bottles, overflowing ashtrays. I thought it would have had to be me the one who would arrive first, so that he would be the one to have to come looking for me and I could watch him coming closer to me. It would have been more dignified than feeling lost in my own city, in my own skin.

A smile far away distracted me and at the same time indicated the way, the one straight to the sofa in which Edward was seated, with his legs slightly crossed, one arm rested on the tallest part of that couch for two and his jacket opened. -Bastard- I thought, of all the tables scattered on the wooden floor of the place, he had chosen to wait for me on the only sofa, where the distances were small, impersonals and the obliged contact forced us to breath the same air.

- You are not lost – I said when I arrived pretending a calmness that I didn’t have.

- I had a good reason not to - he answered.

Bastard – I thought again. He knew perfectly well in which he was moving, he was sure of himself, he controlled every gesture, every phrase, every sided look, the position of his eyebrows, the moist on his lips.

I sat next to him, in that “casual” space he had designed for me, between the sofa and his skin. Away from the exit door, near his mouth.

We talked for hours, as if life, until this moment, we had lived it to share it in this cafeteria in Barcelona, in front of my office, one winter Friday, one boring month of January that palpitated every time Edward caressed my hand with the absurd excuse of a toast <<to the surprises life gives us>>, in a gesture so common that it seemed involuntary but it wasn’t, that could go unnoticed but not to me, that I was already lost. He was speaking but I wasn’t listening to his words, I was attentive to his gestures, to everything that his lips, his eyes, his fingers, his legs close to mine had to tell me. A silent wish, latent, quieted the tone of his voice, rough, subtle, ambitious. People went in and out of the cafeteria, they changed our landscape, night darkened the windows, street lights illuminated us. Empty beer bottles were accumulating and a never spoken pact, forbade us to look at the clocks and realize the time it was. To lose the sense of time was not an option, it was a place in which to live that winter afternoon which was almost evening and that it wasn’t as cold, at least from my sofa corner, each time farther away from the door and closer to his mouth.

- By the way, your English is exquisite – he told me when the waitress was about to clean de coffee machine waiting, wishing, that her shift was about to end.

- Thank you, my mother is English – I explained – I am bilingual since I was this tall – I told him marking a little distance between the floor and my hand.

- That’s great! And where exactly is your mother from?

- Norfolk, noreasth.

- What a coincidence! Sarah, my girlfriend, is also from Norfolk.

He said that with such ease that the phrase almost went unnoticed. If it weren’t for the fact that we were alone in a Barcelona cafeteria, Mr. Becher and Ms. Bass, drinking our fourth beer, at nine in the evening, without dinner, without high heels and without a tie, talking about everything but the Holborn project, with all of those “x” from his emails fluttering invisibly between us. If it weren’t for the way he looked at me, for the capacity he had of making me sweat every time he slightly bit his lip while he looked like he was paying attention to something I was telling him about, for the way he had to bring his hand closer and closer to mine. If it weren’t because I could feel his leg subtly brushing mine, his body next to mine, his smile weakening my immunity system. If it were not for all of that, - Sarah, my girlfriend, is also from Norfolk – would have been in the same drawer in which the phrases – my mother cooks a superb lasagna – or – my favorite dish is rice to the cubana – were kept. But all of that, that sharp image I perceived, did not fit the phrase - Sarah, my girlfriend, is also from Norfolk -. What are you playing at Mr. Becher?

- A precious city – I answered -. I am a little hungry, do you mind if we look for somewhere to snack?

- Sure – he finished the little beer he had left in the glass and got up.

When we went out of the cafeteria, the night had covered the city. The cold, the sea breeze, where her soft cover, the yellow lights of the street lamps compensated the feeling of abandonment, of a Barcelona that was going indoors.

On my feet, in front of the entrance stairs to the cafeteria, while I was buttoning the buttons of my gray coat, I thought we could go to a tapas bar that was only two blocks away. Spicy potatoes were always a good choice, the perfect accompaniment to our fifth beer. I indicated, with a head gesture, that our next stop was on our left. Edward smiled, he came forward a couple of steps and once again in front of me, in the silence of a city not much used to winter, he kissed me.

He kissed me so much, so strong and so good, that I was sure I had kissed him my whole life. I leaned my body against any wall, the only witness to that crime. That way of kissing, that way of touching me, with desire, strongly, without shame, in a hurry, with ease, without saving the details, with the eagerness to go through it entirely, just once, and remember it forever. That way of kissing must have been forbidden. Guilty, guilty, guilty... yes, I am guilty... and who care about guilt? I kissed him, I kissed me, we kissed... we walked without separating our mouths, wandering in our lips, with the craving accumulated in each beer, in the “x” that still fluttered and when we arrived, at last, to the bar, it was closed.

- But what time is it? – I said in a break Edward gave to my breathing.

- Ten – he said catching his breath – no, excuse me, eleven... ten in England, I forgot to fix the time.

We had been kissing for two hours. We never made it to the tapas bar, we didn’t taste the spicy potatoes, we didn’t drink our fifth beer. We got lost in the darkness of the city, that was our accomplice, in the humid cold of the month of January, in the foreign body, the mutual desire. Time had moved on while my life had stopped in Edward’s lips, in the reddish hairs street lamps didn’t shine over.

- It’s so late! I better get back to the hotel, my flight leaves at six thirty in the morning. Do you want me to walk you home? – he proposed.

- Don’t worry about it, I’ll grab a taxi – I said not knowing that at the end of the street, right in that moment, a black and yellow car with the light on, was turning the corner. We saw it at the same time, we stopped it at the same time. Time, that was what we didn’t have anymore.

- Sweet dreams Elena – he said before kissing me one last time.

- Have a nice flight Edward – I said goodbye caressing his beard.

From the taxi window, while the car was turning away from him, I saw him with his hands in his pockets, waiting for me to turn some corner, to disappear from the exact point where he, at that exact moment, was staring at and the night, the thousand kisses impregnated in our lips, our face, our neck... became the memory of a winter night in Barcelona.

Our date ended abruptly. Unexpected, almost unexpectedly. Some kind of unheard alarm woke us up from the dream in which we lived and dropped us down to the reality of a surreal encounter. He to his house and I to mine. He was leaving to London and I was staying in Barcelona. Everything went back to its place all of asudden, everything except me. We could disguise the date, we could pretend the meet was a passional accident, but it would be impossible to erase our tracks. The road was made, the story had initiated, the game had begun. We could not escape what was about to happen, we couldn’t avoid the inevitable.

I arrived home with the emotion of the experienced, the inability to assimilate the perfume that impregnated my shirt. I left the keys over the entrance counter, I left the bag next to it and looked in the mirror. The dried lips, the cheeks reddened by the brush of his beard, blushed by the memory. The disheveled hair designing the brand of fingers that a few minutes ago had brought me closer to an unknown mouth that kissed me as if that was the only function in their life, to kiss me. I liked Edward, yes, but mostly I was attracted to him, I desired him. It wasn’t a matter of the heart, it was my skin the one who depended on him, the vertigo of feeling surrendered to his caresses, to his fibrous body, the touch of his hard hand. Edward was the Anglo-Saxon version of a roman god, the flowering of my sexuality as I’d never known until that night, against a wall, in front of the man who left me literally without a breath. I replayed it over the entire weekend, every one of the unsaid comas in our conversations. The gestures, the emails, the beer, the goodbye, Norfolk, Sarah... I replayed that game that I had initiated myself without knowing it would take over me, of the twenty-four hours of my days, that his memory would make my smile nervously, that it would turn me on, that it would bristle the hair on my body. That my desire would turn almost into an obsession that always wore the same skin, the same perfume that it was the only oxygen that I breathed. My mobile phone became a silent companion that waited next to me for an email that never came, a message on my inbox filled with absurd work errands that little interested me. I wanted to see his name written, Mr. Becher, to know that he was thinking of me, that I wasn’t the only one going insane over a desire that was bigger than myself. – Write Edward, go over all the rules, just one word, an X that gives air to your presence-.

I had to wait until Monday. For the British time delay, to indicate nine in the morning on his watch, ten in mine, to receive an email that simply said

I would like to speak to you in private, would you be so kind as to provide me your personal phone number?

<<I’m crazy to see you>> was the first text message I received on my mobile phone, the first of the hundred that followed in a few hours in which I would be incapable of focusing in something other than the little red light of a small screen. <<I adore your legs>>, <<my lips taste of you>>, I want more>>, <<I want you>>. Office hours text messages, from nine to five, from ten to six, Monday through Friday. Hours loaded with a written passion that didn’t skimp on details, on hurries, on imaginary encounters, of good and bad intentions. Living hours that died the moment the porter of our offices closed the door with lock and key and then his silence belonged to someone else, to Sarah.

We spent two months devoted to the written passion of emails and text messages. While in our respective offices the sound of the computer keyboard turned into a universal soundtrack and the coffee machine turned into our most faithful partner. Edward and I abandoned ourselves to the impatience of the hours, days, months... with a future encounter that only came thanks to the progress of the project that united us in a newly started winter and with the arrival of spring, came also the arrival of the day in which our words could be translated into a muted language that only we would understand.

I arrived at Paddington hotel at lunch time but I wasn’t hungry, I Knew that Edward would be waiting for me at Victoria’s train station at five thirty that same afternoon and the accumulated desire of the last months, was oppressing my stomach. I had been brave from afar, uninhibited in my messages, but the reality of seeing him again made me a coward and with the passing of the hours the shame I didn’t expect to have, grew.

We had planned a reunion for the next day, Thursday, in his office, the one I had imagined so many times, the place from where Edward gave me his hours, the only place in the world in which I, was a hidden priority in a text message. He would have to mark the time of the chores, close the final budget and the objectives, a negotiation between two interested forces that with all probability, would spent the entire evening prior to the meeting together. We hadn’t planned it very clearly, our intention was to meet that same afternoon to break the ice, but it would be stupid on my part not to expect for our encounter to go further. That was what I wanted. I had forgotten for a second, that the afternoons belonged to Sarah and that London was her territory.

I filled the hotel tub with water and submerged inside the soap bubbles, sinking my entire body into silence, into the privileged of feeling isolated for a few seconds even from my thoughts. The cold warned me a few minutes there that I had spent too much time in there, between the water and the porcelain and I got out to cover up with the robe and start the ritual of the first dates. Even if this wasn’t one.

I thanked the truce of British weather that on that day it decided to give me a warm, dry afternoon, to wear the dress I had bought expressly for that meeting. It was a sea blue color dress, long sleeves and wide skirt, it had a narrow tie, almost a rope, under the chest and the neck decorated with a knit embroidery of the same color. It highlighted my narrow waist and dissimulated the white of my skin. I liked the image I saw in front of the mirror, even more so than the one in the store of the Born, one afternoon from the week before, when I had bought the plane tickets and I knew the meeting with Edward was just a countdown. I left my hair down, brown, dark from the months without beach and sun, wavy for the natural humidity of the island. I had my times controlled, chronometrated, and I went out of the hotel at five past ten o’clock, to arrive in Victoria at the agreed time, before or at the same time as him, but no later.

The station was a going and coming of uniformated people that let itself be carried away by a dark, inpersonal fashion of tied up men and women in pencil skirts, sports sneakers and high heels on their hands. It smelled of coffee and butter. The heat from the subway got mixed with the noise from the trains, the coffee pots, the phone calls, the taxis, the busses... time was a race against the clock en Victoria Station, where nobody had time for anything, where everyone was in a hurry for everything (or for nothing).

I thought that finding him was going to be an impossible mission, that the best thing would have been to avoid the city’s rush hour, when all the offices close and people return to their homes, always away from downtown. The light of the station was so intense that one could forget if it was daytime or nighttime. In there, between the bright advertising posters, the public address system, the electric stairs... I could even forget that I was in London. Until suddenly I saw him and I remembered that it was five thirty in the afternoon, that there was still daylight outside and that, effectively, I was in London.

Edward was leaning against a wall with his back to me. With his jacket, jeans and loafers. I slowly approached, not knowing what to say to him , how to announce my arrival, how to act afterwards. The time without seeing him had increased my desire but Edward was still the stranger I kissed one winter night in Barcelona. So much and just that.

- Goodbye honey, I love you – I heard him say before he turned towards me, with his mobile still on his hand and the earplugs on.

Sarah had just appeared, unknowingly, at the exact moment in which we had started to build our encounter designed months ago. She, from the ignorance of their shared house, at five thirty o’clock in the afternoon, at an our that belonged to her and that I was about to steal from her, placed herself like a wall between two bodies attracted to each other by a desire that didn’t understand any rules, languages or seas. At Victoria Station, they melted into a delayed hug, Mr. Becher and Ms. Bas, London and Barcelona, Atlantic and Mediterranean. That call, that “I love you” should have made me back up once again, it should have invited me to undo the way done, to go back to the calmness of my office hours, the voluntary solitude of my apartment, my blanket and my couch. I should have backed up, I was still on time, but I had accepted my place in that game of divided hours, shared and whether I liked it or not, it was where I wanted to be.

- Welcome back to London Ms. Bas – he said reaching his hand out to me.

- It is always a pleasure to visit this city Mr. Becher – I responded to his greeting and to the petty caresses of his fingers on my hand.

Nobody in that station could suspect the couple that had just greeted each other in front of the main arch, caressing their hands in an invisible, delicate gesture, with a smile perceptible only to lovers, were two future lovers just recently found. We lived in the anonymity of the city, sheltered under the secret of our feelings, in a world that only the both of us knew about.

- Is it ok with you if we walk by the Thames? – Proposed Edward.

I loved walking by the edge of rivers, they had always been a point of reference in the cities I visited.

To follow the route of the water without the worry of having to choose a path, simply letting myself go, listening to me, recognizing myself, sharing that moment with the occasional and unknown company that once in a while appeared at my side. A guided tour through the origins of any city.

We passed in front of the Westminster Cathedral, we walked without noticing the dozens of historical buildings that splashed a modernized city, where the crystals, occupy the place of old stones. Entertained in the past of our current lives we forgot the surroundings around us, we ignored foreign voices, selfless looks. Step by step, I started to know a little more about the stranger that that afternoon was walking next to me, the person that wasn’t Mr. Becher, or the sentimental other of Sarah, not even the Edward hiding behind the messages and the emails loaded with desire, it was simply him, the person who wanted to share a walk along the Thames with me.

Edward told me that his father, Mr. Becher, was the director of the University Hospital of the city and his mother, a pediatrician in the second floor of that same center.

- I never wanted to study medicine – he confessed – although surely it’s what my parents would have expected from me. I am more pragmatic. Numbers, accounts, they offer me a vital palpable objective, an immediate result to my efforts. That’s why I studied business management.

I imagined his childhood accommodated in a neighborhood west of the city. He had an exquisite education. He was attentive, thoughtful and respectful, at least to me and during the time we shared.

- I studied business management also, but I wasn’t as clear as you – I admitted – I did it because university was the next step to my superior studies, what was expected from me and what I supposed I had to do. I found the pleasure in my profession later, when I closed the books, gained independence and started to really live.

More than twenty minutes had passed since we left the train station in Victoria, when I stopped in the middle of the bridge and I peered over to watch the river. The wind, increasingly cold, tousled my hair while I lost myself in my childhood memories, the times my mother took me to that same spot and made me lean over the green railing, the one I could barely reach on my tip toes, to not forget the passing of time. – The Thames was the origin of this city. The way the Seine was of Paris, the Tagus of Toledo and Lisbon. It is in the rivers where the history of each city starts and where the memories live, tha passing of the years, the images of every person that one day walk by them. The water shows us its loves, it takes away the tears, it reminds us that they were here-. I repeat my mother’s phrase in a low voice, barely moving my lips, in a whisper. The parliament on my right, the recently released Ferris wheel to my left, symbols of an old city that makes way to the future. London, a place where everything coexists in harmony, in the freedom of letting oneself go.

- I want to kiss you.

Edward had come close to me, had rested his hand over mine and with his mouth caressing my hair, he pronounced the three words that brought me back to reality.

- do it – I proposed.

- Here I can’t.

Here I can’t. those were the three words that brought me back to reality. To the one I rather ignore, to the reality Edward wasn’t hiding.

- Have you ever been to “La Bodeguita”? – I asked.

- No – he asked surprised – what is that? A tapas bar?

- No – I smiled – it’s the oldest winery in London. A subterranean bar of over one hundred and ten years.

- And it’s called “La Bodeguita”?

- No - I said while trying to organize my wild hair before crossing the bridge – that’s what I call it.

“La Bodeguita”, was a wonderful place. I had known of it for several years and it was an essential visit on every trip to London. One had to search for it, you couldn’t find it by chance. Its tiny, narrow door, gave no clues as to what you could find on the inside, you had to go in, down the stairs and throw yourself to the adventure of a dark basement, with low ceilings and humid. Illuminated only by the light of the candles trapped in empty wine bottles. It smelled of history, heat and grape. The lucky ones that knew of that place, we kept faithful to reduced space of its tables, to its wines, its cheeses and its jellies. To the magic of a unique place, exclusive because of its authenticity.

Edward did not speak, he let himself be advised by me on what to order, in front of a bar full of people that enjoyed a Thursday afternoon without work to overtake. He followed me to the end of an almost dark tunnel, where a metallic door, older than the place itself, invited us to go in and a light candle shone over the first kiss of the day, the unrepeatable moment of finding his lips again, remember their taste, guessing their shape.

Time was suspended, the minutes melted, the humidity bathed our skins eager for caresses. We filled the lack of space with intense kisses, passionate, profound looks, subtle tenderness. The fear of being seen vanished, the obscurity protected us from the looks of others, our bodies drawn into one, distorted the image of two lovers finding each other. We got lost in the shadows of the place, in the taste of saliva, the sweat of the other body.

- I want to make love to you Elena – he said while his hand got lost under my dress.

- Let’s go – I said.

It was the first time I invited someone to my Paddington hotel, to the London house that shared my absences with anonym tourists. We kept the forms during the subway ride, respecting the rule of not being discovered, kissing each other only with looks, remembering the caresses we had left back in the basement of that old bar next to the river.

When we arrived to the hotel, we made love with the rush contained, with the eagerness of two teenagers exploring sex for the first time, with their same fears, doubts. With the pleasure of satisfying the other, gifting pleasure itself to the unknown hands, to the party of fingers that go through the secrets hidden under the clothes.

Two names getting tangled under the sheets, in the whispers drowned by pleasure, the need to name the unnamable, of remember with gestures what words could never tell. The hidden secret of an orgasm that vanished over a bruised mattress, a key witness of the happening, stealthy speaker of our adventure. We surrendered to silence, allowing our bodies to recompose while we looked at each other without saying anything.

- I have to go Elena – he said trying to avoid what came after. The confession that his girlfriend was waiting for him at home, the truth of his hours away from me. He didn’t say it, he stood up while pronouncing my name, but we both knew the reason why he was getting dressed to go and leave his side of the bed empty, which he hadn’t had a time to build. – next time, I’ll organize myself to spend the night with you – he added.

- There’s no need – I answered. The excuses were not important. He should have left without justifying himself, without promising something he didn’t know if he could keep, accepting that things were like that and that they would continue that way.

- You know I can’t...

I covered his mouth with one finger so I could kiss him later. I didn’t want to hear it, I rather stayed with the taste of his kisses, the tremor of my legs, the odor of his perfume on my skin.

- Until tomorrow Edward – I said goodbye going back to bed, letting my body drop naked over the bruised mattress.

- You drive me crazy Elena – he said biting his lips.

He came closer to kiss me one last time but I stretched my leg towards him, I rested my foot over his dressed torso and stopped him from coming any closer. I didn’t want to extend the goodbye. I pointed to the door with a gesture of my head and he obeyed.

By the time Edward came out of the room, England had stopped being Queen Elizabeth’s country, the atlantic island of the pound and the black taxis, of the fish and chips, the brunch and the English breakfast tea. It stopped being the land of my mother, of my ancestors, half of my origins, part of my blood, my head and my tears. London was him, me, us. The hotel night, the sex, the walk along the Thames, his hands, the train station, “La Bodeguita”, his perfume, Holborn, a meeting, a man, a name, Edward.

His office wasn’t as I had imagined it. I had been writing with him for months, fantasizing behind the screen on his computer, on the other side of his mobile phone, building his landscape at my whim, unfaithful to reality. That was the first thing I checked when we were both dressed again as Mr. Becher and Ms. Bas, when we went back to the place in the world that belonged to us. The one we didn’t need to imagine.

When reality touches imagination and makes our desires come true, we stop creating imaginary landscapes to be faithful to a more complex painting, a sharp image, raw, that doesn’t leave space for fantasy. If I had been part of Edward’s life, the one that came before or after the messages, the illusion that led me to be close to him, would have vanished under the cover of a routine much less interesting than my fantasy. If I had cohabited with the Edward that every morning had a toast with butter and tea for breakfast, who played soccer every Tuesday afternoon with his childhood friends, the one who went running every Saturday morning along Kensington Gardens... the ambitious Edward that would never settled for his professional successes and always, unsatisfied, would aspire for more. If I had had to share my life with the Hooligan part of Edward, the one that every weekend got loaded with beer in some pub with dozens of Chelsea Football Club fans, the one that purchased book he never read, the one who knew the best restaurants in town but he’d rather cook in the intimacy of his home. If Edward and I would have been an ordinary couple that shared a bathroom, washing machines, grocery shopping list, infinite lines at the supermarket and bills, the madness that dragged us for months would have been the mirage of what could have been and it wasn’t.

That is why, the morning in which we met in his office, after the passionate encounter from the day before, we had to dress up as Mr. Becher and Ms. Bas, so that reality wouldn’t contaminate our little game, to draw a thick line, almost a wall, that separated the reality in which we did not want to live, from the dream in which we lived. Because I didn’t want to be Sarah, and he did not intend for me to be.

- Good morning Ms. Bas. Have you had a nice trip?

- Terrific, thank you – I answered – coming to London is always a pleasure for me. Believe me.

He smiled at me. We could dress up in our most professional costume, raise a wall, separate the dream from reality, but we couldn’t avoid playing with words, gestures and looks. In the end, we were always Edward and me.

I followed him along the hall, a labyrinth of closed doors, until we arrived at the meeting room, a poorly lit stance of a clear carpet and mahogany furniture.

- Let me introduce you to Mr. Higgins, technical director, Mr. Davis, responsible of marketing and Mr. Case, my assistant.

I greeted one by one with determination. It was my first time meeting Edward’s team, the one behind Holborn project. I had seen their names written in some email but I was unknown to their looks.

Mr. Higgins, Mr Davis and Mr. Case, where the vivid image of the Mr. Becher I imagined the first time I received an email talking to me about Gregorian building <<with columns in the entrance and seventy-two windows typical of its architectonic style>>. Just as Mr. Cuevas said when I incorporated the Beauty Buildings Company, in the most part of the meetings I’d find myself surrounded by men that surely where older than me.

That morning, nobody tried to sink me for the fun of it, to undermine me because of my age or my gender, ignore me or even push me away. That day, as in the most of the meetings from the last year, I was in control of the negotiation. – they are the ones that need you, not the other way around – Mr. Cuevas had told me – it’s not you who has to demonstrate your worth, its them that need to do it-. He was right and if it wasn’t because Mr. Becher got me drunk with his perfume in the elevator of Holborn building, probably that meeting would have never occurred, but in a moment of my life in which Edward became the new illusion, that project served as an excuse to jump over the big rule number one in business: <<do not mix business with feelings>>. In my case, with passion.

It had passed a month since our last encounter in London when I had to invent an excuse the would propitiate a new date.

Edward and I had continued with our office hour relationship. We kept dedicating ourselves those eight hours, from Monday to Friday. Hours in which desire was just an extension of a meeting, of a night in a room of a hotel in Paddinfton. Project Holborn had taken its course and Edward and I where involucrated in new businesses that, instead of bringing us closer, they drove us away. My destiny was not London anymore, but Amsterdam and that which one day united us professionally, had stopped uniting us physically.

If at any moment I thought that, the night we spent in London would help applicate the passion that started, four months ago, in the forklift of a three star hotel, I was worng. Our last encountered helped the exact opposite. I wanted tho relive the nerves from the days before the meeting, the adrenaline, the passion of the kisses that recognize each other and want each other. My rutine, whitout the illusion of seeing him again, had become dull. Nothing could compare to the explosion of feelings that I would relive against the expectation of a reencounter. It wasn’t just the pleasure of seeing him, it was all that entailed. The before, the during and the after.

That illusion, was almost a delirium, a drug. A roller coaster from which I did not want to get off. I liked being high up, before the vertigo of a fall, of a new turn, disheveled, crazy, turned on... and once I had a taste of that sensation, walking on firm land in flats, resulted extremely boring.

There wouldn’t have been anything wrong with this if I hadn’t used my friend Anna’s birthday, as an excuse that would bring me closer to Edward. To my particular amusement park.

- Elenaaaa! – Anna shouted when she opened the envelope I gave her as a gift to enter a new decade. Thirties. – Really? Really, really?

- You have always said that one of your dreams was to see a musical on London, haven’t you? Well, there it is. We leave next week.

I had bought two plane tickets, reserved my room in Paddington and two front row seats in the Lyceum Theatre to see The Lion King musical. I was aware of the nastiness I was doing to my friend, not for having made an excuse of her birthday, but also, for hiding the real reasons of the trip.

I had known Anna for nearly ten years. She was one of those gifts that life gives you in the form of friendship. When we met, Anna was barely twenty-two years old and I had just started the university. We were two girls coming to more, saying our goodbyes to adolescence and started to learn about the responsibilities of an adult life that was knocking at our doors. We felt too grown up for the first thing and still too young for the latter. We were on the tightrope of our twenties, and age in which we had to learn experimenting, on trial and error basis.

Anna was from Cardedeu, a town in the province of Barcelona. She was born in Germany, daughter of a Catalan architect and a portugueese teacher who emigrated at the end of their studies in search of an opportunity that their natal country didn’t offer. As most of the foreigners that were trying their lucks in the german country at the end of the sixties, Anna’s parents lived in a gueto on the outskirts of town. Thousands of people coming from Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Morocco and Tunisia, emigrated to Germany to cover the lack of manpower that the Central European country suffered at that time. The conditions in which the new habitants lived, were not ideal for their inclusion in the new land, but whoever ran away from the home country, did it with the warranty of a better future.

Anna’s father and mother, two young persons from different nationalities, they met in the ghetto that they both shared, the place in which the longing for the past, of the place they once called home, was appeased based on the shared experiences, tastes and dreams. There, where thousands of people with the same survival and superation dreams, were learning a new language, a new way of life and kind and generous version of friendship. Their country of origin stopped being a motive for separation and came to be a new reason for union. They all were at one and if the cold hit in winter, the fires were lit and the neighborhood, the ghetto, became the warmth of friendship and love in times of hope.

Anna’s parents adapted easily to their new situation, they were of the few privileged that had received well paid jobs downtown. In between so many cheap labor work, few were the lucky ones how got to be recognized for their studies or their qualities, and they were. Just married, they rented a little apartment outside of the ghetto and the had their first child, Anna, who grew up in a multicultural house, in which Portuguese, Catalan and Spanish were spoken from the doors in, while they used exquisite German, with barely any foreign accent, to communicate in public.

They never thought about returning, they were alright in Germany, thankful for the opportunity, although they would have liked to have more free time to travel back to their land. The problem of coming back to their countries, was an option not even considered, but the extremely rare times when the topic was discussed, the question was still the same.

And the meaning of the word house varied depending on who pronounced it. Barcelona or Coimbra.

The answer had it a Catalan corporation that got in touch with Anna’s father, when she was four years old and still mixing up the languages. They offered him a job as a team chief, in a Barcelona constructor. An “irrevocable” offer they said, so much that three months later they were returning on a train back to his natal city and started, once again, to build a new life. This time, warmer and near the sea.

When I met Anna, behinf the bar of a cafeteria in the center of the city, I thought she was a foreigner and in part, I was not wrong. She had that Nordic beauty that would be inherited from some distant relative, for I doubt that being born in Germany would guarantee blonde hair and blue eyes. She was cult, educated, respectful and generous, very generous. She was responsible of the cafeteria I had just started to work at, on my thirty-day trial, with no professional experience and plenty afraid of messing it up. She, who was only two years older than me, had all the experience I was lacking, she was patient. From Anna I learned the hard work that goes behind the bar of a cafeteria, but above all I learned all about companionship. To cover our backs, to demand the same respect that we give, to understand that not every day is the same and that today is for you because tomorrow, surely, will be for me.

A waitresses job, wasn’t either her profession nor mine. Anna, who was only four years old when she arrived to Cardedeu, grew up in multilinguism. She spoke german, Portuguese, catalan and Spanish to perfection and her English was much more decent than the country’s average, which is why she barely had a choice when she finished her middle school and had to choose a career. Translation and interpretation.

When she started with university studies, her parents proposed to her that she sould keep living in her family home and to travel to Barcelona every day, the distance was short anyway, she only needed to take a train and wait forty minutes until arriving to the university. But she, as most of the girls her age, wanted to enjoy her freedom and the independence of her eighteen years old, even when that meant having to combine her studies with her waitress job to pay the rent of a shared room in the capital.

I shared with Anna eight hours a day, from Friday to Sunday for three years and when she finally finished her career in Translation and Interpretation and she could stop working in the cafeteria, because her new job at a multinational company dedicated to external commerce allowed her to pay the rent in an apartment that was not shared, we stopped being job partners to become simply friends. Very good friends. So good, that I didn’t understand my routine without hers, my problems without her advises, my illusion without her happiness.

It had been a decade since we met on my first test day in the cafeteria and it would be very hard for me to tell my story without hers. Together we lived the best parties, we discovered European cities with our backpacks up hills, we shared bunk beds in youth hostels, we cried our heartbreaks, celebrated joys, we got angry for the stupidest things to make peace with a good dinner in a Mexican restaurant. Just an excuse to drink tequila. They called us Eleanna, and where there was one, there was also the other. In fact, she was the one that came to greet me at the airport in Barcelona the day I got back from Menorca, with a rubber band less of hair and a new scar.

My life was prettier sharing it with her, although with the years passing, our professional responsibilities had kept us from all the free time we used to enjoy together. Even so, her name was still always the first one on my phone list and every morning, when I seat in front of the computer screen at my office, the first thing I did was write her an email. She was my little journal. That was why it was a brutal low blow to take her to London without having talked to her about Edward, to use her for pure personal satisfaction. If I have ever in my life been selfish, that day was one of those.

I was wrong not to tell her, to make her think that my present was selfless, to utilize her friendship as a pretext. I was wrong to hide the history with Edward. Mot to share with her that I had been going through that for over four months. I didn’t fear her disapproval, Anna was sincere but she did not issued free judgments. She was emphatic and could be disagreeing with me in a lot of things, but of course, she didn’t criticize. Maybe she couldn’t understand why I had lost my mind over Edward, I had broken the number one rule in business and I lived glued to a mobile phone. Surely she did not agree with my way of acting over the last few months, but this didn’t give me the right to lie to her, or rather, to not share with her what happened to me, the reason why we were on a plane going to London.

I had decided not to let Edward know about my trip until I had stepped on British land and once there, I did it by sending him a photograph of the bed at Paddington’s through my mobile phone. It served, just the single image.

- I wish I were there right now – he answered.

- It’s easy, come. – I wrote.

My phone rang right away. Edward was calling me.

- Elena, are you in London?

- Yes, I came her with my friend Anna – I told him – we are seeing a musical near Covent Garden tonight and we’ll be back to Barcelona tomorrow. I didn’t tell you before – I justified – because it was a last minute thing.

I lied because I didn’t want him to feel like he was the center of my plans. I lied because I didn’t want him to be the center of my plans. Although that day, sadly, he was.

- Shit! Tonight I have a dinner. I´ll try to escape later, ok? Even for just one drink.

- Ok – I said goodbye – I hope to see you soon.

Really, I was counting on that. The idea of going to London to be with Edward and that he wasn’t available for me, did not fit into my plans. I had to recognize I had been doubly selfish, not only had I taken my friend under false pretenses to London, I also had showed up in the city without telling Edward. Worst yet, I expected them both to be at my disposition.

The Lion King musical fulfilled all of Anna´s expectations. Right in the beginning, the theatre filled up with carton animals, birds that flew over the upholstered seats of the room, the music that filled every corner, emotion in its raw state. A dream, a vibration, art, the magic of theatre. It was a wonderful show, one of those that make you a better person, the ones that take you to another dimension and in the end, when the doors close behind you and you breathe the city air again, everything has a different colour, the world is definitely a better place.

That present was not just for Anna, it was also for me. To share the spectacle of The Lion King with her, that day, in that city, was the beginning of the journey that hours later would take me to understand the priorities in my life. It was the start of an ending that was just a beginning.

It was nine o’clock at night when we went out of the Lyceum Theatre and my mobile phone was still without ringing. The city had its lights on, the fresh wind coming from the Thames accompanied us in our walk through the parallel lines of the river. The trees covered the starry sky of a rainy day that had gotten tired of working. Anna and I walked still excited by the experience, commenting the details of a show that kept palpitating within us. The Ferris wheel, illuminated our north, the way to follow in a tranquil and little trafficked night. The phone in my hand kept silence and for the first time, while Anna was reliving time and time again the passages of the musical, I thought about that which wasn’t a part of my plans; the possibility that Edward didn’t call.

- Elena, are you going to tell me once and for all what’s going on with you?

Anna and I arrived at “La Bodeguita” at nine thirty at night, still without dinner. I had spent so many years talking to my friend about that place that she insisted that our night, depending on what happened later there, had to end or start in the basements of that “mysterious” place.

We irdered a bottle of tint wine with two cups at the bar. The interior room was crowded with people, the humid air was almost non breathable and even if it was the least romantic choice, we went up the stair to the largue exterior patio where dozens of people had occupied the plastic tables of the terrace. Demonstrating that my little secret was increasingly popular.

“La Bodeguita” had been one of those secrets the city kept for me and other privileged few. I liked to presume of its exclusivity, to know that it belonged to the scarce group of people that could still enjoy a nice bottle of wine, with cheese and French marmalades, fried fish, stuffed olives, foie, sausages and other European exportation products “hidden” under the foundations of the city. “La Bodeguita” was my spot and for the first time I had lost the honor of sitting in one of those wooden tables of the interior salon, the place where candles melt inside empty wine bottles, the cobble stone sweating with humidity and the metallic doors remember that one time, almost a hundred years ago, that was a forbidden place.

But more than a hundred years had passed since that cellar innagurated in 1880. The city’s habitants, had shared the secret and I had stoped belonging to a select group of privileged people to be just one more customer. To face that new reality filled me up with nostalgia.

Anna and I sat on the ground of the external patio. Leaning against the wall, near the back door. With the bottle of wine and the cups between the hollow space of our bodies.

- I have spent all day waiting for you to tell me what’s going on with you, but I can see you need a little push. Are you going to tell me or do I have to get you drunk?

I was afraid of saying the words that tormented my out loud, I was terrified about confessing my treason to her, my absurd stupidity. I drank to swallow my cowardice and with the empty cup in my hand, I confessed.

I talked to her about Edward, about how we met, that afternoon in Barcelona, the night in London, the text messages, the emails... I also told her about Sarah, the woman with whom he shared the sixteen hours left on his day, the ones he didn’t spent at the office writing to the girl he met in a forklift of Gregorian building in Holborn on a sunny day of the month of January. Of how I had used her birthday present as a pretext to see him and how I’d spent many hours waiting for a call that didn’t come yet.

- He’s not calling – She said – You just skipped the rules of the game. He won’t call.

- What do you mean?

- You’re on his territory, in the hours of the day that you said so yourself <<belong to someone else>> and you pretend that he drops whatever he’s doing to come and spend the night with you. Just because that’s the way you’ve decided. It doesn’t work that way Elena, I’m sorry to tell you that.

I kept thinking about her words. Anna, she was right, I expected Edward to be at my disposal when and where I wanted and that wasn’t how things worked. We were two adult persons living on agreed encounters in places and times planned ahead. I kept infringing the nom, waiting for him, Anna and the general world to revolve around me and I was wrong, but a part of me felt hurt, rejected. I was getting it all wrong and I wouldn’t accept that the only responsible was me.

- He is not rejecting you Elena, I’m not saying that he doesn’t want to be with you right now. He might be going crazy, maybe there’s nothing he wants more than to come right now and kiss you for hours. Maybe, I don’t know... but this is not the way to do things. You can’t expect him to put a bomb in his life just because you thought it a good idea to come and see The Lion King with a friend!

I hated her and loved her all the same.

- What are you doing? – she asked when she saw that I was standing up in silence.

- I need a cigarette – I answered.

- Ask for two, we’re celebrating.

We smoke the two cigarettes borrowed by a group of young boys and ordered a second bottle of wine. This time, we chose the best one in the bar.

Anna and I toasted to each cup, we don’t need to make up reasons to celebrate. Friendship was by its own, good enough reason.

- Forgive me Anna – I knew she wasn’t expecting an apology from me but I had to do it, it was fair for me to accept my error and apologize for it. If I didn’t, my mistake would lose its importance and it was plenty. I needed to ask her to forgive me because accepting my error was the only way I could learn from it. I was doing it for myself, but also I was oing it for her, because not everything is worth it in life and neither does in friendship.

- Forgive you for what Elena? For bringing me to London and take me to watch the most spectacular musical in history? – Anna was an innate exaggerator. A grateful one.

- You know why...

- Shut up and drink – she answered.

And as Anna predicted, “La Bodeguita” was only the beginning of a long night in which we remembered the best moments of a decade of friendship. We laughed for the memories, we toasted for the people that got in once and that luckily were not in our lives anymore. We confessed secrets already confessed and regretted our bad memories. That night we learned that our back would always be covered by each other’s love, that if someone hurt us, he would have to face two women that wouldn’t let him win the match and that if someone loved us, he would gain a love and a friend. We learned that we already knew but that it was important to remember, because sometimes we forget that love is not just one. We confuse those four letters with other letters that are alike but very different; sex.

Love is undefinable and unmistakable, it doesn’t speak only of passion, it speaks about respect, partnership, empathy, understanding, support, trust, pride and dignity. Love is one of a kind on its one but it must be shared. We love people, animals, plants, ideals, art and passions... we love ourselves, or we should on principle.

To love is to gain and I, that spring night, gained a lot. I loved my friend Anna and that should have been enough from the start. Anna should have been the only reason of my trip to London. And so she was.

Three weeks passed since Anna and I returned from London. Edward wrote me the Monday after our return, at ten in the morning, when his watch indicated only nine o’clock and officially opened the British office hours. He apologized for not calling the Thursday before and he justified his absence to a dinner that lasted for hours and kept him from escaping to meet me at the Hotel Paddington. It didn’t matter, if anyone had to justify what happened that night, it was me, and I did already with Anna at “La Bodeguita”.

That’s what Edward wrote on his first email of the week and before the month was over, he had fulfilled his promise.

After the trip to London, I had promised myself not to invent new pretexts to propitiate a meet. I lived with more serenity ever since, but I continued to desire Edward. The weeks kept going in between text messages and emails within office hours. The memory of the night at the Paddington Hotel kept feeding our desire, that would not give up, that wouldn’t fade with time. The distance surely would help to forget it, but it did nothing to blur the passion I felt every time I remember Edward’s body, the way he unbuttoned his shirt, slowly, letting me discover his torso button by button. I could still remember the taste of that first kiss on a street in Barcelona, the rush of nocturne caresses, the clumsiness of a buttoned coat that made a wall to avid hands to discover the touch of a new skin.

We still wanted each other, imagining meetings, fantasizing about hotel rooms that were just waiting for our reencounter. Edward was still my big illusion, the one that would make me vibrate every morning waiting for a new text message loaded with described caresses with a luxury of details. He was still in charge of the game, always a slave, with his office hours.

- Elena, I have a plan to propose to you – he wrote when three weeks had passed after our failed meet in London – On Wednesday I will be departing to Lanzarote. They just told me I have a training course there with several colleagues from the agency and various people from the sector. I will be very busy the first few days but I thought that if you could come on Friday, I’ll tell Sarah that the course ends on Sunday so we can spend the whole week-end together. What do you think?

I asked for Friday off that same day, reserved an apartment in Puerto Calero, rented a car from the airport and bought the plane ticket.

Lanzarote was one of my pending visits. I had been on the island at the age of seventeen, the first time I flew on a plane by myself. Up until then, whenever I travelled, I was always accompanied by my mother, but one of my childhood friends, one of those who shared neighborhood and school with me until the age of fifteen, had moved to Fuerteventura and I seized the occasion to make a little escapade before starting the senior year at the institute. Her mother, who was a brilliant engineer, had been offered a job on the island. A new construction company would be taking on the tourism project that a hotel chain had signed with the local government and the mother of my friend would be the technical responsible of said project.

My friend, missed Barcelona the time the plane trip lasted from her city to her new house. There, on a cozy house with red ceramic floors, private pool and infinite views of the endless white sand beach that shapes the beautiful landscape of Atlantic Island, I spent a week. They were seven days of peace, fresh wind, waves, sun, pure air, nature, water and salt. Being surrounded by the sea made me feel like I was, too, at home.

- Before you go back to Barcelona, we have to go to Lanzarote – my friend proposed – if I know you well enough, it’s going to make you fall in love.

And it is that a childhood in common in the Gracia neighborhood, goes a long way and she knew from the beginning that Lanzarote would be a new love for me.

We got on the Ferry that connects Fuerteventura to its north neighbor and visited Lanzarote. It was only six hours, just the time to promise myself that I would return, that I would relive the magic of the ashes, the dark color of its beaches, the magnet in the form of minerals that catches you, turns your feet and anchors you in its volcanic land. Edward couldn’t have proposed a better destination for the one that would be our last encounter, although neither of us even suspected it.

I landed leaving a sunset behind me. Barcelona would be starting to get dark at eight o’clock in the afternoon, but in the island that shared schedule with Edward, the sun was still shining at seven. I was carrying my suitcase with me. I was only spending two nights in Lanzarote and it was enough just two pairs of dresses and a pair of sandals to tour the island. It is not the same to travel to Norfolk for two days than to do it to Canarias.

In the rent car offices, they gave me the keys to a gray Fiat Panda and the first thing I did when I got in, was to put on my sunglasses and put the CD I had taken for the trip. Songs are like smells, they have the virtue of reminding us eternally of a moment, a person, a feeling. It’s only necessary to listen to the first few musical notes of a song dedicated to a love, sung in the school yard or a karaoke at dawn with a group of friends to transport you to that place, on the floor of a room where Luis Eduardo Aute could be heard while I closed my eyes and came back to remember.

For my trip to Lanzarote I chose Salitre 48. I wasn’t in the city of the wind, but I knew that breakwater would remind me of him. That the breakwater would take me away from him.

I arrived at the urbanization of Puerto Calero where I had reserved the apartment when the sunset was starting to bathe the mountains the color of fire. It didn’t take me more than twenty minutes to get there from the airport and park the car at the main entrance, in a street with a name of a Canarian aboriginal princess. I couldn’t see the sea from there, but I felt the breeze, the salt on my skin.

I didn’t see that many people in the urbanization when I arrived. A couple of families on the front terrace of each apartment, parked bicycles in front of the main entrance, towels hanging from the balcony of the second floor, drying. The pool that served as an internal courtyard for a square shaped, temporary neighborhood, was empty but the water around it was the final witness of a summer day on an island that does not know the cold.

I put the key in the door that the reservation of accommodation indicated under my name and surname. Among all white, narrow and elongated modules, in the form of a single-family apartment with wooden windows, mine was the central one. Edward was staying at a luxury hotel on the beach but I preferred the intimacy of a private house to the indiscretion of piled doors, like the pieces of domino, of a hall awarded with five stars. To me, the stay on the island had nothing to do with any of my business trips, although Edward, in a way, was a part of my professional life, that is why I wanted to rent a space that could be used as a house. Anonymous and shared, temporary, but mine. Hotels were part of my routine, just the thing I needed to escape from.

The apartment was divided in two floors. It had an ample lounge at the entrance, with two sofas that looked parallel to a long black table ans a small terrace with two hammocks that observed the solitude of the communal pool. In the upper floor, under the dark wood roof, after going up a dozen stairs, was the main room, also with white walls, a double bed and a crystal armoire. I put the book I was carrying as a travel companion over the night table near the window facing, but no looking at, the sea. I marked my place in that bed that had not yet designated the positions to occupy, but that night would be mine alone and would give a break to the hard cover story that changed country before a chapter reached its end.

I wouldn’t see Edward until the next morning. Before getting on the plane, while I was still in Barcelona, he had let me know that the company responsible of the training course had organized a farewell dinner for every person that assited and we both decided it would be best to see each other once the course was over, when all of his partners were back home and the island was left without any know witnesses. We were in neutral territory, we were entitled, for the first time, to a meeting in freedom.

It was nine in the morning when Edward’s text woke me up. It had been a while since I’d slept as good as that night. The sheets were glued to me. It would the magic of the island, the smell of salt, the breeze that was sneaking under the door, the shiny, bright sun hiding behind the window. The bed seemed to be floating over ocean and I was willing to let myself go but the time had come to put my feet on the ground and start living the adventure that had taken me to the island, to a date that had only twenty hours left.

While I was approaching with the rent car to the door of the hotel Edward was staying in, it sounded the end of a song that, between the guitar chords, sang to a grief and was sworn to forget by necessity. <<I will have to forget about you somehow, I have to forget about you somehow>>. I would have to do it too and the clock had already started its countdown.

Edward, was waiting for me in front of the crystal door of the lobby. I barely went around the palm trees surrounding the roundabout, and I saw him. Two months had passed since our second and last encounter. The last time we were together, was in the meeting room of his London office next to Mr. Higgins, Mr. David and Mr. Case. That dim lighting and carpeted room had nothing to do with the clarity of a new morning in Lanzarote.

Edward, I always remembered him with his loafers, his long pants and the first button of his shirt always unbuttoned. To see him disguised as a tourist, with light trousers, sandals and a green shirt with a black line that crossed his chest horizontally, made me realize all the things I still did not know about him. That uniform of British tourist belonged to his other world, to the part of his life where I did not exist. I remembered that whatever was about to happen, would belong only in a dream of a canarian night.

<< may the waves bring you, may the waves carry you, and may they never force you the way to go>>.

For the first time, we would have an encounter in which rush would not be a protagonist. We could dose the kisses, calm our passion, enjoy the gentle strokes in midday light. We had enough time to truly enjoy ourselves, without the need of dressing up our day with velocity. We’d stop building moments to write a story that only lacked the ending.

We put his luggage in the trunk of the car and began enjoying the hours that we could guarantee ourselves. With the engine running, we inverted the order of the clock and started the route in Punta Mujeres, Jameos del Agua and the Mirador del Río.

- That island you see in front of you, it’s called La Graciosa – Edward told me. – Barely eight hundred people live there in its nearly thirty square kilometers and it surely is the only, or one of the only – he emphasized – places in Europe, without paved roads.

- What a nice place to get lost...

- What are you trying to escape from Elena? – He asked me.

- Me? From nothing!

- Are you sure? – he insisted.

- Why do you ask me that?

- You have seen La Graciosa, its intimacy, the isolation of the sea surrounding it, the forced lack of communication and you have thought about losing yourself, about disappearing...

- It’s just a saying Edward – I justified.

- No Elena. Ever since I met you I have the feeling like you constantly want to escape from something. The sobriety of your apartment, the trips not always justified, the suitcase prepared at the door, the impossible love... I think you’re afraid to stop and discover yourself.

- Why did you say <<impossible love>>?

- Don’t hang on to just one phrase, don’t hang on to it to escape, once again, of what’s important. – He saw that I was deviating my stare to the horizon, he noticed that that was not the conversation I was expecting from a day like that and he decided to respect my silence – are you hungry?

- I’m starving! – I answered.

Among the narrow and small houses of Caleta de Famara, we found a small place with three plastic tables facing the sea. There, we ate what Pedro, the owner, served us without the right of choosing.

And so, under a warm sun and a pleasant breeze that moved the flight of my skirt, we ate everything served, we accompanied it with beer and lemon and we gave each other the caresses and kisses that we had to hide in other cities.

I really liked the Edward I met that day. Until then all of our encounters and most of our conversations had been the result of a desire that caught us almost by surprise. Neither of us was prepared for what happened after our first meeting in the Holborn building. Later, I understood that my desire was born out of a necessity of a new illusion but I never knew where his came from. During those four months that Edward and I lived our particular relationship of imaginary encounters and words that could touch the skin like real caresses, I had dedicated very little time in getting to know the person behind every message. I settled into my feeling, the excitement of our dates and I neglected the most emotional part of our encounters.

The day we spent in Lanzarote, while the time gave us a truce and allowed us to enjoy the company without the necessity to burn in lust on every corner, I met a sensible Edward, committed to various social causes, very familiar and with great knowledge of universal history. A man capable of debating the political actuality of his country, a staunch defender of his ideas, understandable and respectful of those of others. A person who enjoyed landscapes as small hidden gifts, a young man who spoke to me of his dreams with an almost childlike passion.

That was not our moment, Edward and I we were part of a wonderful adventure that was about to culminate, we knew what was our place in that match, even if at some point we had played with the idea of changing the pieces on the dashboard and skip a few rules. Being able to know the intimate part of Edward made think that if life, at any point, gave us a new opportunity, Lanzarote would always be our place.

That same night, while we were having dinner at Playa Quemada, like any other couple, dressed in Sunday clothes and without being able to separate our hands, Edward pulled a little box out of the pocket of his pants.

I opened the silver paper that wrapped it up and I saw a bracelet made of volcanic rock and five green crystals in the center.

- Elena, I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future but I can assure you that I will always remember this day, you, and everything you have given me. You have been my sea breeze, my volcano, my fire and my calmness. – he was looking at me fixedly. He had lost the naughty expression in his eyes, the moistness of his lips and I felt as if before me I had for the first time, the authentic Edward, the one that did not hide behind the success of his work and his skillful seduction game – I can’t ask you to think about me all the time, I’m just asking you, not to forget me.

When at six in the morning of the next day, I said goodbye to him at the airport, I knew I did not need to promise him anything, that I would never forget him. I sensed that that dinner for two, last night’s dream and the nudeness of his words, had been the goodbye of a story that never had beginning and maybe not even an ending. I cried at the dawn of the parking lot, hugging the wheel, kissing the bracelet on my right hand as if I could hold Edward between its stones, still feel him on my skin. I wished for him to return, for La Graciosa to be our hiding place, our beginning, the witness to that eruption that changed the landscape of my life and my body as I knew it. I walked over Puerto del Carmen with the moisture of my fogged eyes. I returned to Playa Quemada to see in the light of morning the landscape that illuminated the promise of remembrance. I cried trying to empty the fire of my chest, with the desire to leave in the island what was only hers. I cried away all of my passions, his perfume on my clothes, the taste of sea in our mouths. I cried, cried, and cried. I got on the plane to Barcelona and I cried again. How difficult it is to say goodbye to an instant of happiness.

I would have like to hug her, to take advantage of the three hours of flight to vent, that the unknown lady in the ponytail was my confidant.

- Yes, thank you, I’m just afraid of flying – the excuses kept accompanying me even in the oblivion.

- Don’t worry about the turbulence, it’s just very windy today.

She was telling me, as if I hadn’t been dealing with turbulence for months now. I thanked her for her comforting words and tried to hold back the crying to show her that yes, her visit to seat 19C had worked, that I was better already and that I trusted that the turbulence was only due to the strong wind, but tue truce lasted a few minutes.

- I brought you a chocolate candy, maybe this will cheer you up – the stewardess told me again.

The trip to Lanzarote was the storm that preceeded the calm. We spent togheter twenty hours that were a dream, the fruit of the magic of an island I always thought was bewitched. Edward lived on the limits of its frontier, on the lines of its beaches and when I got back to Barcelona, I brought the memory and the silence with me. I didn’t write him again. He didn’t either.

We both knew that day had been a little farewell present, a bitter ending. Edward had given me back the illusion, it was up to me to do the hard work, of retaking the reins of my life, the one that was left suspended for four months by his texting, by the excitement of the hidden encounters.

To my return, I thought a lot and for a long time about the conversation that Edward and I had about my route of escape, La Graciosa, and I decided to settle in Barcelona, to decorate my house, buy fresh flowers and put my clothes in my closet. With the suitcase close, but empty. I passed the Holborn project file to one of my colleagues. I did it because I needed to put some distance with everything I had lived during the last months, I needed to breathe my own air. I left the excuses and simply focused on a new remodeling proposal, this time near home, in Sitges.

When autumn arrived and I was about to celebrate my third anniversary in Beauty Building Company, an unknown number appeared on the screen of my mobile. The country prefix in the form of fourty four, and it stole me one heartbeat. I had cancelled Edward’s phone number off of my address book. I wasn’t pretending that he’s go out of my life with that gesture, but doing so, it was a necessary part in my reconstruction plan.

Hey Elena, how are you? It’s been so long that I don’t know if my proposal might be out of place, but it is the first time I’m coming back to Barcelona since our meeting, almost a year ago and it is hard to comprehend this city without you. I’d like to see you. Let’s eat together? Edward x.

That message said so much about him that I didn’t need to find him to know that the winter’s passion belonged in the past. His proposal, the possible date, was only the Bis of a concert that ended in salt water, the sweet taste we hadn’t found yet. A closure with pleasure and serenity.

Edward was waiting for me at the door, punctual, as usual. I saw him through the window pane of my office while I was coming down the stairs from the second floor and when I opened the door I didn’t even have the time to look at the cars that were crossing the one-way street. I walked between the horning and the complaints of the drivers and I hugged Edward. His smell, the same of that Tuesday morning, the day of my fortieth birthday, accompanied our embrace, it invaded the hole street. It came in through my lungs and owned every pore on my skin. I felt as if a part of me was back home, in that Lanzarote apartment where life gave us a twenty-hour truce to fill up the album with our best memories.

It was so nice to see him again without the pressure of stolen kisses and hidden caresses, that I wished to stay forever living in that moment, between the laughter, the shock of our wine glasses and the immense affection of two persons that were starting to know each other from a different perspective. Two persons that saved the magic of three encounters in a little precious box and decided to forget any kind of suffering to protect the treasure they shared. It was so nice to see him again.

When I turned forty years old, I began to become aware of what I had lived, learned. To feel proud of the road traveled and accepted the mistakes of the past without judging myself for them. I understood that all of my flaws made me beautiful, because I had learned to live with them, to control them sometimes, to overcome them most of the time. I stopped feeling frustrated for repeating, sometimes, the same mistakes and I understood that every mistake, however equal it might seem, was always different and what I learned, better. I managed to understand that the fight to reach my own objectives, was not incompatible with my dignity and that I didn’t have to prove anything to anybody, not even to myself.

I could change my opinion without having to justify myself for it, I could be whom I never thought I’d be and not feel like a failure, but evolved. I could recognize all the stupid things done and said a while back and understand that consider them as such, was the confirmation of going the right way. That being different doesn’t mean to be worst. That choosing a book instead of a glass of whiskey to spend a Saturday night is not boring and that no one needs to insist to make me believe the contrary. That silence was a choice of life and that solitude, as long as it was chosen, a wonderful company.

My thirties were my inflexion point. When I stopped caring for everyone else’s opinion, for the rules, the protocols and that “right impression” that so many people force you to comply and that I never understood why or with whom. It was at my thirty years old when I started doing what I really wanted to do and I didn’t apologize for doing it. At thirty, I chose my happiness over the world’s and I knew I wasn’t being selfish for it.

I learned to feel at peace, to live in peace. To not label myself or others. I understood the Carpe Diem and took advantage of it.