Complicated stories are always like that. I don’t know why someone made us believe that love fixes everything. It’s not true. We’re much more than two halves of an orange. The majority of time, love doesn’t fix anything, just like getting married doesn’t fix an engagement that doesn’t work and kids don’t revive a broken marriage. Love puts us to the test. It almost always demands something from us: more maturity, less egoism, more courage. I won’t say that love is complicated; it’s exactly the opposite. Love is simple, it’s easy, it’s fun…but life isn’t always. And I don’t know if you know this, but the head and the heart are old enemies. They sound the alarm, ignore each other, throw each other into the unknown. And somewhere between the head and the heart is where the painful part happens. It’s always there.
Always.
The hotel in Mykonos was really impressive. Secretly, I felt proud it was part of the company. It felt like an oasis, like you had built your own custom paradise. Besides the bed, my room had a big, wide, and luminous living room, with windows looking out over the sea. Pops of bright color were dotted throughout the mostly white decor, and they made the place warmer, along with all the wood and details like dusty-rose armchairs, a jar full of fresh flowers displayed proudly on the center table, and the turquoise cushions scattered across the large white corner sofa. The bed was huge and had simple lines and nothing elaborate, but it had a canopy draped over it. I remember thinking when I saw it, with its white, almost translucent curtains hanging from the posts, that a Disney princess would definitely lose her virginity in a bed like this. Next to it, there was a walk-in closet that led into the huge bathroom, all white, gold, and emerald. My room, I repeat, because we never even set foot in his.
Between the floor-to-ceiling windows on the wall across from the bed, there was a sliding door that led out to the private terrace, with two very large loungers and a midsize infinity pool that was level with the floor and seemed to flow out into the sea. High walls covered with bright strawberry-colored bougainvillea protected us from the eyes of the guests in the neighboring rooms. It was the perfect refuge for those days. Our arrival in Mykonos was the starting gunshot for our looming goodbye. Maybe that’s why we didn’t get out of bed at all the first day. I opened my suitcase. He opened his. We looked at each other. Before I even realized, I had my back against the wall, my legs around his hips, and his hand trying to push my underwear aside.
“Now can I invest that half hour of my life between your thighs?” he asked.
I nodded while his tongue slid down my neck, and I flew. Literally, he threw me onto the bed in a perfect maneuver where I fell exactly where I should so all he had to do was take off my panties and kneel on the edge of the bed.
“How do you like it?” He lifted my left thigh up on his shoulder. “Fine, if you refuse to talk, I’ll have to figure it out myself. Moan when I get it.”
I dug my fingers into his hair when he unfurled his tongue between my pussy lips, and he groaned. That groan did a lot. He groaned like an animal who liked being stroked. It was his human purr but deeper, sexier, and dirtier.
David was the most passionate person I had met in my life. And the most curious. And the most generous. He was selfless to the point of madness when it came to pleasure, and proof of this was discovering that I would be more likely to abandon oral sex than he was to get tired of it. Half an hour, he said, right? Well, I think he did a few extra minutes. And as someone who had always thought guys just did it to fulfill their obligations, this seemed like the fucking best. Seriously…he was incredible at seeking pleasure with his tongue, his fingers, blowing, kissing, licking…
From day one, sex with David was a place to take refuge from everything bad in the world. A space where once you entered, you let go of shame, fears, and any sensation that threatened to diminish pleasure. I wasn’t fucking David, even though I was. I fucked, laughed, explored, discovered, shouted, traveled, growled, and asked for two minutes to catch my breath in positions I had always wanted to try and had never dared. And it made his mouth water just hearing me whisper, with a mischievous look, “Stay still. I’ve always wanted to try this.”
And I tried it. Sitting on his chest, with his hair between my fingers, I tugged his locks as he devoured me calmly, slowly, looking at me as I soaked his mouth. And it didn’t matter if I fell asleep after I came. When I woke up, he climbed on top of me and, without a word, entered me until our voices melted again into a chorus that only knew how to conjugate the verb enjoy.
But in the end, what definitely changed my (our) life were not the sex marathons that we started back in Santorini, and which felt like we were trying to break a world record, but how selfless and generous David was when it came to opening up for me. I guess that started from day one too, but it wasn’t until that night in Mykonos, when we stayed in bed all day, that I felt he had opened his life so wide that I could find myself in whatever corner I most wanted to occupy.
And between orgasm after orgasm, I didn’t miss the marvelous beaches of the Aegean or the incredibly famous party scene on the island, but I learned a lot about him. Wrapped in the same sheets where we made each other sweat, David seemed to make me, somehow, part of who he really was.
David grew up in a tiny village in the Avila province, in his grandparents’ house, where three generations all lived together. His older brother was born when his parents were still very young, and the maternal grandparents stepped up and gave them a place to live. There were three siblings: Ernesto, Clara and him. None of them lived in the village anymore.
He told me about his childhood, a childhood like the one all eighties babies had, even though he was a nineties baby. Scraped knees, mouths full of chocolate, games in the street, “regulation” balls so dusty that when it rained they became heavier than corpses. Games of basketball, soccer, pogs, pants torn every week and patched until they were nothing more than a seam with legs.
“My mother always said to my brother and me that raising two pigs instead of two sons was worth the trouble because at least she’d have four hams by now. We were rougher than a box of rocks. We both had heads full of holes; we were always falling out of trees and stuff like that.”
His first kiss, hidden behind the church wall. His first girlfriend, the daughter of a mayor his parents hated because they said he was a reactionary. His first real love, Marina, who smelled like flowers, was a redhead and cheated on him many times in their five-year relationship. The breakup and the subsequent heartbreak. And here it seemed that the true essence of the little boy who had fallen on his knees in front of a woman like Idoia emerged, mixed with oxygen and the smell of sex.
“Look…my mother said my life fell apart when the thing with Marina happened.” He sighed.
“Why?”
“I guess she says that because I left school right after, but I have to give it to her that I think I threw my life into free fall at that point.”
“You left university because you were lovesick?” I asked, surprised.
“No. It felt pointless that I had picked humanities. That’s not what my mother thinks, of course; she says that I’m sensitive and when Marina left me, I thought that people’s dreams were just fantasy; I was disillusioned. I say I had a screwup attack and got overwhelmed thinking that a conventional life was awaiting me, with a conventional schedule and a conventional love.” He turned and looked at me. “I thought, Am I really going to spend my whole life complaining about the alarm clock, never finding a job that I like, looking for ‘a good girl’ who won’t hurt me again, wishing I had made other choices? I don’t know. I got obsessed with the idea of freedom.”
“And you threw everything away.”
“Everything.” He nodded, not looking at me. “Even my dreams.”
David turned his gaze back on me and smiled, emerging from his memories.
“Do you know my mother never wanted to meet any of my girlfriends?”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. Same with my siblings. She told us: ‘Live however you want, kiss who you want, and enjoy it however you want, but don’t bring any of it into my house.’ She hopes that when one of our partners comes to her house they will be the last one.”
“And you wanted to bring Idoia?”
David seemed to look deeply into one of my eyes and then the other, like he was looking for the reason I asked that question. Or maybe interrogating himself about the truth.
“Yes, I wanted to,” he admitted. “It’s possible I still want to.”
Did it hurt me? In a way, yes; in another way, no. Did I do myself a favor by asking that? In a way, yes; in a way, no.
“Will you forget how much she hurt you?”
“Don’t you want Filippo to forget?”
I was stunned, and I didn’t know what to say. He noticed and closed his eyes.
I tried to gather my thoughts. “I’m sorry. I know it’s not the same. You and Idoia…well, you’re very different from each other. But the thing is…I don’t want a conventional love. I understand you want that, and…the truth is I get it, but…conventional love doesn’t fill me.”
“Right.”
“Don’t listen to me…my head is all mixed up.” I took a deep breath and stared intently at the ceiling. Suddenly I didn’t want him to see my expression.
“What about your family? Are they all like your sisters?” he asked.
“Worse.”
“Maybe you were adopted?”
“No way. I’m exactly like my father.”
“Well, he must have been a very ‘dashing’ man.”
I burst out laughing, partly to hide the claws that were digging into my stomach and not because I had just mentioned my father. It was…I don’t know. The thing about conventional love had made a mark on me. Had I ever really asked myself what kind of love I wanted?
“I didn’t know him. I mean…he died when I was really little. He had a heart attack.” I shrugged. “People say he was a nice guy; that’s why he was so good at closing deals. From the few photos my mother kept, I’d say he had a pretty androgynous beauty.”
He smiled and stroked my hair. With that caress and the look he gave me, maybe understanding, maybe compassionate, David opened a dam in my chest too.
It was probably because he had told me everything about his life or maybe because I had never told anyone about mine in the terms I wanted to with him. Deep down, the reasons escaped me, but the truth is I talked. I talked about my mother…absent, preoccupied by her life of magazines and appearances. I talked about boarding school, the feeling of drowning. About my sisters, who had been father, mother, teacher, example, and hug. I talked to him about my first love, how I realized that I had never really loved him. And the perverse and obsessive passion I felt for one of my professors at university, who broke up with me because he had gotten another student pregnant. I told him how I had never dreamed of being anything really, that the only thing that ever existed in my head was the image of a better me that I was forever reaching for and a feeling of emptiness when I failed.
“Until Filippo showed up,” I confessed.
“Why until he showed up?”
“Because then I didn’t want anything more from life than what his love promised.”
Have you ever heard yourself say something that, a minute before, you believed to the tips of your toes, and suddenly it doesn’t mean anything to you besides a bunch of words all piled up in a certain order?
David made a face. I did too.
“Silly fairy tales, little girl,” he muttered.
“Silly.”
The next thing he did was something that princess stories don’t end with, something that doesn’t come before the “happily ever after” and that I don’t think the Prince Charming we know would ever do: he pushed the sheet away, got on his knees between my thighs, naked, and grabbed his cock with his right hand to caress my clit with it, never taking his eyes off me.
“I don’t believe in fairy tales,” he whispered.
“Me neither.”
“We both need something else to lull us to sleep. None of that ‘once upon a time’ or promises. Just moans. Making love until we fall asleep.”
And it sounded like a plea.
A few minutes later, when the only thing separating us was a thin layer of sweat and latex, when I felt like I needed more, I wanted him closer and the emotion turned to weakness, it was my turn to beg.
“Call it sex, David. Never say ‘making love’ again.”
And he nodded without a word because he understood, like I did, that we couldn’t keep making things more complicated.
The countdown had started. For both of us.
Had the spell broken?
I startled awake, but I didn’t know why. I turned toward my bedside table in a daze and checked the time on my phone: 2:30 in the morning. When I turned back over, I realized I had probably woken up because David wasn’t in the bed.
I got up in the dark, while my eyes were slowly getting used to the dimly lit room, and walked to the bathroom, but the door was open and nobody was in there. I crossed the room again and…stuck my head out onto the terrace.
I found him sitting on one of the lounge chairs, his fingers buried in his hair, looking crestfallen. His left hand was holding his phone to his ear.
“No. Of course not,” I heard him whisper. “It’s just that… Did you check the time before you called, Idoia?”
My heart did a flip. I didn’t know what to do. He hadn’t noticed me standing in the open sliding door.
“I know you always called at these hours, and it never used to be a problem, but the thing is circumstances have changed. First of all, you know perfectly well that I’m not working right now and I’m on vacation. And second, I’m on vacation…with another girl.”
He fell silent, and I heard the muffled sound of a girl answering, but I couldn’t make out a word of her spiel. I thought about going inside, getting back in bed, pretending to be asleep, and never bringing this up unless he told me about it the next day, but he kept talking, and…human beings are curious by nature.
What did they say killed the cat?
“It’s not that we can’t talk as friends; it’s just that it’s the middle of the night. And I don’t understand the urgency.”
I heard him suck his teeth and her responding. And her answer was long and elicited two soft sighs from him.
“No.” And his tone lowered and became more intimate. “You know what I think, Idoia? I think you miss me. You miss me a lot. And you got to thinking about this trip, and it made your blood boil. Am I wrong?” A pause. “Right. Well, you have to learn to say it how it is. You can’t expect to just drunk-dial me…Yes, yes, you are drunk, Idoia. And I don’t know if you’ve taken anything stronger.” A deep breath. “Come on, please! Do you seriously think I’m that stupid?”
I took a step back, not to go back to bed but to hide behind the curtain in case he suddenly stood up and found me there, like an idiot.
“No, don’t say that. You’re saying that because you’re drunk and jealous. And tomorrow, when you sober up, you’ll act like nothing happened and I… What am I gonna do with all this ‘David, you and I are so awesome together’? I’m with another girl. Idoia… I’m sleeping with another girl, and when I do, I’m not thinking about you.”
My heart was pounding so fast I thought he was going to hear it from the terrace.
“You know what she doesn’t make me feel like? A pariah. I’m not mediocre to her, and when I’m with her, I don’t feel like I am. She gives me wings, Idoia. And you clip them.”
In his eyes, there was no one else when we fucked. When we laughed, it sounded like water running over a riverbed of smooth round stones. I gave him wings. He felt capable. Together we were worthy of anything that shined in life and we didn’t always see. The patina of magic we insisted on not believing was there, on our sweaty skin and in the last moan—a hoarse whimper coming out of David’s throat—mixed with the desperate gasp for oxygen. What if…? What if we weren’t crazy? What if life had brought us together for a reason? I clutched my chest over my nightgown. Terrified.
But David kept talking. And…I felt like such an idiot.
“That’s not it. Of course I’m not falling in love with her. You know damn well that this thing with Margot isn’t love, just like you know how much I miss you. And I think about you. I can’t just cut that off overnight. I love you, Idoia, but that’s always been the big problem: I love you, and that scares you a lot.”
I love you, Idoia. I swallowed.
“Let’s leave it for today, really. I…need to think. Give me time. I’m here and…” A pause. She was talking, suddenly, much lower. I could barely hear the sound of her muffled voice. “You know. Don’t make me say it.” He thought it. He looked up, searching for the moon. He weakened. “I still love you. And that’s it, Idoia. I’ll text you. I don’t want… We’ll talk when I’m back, but…I don’t want to make her feel bad.” She asked something, and he pulled the phone away to sigh deeply, like he needed to get out a ghost dwelling in his chest. “I can’t promise that, Idoia. I’m not going to promise I won’t touch her again. I’m not going to do it. And I’m hanging up on you now because…I don’t feel like being reminded how egotistical you are. Good night.”
When he threw the phone down next to him, I went back to bed. Worried. Anxious. Wanting to cry. Feeling like shit. Apparently completely forgetting all the things we thought were so clear.
He didn’t come straight to bed. He took long enough for my head to turn all that information into a bullet with my name on it, embedded in my gut. And also gave me time, accordingly, to send a message to Filippo:
I miss you. I’ll never feel as safe as I do in your arms. I can’t wait for you to hold me again.