David
My headache wasn’t as bad as I deserved it to be. That was the first thing I thought when I woke up in my boxers, sweaty and dry-mouthed. In the next bed over, Felix was snoring softly even as the midday sun poured in through the slats in the blind, making slashes of light across the bed.
When I opened my eyes, I perfectly remembered fucking Margot on the hood of my grandfather’s car, parked right in front of his house. But that was fucking crazy. And if she hadn’t stopped us, I would have done it without a condom.
And without telling her that I had seen Idoia and we had talked.
It’s not that I wanted to lie to her, it’s just that…in the little time we had left, why waste it talking about another girl?
Jesus! I clutched my head when I remembered that when I got home, when Felix’s breathing slowed and I could tell he was fast asleep, I slid under her covers. I needed to kiss her more, caress her, feel her hands on my skin. Margot arched as she asked me to go back to my bed, to make it a little easier, and I…I acted like a teenager in love. In love and out of control.
And now there was no trace of her in the room.
I snuck out of the room, thinking my friends would still be sleeping like logs and that the house would still be quiet. But as I went downstairs I realized there was already a commotion in the kitchen, the nerve center of any party worth its salt.
I found them all fighting to get their hand into a bag of churros. A bunch of sharks on a wounded seal would make less of a racket.
“This is a novelty,” I said with a gravelly voice. “You guys went and bought breakfast?”
“No, she did.”
The group parted to reveal Margot in the middle, smiling and diverting her gaze to the floor. Another thing that reminded me of the night before and I didn’t feel exactly comfortable with the memory.
“So sweet.” I couldn’t think of anything more natural to say, and they all looked at me, confused. It had been a shitty answer. I cleared my throat. “Don’t spoil them. They’ll get used to it.”
Margot smiled politely and looked down at her feet. I did the same and discovered that I hadn’t even put on a shirt. I was wearing cotton shorts with nothing underneath. I wasn’t even wearing flip-flops.
“Why the hell did I come down so naked?” I said out loud.
“We can see your foreskin,” Laura pointed out with a smile.
“Don’t worry, Margot, we look but we don’t touch,” Rocio added.
“Ah, they’re blushing,” Esther and Cristina chorused in a stage whisper.
“Suck my balls,” I offered, shoving a churro into my mouth. “I’m gonna take a shower.”
Margot and I exchanged a sly look. My friends were looking at us with stupid little smirks on their faces. We thought we had been as silent and discreet as ninjas, but maybe all of them (and with them, the entire village) had seen us fucking against a red Seat Ibiza from the year 2000. Or maybe they were just witnesses to how flustered and red we got after a few words.
It would be better to tackle the problems head-on.
“Queen, will you come with me for a second?” I asked her, once I had chewed the rest of the fried pastry.
“To the shower?” Esther exclaimed, surprised. “OMG, David, you wake up raring to go.”
“Upstairs. To talk.” I exaggerated the word talk with an irritated tone. “You coming, Margot?”
“Um…yes, yes. Of course,” she replied, grabbing a churro and wrapping it in a paper napkin to soak up the grease.
I stole Marta’s glass of juice from her hand and, with a pretty ironic thank-you, went back upstairs, followed by Margot brandishing her churro.
I went into one of the bedrooms “the girls” had left empty and closed the door. Margot had kind of a shocked look on her face. Something like “You’re not going to ask me to do it here, are you?”
“I’m not going there,” I warned her.
“So this is about last night.”
“I’m really sorry.” I put the glass down on the chest of drawers and expelled all the air from my lungs. “I lost my mind.”
“We both lost our minds.”
“It’s not that it wasn’t good,” I hurried to clarify. “It was really good, to tell the truth. But the thing is…this isn’t going how we planned.”
“It’s okay. Breaking up isn’t an exact science.”
As soon as I heard “breaking up,” I’m not gonna lie: I got a little freaked out. Breaking up implied something solid before. Something that could be broken had to exist by necessity. And “we” had existed, there was no doubt about that, but it scared me. It really scared me. I could still hear myself saying that if we didn’t stop, we’d end up falling in love. And it was happening. In some way, either cowardly or childish, it was happening.
“Right.” I couldn’t say anything else.
“It doesn’t always go as planned.” Margot sat down on the edge of the bed, unsure what to do with her churro. She looked at it and laughed.
I laughed too. It was always easy with her, even when it scared me.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“About last night?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I think…” She took a deep breath and swept the room with her gaze. She looked beautiful, with her hair tousled, a little wavy, wearing that black shirtdress she had worn in Santorini. I forced myself to focus. “I liked it. And by I liked it, I don’t just mean the obvious…” Her tone became a little lighter. “Obvious because I don’t think I was that silent when I came.” She breathed in and took up her old tone again. “I mean, I liked doing it again. And the one in the bed. I liked the one in the bed too.”
“But…we have to stop doing it.”
“Is that a statement or a question?”
“I have no idea.”
I bit my cheek and sat down next to her. We both smiled.
“I liked doing it again too,” I said, unable to stop myself from locking my eyes on her mouth.
“Well now, I’m the one saying, and it is a statement, that we have to stop doing it.”
“Okay. You’re the boss.”
“No.” She smiled sadly. “The boss is the things you said in Mykonos.”
Stopping it. Not letting it go any further. Turning our backs on the possibility of falling in love. What if it was too late for that? But since I didn’t say a word of what I was thinking, Margot kept talking with a sadder and sadder smile.
“Plus we should concentrate on sealing the deal on winning them back and reap what we’ve sowed.”
“You’re right,” I admitted, but I still hadn’t found the courage to tell her that Idoia had come to surprise me at the florist a few days back. The same day I sent the flowers.
We looked at each other again without moving, like we both wanted to add something but neither of us dared. I wanted to kiss her, but I didn’t.
“Well, then it seems like everything ended up how we wanted…right?” I looked at her, in case I saw even the slightest doubt and, surprise, not the slightest; her whole face was a question mark with eyes.
Maybe it was time to tell her that I hadn’t liked being away from her these last few days. Maybe it was time to announce that I was more than a little lovesick. Maybe she felt the same, although she was definitely still waiting for the Iron Man of fiancés.
“Yes,” I responded, despite the doubts I thought I could read on her face. “A happy ending.”
We looked away. We searched for something to say. We were suddenly very awkward.
“I’m going to see my parents.” I stood up. “Wanna come?”
She raised an eyebrow.
“No.” And a very warm smile spread across her face. “Because bringing me to meet your parents, fully aware that your mother forbid you from bringing anyone through that door unless they were the final one, doesn’t seem very…um…coherent.”
A flash of a life together dazzled me. A bright room where old vinyl would be playing, where it would smell like plants and flowers, where it wouldn’t matter if I came home with dirt under my nails and if she got home when dinner was already cold. The life that could be slapped me in the face, and I had to blink.
“You’re right. I’m going to take a shower. My grandmother can sniff out a hangover from a mile off, and I want to throw her off the trail.”
I’d say Margot seemed disappointed, but I don’t know. What I do know is that I had hoped she would say something else.
My mother was wrapping soaps in floral-printed wax paper. Now she had decided to make her own soap because she said commercial soap was made from pork. The whole house smelled like those scented glycerin pills, even though my grandmother was in front of the stove, trying to compete by cooking something I thought was rice with rabbit.
“Hello!” I called, stopping in the open doorway to let my eyes adjust to the dim house.
“Well, well!” my grandmother said. “The skinny one.”
“I’m not that skinny!” I defended myself, going inside and flexing. “I’m built like a bull.”
My grandmother looked at me with a pretty derisive disappointment. “Look at you. You’re so scruffy.”
I gave her a kiss and sat down next to my mother.
“Mother.” I winked at her. “As you can see, I’m a very good son, and as I promised, I dropped by to say hello.”
“If I hadn’t seen you at the festival…” She rolled her eyes.
“Do you want a glass of gazpacho?” my grandmother offered.
“A beer.”
“A hair-of-the-dog beer because I can smell your hangover from here.”
My mother and I laughed.
“I didn’t even get that wasted,” I declared.
“Right. When I went to get bread this morning, everyone was talking about your infamous fireman dance,” my mother pointed out.
“That was just a silly joke.”
“What’s going on with you?”
“With me? Nothing.”
My grandmother put a glass of gazpacho in front of me and gave me a few tweaks on the ear, letting me know that I wasn’t leaving there without finishing every last drop.
“Granny, did you want to add some gazpacho to this garlic?”
“Garlic is really good for your heart.”
“If I drink this, I’ll never be able to kiss anyone again.”
“You don’t need to.”
When she’d disappeared back into the kitchen, I took up the conversation with my mother again, who was chuckling at my grandmother’s zeal.
“Where’s Papa?”
“At work.” She smiled. “He works on Saturdays now too.”
“Wow. Um…” I looked around. “Ernesto and Clara didn’t come home for the festival this year?”
“You’re a disaster, David,” she said, her eyes back on her work. “They’re your siblings. A call every once in a while wouldn’t hurt.”
“I do call them… It’s just that lately I’ve been a little…distracted.”
“Does that have anything to do with the girl from last night?”
“No,” I lied.
“Who is she? Are you two dating?”
“No,” I lied again. “I’m dating another girl called Idoia.”
“And knowing you, I’m sure she’s one of those girls who drag you down a path of bitterness, who says she loves you one day and then doesn’t return your calls the next. You don’t know how to love someone who loves you. And there’s something there that doesn’t work, David. Something you have to fix so you love yourself a little more because you don’t deserve that kind of love.”
“That’s me.” I raised my eyebrows, resigned while I settled into another chair, this time opposite her.
“That one from last night looked like a nice girl.”
“And she is.”
“And that’s why you don’t like her, I imagine.”
For God’s sake. It doesn’t matter how young your mother is. She never stops being your mother and doing motherly things.
“I do like her, Mama, but things aren’t as easy as you…”
“Oh no?” She side-eyed me. “Tell me, tell me. Maybe I’ll learn something.”
“You’re teasing me, and that’s why it’s no fun talking to you,” I sulked.
“Are you going out with either of them? And if you say both, I’ll make you swallow so much soap you’ll have bubbles coming out of your butt until you die. I didn’t raise you to treat women like cattle.”
I gave up. I rested my forehead on the table.
“Do you see why I didn’t feel like coming to say hi? You’re giving me a headache!” I complained. “I’m not going out with both. Actually, I don’t think I’m going out with either.”
“What a shame. Considering how handsome my skinny little boy is.” My grandmother appeared out of nowhere to kiss my temple.
“Granny, please! Make noise when you walk or something. You’re going to be the death of me.”
“This village is going to be the death of me! Can you believe that last night someone…fornicated…” she said, lowering her voice, “on top of your grandfather’s car?”
I opened my eyes as wide as plates.
“How would you know that?”
“I woke up and heard heavy breathing, and this morning…guess what I found: a butt print on the hood!”
I barely said hello to my grandfather. Suddenly it felt like the house was on fire and I had to cut and run. It was very obvious, from the look my mother shot me before I left, that at least she was aware of the source of the “fornication” on the car. But still…I had to down the gazpacho. I had to brush my teeth twice and chew five pieces of gum to get rid of the aftertaste of garlic.
In a naive corner of my chest, I had hoped the visit to the house I grew up in would clear some doubts, the mental fog of priorities, but the truth is that the house was still chaos (fun chaos, but chaos after all) since I became independent. So if I was looking for answers, they weren’t there.
When I got back to Cristina’s house, I found Margot swimming with the others. They were talking about which swimsuits were flattering on them and which looked awful. And I thought, somewhat bewildered, that it was a gift. I pictured Idoia there. She would be sulking at having to hang out with people as un-glam as my friends, with their ridiculous sunglasses, like Miss Rottenmeier, tanning in hostile silence far away from everyone else. Seriously, did I really want to get back together with her? Since I had gotten back from the trip, I’d been having a hard time finding the pros in our relationship. Idoia wasn’t like Margot; she didn’t have any warm corners to take shelter in. There was no life in her laughter. She wasn’t supportive and kind. I reflected: How much did I actually like being hit during sex? I was starting to think I might be a masochist and not know it.
I snorted.
“What are you doing?” Laura asked, sitting down next to me.
“Thinking about my ex.”
“Why would you do that?” She threw me a baffled look.
I turned to look at her again, with my arms crossed over my chest and a feeling of pressure in my stomach.
“Laura…what do you think makes a relationship work?”
“Jeez, David…that’s quite a question. Well…I guess respect, skin, and desire, to boil it down.”
“What about without boiling it down?” I wanted to know.
“Respect means giving admiration, empathy, affection, warmth, understanding, reciprocity…”
“What about skin?”
“Sex and intimacy. Laughter too. Skin is what makes it fun. The respect, stability. The desire, long-lasting.”
I stared right through her. Of all those things, Idoia only fulfilled sex because she was a fucking machine, not because she left a rainbow of intimacy in her wake. She didn’t admire me in any of the ways it’s possible to admire someone, she didn’t feel the slightest empathy for me, she wasn’t affectionate, she didn’t give me warmth when everything around me seemed cold, and she would never understand the way I saw the world or relationships. She didn’t make me laugh or laugh with me. It was never really fun with her, though it was very intense.
“What about intense?” I asked. “What do you think about intense?”
“Intense or toxic?”
She smiled. She smiled with her teeth, and I did the same out of habit even though I didn’t feel like smiling at all. We must’ve looked like two loons.
Margot climbed out of the pool, and I locked my eyes on her. What a sight. The curves at her waist would kill you if you tried to drive too fast. She turned around. That ass. I thought I could see some round marks, and my stomach flipped at the thought that it could be a reminder of my fingers digging in there.
Laura pinched my arm to bring me crashing back to reality.
“Sorry.”
“David, you need to clear out the old broken stuff if you want to fill yourself up again. I don’t know if you get me.”
I didn’t get her. Not then, at least, even though I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop going in circles in my head about whether turning my relationship with Idoia into something healthy was mission impossible, if what I felt about Margot was really valuable, and this whole thing about clearing out the broken to make room for the new.
And even with all the mental mess I was carrying, after we finished eating, when everyone else was playing cards in the living room and Margot was dozing off on the couch, I felt an irresistible temptation to snuggle in next to her.
“Hey…” I whispered to her. “Won’t you be more comfortable in bed?”
“I’m fine here,” she murmured drowsily.
“But I don’t fit here.”
She opened her eyes and smiled. And when she did, I was even more scared.
I didn’t love Idoia, damn it. I loved Margot. And it was really fucking messy.
So we went upstairs. I didn’t fall asleep. I spent the whole time stroking her. Her arms. Her shoulders. Her back. Her hip. Her hair. And when she woke up, wordlessly, I reached into her panties with the intention of slowly fingering her until she came. I needed to have her in my fingers one more time, but she stopped me.
“We said we weren’t going to do goodbye sex, and I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve said goodbye by doing it.”
And she was right, but when I leaned in to kiss her again, she forgot all about it.
We ended up having sex silently, with me on top, in the bed in the attic, which squeaked more than we would’ve liked. This time she was the one who took a condom out of her wallet.
“I grabbed it at the last minute. Just in case.”
“And it didn’t occur to you to whip it out last night?” I asked her.
“I left my bag here.”
We made love like a sweet summer siesta, rocking ourselves. And in the end, I mentally told her the reason goodbye sex didn’t make any sense. If it was bad, which wasn’t the case, it left a bad taste in your mouth and spoiled the memory. And if it was good, you’d always want more.
As always, Jose was behind the grill…until he threw a tantrum because he couldn’t get the fire to light and he left it to us. So I took over and yelled for my friends to help me, at least by carrying things over. Margot was the only one who volunteered.
It was hot next to the barbecue, and I ended up in nothing but shorts, fanning myself with a cardboard plate.
“Holy shit, it’s so hot,” I moaned when Jose brought me another beer.
“Hey, kid, I like the view,” Esther teased. “With your torso all sweaty, you look like a male stripper who came to save the night.”
“I’ll give you a private dance later.” I winked.
Margot came over to offer me a damp cloth, which she had wet in the cold water from the cooler, and smiled, looking back and forth between Esther and me. I thanked her and stopped on my way to give her a kiss when I realized everyone was looking at us and that I was about to break the promise not to kiss her again for the umpteenth time.
“Don’t hold back, dude,” they teased. “After the squeaking from the siesta…”
“Please, so mortifying.”
Margot leaned on my shoulder, hiding herself and making the whole group burst into laughter. I put my arm around her and kissed her temple.
“You’re all so rude!” Marta chided them. “Poor thing, she just joined the group. And she’s so nice. Good thing you dumped that grouchy girl who sounded like a drone, David.”
“Don’t you mean a cyborg?” I answered, confused.
“Yeah, that’s it, the ones who seem like humans but they’re robots. Are they called cyborgs?”
“Drones are the things that fly,” Laura pointed out, filching a potato from the plate next to her.
“Well, I didn’t like the cyborg at all. She was such a jerk.”
“Marta…” I started to say.
“Sorry, Margot, I know it’s not tasteful to talk about the ex, but it’s just that…I only met her once, and that was plenty.”
“Marta…” I tried again.
“She was stuck-up, grumpy, a snob and a half…a ‘trendy’ woman who bought cheugy, expensive clothes and thought the whole world had to kiss her ass. And I mean, not gonna happen. My David is so David. He needed a girl like you: elegant, discreet, funny, sweet, beautiful…”
Margot quickly glanced over at me, putting the ball in my court.
“Marta, Margot and I aren’t together.”
They all grimaced at each other. It was clear they had just assumed, and I didn’t blame them. There was something between us that I’m sure was as beautiful from the outside as it felt from the inside.
“Ah…seriously?”
“Seriously.” Margot smiled sadly.
I glanced at her and turned back to the barbecue, clacking the tongs in my hand, to turn over the two kilos of pancetta the gang of nutjobs had bought. I pulled a piece of meat off the grill, waved it around to cool it down, and gave it to her to taste.
“It needs another minute,” Margot responded.
“Seriously, you guys make a really cute couple,” Marta insisted.
“Hey, Margot, what do you do?”
“Yeah, Margot, what do you do?” I said as a little dig.
“I work in the family business.” She leaned into my side and was unconsciously stroking my back. Everything felt so natural with us… “My grandfather founded a hotel chain. He built a hotel in Galicia, and little by little it grew until it became a giant.”
“Which hotels are they?”
“The Ortega Group.” I could feel her looking at me sidelong.
The Ortega Group. Everyone knew the Ortega Group. It was iconic. Everyone fell silent. Except Esther.
“So what do you do at your job?”
“I’m the vice president of the company and the associate in charge of customer relations and brand image.”
Margot looked at me anxiously, and I understood that she hadn’t told me before because she didn’t want that (her money, her hotels, her family of origin) to get in the middle of our relationship. With me, she just wanted to be Margot and…fuck, that’s how I had fallen in love with her. With nothing in the middle of us, just skin, desire, and respect.
She kissed me on the shoulder while stroking my back. I wanted her to be able to do that all the time. I wanted us to be like that, two people who love each other beautifully, sweetly, slowly, without anything else mattering. Not stocks or my three shitty jobs.
I turned back to the barbecue and pretended to be very focused on my task; I heard them resume the conversation, but I drifted very far away. I went to Neverland, where relationships between people like us worked. I went to Wonderland, where no one would look at me like a fucking parasite if I risked working through my fears and starting something with Margot now that I knew who she was. I went far away, into space, where all the lives we could’ve had were exploding from pressure and lack of oxygen. When I landed, I found refuge in the knowledge that suffering now so we would suffer less in the future was the most elegant option. My pockets were empty, and my head was hollow, dreamless. I don’t know when I let life engulf me and throw me in so deep that even if I stretched my arms so hard I dislocated them, I could never reach a love like the one Margot offered.