All the Truth In My Lies

Chapter 1

I’m a Liar

Coco

The first problem on my list of “things that keep me up at night” is that I’m a fucking liar. I’m not sugarcoating it, dear Coco. You’re a bullshit artist.

I have one of those names that were so popular when I was a kid that we always had to label all our stuff with our last names. Mine was so common, I ended up sticking with the nickname my brothers gave me. And…here I am at twenty-eight, still introducing myself as “Coco.”

About the lying thing, I swear it’s not pathological, and I only let those fibs slip out in an attempt to survive the jungle that is being twenty-eight, being in love, and being a total idiot. And making bad choices. I’m good at that too. But let’s take it one step at a time.

Any story can be told three ways: the short way, the one that’s somewhere in the middle, and the long way. Like life itself, which version you choose says a lot about all the things you want to keep quiet. And the biggest lies are always the ones you hide from yourself.

I could take the simple path and give you the no-frills version: I’m head over heels in love with my best friend, who’s also my roommate and the ex of one of my other best friends.

My last name should be “Complications” instead of Martinez because it really fits me way better.

To make a short story a little longer, I could confess that sometimes I say stuff to my friend Aroa like “Hey, Aroa, he’s such a weirdo…

Do you really wanna get back together with him?

” And it’s probably best if I don’t mention all the bullshit I spew about how frustrating he is to live with.

These are just little white lies, right?

Love makes us cruel.

If I go with the mid-length explanation of how I ended up here, I’d have to add that life is complicated.

I mean… I fell in love with Marín by accident, and even though that should make me feel less guilty…

Forget it. I fell in love with my friend’s boyfriend (while they were still dating), I destroyed my peaceful roommate situation, and now I’ve become some kind of pathological liar.

But…what did the universe expect me to do?

I only lie because I’m trying not to create an apocalypse in our friend group.

Still, even if that version is closer to the clusterfuck that is my life, the most honest and real way to tell the whole story would start with a simple: I met Marín in a bar.

I didn’t fall in love with him at first sight.

Marín is one of those men—a needle in a haystack, the kind you can’t believe is real.

You think I’m exaggerating? Fine, judge for yourself: Marín is persistent.

He’s honest. He’s so polite he’s practically British.

He’s chaotic but brilliant. He’s obsessed with music and has the perfect song for every moment.

He has that thing you can’t fake, being born with the gift of elegance.

When he smiles, it must get dark somewhere else in the world.

He’s fun, a good brother, a good roommate. A triple threat: He’s hot.

He’s good in bed (judging by all the “God, Marín, don’t stop.

There, right there, keep doing that… Fuck!

That was amazing!” floating out of his room when Aroa was still his girlfriend), a good friend, a good conversationalist. A natural at getting over himself.

He could have felt sorry for himself his whole life for the bad luck of having an alcoholic mother who never took care of him or his sister and coming from a family with very limited economic resources.

But no. Because he’s Marín, of course, and he pulled on his ripped jeans and his white shirt and proved to everyone that you can’t always get what you want, but your attitude and hard work help a lot.

So, yeah, I met him at a bar, and a week later my lease was up on my hovel and I was moving all my earthly possessions into his house because I was sick of living alone.

He had rented a beautiful apartment on my favorite street in Malasana (close enough to the center but still quiet), and an exchange student from Belgium was moving out, leaving a room free.

From the day he invited me to have a beer in his kitchen, I felt like it was my home. My refuge.

His friends became my friends. My friends, his.

The years flew by. The apartment filled up with cacti—which miraculously survived our complete neglect—and with framed artwork.

We dubbed one side of the hallway “the wall of fame,” where we hung caricatures we’d drawn of all our friends, acquaintances, and random people who passed through the house.

We were growing. That was the most beautiful part of all.

Growing alongside him as a person and in our careers too, through support, hugs, and unconditional trust in each other.

When I moved into his place, I wasn’t earning a bad salary, but I was still a little grossed out by the auction house where I worked and spent pretty much every waking hour.

He was just finishing up his degree and working as a waiter.

Our fridge usually looked like a desolate tundra littered with a few cheap beers, half a lemon, and at most four yogurts, until we forgot we were thousand-aires and went back to wasting our pennies on alcohol (me) and slices of pizza (him).

Now that I think about it, I miss when Marín would eat microwaved pizza at five in the morning.

But he got his dream job at a major label as a “product” manager for a few emerging bands and artists.

And I’ve come to terms with the luxury of selling paintings for outrageous amounts.

So the apartment is still stunning but now has a fridge full of special Alhambra bottles, face masks for tired skin (I don’t get much sleep), and food that makes him happy.

A few years back, Marín started treating his body like a temple: He doesn’t smoke or drink, he doesn’t eat processed crap, and, get this, for his last birthday he asked me to get him a bread machine.

It’s not like he’s a star in the kitchen, but he tries so hard…

like everything in life because, babe, Marín doesn’t know how to do anything in halves.

And ever since then I eat homemade multigrain bread for breakfast.

Come on, aren’t you falling in love with him a little?

Wait, you don’t have all the information yet.

You’ll see: We have a little chalkboard in the kitchen where we leave each other messages.

Once he wrote that he had realized happiness was just spending a little time looking around at home, watching the curtain in the living room sway in the breeze coming in off the street.

“That’s the image that comes to mind when I think about being happy. Our house.”

No. He’s not in love with me. After that beautiful soliloquy, he added, “Living with my best friend: just to be clear.” Just my luck…

When he gets mad, he furrows his brow and won’t look you in the eye, but that only makes him look even hotter.

He has beautiful hands. He’s affectionate like a cat: only when it comes naturally because he doesn’t know how to fake it.

He has beautiful feet, for fuck’s sake. The way he irons shirts kills me (sometimes in his underwear, for the love of God).

And he loves me so much, so very much, that on the days when I can’t find myself, all I have to do is look at his face to remember that I can, that I’m worth it, that I’m good for something, that I deserve it.

Not for him, but for me. But there are days when I just see it in his eyes.

But he loves me as a friend, you know. A best friend.

Welcome to the friend zone, a circle of hell reserved for idiots like me.

It’s been more than a year since I realized I was in love with him, wondering why we never hooked up on some lonely night, why I introduced him to Aroa hoping they would hit it off, why it took me so long to realize that Marín is my him.

I can’t stop thinking about how our destinies could have changed if I just hadn’t made a few stupid decisions.

Pretty fucking messy, huh? Well, wait until we get into the fact that I was so scared of being found out that I’ve spent a year pretending (like the fucking liar I already told you I am) to be madly in love with my ex, another member of the friend group, one of those “It’s not you, it’s me, the ladies like me too much for me to stay with just one for the rest of my life” guys and…

Hold on, it gets worse… My ex is a poet.

Let me give you some advice: Every woman should have a list of men who aren’t good for them, and despite all the temptations, they should get tattooed on their forehead that if they meet someone with any of those characteristics, they have to run in the opposite direction.

The top of the list, contrary to popular belief, isn’t a singer or a guitar player or a hell’s angel…

It’s a poet. The poet as a figure, as a symbol, as a legend.

Like the dude who will whisper to you, write to you, recite to you…

always completely aware that he’s in love with the muse and he’ll never be faithful to you.

Look, I’m not saying all poets are unfaithful.

What I’m trying to say is that they have the words for love embedded in their brains, and they weep from their fingers when they write…

That makes it complicated to stay with a woman who doesn’t suffer, who doesn’t make you suffer, who doesn’t get bored.

Because, babe, the poet needs to feel at any cost—their creation depends on their feelings.

A relationship with a poet is like a roller coaster, blindfolded, where you never get used to ratcheting up or plummeting down because the change of direction can be a matter of seconds.

There are people who love this, but I’m not one of them.

For me, the unbridled passion of kisses that were almost more teeth than tongue, the arguments that were as ridiculous as they were impassioned under the blinking neon of a pharmacy in Chueca, the nights of fucking and poetry and the completely empty mornings…

didn’t make me happy. And I didn’t make him happy either.

Sometimes, I felt like I was trying to domesticate a rhino and keep it as a pet.

Plus, in this specific case, for Gus, the Instagram star, the it boy of the new poetry scene, the wunderkind, my ex, my friend…

It turned out to be very difficult for him to say no when temptation knocked on his door.

He never cheated on me, fine, but that’s just because I’m not the type who considers jerking off over dirty Instagram DMs to be infidelity.

So here I am, pretending I’m tormented by his poems and his stories.

Sometimes I even use them to cry out my frustration about loving Marín, faking like I’m devastated by the same old poem that, if I’m being honest, I have no clue whom he’s writing about now.

Because he’s writing about someone, I’ll tell you that, because I know him and he’s definitely in love.

I know this isn’t good, that I’m a liar and that this trip we have coming up, spending a week with three of my best friends twenty-four seven, isn’t good, but no use crying over spilled milk, Coco.

It’s Blanca’s bachelorette party, and that is the only important thing.