Chapter 8 On the Road
On the Road
Coco
We have more than six hours on the road ahead of us, but Blanca doesn’t know that.
I turn my head and see her inspecting everything from her seat, blown away.
About a year ago, getting tipsy on beer at El Viajero, we were both complaining about being clichéd adults who had never gone camping as kids.
“How can people expect me not to be basic when I don’t even know what the inside of a tent looks like?” she said before she downed the rest of her glass.
Blanca is the daughter of an overprotective mother who was afraid her daughter would run off to join the circus and wouldn’t survive the experience.
Blanca now looks like unicorns are going to float out of her eyes on clouds of cotton candy every time she blinks.
Every once in a while she just gives a little clap.
She’s so excited it’s almost painful to let her believe our destination is some shitty campsite in the middle of nowhere.
“Loren, why don’t we stop for lunch at a rest stop and then we can go straight there?” I whisper.
“Get the fuck outta here.” He laughs. “I’d pay good money to see the face she’s gonna make when she thinks we’re going to sleep in the middle of nowhere.”
“You did pay good money. This bachelorette trip cost an arm and a leg.”
He waves his hand like it doesn’t matter. None of us are loaded, but there are some things that, honestly, money can’t buy.
“Hey,” Loren says. “This whole Gus thing… You didn’t believe it, right?”
“Believe what? That he’s in love with me? No, not at all.” I force out a giggle.
My ass is so tightly clenched I’m basically sitting on one butt cheek. A tiny part of me did believe it.
Gus has been writing some pretty intense poetry lately…
the kind that would be impossible to write if you weren’t in love with someone.
When we were together, I didn’t give a fuck, but that’s because I knew our relationship was pretty superficial: wine and sex, going from one reading to the next, and not very much intimacy.
But now…he shows up with some excuse everywhere we go.
He calls me much more often than usual (last week it was to tell me he had eaten an expired yogurt, for Christ’s sake), and when we run into each other, sometimes he’s smiling like a six-year-old who’s been promised a piece of candy, and others, his brow is so furrowed you could hang curtains from it.
I try to search through my memory… Those times he seemed so bitter… Was I with Marín?
God…I think I was.
I side-eye Loren, who shoots me a quick look.
The other day Gus told me I looked really beautiful. I caught him staring at my boobs when I bent down to pick up a coin. Didn’t he wink at me when he said goodbye? Could he be jealous because he figured out I like Marín?
“Coco…” Loren whispers warningly. He must have been able to tell from my face that I was doing complicated mathematical calculations.
“What?”
“He’s not in love with you. The last thing we need is for you to get obsessed with that now. We have enough going on.”
“Like what?”
Loren looks in the rearview mirror to check that Blanca and Aroa are busy and not paying attention to us. “Marín. Marín and Aroa on Wednesday. And you. Great party.”
“I’m not going to make a scene.”
“I hope not.” He sighs.
He runs his fingers through his hair. It’s not the first trip we’ve gone on together. Something’s bugging Loren.
* * *
The landscape gets drier as we get farther from Madrid. The sun is relentless, baking the yellowish weeds growing on the edge of the highway. The music is playing much more quietly now, but it seems like none of us have even noticed because there’s still a festive vibe.
Aroa doesn’t like silence because she says it feels very dry to her, so I’ve spent the last ten minutes waiting for her to break it with some inane question. I smile when I hear her say to Blanca, “When are you getting the dress back?”
“I’m not sure yet. They’re going to call me, but…I guess I’ll be able to pick it up the week before the wedding.” Blanca inspects her nails, painted bright red. “One less thing.”
“Everything else is all set already? Shoes, earrings, lingerie…” She raises her eyebrows suggestively.
“Lingerie? I’m planning on wearing the same underwear I do every other day.”
“The seamless nude ones,” I joke.
“Exactly.”
“No!” But even though Aroa thinks this is a total deal-breaker, she still cracks up. “You can’t do that! Nude?”
“What do you want me to wear? A red thong? Girl, the dress is nuclear white. You can see my veins through it!”
“Listen, lady… Find some pretty white-lace thong and a matching bra. I don’t know. Something special. It’s your wedding night.”
Blanca snorts, making it clear she thinks it’s bullshit, but Aroa doesn’t back down.
“We’ll get them for you.”
“I think Blanca would like it better if we give her money to pay for the Roman bacchanal of a wedding dinner,” Loren points out.
“Of course, but on top of that. We’ll buy you the sexiest, most empowering set we can find.”
“But why? Nobody fucks on their wedding night! The only thing I’m gonna want to do when we get home is take a shower and sleep until my leg hair grows.”
“Yes, they do, dude!” The blondie cackles. “You should stay in a hotel that night and go at it, like newlyweds.”
“Aroa, I have to confess something to you… Ruben and I are sinners and…we’ve already done it. You know… We’ve done stuff. Naked. We’ve done ‘it.’”
Loren and I crack up.
“You idiot! I know you have a great sex life, but that night is special.”
“What couple who’ve been together more than a year still have a great sex life?” Blanca asks, throwing her head back. “There are a lot of myths around the sex life of couples, but don’t let that fool you. Your little cucumber itches, and you go in search of relief. No rose petals or fireworks.”
“Well, Marín and I always had incredible sex, and we were together…”
Three years. You were together three years, I think bitterly.
“Like three years,” she ends up saying. “And we still do.” Wait…
Wait… Wait… Even now? When was the last time those two…
? “Marín strokes me, and…I melt. Every time I look at his mouth, logic flies out the window, and all I want is for him to touch me, to kiss me”—help—“to lick me, fuck me up against a wall”—seriously, kill me now—“and for him to come, groaning, with his head thrown back…”
Loren takes his eyes off the road for a second and looks at me. There are probably patients in the middle of a rectal exam who are making cuter faces than me, but I turn back to them again and swallow.
“Isn’t that how it was for you with Gus?” Aroa interrogates me.
“The thing is, the only thing Gus and I were good at was boning. And even so…there were issues.”
“Issues?” Blanca raises her eyebrows. “You never said there were issues. Just that…that it was all explosive.”
“It was.” I look at the highway again as I nod. “We fucked like rabbits, sometimes for hours, but…”
“But? You’re going to complain about a guy who can do it for hours?” Loren teases. “For hours, girl, what are you thinking? If I get to fifteen minutes I want a medal for the Spartan Race.”
“I mean… It lasted hours because…” I look at Loren, who seems into the gossip even though he’s concentrating on the road, and then at the girls, who are waiting with raised eyebrows for me to finish the sentence. “It’s just that sometimes…he wouldn’t come.”
Aroa’s chin drops, and she looks confused. “He wouldn’t?”
I watch as we exit the highway and merge onto a smaller road that, a few meters later, turns into a kind of path.
I guess Loren has decided this is an inhospitable enough place to play the prank on Blanca and make her believe this is the first stop on our trip.
A decoy before we continue on to Torrevieja, where we’ve booked a site at a campsite that looks incredible.
I look at Loren, who gives me a cute wink.
“Huh! He didn’t come?” Aroa exclaims shrilly.
“Him. Like I always told all of you… I would come sometimes four times in a row. There were days I would go to work and even my eyelids hurt.” I smiled to myself, remembering Gus pushing me onto my desk at my office and pulling my panties down while he whispered that I was filthy.
“And he didn’t come?” Blanca is the one to insist this time.
“No. Not even a drop. Other times it would be so much I’d be glued to the headboard, to be fair.”
“Come on, girl, you’re so refined and elegant. By day you sell six-figure paintings to Madrid’s high aristocracy, and by night you give soliloquies about semen,” Loren says, side-eyeing me.
I cackle, and without thinking, I add, “Good times.”
We all fall silent, and I repeat that phrase to myself. Good times. Yes, they were. Marín and I were best friends. Gus would grab my hand and lead me to great dive bars to drink wine and make out. They both made me laugh. Now I’m always weighing my words, in front of one or the other…
“You’ll get back together. I know it.”
Sometimes Aroa’s optimism pisses me off, I have to admit it.
I know her personal magic illuminates her every expression, always smiley, always so sweet…
or her other favorite thing is to say what you want to hear, which kind of gives me the ick.
But, no, Gus and I aren’t getting back together, and it worries me that someone, even if that someone is Aroa, thinks it’s so obvious.
“Are you going through a pre-wedding sexual crisis?” I ask Blanca to change the subject.
“No. I don’t think that’s it. It’s just that…we’re both so busy with work. We barely see each other.”
“You work in the same office.” I smile.
“Maybe that’s the problem. We see each other too much without actually seeing each other.”
Loren shifts uncomfortably in his seat, and I realize it’s been more than two weeks since I’ve seen Ruben. I look at Blanca, whose gaze is lost on the road.
“Are you two okay?” I fire off point-blank, even though I should probably be asking her when we’re alone because I know that deep down, Blanca is actually easiest to bully in smaller groups.
She looks at me too, and I know she’s hesitating, even if it’s just for a second, even if it’s only internal, but she answers, “We’re nervous about the wedding, and work doesn’t help, but this bachelorette trip is going to be great.
You have no idea how much I’ve been looking forward to this.
The four of us alone, having fun… A whole week of vacation with my best friends in an RV. What more could I ask for?”
I can’t really describe the roar that explodes outside, instantly infiltrating the passenger section of the vehicle.
It’s a bang, followed by a screeching noise from, I think, the brakes.
We don’t have time to think about it because Loren seems to lose control of the RV, which is making S’s on the road for a few seconds that seem to last forever.
The wheels are sliding around on the asphalt, causing a hell of a lot of smoke.
Aroa lets out a high-pitched cry, filled with anxiety.
When the RV finally brakes on the side of the road, I realize that Loren must have been holding his breath, because he sucks in a huge gulp of air before he looks at the three of us.
“Is everyone okay?”
“Fuck… That was terrifying! What was that?” Aroa cries out.
“Tell me we didn’t hit anything! Please! Tell me we didn’t hit anything!” Blanca prays in a howl.
“Fuck me and my spirit guide,” I whisper.
All our voices mix into gibberish, and Loren unbuckles his seat belt and gets out without a word. For a moment, the only thing we can hear is the pebbles covering this rural road crunching under his sneakers.
When he pokes his head back in, he doesn’t look like he has good news.
“First stop,” he announces.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Blanca complains. “If you’re fucking with me to try to make me think you have nothing planned and that we’re going to sleep in the middle of a field, the swerving wasn’t necessary. You almost gave me a heart attack, you idiot.”
“Fucking with you?” He laughs reluctantly. “Everyone out. We have a flat.”