Chapter 14 This Party Is So Fantastic #2
“Blanca, put down the wine. No one’s going to steal it from you,” Gus says, putting his glass in reach of the bride. “You really do work hard, play harder.”
“It’s my bachelorette party. I’m supposed to have a good time.”
“At this pace, you’re going to have a good time vomiting into a bag.”
“Hey, Marín, so was Noa a sight to behold?” Aroa changes the topic. She’s leaning on the table, staring moony-eyed at him.
“She looked like a cuckoo clock, the poor thing. It’s not like I’m happy, but…”
“You’re happy,” she says playfully. “We know each other, Marín…”
“I would’ve been fine if she’d had a month of diarrhea. Something not too painful. If she lost control of her sphincter, that would’ve been perfect.”
Aroa makes a face. Before I can even consider whether they’re looking at each other like two lovebirds, I let out a strident cackle that makes the whole table look at me.
“A whole stage full of poop!”
Great. Thanks, Coco. Your intervention made it more than clear that, far from being an adult woman worthy of the love of the most wonderful man you’ve ever met, you’re five and you’re stuck in the poop-jokes stage.
I push away my plastic plate littered with dinner scraps and rest my head on the table with my forehead on my hands, dying.
“Hey, Coco Puff, you seem a little nervous, huh?” Gus asks in a seductive tone.
“It’s the wine.”
“Coco loves stories about poop. They’re our fave, right?”
I lift my head up from the table and see Marín leaning toward me, smiling. “They’re the best.”
“And farts,” he adds.
“And that one where you were pissing in the Arenal Sound and…”
“Shh…” He puts his hand over my mouth, and I bite it.
We start playing slapsies over the table, and I’m dying of laughter, but in a natural way this time.
“Okay, kids, let’s get it together. Hand me the tortilla. Come on,” Blanca says.
“Blanquita, are you going to have seconds? Then you won’t fit into your wedding dress and there will be crying and gnashing of teeth.”
We all gape at Gus.
“What?” he says.
“Good thing that couldn’t be further from being your business,” Blanca says, thrusting a piece of tortilla onto her plate more violently than necessary.
“Such a shitty joke.” I kick him under the table, trying to put out the fire.
“You girls say stuff like that to each other all the time and it’s fine.” He sounds indignant.
“It doesn’t matter. Let it go,” Blanca says.
“Of course it doesn’t matter. It was just a stupid comment,” Gus insists.
“A shitty one,” Loren adds, glaring at him threateningly.
“But wait… What’s happening here? Is it a gendered joke? I can’t say it if I’m not a woman?”
Loren, Aroa, and I all start to answer, but Blanca cuts us off vehemently.
“No. It’s not a gendered joke. It’s a fat-fucker jokes. Do you know what fat-fuckers are, Gus?”
“You think I called you fat?” He points to his chest.
Blanca cuts a bite of her tortilla, stabs it with her fork, leans on the table with it in her hand, and smiles, “Gus…shut up.”
Then she scarfs down the tortilla and asks for the bottle of wine.
Loren changes the subject, and everyone else follows his lead hoping it will defuse the atmosphere.
I look at Marín and Aroa again; they seem like always.
When they look at each other, isn’t that the look I’ve seen in his eyes when he’s with me?
The gleam, the way he bites his bottom lip, the way he smiles when he makes a joke.
Am I seeing ghosts? Insecurity, fear, yearning, all at once.
When Aroa rests her hand on his over the table, I look away and find myself looking at Gus.
“Fucking hell,” he whispers. “These people take everything too seriously. It was just an observation.”
“It was gross and made you sound overbearing.”
He scoffs, leans back from the table, and looks into the darkness that has started to hover around us and is only broken now by a streetlamp two sites away and the exterior light on our camper.
“What’s going on with you?” I ask him because I know him and something’s up.
He grabs his hair with both hands and sighs. “Can we take a walk?” he asks.
“Of course. Let me just clear some of this away.” I grab a few plates and stack them up, and he snatches them from me and throws them into the trash can next to us as he stands up.
“Where are you two going?” Loren asks with a furrowed brow.
Gus is already a few steps away from the table and is looking both ways up and down the street that separates the sites, like he doesn’t know they’re asking me why we’re leaving.
“I think he drank too fast,” I lie. “A walk will do him good. I’m sure when we get back he’ll be apologizing,” I say to Blanca.
“Like I care.”
We wander off aimlessly. I feel like I’m strolling through a cemetery. It’s barely ten at night, but everyone seems to be sleeping already, except us and a few other campers who aren’t following the European schedule and are still eating dinner.
Gus is walking fast. His legs aren’t that long, but it has always been hard for me to keep up with his striding pace.
I run a little to catch up. He looks at me.
I look at him. There’s something in his look that takes me on a trip that we took together: to the doors of clubs where we would make out, the plaza where we would always sit to eat something before we went home and fucked like animals.
There’s something here that reminds me how much I liked when his fingers would leave marks on my thighs—painful bruises but made from a lot of pleasure.
The two faces of the same coin that were sex with him.
Gus? Do you feel it too?
I shouldn’t have agreed to take a walk alone with him.
“I was getting overwhelmed sitting there,” he says, a smile unfurling across his face.
“You’re, like…weird, right?”
“I’m going to tell you something, okay? But you have to promise you’re not going to tell anyone and you’re not going to think it’s a problem.”
“Of course. What’s going on?”
“It’s just that…Loren’s making me nervous, girl,” he says with his particular brand of insolence. “It’s like he’s inspecting everything I say, everything I do…and he always acts like I owe him money.”
I smile. Ay, Loren…the dad of the group. The protector. “No. It’s just that Loren has always been very protective over us.”
“So? Do I treat you badly? We’re all friends here.”
“Yeah, but you’re my ex,” I point out.
“And? Marín is Aroa’s ex, and he doesn’t look at him like that.”
“Well, if Marín fucked half of Madrid since their breakup, he’s been very discreet about it.”
He stops and looks at me with a furrowed brow. “Coco Puff—”
“Don’t get me wrong,” I cut him off. “I don’t… Like, I get it. I mean…”
“Calm down.” He gives a half smile.
“I’m calm. It’s just uncomfortable.” I make a face. “It’s awkward talking about your sex life, Gus.”
“Jealous?” He raises his eyebrows.
“No. But I think…” Here we go; the wine is talking for me. “I’ve always thought sex drains you, Gus. It’s your way of feeling like your own master, of feeling like you’re in control, but after you fuck the very cute woman you met in a bar, instead of feeling good, you feel like shit.”
“That’s not true.” He shakes his head.
“Maybe not. Or maybe you’ve never allowed yourself to accept that, surprise, you’re human and you need affection that sometimes…”
“Try again…” He rubs his face and keeps walking.
I follow him. He doesn’t say a word.
“Listen…”
I tug on his arm, and he stops. He looks at me.
I look at him. Once again, I remember his fingers around my neck, with that look that changes his face completely.
His mouth hanging open a little, his hips thrusting between my thighs, his cock pushing so deep inside me.
Groaning. Reminding me how much I like feeling dominated in bed.
I come back to reality and let go of his arm, but not before I felt the tickle of his soft arm hair under my fingers.
“You and me,” I say as firmly as I can. “We’re friends, Gus. Good friends. Our past is…ours, but it’s in the past. Forgotten affectionately and with love.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“That I’m worried about you, that it seems like there’s been something going on with you for the past few months, that I’m sick of you hiding stuff from me, you not opening up, maybe because of what we were…”
A smile sets fire to the corner of his mouth and spreads across his lips until it conquers it entirely.
“What?” I raise my eyebrows and his smile spreads to me. “Are you laughing?”
“A little.”
“Why?”
“Because…we met years ago and you still don’t get that it was never you. It was me. And this time, when I say, ‘It’s not you, it’s me,’ it was true.”
He grabs my hand and kisses it. Then I stroke his stubbly cheek.
“We were idiots,” he says with an expression floating somewhere between nostalgic and playful.
“For loving each other or stopping?”
He furrows his brow and smiles even deeper.
“Girlie…you love me? No. That wasn’t love.
Love is what you feel for the one who’s making your eyes shine like that.
And I don’t love you, not like that, but I admit that I’m jealous, Coco Puff.
Because that”—he points with his eyes—“that I don’t know how to do. With anyone. Even though I want to.”
“You? Gus? The poet? Sweetie.” I laugh. “You set Madrid on fire with the looks from all those girls who dream of you reciting poetry into their ears.”
“Poetry doesn’t always work,” he adds.
“Yours does.”
He interrogates me with his eyes, and I nod.
Yes, Gus. Say it. Use the words. Bring your feelings to their knees, subjugate them in your way of containing them, in vowels, consonants.
You’ve been driving this woman crazy with your suspension-filled ellipses…
that end in her mouth. Now make her gasp for air.
And I swear I don’t love him either, not like that, but even I’m, suddenly, a little jealous too.