Chapter 16 The Clusterfuck
The Clusterfuck
Coco
I’ve never seen Aroa so subdued. Normally she just gives off this light that makes her irresistible.
But tonight when she goes to bed, she looks beautiful but sad.
It’s like suddenly, the weight of the breakup is starting to make a dent on her.
Something tells me there’s not going to be sunrise yoga tomorrow.
I hear Loren and Gus griping in the darkness. One thinks the other is pretty close. The other is wriggling too much.
“Are you going to breathe that loud all night?” Gus kicks off.
“Yes. If you don’t like it, you try not breathing and you can make up rhymes with my snores until you fall asleep…forever.”
“Can we drop the poetry thing, jeez?”
“You are poetry.”
“Come on, stupid. Come here.”
“If you touch me, Gus, I swear I’ll get the ick so hard I’ll die and then I’ll come back from the dead to trigger you for the rest of your life.”
Marín, standing next to the bunk, is laughing as he takes off his pants and folds them. Oh, yeah, take it all off.
“Those two. Good night, blondie,” he says to Aroa.
“Come here a sec,” she replies.
He goes over, just like that, in his boxers, with his shirt still on, with his long legs… I can almost feel them brushing against mine in the narrow bed—I don’t even care that he’s so close to Aroa right now.
I hear them whispering. The light doesn’t reach them, so all I can see is that he’s crouching. I hear the scratch of a kiss, but I’d bet the hand I put eyeliner on with that it was on the forehead. Or at least that’s what I want to believe.
He comes back to the bunk, but he doesn’t use the ladder. He asks me to scooch over and propels himself up with his hands. I think I just came. Is that possible? I think I squirted.
“What’s going on, Sardine?” he asks as he settles in.
All long legs, messy hair…
“Nothing.” I shrug.
“Right…”
He finds a good position and stops moving. God. We’re really close. Really, really, really close. I can smell his cologne, the woodsy touches, the twang of damp earth…his only luxury: an expensive cologne from Hermès, which makes everything he touches smell like Marín.
When he closes the curtain, I swear I’m about to fart from the nerves.
We’re here alone… As alone as we can be in an RV full of people, of course.
But that fabric separating us from “the outside” suddenly creates a (probably false) atmosphere of privacy.
I’m dying, suffocating myself on the cloud of cotton from my adolescent fantasies.
I’m looking at him, but really I’m seeing stills from our wedding.
“What’s going on?” he asks me again in a whisper.
“Dude, your feet are freezing!” Gus yells. “Stop touching me with your fucking feet!”
“They’re going to kill each other,” I joke.
“Don’t change the subject,” he whispers very softly. “What’s going on? What the hell is up with Gus?”
“With Gus?” I’m baffled.
“What was up with that little walk?”
“It was just a walk.” I turn onto my side and look at him with my brow furrowed.
Loren’s whimpering drifts through the darkness of the RV when Gus starts up again like a broken record. Sensitive, sulky poet.
“Coco…” Marín gets my attention again with an almost inaudible murmur.
I focus my attention on him. Fuck. He’s so hot; I don’t understand how I didn’t fall on my knees dying of love and lust when I met him that night four years ago.
Marín’s nose is so cute I want to kiss it.
I want to bite it. I want to lick his forehead, like I’m baptizing him with my love.
I want to kiss him so badly, so badly… I don’t think I’ve ever been this close to him.
“What?” I answer, my voice trembling.
“Are you two getting back together again?”
“No,” I assure him.
“You wouldn’t lie to me, right?”
Jeez. Yes. Marín, I would lie to you. I lie to you every day. I don’t know how to do it any other way because…I love you. To the tips of my toes. And if you knew it, I think you’d leave so you wouldn’t hurt me.
“No. I’d never lie to you.”
He stares at me. I get the feeling that he’s studying my face through the shadows. My expression. My eyes. The rhythm of my eyelashes. This dude knows me better than my mother does.
“Coco…you… You’re not still in love with Gus, right?”
“What?”
Boom, boom, boom, boom. My heart is beating so loudly it feels deafening. I’m giving myself a stroke. Or a heart attack. I’m not sure which.
“He doesn’t believe you’re in love with him.”
“You talked about this with him?” I tense up.
“No. Well, in passing.”
“But, Marín, for fuck’s sake… Is it too much to ask you all not to stick your nose into my life?” At this point my secret is going to be a trending topic before we get back to Madrid.
“It’s not like that. It’s just tha—”
“What about you?” I counterattack.
“Lower your voice,” he says in a whisper.
“What about you and Aroa? Dude…I’m your best friend and I’ve never pressured you to tell me why the fuck you broke up. She’s crazy about you. She wants to get back together with you. What’s going on there?”
“Nothing’s going on there. It’s a private thing between couples.” He pauses and adds, “And ex-couples.”
“It’s just that I don’t even know what phase of the breakup you’re in,” I complain. “But you’re making a face because I went for a walk with my ex.”
He turns onto his back and rubs his face.
“It’s not like that.”
“Your life is just for you. Mine is for everyone.”
“No, Coco, really,” he apologizes. “I’ve just had so much work…”
“No. You’ve been hiding out in your work. That’s not the same thing.”
“Maybe, but—”
“Every time you move, it feels like you’re going to push the motor home’s nose into the ground and we’re going to sink, for fuck’s sake,” Gus grumbles.
“Oh my God! You’re such a cunt!” Loren snipes at him.
At the perfect moment, the odd couple defuses the atmosphere. If Blanca were conscious, I bet she’d be recording it all on her phone. I get the giggles. Marín shifts and rolls back onto his side, looking at me. He jiggles me affectionately and puts his nose, his perfect nose, on my shoulder.
“Don’t be mad at me, Coco. Sometimes I don’t know the right way to say stuff.”
“So what are you trying to say?”
“I mean, I dunno. Maybe I have nothing to say.”
The hand that was jokingly shaking me is resting on my waist, like he’s holding me. I can barely breathe.
“I’m falling out of bed,” he whispers with a smile. “Hold me in somehow, Coco Puff.”
“Don’t call me ‘Coco Puff.’” I push aside the sleeping bag because we’re going to die of suffocation, and I thread one of my legs between his, making it into an anchor. “That’s what Gus calls me.”
“Well, then I’ll call you by your name.”
“Coco is fine, thanks.”
“Coco is what everyone calls you.”
“Fine then, Sardine.”
“I love your name,” he says suddenly. “Why doesn’t anyone call you—”
I slap my hand over his mouth.
“What about you? Why doesn’t anyone call you…?”
It’s Marín’s turn to cover my mouth. We’re both laughing and we let our hands fall. God. God. God. Is this flirting? My right leg is between his! I’m wearing really tiny pajamas—just a tank top and underwear! This is less than three steps from being considered sex!
“You know what’s happening here, Coco? I think I’m scared to say I’m ready to turn the page,” he suddenly pipes up. And the idea of fucking suddenly self-destructs in a loud explosion in my head.
“Are you talking about Aroa?”
“Yeah.” He nods. His hand tightens around my waist.
“Do you want…? I mean… Are you thinking about someone else? Is there someone else already—?”
“No, but…fuck. I want to keep living, meeting girls, going from flower to flower for a little while and then…falling in love. I want to feel how your bastard of an ex-boyfriend lives. I want my eyes to shine like yours do when you think about the person you’re thinking about…
who’s definitely not Gus.” I open my mouth to argue, but he shakes his head.
“Don’t say it, Coco. I don’t want you to say it.
If you lied to me about that, it’s for a reason.
I respect that, okay? I believe you, whatever you tell me.
I see you shine, and I light up with you.
I’m not going anywhere just because you don’t want to tell me that. We can have secrets and that’s fine.”
“You’re not mad?” I ask.
“At you?” He comes closer, kisses me on the forehead, looks at me, and smiles. I’m dying. “Never. I can’t. I couldn’t.”
911? One crash cart to site 297, please.