Chapter 32 No More Fantasies
No More Fantasies
Coco
Blanca refuses to go to the hospital. She won’t even go to the Red Cross hut on the beach.
“It was just heatstroke. The sun was too much for me.”
Yeah, it was hot. And…it was too much? Let me guess. Is it possible you were about to confess to your best friend that you’ve been sleeping with her ex for nine months? An ex you thought she was still in love with. But of course, that didn’t stop you.
Fucking awesome.
When I was sure she was doing better, I went to take a shower. I needed to get away for a minute, to put on clean underwear, change into other pajamas that still smell like fabric softener. Little gestures to make me feel a little more clean.
When I get back, I find her sitting in the shade with a bottle of cold water in her hand.
“Are you feeling better?” I ask her, a little more dryly than I mean to.
“Much.”
I look around, where Gus and Loren seem to be very busy going in and out of the RV. I, on the other hand, can’t take my eyes off Blanca. Her, fucking my ex. Him, having an affair with an almost-married girl. Them, behind everyone’s backs. Or just behind my back?
“Listen, Coco,” she says awkwardly when she realizes I’m staring at her. “Uh… I… I want to finish the conversation we were having before I fainted like a damsel in distress. Maybe we can go buy something for lunch and…”
“Don’t worry about it.” I smile tensely. “Right now the last thing you need is a walk”—with me, I think—“in this heat.”
And I smile stiffly.
“Coco…” Gus brushes my elbow gently from behind to get my attention. “We can trust each other, right?”
“Yeah. Why? Are you going to reveal some kind of state secret?”
Yesterday the look they exchanged would have flown right over my head. Not today, obviously.
“I was going to ask if you’ve heard anything from Marín,” he specifies.
You know that feeling of immediate discomfort, like your feet melt through the floor and you’re falling miles and miles into the magma core of the earth where you die? No? Well that’s exactly how I feel right now.
“No.” I swallow. “I haven’t heard anything from him. He hasn’t…” I take a breath. “He never answered the message I sent last night. He didn’t come back to the hotel?”
“Not since last night.”
“Fuck.”
What if something happened to him?
I stand up and grab my phone. I have his number saved in my favorites, so the phone starts ringing almost immediately.
“What are you doing?” Loren asks.
“Swallowing my pride and calling Marín.”
“I already tried,” Gus says, looking over at Blanca, I guess to gauge her reaction.
If Marín is upset he found us in bed, Blanca…
Wait…Blanca? How could she have smiled at me when she saw me? Who buys coffee for the person she thinks fucked her lover?
“Fuck…” I blurt out loud.
“Did he pick up?” Blanca asks.
“He’s not picking up.”
“Should I try?” she offers.
“No.” I take a few steps away when the voicemail picks up and I close my eyes as I listen to his message.
“Uh… Hi, leave your message. If you sing something, maybe I’ll even call you back.”
“Marín…it’s me. I guess you’re still mad at me, and you probably ran in the opposite direction as fast as you could, but I just need to know that you’re okay.
Even if you’re crossing the French border.
Please…just send proof of life. I’m worried.
” I hang up and go back to the table. Blanca looks at me with a furrowed brow.
“Nothing?”
“No, but…considering how angry he must be at me, he probably took off.”
“Did you talk last night?”
“A little. But the conversation was pretty…heated.”
“Do you want us to go look for him? And…talk.”
“He’s gone.” I prop my elbows on the table and shove my fingers into my hair. “He left to run away from the problem and give himself time to cool off… Classic Marín.”
“He’s not running away. He doesn’t like arguing.”
“Maybe I should leave too,” I mutter.
“If he’s gone, I don’t think he wants you to follow him,” Gus pipes up, munching from a bowl of chips.
“Hey, don’t you have anything better to do than give opinions on my love life?” I retort tersely.
“Marín is your love life?” He raises his eyebrows. “You two are moving pretty fast. You went straight from roommates to lovebirds. What happened to fuck buddies? Won’t anyone think of the fuck buddies?”
“Gus…shut up.”
I have to admit one thing: Blanca is the only one who can get him to shut up.
I’m still spinning my phone in my hands. He’s gone. He went to Madrid, turned around, picked up his sister, and forgot all this. What a mess, Coco. What a fucking mess.
I look at Blanca, who shoots me a worried look.
I don’t even know how to feel—about Marín, about Blanca and Gus, about Gus.
How can Gus be so calm? Did they talk? They must have talked.
Are they still hooking up? Did they “break up”?
What exactly did he tell me yesterday about “her”?
God…my memories of yesterday are cushioned by an alcoholic cloud that won’t dissipate.
I can’t focus on that right now. Marín. Where is Marín?
I spring out of my seat. “Gus, will you give me your room key?”
“Huh?” he splutters through a mouth full of chips.
“Your room key. Give it to me?”
“Are you going to the hotel? What for?”
“I don’t know. To see if he went there, if his stuff is there…I don’t know.”
“Girl, I left the room looking like a crack house.”
“I don’t give a shit. Give me the key.”
“Want me to go with you?” Blanca offers.
“Uh…no. No. It’s better if I go by myself.”
Gus slides the card over the table, and I grab it and run off. I don’t want to give myself time to think twice about it, to feel ridiculous or pathetic. Right here and right now, I need to make a move to at least try to fix it.
* * *
The four hundred meters between the campsite and the door of the hotel feel eternal to me, but I need to fix one thing at a time. First: Marín.
I’m planning on asking at reception if they’ve seen Marín, but just picturing myself trying to describe him (He’s the most handsome man you’ve ever seen, with these amazing eyes and a smile that could make the sun shine anywhere in the world, you know what I mean?) freaks me out, so instead I head straight to the room.
When I open it, I’m surprised to be flooded by a feeling of calm.
The bed is made, and someone, probably the cleaner, folded some of Gus’s clothes into a neat pile on the desk.
I know him… It definitely wasn’t him. His brown leather bag is open on a chair, and I get a glimpse of majestic chaos inside with a copy of his book sticking out.
The copy he signed to himself, need I say more.
Seriously, what was I doing with someone like him? We weren’t compatible at all.
A sound stops. It takes a few seconds for me to understand it was the sound of running water. My heart starts racing before I even have time to wonder if maybe the walls are so thin that the sound is seeping in from the room next door. But no. Someone’s moving around in the bathroom.
I don’t even think about it; I just head straight toward it like a nutjob and yank the door open. Marín’s terrified reaction is like something out of a movie.
“Jesus fuck!” One hand flies to his chest and the other to grip the towel around his waist. “Fuck! What the fuck are you doing?”
I gasp.
He leans back against the sink, spluttering curses.
“You didn’t leave,” I manage to say.
“No.” He shakes his head. “Fuck, my heart is in my throat. Give me a second.”
“Should I leave?”
He doesn’t answer. He’s looking at the ceiling, and I can see his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows.
“Shit, Coco, don’t ever do that to me again for the rest of your life.”
“The scaring part or…?”
“Let’s take this one step at a time, okay?”
“I was… I was scared. I thought you had left.”
“I did leave,” he says, rubbing his cheeks, which are starting to get stubbly. “But here I am.”
“So what made you come back?”
He licks his lips. He looks at me. “You really hurt me yesterday,” he blurts out.
“I know.”
“Explain why. I need to know. But, please, don’t say you were drunk…”
“I was.”
“It’s not a good excuse. Try again.”
“You make me feel insecure.”
“Me?” He seems surprised. “I make you feel insecure? Coco, I’m your home. Find another excuse.”
He’s home. My home. I lean against the damp bathroom tiles and huff.
“Aroa is…perfect. She’s incredible. At this point I know that…
well, that she can get a little overbearing, but I saw you two and you seemed so good together and…
suddenly you weren’t together anymore. The most I could get out of you was that the breakup was for the best, that you weren’t looking for the same thing.
That was it. And yesterday I saw you two…
together. You were giving off this energy of… I don’t know. Intimacy.”
“Intimacy?” He raises one eyebrow. “Intimacy, Aroa and me? Coco, that sounds like a lie.”
“What if I don’t know what intimacy is, Marín? What if I’ve never had it with anyone and that’s why I confuse it with other stuff?”
“You’ve never had it with anyone? That’s a crock of shit, Coco. Intimacy is what you and I have.”
“You and I went from talking about farts at home to touching each other like we were on a conjugal visit. I don’t know if that can be called intimacy or just a weird idea of friendship.”
“Did I say anything about sex? I don’t understand you.” He takes a deep breath. “I swear I don’t understand anything.”
“And that… There’s that too. You keep going on about how confused you are, how you don’t understand anything, you don’t know what you feel… I saw you with her, and then you didn’t pick up the phone. I invented a monster, fine, but it’s what I believed.”
“And you decided sleeping with Gus was the best option.”
“Sleeping with Gus was familiar, Marín, what I was used to doing when being with you hurt, but I didn’t understand I was head over heels in love with you. It was like going back to my fucking comfort zone, the shitty one…the mediocre one. The one that wasn’t you.”
That seems to mollify him. He doesn’t say anything.
“I’m not going to tell you I did the right thing, Marín.
That’s impossible. I didn’t. I can’t even promise you I did it for justifiable or understandable reasons.
I did it because…I felt alone and abandoned and…
because when I’m as in love with someone as I am with you, fuck, Marín, I turn into a shitty person.
You know how long I’ve been hoping for this?
Do you understand how much I like you, how difficult it’s been to carry all that and try to fit it into the mold of what I’m supposed to feel for you? ”
He looks down at the ground.
“You’re disappointed”—I keep going—“and I get it. I am too because nothing is how I imagined and I imagined it so many times that I thought I had covered every single possibility. Everything was happening and—”
“Stop,” he says.
“No, dammit. You know how many mornings I stayed in bed, listening to you padding around the house and thinking about all the things I wished I could say to you, do to you?” I’m going too far.
“I’ve spent a year thinking about someone who was in love with someone else, someone else who, by the way, I introduced him to.
All I could do was imagine, and I created my perfect story.
Our first perfect secrets, our first moments of perfect magic, our first perfect kiss, our fucking perfect story that was never going to happen, but it was perfect. ”
Marín looks up at me again. “What else?”
“What else? For fuck’s sake, Marín!” I yell.
“I mean it. What else? What else did you imagine?”
“Look, dude, I’m your best friend, and I’m head over heels in love with you, but if you take it too far, I’ll have no problem kicking you in the nuts.”
The indecipherable look on his face turns into a cautious smile. “Wedding? Kids?” he goes on.
“I swear I’ll do it, Marín. I learned very early to get back at my brothers’ humiliations with violent acts aimed at their genitals.”
“I’m not humiliating you. I want facts. You’re…”
“An idiot?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “The other day I was driving and I suddenly thought to myself that if we got married one day you’d probably wear one of those golden clips you like so much, with dragonflies and…bugs.”
“What are you saying?” My brow wrinkles, and my voice comes out all squeaky.
“What I’m saying, Coco, is that we all fantasize. We can imagine whatever we want, and of course everything will be perfect in our imaginations. But we’re grown-ups, and we know life’s not like that.”
“Of course it’s not. Life can be a fucking miserable whore.”
“Hey, you can’t take it too far either.”
“I almost fucked Gus, Marín. I almost fucked my ex trying to forget that you were with Aroa.”
“Don’t remind me.” His mouth flickers into a grimace. “Nothing is perfect.”
“Well, that’s fucked up because you don’t know how beautiful our story is in my head.” I snort and cover my face. “I never thought talking to you would feel this complicated,” I declare.
“It isn’t,” he adds. “Look at me.”
I let my hands drop and give him a weary look. “Did I fuck it up forever? I just need to know,” I ask.
“You fucked it up, but not forever. I have a lot to learn here too.”
“About how disappointing I am in reality?” I pout.
“No, about how trying to make everyone except yourself happy always ends badly.”
“So now what? How do we fix all of this?”
“With an exercise of empathy, I guess.”
“But I fucked it up.”
“What did you tell them?”
“Who?”
“Them. Everyone else. What did you tell them? Where do they think you are?”
“Here. I told them I was coming to find you. I was worried. Except Aroa, she went off to the beach alone this morning and said we should make plans without her and…”
“Do you have your phone?” He cuts me off.
“Yeah.”
“Well, send them a message. Tell them I’m here, that you’re staying, and then…turn off your phone.”
“Why…?”
“You asked how we fix this, right? Well, we’re going to fix this. No more fantasizing.”
Marín reaches his hand out toward me, his palm upturned in a silent invitation to come over.
Maybe it is… Maybe this is the end of fantasizing.