Chapter 36 The Truth Is Not a Salve
The Truth Is Not a Salve
Coco
“Son of a bitch!” he yells, pulling away from me. He doesn’t even see Blanca clutching at his arms or me trying to get him to look at anything that isn’t Gus. I’ve never seen him like this. Never.
“I’m a son of a bitch, Marín? Why? For hooking up with your ex when you were together or for hooking up with Coco when you weren’t together yet? Either I’m confused or you’re a hypocrite.”
“Hypocrite? Let go of me. Jesus!” he yells. “Let go of me! You fucked all three of them, like they’re not worth shit, you son of a bitch!”
“Marín. Marín.” I grab his face. “Look at me. At me. Look at me.”
“Blanca, I swear—” Gus starts to say.
“What are you going to swear to me now? What?”
Marín takes advantage of Blanca’s moment of weakness to break free. And this, ladies and gentlemen, really is a shit show. The blow leaves Gus so dazed he doesn’t even notice the blood streaming from his nose. Loren, who was holding Gus back, lets him go to shove Marín away.
“That’s enough, for fuck’s sake! What the hell is this performance for?”
“Hypocrite your fucking mother, you sicko. You’re sick. You just keep fucking, champ. Fill your time so you never have to look inside. You’re empty,” Marín spits. “You’re an empty son of a bitch.”
“Blanca,” Gus splutters, letting himself slump back on the steps of the RV.
“Goodbye, Gus. Good luck,” she sobs. “Good luck handling all this shit.”
“I never wanted…this.”
“Too bad your dick didn’t get the memo.”
Gus throws his head back. The blood from his nose is dripping onto his shirt. The sight would be funny if it weren’t the end of who we were and who we could’ve been.
I yank Marín out of there. Blanca collapses into a heap of bitter tears. I hear her wailing that she fucked her whole life up for nothing, that she feels dirty.
“You used me,” she cries. “You used me to make yourself feel good. You made me feel like I was special.”
Gus doesn’t even lift his head. Loren tells him he should leave.
“Get out of here!” Marín screams. “Get out of here already. Nobody wants you here! Fucking soulless brat! That’s all you are! You’re going to die alone!”
I tug on him hard again and manage to pull him in the opposite direction. I look back. Wreckage. Wreckage. Nothing else.
* * *
I’m sitting at the end of the bed, staring into nothing, waiting for Marín to get out of the shower. It gave me time to pack up all of Gus’s stuff I could find, shove it into his bag, and send him a curt message telling him I’ll leave it at reception.
Coco:
Find another way to get back to Madrid. You’re definitely not going in Marín’s car.
He answers me almost immediately:
Gus:
I need to talk to him, Coco. Let me talk to him for one minute.
My reply leaves no room for doubt:
Coco:
It’s over, Gus. Some paths don’t have a way back. I’ll miss the person you are deep down, but you work too hard to hide it. Don’t call. Don’t write. Disappear from our lives, please.
If I ever got a message like that, it would kill me. That’s why I hesitated before I sent it. But it is what it is.
When Marín comes back into the room, he still seems devastated. Apparently it wasn’t a good idea to leave him alone in there, thinking about everything, but I needed a few minutes to get my head straight about what the most worrying part of all this is.
“Better?” I ask him.
“No.”
He answers dryly, not even looking at me. He’s looking at his right fist, which is swollen and turning purple.
“Marín, it’s not a good idea to spiral about it. He’s gone and he won’t come back. Neither of them will.”
“I can’t believe it.” He sits down wearing only his jeans, barefoot and with wet hair. “I can’t believe it. With Gus…”
“There’s no point thinking about it. We don’t even know when it happened. It’s water under the bridge.”
He doesn’t answer. He’s staring hard at a fixed point, stroking his hair, miles away.
“Should I leave you alone?”
He looks at me, slowly returning to me, with his tongue on his molars. “Now what’s that about?”
“I don’t know. I feel like I’m annoying you.”
“This is not the time, Coco.” He rubs his eyes.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Well, it depends what that something is, to be honest.”
“What is it that’s bothering you? That Aroa cheated on you or all the lies that—”
“Drop it, Coco. It’s too complicated.”
I chew on my doubts and swallow them. If we keep going in that direction, we’ll end up fighting, and I don’t want to give Aroa that pleasure. “I’m going to leave, okay? I want… I want to talk to Blanca, and we have to pack everything up so we can leave.”
“Okay.” He nods.
I go over and touch his hair. He’s still not looking at me. “We’ll talk soon.”
Marín lifts his head. “Yeah.” He nods. “There’s a lot to talk about.”
“I’ll see you at home?”
“Yes.” When my hand lands on his shoulder, he rests his hand on it. “Sorry, it’s just this is all so…”
“I know.”
“You know?”
I have his expression stuck in my head when I get back to the campsite. All I know is that our goodbye kiss meant less than nothing. Marín wasn’t there.
* * *
Blanca’s not crying—she’s howling. And the sound of her pain claws and gnashes its way into your chest. The closer I get, the heavier the air feels.
All the lies we’ve told carry weight, and the one Aroa shared is still slithering along the gravel.
I want to get out of here, soon and far.
I want to go back to my house, where I never imagined Marín could…
Loren doesn’t know what to say. He’s just sitting next to her, inside the RV while she sobs. When I go in, Loren’s look could be translated into a “hallelujah” in any language in the world.
“Coco…please.”
“Okay…let me try.”
When Blanca sees me, she clings to me. And she clings to me so desperately that it scares me. She curls up in the fetal position on my lap as soon as I sit down next to her. She blubbers “I’m sorry” so many times that the words stop having any meaning. I stroke her hair.
“Leave the apologies for later, Blanca. Right now I need you to tell me everything.”
* * *
Blanca and Gus bumped into each other on the metro one day.
They’d both had a shitty day. She was coming out of court frustrated and pissed off at the world and justice, which are not always…
Well, they’re not always just. He was bored.
He was on the walk of shame from a girl’s house where he had spent the night and the whole day too.
And that might sound fun if it weren’t for the fact that, even though hooking up with her was a win for him, he was bored.
Everything was just repeating endlessly. Meaninglessly.
They didn’t share their miseries with each other because they weren’t that close…
yet. He proposed getting off at Tribunal or Bilbao, grabbing a glass of wine in Malasana, and toasting to routine.
And she agreed, but it wasn’t a glass, it was a bottle.
And it ended up being fun. It had been a long time since they’d laughed that hard or felt so comfortable, and so they thought that sometimes the people you’re destined to click with are disguised by indifference at first.
A few days later, he sent her a message. Something stupid, making fun of an ad. She responded politely. They started talking. “What are you doing?” “Here, working, bored.” They started chatting as soon as they woke up. That was it. It was all very…natural, inoffensive.
Maybe I do actually like this guy. He’s not so bad, Blanca thought.
A plan to see an exhibition. Nothing out of this world. But behind everyone’s back because “they won’t understand why we’re going alone.” Light flirtation. A slightly overheated conversation when they were drinking wine after.
“Sometimes I miss the passion of the beginning,” she said.
“That’s why I never go past it.”
“Well, I’m jealous. You’re saving yourself from a ton of bullshit.”
“And a ton of good stuff.”
“But you get to keep the best.”
“You think?” Gus looked at her mouth. “If you think that, why don’t you do something to fix it? Plenty of dudes would cut off their left nut to have an affair with a woman like you.”
She didn’t want to even consider it. Not the conversation or the lingering looks or the goodbye hug. They had drunk some wine. They felt alone. It was easy to picture it.
That was followed by a WhatsApp chat that Blanca could only describe as weird… Very intimate, kind of hot, right on the line between friendship and something dirty.
“We weren’t talking about us,” she says to me, wiping her tears. “We weren’t talking about us yet. We were just…sharing our experiences. Even though it was bad. It was already bad. It was from the very beginning.”
Gus went to see her at work one day. He told her he thought she should come out for lunch. “You spend too much time here.” What a coincidence. It just so happened to be a day when Ruben wasn’t there.
There was more flirting, more steamy looks…
Fuck, they were steamy. Before she knew it, Blanca was up at dawn answering a message where he asked if her guy made her feel “full.” An ambiguous question that led to the question “From one to ten…how much do you want to touch yourself with me, Blanca?” And at that point, it was already ten.
It stayed confined to the phone for the first few weeks.
She knew it was just a crazy blip that she’d end up forgetting if it never went further than that, and she kept telling herself the only reason Gus was interested in her was that she was about to get married.
“I’m a challenge.” And he… What was he? A thrill.
But they saw each other. Any excuse was good enough. And the first kiss was brutal, all tongue, pulling hair, nibbling, and moans. On their first kiss, they nearly fucked.
“I know it was bad. To Ruben, to you because it didn’t make sense, but…I felt alive… More alive than ever. I convinced myself that it would just be a fling that wouldn’t hurt anyone because…because no one would ever know.”