Chapter 46 No #2
We look at each other. Neither of us says anything.
Just a silent hello sitting on our lips.
I grab the glass of wine and take a timid sip, just to have something to do.
We must look like two strangers on a bad date, but inside the bubble that always springs up around us, it feels different, even pleasant.
I just have to look at him to know what he came to say, but I need to know what words he’ll use to say it.
I’m almost expecting him to do it with a song, to slide his headphones across the table and ask me to listen to something, but we both know that wouldn’t be enough.
Months ago that would have done it for me. Not now.
“Coco,” he whispers.
“It’s hard, huh?” I smile at him.
“Fuck.” He runs his hand through his hair. “I’m realizing that, out of the two of us, you’re the brave one.”
“But you’re the hot one.”
He lets out a chortle and whispers that I’m an idiot.
“I know what you came to say,” I murmur, looking away. “But I still need you to say it.”
“Don’t think I’m trying to get out of it. I need to say it too. I came this close to choosing a few songs to say it for me, but…” I laugh, and it makes him smile. “What are you laughing at?”
“How well I know you.”
“Coco…”
“What?”
“I’m sorry. Forgive me.”
“What are you asking me to forgive you for, Marín?”
“For the time, for what we missed, for getting stuck on the border of what we were and what we wanted to be. For not knowing how to do things in a better way.”
“I’ve always thought we put too much responsibility on words. They can be pretty, but…look at Gus’s poems. What are they besides pretty? Nothing.”
“No, they are something, but in his case they weren’t enough. He has too many words, and I don’t have enough. I don’t know how to say this to you.”
“Just say it.”
He leans forward on the table and takes a deep breath. “Ever since you left, I’ve lost my home. Everything echoes. I echo. I want to disappear.”
“Missing is human,” I reply stubbornly.
“I know, but that’s not it. It’s just that… I mean, Coco…”
“I mean, Marín.”
He runs his fingers through his hair again, leaving it disheveled. I want to smooth it with my hands, but right now I can’t touch him. He has to keep going.
“You know those stories we read when we’re little?
The ones Disney turned into a whole empire?
I think we try to make love match that image and then we dismantle the myth, sometimes making it more sordid and other times more practical through experience and desire.
Through age. Well, I went too far. I stripped away everything about what should have been love, I just left a bare skeleton that could barely stand up.
That’s why my relationships have always been…
mediocre. They didn’t have any magic. Or poetry.
I was looking for someone to be comfortable with, who I wanted to kiss, who I was into sleeping with and didn’t bug me…
and, don’t get me wrong, who wouldn’t get in the way of my career. ”
“Sounds awful,” I mumble.
“What I’m trying to say, Coco, is that I built a way of understanding love that couldn’t hurt me.
The more you feel, the more you risk yourself, the more you open up, the more you give, and then when that ends…
nobody gives you yourself back. I didn’t want anyone to be able to disappoint me. That’s why I didn’t understand.”
“What didn’t you understand?”
“That I fell in love.” He shrugs. “Head over heels, like an idiot, at first sight, a fucking arrow that almost split me in half when you looked at me in that bar. I could describe, thread by thread, what you were wearing that night, how your hair was wavy, and I think I even counted the lines on your lips, Coco…”
I raise my eyebrows, but I let him continue, even though my heart is clenched like a fist.
“‘Crystals’ by Of Monsters and Men was playing, and I’ve never been able to listen to it since because the red light of the bar melded with the lipstick that had started smudging on every glass you sipped from.
And you were laughing and saying that everyone was an asshole sometimes, that it was a human right, and I wanted to be an asshole so you would say it to me.
I didn’t identify it as love, I’m sorry, but I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if I had said to you right then that you were the love of my life and that if it wasn’t with you I didn’t think I’d be able to do it with anyone.
You would’ve thought I was nuts, I’m sure.
You definitely wouldn’t have moved into my empty room a week later, and we never would have gone on that trip to London.
How did I not realize it was love, Coco?
I told myself you were the luckiest thing in my life, for fuck’s sake!
A beautiful, fun best friend, who sleeps in wool socks in the winter and naked in the summer, who gave me advice about my life, about women, about my sister.
What could go wrong?” He raises his eyebrows, desperate, like he can’t find the words.
“Everything! Everything went wrong, always, even though we disguised it as something else! You have no idea how much I suffered through your whole relationship with Gus, who seemed to make you shine and dance and fly, and I was sitting there, holding the hand of a girl all my friends thought was perfect and feeling nothing. I thought I was envious of you for knowing how to live life that way, but I was actually jealous that I wasn’t the one making you feel those things.
We have to admit that we never worked as friends, Coco… ”
“Of course we worked,” I retort.
“No!” The middle-aged couple at the next table look over at us, and he lowers his head and his tone.
“No, Coco. We spent four years being the happiest fucking couple in the world without kisses, without sex, but with everything else. Was I scared to put a label on it, close the house to everything else, and just be you and me? Yes. Of course it scares me. But…you know what? Even without putting a label on it, this distance is almost eating me alive, and I don’t want to live like that.
I want to live with you, always, for the rest of my life, until I die.
” Marín looks at the table, not at me, and takes another deep breath.
“I want to live in you, I want you to live in me. I want you to be my family; I want to be buried at your feet… Fuck, Coco, there’s no way I could love you more, but if you let me, I can love you better. ”
I swallow. Jesus fucking Christ. I can’t say anything. Nothing except yes, but I feel ridiculous selling out so fast, so I decide on something that might be stupid: I stand up. He stands up at the same time, scared, and his expression grows somber. “Coco…”
“It’s not that… I…” I don’t manage to say anything. All I can say is yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, but I resist. “I want to leave.”
“Okay…I came on too strong. I get it. Uh…think about it. Just think about it.”
I grab my bag, buckle up the belt of my jacket, and in a daze try, mostly successfully, to swerve around the rest of the tables on this terrace.
“Coco,” he calls out, standing next to our table. “I’ll wait for you at home, okay?”
At home. There’s a lot in those two words.
At home, without a possessive pronoun to clarify whose house it is, which implies it is a home, that we are a we—but in my mind, the we he’s proposing no longer exists.
He’s talking about a past that was happy because I learned to chew up love and swallow it instead of sharing it through kisses, nibbles, and cackles, as it should be.
Loving in silence is so awful, fuck. Loving in silence traps it in time, in space, turns it into the mummy of a love with all its organs ripped out.
I want to tell him to wait wherever he wants, but that home is no longer ours; it doesn’t represent anything more to me than conjugating in the past tense.
I left that apartment; I moved back in with my parents.
If it had really been our home, that never would have happened.
“Coco—”
“No,” I blurt out all of a sudden.
“No?”
“No!” All the yeses piled up so high they turned into a no. “That’s not my house anymore.”
“Well, then we’ll choose another one.”
“But you’re obsessed with that house.”
“But I’m more obsessed with you.” He lifts his hands and then lets them fall back to his sides. “We’ll do whatever you want, Coco, your conditions, it’s your life. Just…let’s try to make them fit with mine together. Please…”
I’m vaguely aware that all the diners on the terrace at Ramsés are watching us intently, but I don’t care.
I’m standing on the sidewalk, the rain has started again, and I’m getting wet.
He’s still standing there, and when we look at each other, there are no waiters or tables or restaurant or Madrid that looks like a big, beached whale in the middle of nowhere.
And finally I stop turning it over in my head, and I spit out two single words that I remember from that song I heard for the first time with him.
“Say it,” I demand.
“I love you.”
“No. Say my name. I don’t want to be Coco to you anymore. Coco was your best friend, your roommate. Coco introduced you to your ex. Coco would die for you and you didn’t see her. I don’t want to be Coco ever again, Marín, at least for you.”
He smiles. “Okay, but come here.”
“No.” I shake my head. For the record, I feel ridiculous, childish, crazy, but I need a resounding yes. I need my conditions, my needs covered, my promises, my words, my Marín. “Say it.”
“You’re getting wet.”
“So come out here. Then you’ll get wet too.”
He smiles, scratches his nose, and walks without bumping into any tables. When he’s in front of me, a few fat, cold drops quickly soak his hair. “We’re going to catch pneumonia.” He smiles.
“I don’t want that house. I don’t want to be Coco. I don’t want…”
His arms suddenly circle me, and his face is close to mine. Water is streaming down our noses and cheeks. “Maria, just tell me what you want and we’ll do it. We’ll do it.”
“It’s a long list.” I smile.
“We have time.”
His lips brush against mine, but I pull back for a second to really look at him.
This person is no longer Marín. He’s not even the guy I was so in love with because that was a one-dimensional character, the good guy in a film where the main character manages to defeat the bad guys and save the girl and…
I want to be honest, I don’t need anyone to save me.
What I want is a partner to start again with, and he and his shadows, he and his emptiness, he and his fears, his cowardice, his clumsiness…
fit perfectly with my own humanity. I don’t want a perfect man, like Marín was in my head, but I want the guy behind all that.
“No more Coco and Marín, Carlos…”
“Never again, Maria…”
When we kiss, just like in the movies, we don’t notice the rain, the cold breeze, how uncomfortable our drenched clothes are starting to get—just each other’s lips and tongues, but…
we’re startled out of our reverie by the applause from four tables that have been avidly following our argument, and since this isn’t a movie, we’re mortified.
“Fuck,” he splutters, cracking up, pressing his forehead into my shoulder. “Give me ten bucks so we can pay quickly and get out of here. All I have is a card.”
And this, this man capable of fucking up the most romantic scene in the world to ask me for ten bucks, is the love of my life, and there’s nothing left to say no to.