The melancholy follows us around like ocean mist, and few words are spoken between us. There isn’t much to say, and yet there is too much to say. We make our way past picturesque restaurants, their windows lined with hanging vines of dried garlic and chili peppers as red as blood, and past small boats, sheltered in tiny, enclosed marinas, walls of stone the only barrier between the raging sea outside.
While we walk, I hear the faint sound of music. It is a saxophone—not my most favorite of instruments—but here it is melodic, sad, and powerful. It rises over the sea at us and bathes us like the sun.
I squeeze Vera’s hand and she squeezes back. We both hear it, we both feel it. It’s almost like a swan song just for us, something conjured up by the stars, or God, or the Virgin Mary herself. It is only when we turn the corner that we see the source.
There is a rocky outcrop sticking out into the surf, and at the very end of the promenade is a lone street musician. He is playing to no one but the ocean, and the sounds of the saxophone seem even sadder this way.
“Vera,” I find myself saying, unable to stop the emotion that’s trying to claw its way out of my chest. I stop, pulling her to the side of the path, the waves crashing below us, and hold her sweet face in my hands. Bronze and white. So beautiful together.
“Vera,” I say again, staring hard and long into her searching eyes, and I don’t try to fight it anymore. “Vera, will you marry me?”
My words have taken her by surprise. They have taken me by surprise. But that doesn’t stop it from being the most real, honest, and raw thing I’ve ever said.
Her mouth goes into that pretty O shape, and her eyebrows come together, and her eyes are dancing like she’s in love. In this moment I am a man of hope and potential; I have been given a glimpse of the person I will become, someone to do her proud. Someone better.
But the moment is lost when her face crumples into everything that is sadness and heartache. It is not the face I wanted at all. It is not her hand, it is not her heart. It is only her mind, wanting to push me back.
“Oh, Mateo,” she says breathlessly. “No.”
And just like that, I feel as if I really have lost everything. I am rejected. I will not have her as my wife, the mother of my children, or anything else I have dreamed of having, like the fool that I am.
I have nothing.
I suddenly gasp, realizing I can barely breathe. “No?” I repeat, just to make sure.
She shakes her head and tears spill down her cheeks. “I can’t. Not like this, not this way.”
“What way?” I ask, pained. My hand is at my heart now because I fear it may stop working. Maybe I welcome it.
“This way!” she cries, throwing her hands out to the side, instantly volatile. “You’re only asking me as a means to stay.”
Now it’s my turn to be shocked. “What? Wait a minute. Please, Vera, that is not what is going on here.”
“Yes it is!”
I grab her by the shoulders and hold her, wishing I could shake some sense into her. “No. No. I have wanted to ask you for a very long time now. This has nothing to do with trying to keep you in the country.”
“I’ll still have to leave,” she says feebly.
“Do you hear me?” I say again, louder now because I feel like I’m splintering and no one will ever hear from me again. “I have always wanted to marry you. I want you to be the mother of my children.”
“We’ve never even discussed children!” she cries out, alarmed. “You don’t even know if I want them.”
This is true but I can’t feel ashamed about it. “I know, I figured we would talk about it along the way. You do want kids, don’t you?”
She shrugs helplessly. “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s nothing I really think about. I’ve been so busy just trying to stay here each fucking day.”
And I am hit with our age difference again. It has been something I’ve thought about often, no matter our circumstances. She’s too young to have it on her brain all the time. Perhaps she’s just the type of girl to never have it on her brain at all. Either one wouldn’t surprise me, and yet I would love either one just the same.
I look away, turning to face the street musician who is still playing his sad song. I feel like it could be about me, the man who once had everything and nothing at the same time.
I feel her hand on my shoulder, light and tentative.
“Look, Mateo,” she says quietly. “It’s just too much. I can’t deal with this, I can’t handle it. Not now. Any other time, any other way, maybe I would have said yes.”
“Maybe,” I mumble, not turning around.
“Do you even have a ring?”
I sigh. “No,” I say harshly, frustrated. “Lucia wanted to come with me when it came time to pick it out.”
There is a pause. “Oh. You talked about this with Lucia?”
I nod. “Si.”
She is silent. She takes her hand away. I continue to stare at the sea, contemplating how cold the water is and whether it would shock me if I jumped in. A body can only take so much shock. I wonder how much I can take.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I just . . . it’s not right. It doesn’t feel right. I can only go by how I feel.”
“If you weren’t leaving,” I ask her. “Would you have said yes?”
She hesitates then says, “I don’t know.”
“You know, by pushing me away like this, you aren’t making things any easier on yourself. It will still hurt when you leave.”
“I know.”
I slowly turn around and look at her. I just can’t accept it. “Why won’t you marry me? What happened to our happily ever after?”
She looks like a broken woman. “I never said there was one.”
“But don’t you want there to be?”
She looks at her red toenails peeking out from her sandals. “I just want you, Mateo.”
It feels like she’s just reaching into my chest now and squeezing every last drop out of me. “And I want you.”
She shuts her eyes as if she’s in pain. “And yet we don’t have much choice. Whether you mean what you are asking me or you’re doing it to make me stay, it doesn’t matter. I’ll always wonder if it was real or not. And marriage—you of all people should know—is a big, big thing. Yes, I think I’m young. Yes, I don’t know if I want kids yet or not. I think I do. But all that aside, it’s not something I’m afraid of—as long as it’s for the right reasons. And right now, I fear the reasons you are asking me. You may even be tricking yourself. So I can’t say yes, even though it is something I’ve dreamed about too—Mrs. Mateo Casalles. I’ve always thought it sounded so beautiful, almost as beautiful as waking up to you every morning for the rest of my life. But life has other plans for us. It always does.”
“You’re breaking me,” I tell her in a ragged whisper.
A tear rolls down her cheek and she doesn’t bother to wipe it away. “And I’m already broken.”
I grab her hand and pull her close to me. I wipe away her tear with my thumb, so gently, so as not to break her further. “I won’t let this be the end of us.”
She tries to smile. “I believe you.”
“Do you really?” I ask, kissing her softly on the cheek. “Do you really believe what I am telling you is true? Do you really believe I’ll fight for you?”
Her eyes dart to the side but she won’t find any answers out there. They all lie in me; they are all there if she wants them.
“It’s getting late,” she says, rubbing her hands up and down her arms as if she’s cold. “Shouldn’t we head back to San Sebastian?”
The sun is hours from hitting the horizon. What she really wants is to escape this conversation. I should want the same, to run away from a rejected proposal. But I don’t want that. I want to stay and talk. I want to see that fire in her, that urge to run headfirst into battle. It’s like the concept of going back home has already changed her, compromised her, and she’s resigned to become the person she used to be.
I can’t let that happen, I won’t let that happen. But beyond feeling and thinking that, there is nothing I can do. I can only be there for her, no matter how badly my heart is breaking, no matter how soft and bruised my ego has become.
I take hold of her arm and say, “Okay. We can go back.”
But we can’t go back, not to the place we once were, where we once were free.
When we arrive back in Madrid on Sunday afternoon, we are both surprised to feel the difference. The temperature in the city seems to have cooled down by at least ten degrees. The temperature between us seems to have done the same.
Vera is definitely trying to push me away, and I’m trying to pull her in, and we’re going nowhere. She talks to her mother, her brother, even her father. Her mother had told her when she first decided to move to Spain that she wasn’t welcome in the house anymore. Vera is worried she has no place to go.
As if things can’t get any harder for her.
Thankfully, she has a good brother who convinces her mother to let her stay, at least for a little bit. Vera is now torn between starting a life in Vancouver and moving to the province of Alberta to be with her father and stepmom. I am torn between letting her go and fighting for her to stay.
The fight is futile, but I try.
She leaves in two days, and Pedro is nice enough to let me have work off to spend time with her. To his credit, he doesn’t seem smug about the fact that Vera has to leave. In fact, everyone at Atlético feels sorry for me. I’m not sure if I like the sympathy. Sometimes I think I would rather have their disgust again. Somehow it was more manageable and easier to bear.
The night before she is to leave, I find Vera sitting on the balcony, drinking wine, lost in thought. I am hit with the greatest sense of loss I have ever known, like I’m about to lose some driving force inside me that keeps me alive. It’s almost hard to breathe, and I know she’ll take the air and sun and stars with her when she goes.
She’s going.
She’s leaving.
She’s leaving me.
The pain is debilitating.
I lean against the side of the glass door and watch her. She knows I’m there but she doesn’t turn around to see. So I watch her, soak her in, this memory of her. I’m afraid now that this is the only thing I’ll remember, the sight of her alone, her features deadened with despair, the night spread out before her echoing our loneliness.
Somehow I manage to clear my throat, find my voice, and ask, “I thought you were going out for a goodbye dinner with Claudia.”
She takes a moment before she finally turns to look at me. “I’d rather spend my last night with you. My last night . . .”
Her voice breaks over the last word. She’s been so strong, or maybe just so numb, for the past few days that to hear the damage nearly brings me to my knees.
I choke back on everything. Words, tears, wishes. I choke back on everything but love.
I cross the balcony in two strides. I collapse to my knees beside her, wrapping my arms around her waist and burying my head in her chest. A cry rolls out of her body, anguished, panicked, the epitome of sorrow, and when it grows louder, I realize that it’s coming from me too.
It hurts deeper than any wound, something festering from the inside out. And still I can’t wrap my head around what this means. My heart and soul seem to know, from the way I’m holding on to her, from the way she’s holding on to me. But I can’t imagine how tomorrow I’ll drop her off at the airport and that will be the end of it.
The end of us.
But it can’t be the end. It doesn’t have to be the end. I had told Vera that she would only have to return to Canada for a few months, then, if she could get into school—which never seems to be a problem if you have the money—she could return in January, safe and legal.
Without all the plans though, all the hopes, it still feels like this is the end. Once she steps back on her home soil, I’m afraid all that we’ve been through, all that we are, will disappear into the atmosphere.
“I don’t think I can do it again,” she sobs quietly, her hands nestled in my hair. “I don’t think I can leave you again. It almost destroyed me before. Those were the hardest months of my entire life.”
“But at least you know you can return,” I tell her, still mumbling into the softness of her chest. It feels so much like home. “We’re different, better people than we were back then. There was no certainty then like there is now.”
“There is never any certainty,” she spits out.
I raise my head slowly to look at her. The world seems to spin. “What do you mean?”
She looks away, anguished. “You know what I mean. Five months is a long time. What if you fall in love with someone else?”
“What if you fall in love with someone else?”
“I won’t.”
“How do I know that?” I ask, and look away as if I am ashamed. “Usually when a man proposes and the woman says no, things don’t—how do you say, bode well?—for the situation.”
She shakes her head once. “It’s not like that.”
“So we’re not over.”
“We’ve never been over.” She places her hand on my heart. “Not here. Just because I said no . . . Mateo, you know why I said it. It doesn’t mean what you think it does. It’s more of a not yet. But . . .” She looks away. “Because I said no, I’m worried you’ll start looking elsewhere. For someone who will say yes.”
“No,” I tell her adamantly.
“How can I know? How will we know?”
I place my fingers under her chin and tip her face toward me. “I won’t. Look at me. Look at me, my Estrella. Don’t you know what that means? You’re my star. How many people on this earth have their own star? And you shine just for me. How could anyone else ever compare to this?”
I hoist myself up so that I’m leaning over her, and I stare down into her yearning eyes. She wants to believe me. She has to believe me.
I kiss her lips, so satiny soft that they threaten to unravel me all over again. “You are my everything,” I say, lips moving against hers. “I’ve said it before and I will say it again, and I’ll go to my grave saying it. You are my star, my light, my love. And it doesn’t matter if you believe in it or not because it is the truth and the truth always finds a way to shine.”
She doesn’t say anything for a moment, but then she answers in her own way. She kisses me with strength and fire, enough to catch me off-guard. Her passion is on her sleeve, and in our mouths, and in the heat of our fingers as they grip each other tightly.
Just when I’m about to take her clothes off right there, she whispers, hushed and hoarse, “I love you,” and I know that this requires delicacy. There should be nothing fast and frantic about our last night together. It should be slow, languid, decadent. It should feel like the night burns into day and burns into night again. It should be long enough to make a million memories.
I stand up and then scoop her into in my arms like I’m some kind of hero. Only I’m no hero. I’m just a man in love.
Though there’s never been anything more courageous than loving someone.
I take her down the hallway to the bedroom, throw back the sheets, and place her on the bed, where she lies beneath me, waiting. I straddle her, my thighs on either side of her hips, and reach down to ever so slowly push the straps of her dress off her shoulders, and leave soft kisses in their place. She tastes sweeter than wine and I run my tongue over her skin, feeling it awaken under my touch.
She reaches for my zipper but I gently nudge her back. “Slowly, slowly,” I tell her in Spanish. “We make love slowly, as it prolongs the night.”
More than that, it prolongs us.
I peel the top of her dress down her body, all the way to her stomach, and her nipples harden, exposed to my hungry eyes. I immediately dip my head and lick them softly until she groans, arching her back. She is so perfect, the feel of her, the shape, the way her body responds to my every move.
I can’t believe I have to say goodbye to this.
It hits me hard again, an aftershock. I clench my eyes shut and will it away. I can’t think like this, not now.
Vera runs her fingers through my hair, slowly, keeping with the rhythm, the act that we have all the time in the world.
I tease her breasts from the soft outer swell to the nipple and back again, flicking them like I’m trying to lap up the rest of the richest dessert. Sometimes I think she can have an orgasm just from me giving her breasts extra attention, and I’m wondering if I should attempt this tonight. It may be our last chance; it would be another way to get the most out of each other, another memory.
The way her fingers are digging into my skull tells me that she’s getting restless, that she wants nothing more than my tongue between her legs, to have me inside her bringing her relief. She will get her relief, more than once.
I continue to work at her breasts, licking a warm path up the swollen corners toward the middle. I gently nip at her, bringing in sharp bursts of pain with the soothing stroke of my tongue, alternating the two until she begins squirming beneath me, her face contorted with that anguished need for both more and less.
“Mateo,” she groans, her fingers tightening their grip. “Come inside me.”
I reach up with my hand and place it over her mouth. “Shhhh,” I tell her. “Let me do this for you.”
She resigns and leans further back into the bed. I take my mouth and place it flush over her peaks, sucking them gently and working them with my tongue. I lap and flick, my attention completely on her, trying to make her eyes roll back, her thighs shudder.
“Mateo,” she groans again, pulling on my hair now. “I can’t . . .”
But I persist. Her breathing deepens, then sharpens, hot and heavy pants that inflame my own desire. I give and give until she’s writhing beneath me and yanking my hair with all her strength. I squeeze her breasts, bite her nipples, and it’s enough to cause her body to quake uncontrollably. Breathless words come from her open, yearning mouth, wild and animalistic.
Then her tremors slow and her body relaxes into the mattress.