Karina Halle - Love, in English

We fell quiet. It wasn’t awkward now. It felt comfortable, natural, just to hear each other breathing, to know we were alive. I heard what sounded like a bus zoom by.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“I am walking down Calle Toledo,” he said, not sounding out of breath at all.

“How is your knee?”

“Better,” he said. “Hurts in the morning, but that is all. As long as I stay away from the ball, I should be okay.” He sounded a bit dejected, as if playing soccer again had factored into his plans. I remembered how joyous he looked on the field, how confident and in control. He couldn’t have gotten that same feeling from co-owning a restaurant. Though we never talked about it, Mateo didn’t seem the slightest bit passionate about food or cuisine, aside from telling me what tasted like shit and what didn’t taste as much like shit.

“Are you coming from the office?”

‘Si,” he said. “I’ve been spending a lot of time at work. I think my partner thinks I’m a bit crazy. I told him I was trying to make up for lost time. It’s just a tiny room in a building downtown, and I know he wants me to go work from home. But, I just can’t.”

“Why?” I asked, though I had an inkling.

“Because Isabel is there,” he said. “And I can’t stand to look at her.”

My chest squeezed and I tried to take a deep breath. “Are you going to tell her?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It is the right thing to do, yes? I just need…more time. To think.”

“About what?”

“About my new universe. I’ve never been one to jump into things without thinking it through. Even with you, I spent a month weighing the pros and cons.”

This was something new to me. “I see.”

“There were only two cons.”

I nodded to myself—I knew what they were. “Do you think she knows?”

He sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Things have been distant between us for a very long time. She goes out a lot to parties. Usually I go, but I have turned her down the other night. She didn’t like that. But no, I don’t think she suspects anything.”

I don’t think she suspects anything.

Shit just got real.

“Vera?”

“Yeah?” I whispered, feeling out of breath. “Sorry.”

“Is it getting too much?”

I rubbed my lips together. “Yes.”

“Don’t feel bad,” he said. “You are not the one married.” He sighed, silence wrapping the line for a few beats. “We are both adults. If I could have chosen it any other way, I would have. But…I love you. And I don’t want to deny myself, or yourself, of that, no matter how selfish that might be.”

“I know,” I said as the self-loathing tried to sink its dirty claws into me. He loved me. How could something so beautiful making me feel so ashamed?

“You are still my Estrella,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

“Yes.” I was. And like the stars, I was unreachable, untouchable, oh so far away.

At least, I thought.

“Vera,” he said. Sometimes I think he just liked to say my name for fun, letting it roll off his tongue. “When can I see you again?”

I nearly laughed. He said it as if we’d had our first date and were planning the next. “Mateo,” I said. “That’s not funny.”

“I am not trying to be funny. I’m serious.”

I had no idea what to say to that.

“How about next month?”

“As in August?” I asked, completely confused.

“Yes,” he said. “You have some time before school starts, don’t you?”

“With what money?”

“I will fly you here.”

“And where the hell would I stay?”

“You don’t need to get upset, Vera.”

“Well, I kind of am upset!” I said. “You’re being a tease.”

“I am not being a tease,” he said, his voice gruff. “I told you I was serious and I am. Do you not take me at my word?”

“And where would I stay?” I repeated. “In your house?”

“I would get you a hotel room.”

I laughed at the sincerity in his voice. “A hotel room. Perfect.”

“I do not understand…”

“I will not be your mistress, Mateo!” I shouted into the phone. “I’m not going to fly to Spain for a month and stay hidden in a hotel while you continuously cheat on your wife.”

“But in Las Palabras…”

“That was a different animal and you know it,” I maintained heatedly. “We knew better. What we did was wrong. What we did, I am sure will come back to haunt us in the end. But, please, I cannot willingly go and be your mistress. I can’t let you keep me hidden while you pretend to have this other life at the same time. I won’t do it.”

And now is when the silence felt awkward, but my heart was beating so loudly, the blood in my head so hot, that I barely noticed it. So much time passed that I thought he hung up on me until I heard a bird chirping in the background.

Finally he said softly, “I am sorry, Vera. Very sorry. You’re right, about all of it. I guess…I’m not thinking properly. No, I’m not at all. It is just that I am so…blind, without you. I just want to feel like I did before. I’m desperate for you and I’m not making the right decisions. I am being a total asshole. Forgive me, please.”

Ugh. I put my hand on my chest, pressing down. He sounded so fucking lost; he wasn’t like the Mateo I had known. Then again, I wasn’t the Vera I had known either.

“It’s okay,” I tried to reassure him. “I forgive you. I just don’t know what to do either.”

“I guess the only thing to do is….keep talking?”

I leaned over and turned out the light, settling back under the covers. “I would love that.”

“So,” he said after a pause. “What are you wearing?”

“Vete a la mierda,” I swore at him in my best Spanish accent.

“Go to the shit,” he commented happily. “I like that. I like your pronunciation, it is pretty good. How about saying it this way…”

And so, a week after Las Palabras, Mateo taught me how to swear properly in Spanish until five in the morning, when the stars in the sky started to fade.

Compared to the previous month, the month of July crawled by at a sloth’s pace. In some ways this was good since every day that passed was a day that took me further and further from the Spain version of Vera. It made the memories harder to recreate in detail, it made me forget conversations, forget myself. Every day brought me closer and closer to becoming the old Vera Miles, the one I didn’t want to go back to, so the slower the month went, the better it was.

There was only one thing that kept me going throughout the days, and that was Mateo. Sure, I was enjoying the summer weather and the gorgeous beaches now that the rain had let up. I had gone to Calgary to see my father and Jude, and that was a nice little escape where my dad still spoiled me rotten. I got my job at Waves Coffee back, only I couldn’t get full-time, so I just picked up shifts when I could. I even briefly saw Jocelyn when she came to town, which ended up in a night of debauchery on Granville Street and me in tears because I’d had too much to drink. I couldn’t blame her for hurrying back to Saskatchewan after that.

But, even with all that, it was Mateo who got me up in the morning, looking forward to each day. He was a busy man, still looking into opening a restaurant in London thanks to his fancy English skills, so we didn’t talk on the phone every day. But we texted as much as we could, and sent emails when texting wasn’t good enough.

Sometimes we would talk for hours about everything under the rainbow. Other times we would watch a movie together, trying to get our DVDs on our computer to synch up. The other night we tried phone sex, which was an absolute first for me. I never asked where he was when we were talking dirty to each other, but I tried not to think about it too much. He would pleasure himself while talking wildly in Spanish, and that was such a fucking turn on that it only took me seconds before I was coming. My vibrators definitely got a work out, as did my voice control. No one wants to be a screamer when you live with your mom and brother.

We were pushing the limits with that and yet it only felt natural.

So, in some ways, I was satisfied. My sex life was healthy in its own fantastical way, I was able to keep in contact with him, to hear his voice, to talk and understand and enjoy each other. It was like part two of the relationship, a slower, distant version of what we had at Las Palabras.

But in other ways, I was absolutely miserable. There were only so many times I could hear him whisper that he was biting my nipples without needing him to physically be there biting my nipples. There were only so many times he could tell me he loved me and wanted to hold me without me feeling that hollow ache that he couldn’t hold me in his arms.

The only high point in my day was him, and after a while, that just wasn’t good enough anymore. That depression, that descent into Crazyville that happened right after I landed, that was coming back to me. To make matters worse, I had to start picking courses for the school year and concentrate on what my future would bring—a future that didn’t contain the man who had my heart.

On one extraordinarily hot and humid day, I felt pretty close to snapping. It didn’t help that Mateo and I had a fight of sorts over the phone in the wee hours of the morning. It wasn’t even over anything in particular, I was just being super bitchy and snippy, and he didn’t take that attitude very well, so the angry Spanish stallion in him came out. I didn’t see that side of him very often, but it made me realize I couldn’t be a bitch for no reason and not get called out on it.