by Elena Armas
Single and alone after fleeing the country, heartbroken.
Stuck.
I was over him; I truly was. But, man, all that had happened had … messed me up. I realized that now—not because it’d suddenly hit me that I had been single for years, but because I had lied—and what was worse was, I had just made up my mind not to go back on my lie.
“Everybody understands. You went through a lot.”
A lot was a very gentle way to put it.
Nope. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t be that Lina in front of my whole family, the whole damn town. Daniel.
“Lina …” My mother said my name in that way only a mother could. “Are you still there?”
“Of course.” My voice sounded wobbly and heavy with everything I was feeling, and I hated that it had. I exhaled through my nose, straightening in my chair. “Nothing happened with my boyfriend,” I lied. Lies, lies, and more lies. Lina Martín, professional liar, deceiver. “And I am bringing him, just like I said I would.” I forced out a laugh, but it sounded all wrong. “If you’d just let me talk before jumping to silly conclusions and sermonizing me, I could have told you.”
Nothing came through the speaker of the phone. Only silence.
My mother wasn’t stupid. I didn’t think any mother was. And if I believed for a second that I was out of the storm, I was probably wrong.
“Okay,” she said oddly softly. “So, you are still together?”
“Yes,” I lied again.
“And he’ll come to the wedding with you? To Spain?”
“Correct.”
A pause, making me realize my hands were sweating so much that the phone would have slipped if I hadn’t been gripping it as tightly as I was.
“He’s in New York too, you said?”
“Yep.”
She hummed and then added, “American?”
“Raised and born.”
“What’s his name again?”
My breath got stuck somewhere along my throat. Shit. I hadn’t given them a name, had I? I didn’t think I had, but …
My mind raced through my options very quickly. Desperately. I needed a name. What an easy, manageable thing. A name.
A simple name.
A name of a man who didn’t exist or I still had to find.
“Lina … are you there?” my mother chimed. She laughed, somehow sounding nervous. “Have you forgotten your boyfriend’s name?”
“Don’t be silly,” I told her, hearing my distress in my voice. “I …”
A shadow caught my eye, distracting me. My gaze shot to my office door, and exactly how he had wedged himself into my life one year and eight months ago—with horrifyingly bad timing—Aaron Blackford walked through the threshold and placed himself in the eye of the storm.
“Lina?” I thought I heard my mother say.
In two strides, he was in front of me, across my desk, letting a stack of papers drop on its surface.
What is he doing?
We didn’t visit each other’s offices. We never needed, wanted, or bothered to.
That icy-blue gaze of his fell on me. It was followed by a frown, as if he were wondering why I looked like a woman currently dealing with a life-threatening crisis. Which was exactly what I was doing. Getting caught in a lie was far worse than lying. After only a couple of seconds, his expression morphed into an appalled one. I could see the judgment in his eyes.
Out of every single person who could have walked into my office right now, it’d had to be him.
Why, Lord? Why?
“Aaron,” I heard myself say in a pained voice.
I was vaguely aware when my mother somehow repeated his name, “Aaron?”
“Sí,” I murmured, my gaze locked with his. What in the world does he want?
“Okay,” Mamá said.
Okay?
My eyes widened. “¿Qué?”
Aaron, who had caught the Spanish words, put two and two together with an ease that shouldn’t have surprised me.
“Personal call at work?” he queried, shaking his head.
My mother, who was still on the line, asked in Spanish, “Is that him, the voice I’m hearing? This Aaron you are dating?”
My whole body locked up. Eyes wide and mouth agape, I stared at him as my mother’s words resonated inside my clearly empty skull because what in the world had I done?
“Lina?” she pressed on.
Aaron’s frown deepened, and he sighed with resignation as he stood right there. Not leaving.
Why isn’t he leaving?
“Sí,” I answered, not realizing she’d take that word as confirmation. But she would; I knew she would do exactly that, wouldn’t she? “No,” I added, trying to backpedal.
But then Aaron tsked and shook his head again, and whatever had been about to leave my lips scattered.
“I …” Oh God, why is it so warm in my office? “No sé, Mamá.”
Aaron mouthed, Your mother?
“¿Cómo que no sabes?” came at the same time.
“I … I …” I trailed off, not really knowing who I was talking to. The scowling man or my mother. I felt like I was flying on autopilot while my plane approached the ground at a breakneck speed, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it from crashing. None of my controls were responding.
“Ay, hija,” my mother said with a laugh. “What is it? Yes or no? Is that Aaron?”
I wanted to scream.
All of a sudden, I had this powerful urge to cry or open the window and shove the phone out and onto New York’s merciless traffic. I wanted to break something too. With my bare hands. While I stomped my feet with frustration. All at once. I wanted to do all those things.
Curiosity filled Aaron’s blue eyes. He tilted his head, watching me as I struggled to even take a decent breath.
I covered my phone with my other hand and addressed the man in front of me in a broken, defeated voice, “What do you want?”
He waved one hand in front of him. “No, please, don’t let me—or work—get in between you and your personal call.” He crossed his arms in front of his stupidly wide chest and brought a fist under his chin. “I’ll just wait here until you are done.”
If smoke could physically leave my ears, a black cloud would have been trailing up and circling over my head.
My mother, who was still on the line, spoke, “You sound busy, so I’ll let you go.” I kept my eyes on Aaron, and before I could even process her words, she added, “Wait until Abuela hears about you dating someone from work. You know what she’ll say?”
My dumb brain must have been still flying on autopilot because it didn’t skip a beat. “Uno no come donde caga.”
Aaron’s lips puckered lightly.
“Eso es.” I heard my mother chuckle. “I’ll let you get back to work. You’ll tell us about this man you are dating when you two come for the wedding then, okay?”
No, I wanted to tell her. What I’ll do is die, choked in my own web of lies.
“Of course, Mamá,” I said instead. “I love you. Tell Papá I love him too.”
“Love you too, cielo,” my mother said right before hanging up.
Filling my lungs with much-needed air, I glared at the man who had just complicated my life tenfold and dropped my phone on the desk as if it were burning my palm.
“So, your mother.”
I nodded my head, incapable of speaking. It was better that way. God knew what would come out of my treacherous mouth.
“All good at home?”
Sighing, I nodded again.
“What does it mean?” he asked me with what might be genuine curiosity. “What you said in Spanish at the end.”
My head was still swirling with that horrible, catastrophic phone call. With what I had done and how big I had messed up. I didn’t have time to play Google Translate with Aaron, who, on top of everything, was the last person I wanted to chat with at the moment.
Jesus, how did he manage to do that? He showed up, and in th
e span of a few minutes just—
I shook my head.
“Why do you even care?” I snapped.
I watched him flinch. Only slightly but I was almost sure he had.
Immediately feeling like a jerk, I brought my hands to my face as I tried to calm myself.
“Sorry,” I whispered. “I’m a little … stressed. What do you want, Aaron?” I asked him, softening my voice and fixing my eyes somewhere on my desk. Anywhere but on him. I didn’t want to face him and give him a chance to see me this … unsettled. I hated the idea of him seeing me at my lowest. If it wouldn’t be completely inappropriate, I would drop to the floor, crawl under my desk, and hide from him.
Given that I refused to look at him, I could only notice the difference in his tone when he said, “I printed out some more documents you can use for one of the workshops we outlined.” His voice was almost gentle. For someone like Aaron, that was. “I left them on your desk.”
Oh.
My gaze tracked down the wooden surface, finding them, and I felt like an even bigger jerk.
That emotion churned in my gut, turning into something way too close to helplessness for me to feel any better.
“Thanks,” I muttered, massaging my temples with my fingers and closing my eyes. “You could have just sent them by email.” Maybe that way, all this could have been avoided.
“You highlight everything by hand.”
I did. When something required my full focus, I needed to print it on paper and then review it with a highlighter in hand. But how … oh hell. It didn’t matter that Aaron had somehow noticed. He probably had because it was a waste of paper or bad for the environment anyway. And that didn’t change that I was still a jerk for snapping at him like that.
“You are right, I do. That was …” I trailed off, keeping my gaze on the desk. “That was nice of you. I’ll go through them over the weekend.”
Still not lifting my head to look at him, I reached for the thin stack and placed it in front of me.
A long moment passed where neither of us spoke.
I could tell he was still standing there, all statuesque, not moving and just looking down at me. But he didn’t say anything, not giving me an excuse to look up. So, I kept my eyes trained on the papers he had so nicely printed out for me.
That long moment seemed to stretch into a painfully awkward amount of time, but right before I was about to lose the weird battle and look up, I sensed him leave. Then, I waited a full minute until I was sure he was long gone. And … I let it all out.
My head fell on my desk with a muffled thud. No, not on the desk. My head had fallen on the stack of papers that Aaron had come to deliver—very nicely—right before I put my foot in my mouth and somehow told my mother that the name of my made-up boyfriend was Aaron.
A groan slipped out of me. It was ugly and miserable.
Just like I was.
I softly bumped my head against the surface of my desk.
“Estúpida.” Bang. “Idiota. Tonta. Boba. Y mentirosa.” Bang, bang, bang.
That was the worst of all. Not only was I an idiot, but I was also a lying idiot.
The realization pushed another groan out of me.
“Whoa,” came from the door. It was Rosie’s voice.
Good. I needed someone I trusted to retrieve me from this madness I had gotten myself into and register me into the closest mental facility. I couldn’t be trusted to … adult properly.
“Is everything okay, Lina?”
Nope.
Nothing about what I had just done was okay.
“Wait, wait, wait, wait.” Rosie shoved her hand between us, making the universal sign to hold your horses. “You told your mom what?”
Gobbling down the rest of my pastrami panini, I shot her a look. “You gnow whatf I saifd,” I told her, not caring that my mouth was still full.
“I just want to hear that last part again.” Rosie leaned back on her chair, her emerald eyes wide with shock. “You know what? How about you start from the beginning again? I must be missing something because this whole thing sounds a little too much, even for you.”
Narrowing my eyes at her, I gave her a fake, toothy smile that I was sure showcased some of the contents of my lunch.
I didn’t care that anybody in the coworking space on the fifteenth floor, where we were having lunch, could see me. At this time, there weren’t many people left on this floor anyway. Leave it to a company in New York City to dedicate this much space—and money because the decor was right out of hipsterland—to a coworking and shared space for a bunch of workaholics who didn’t make use of it outside of their lunch break. No more than a couple of tables to my right were occupied by now—the ones closest to the impressive floor-to-ceiling windows, of course.
“Don’t look at me like that.” My friend pouted across from me. “And please, I love you, but that’s not a nice look. I can see some … lettuce hanging out of your mouth.”
I rolled my eyes, chewing and finally washing down my mouthful.
Contrary to what I had hoped, food had done nothing to appease my mood. This pounding ball of anxiety was still asking to be fed. “I should have ordered a second panini.” On any other day, I would have. But the wedding would be in no time, and I was trying to watch what I ate.
“Yes, and something else you should have done? Told me about all of this before.” Her voice was soft, just how all things Rosie were, but the weight behind those words prickled at my skin all the same. “You know, like from the moment you decided to make up a boyfriend.”
I deserved it. I had known Rosie would—sweetly—kick my ass as soon as she found out that I had kept from her all that me lying to my family about being in a relationship business.
“I’m sorry.” I reached my hand out across the table, taking hers. “I’m so sorry, Rosalyn Graham. I should never have kept this from you.”
“No, you shouldn’t have done that.” She pouted some more.
“In my defense, I was going to tell you on Monday, but we were interrupted by you know who.” I wouldn’t say his name out loud, as he often appeared out of thin air when I did. I squeezed her hand. “To make it up to you, I will ask my abuela to light a few candles to one of her saints, so you are rewarded with many children.”
Rosie sighed, pretending to think about it for a moment. “Fine, I accept your apology.” She squeezed back. “But instead of children, I’d much rather get introduced to one of your cousins maybe?”
I reared back, shock etched on my face. “One of my what?”
As I watched the light blush rise in her cheeks, my surprise only grew when she said, “The one who surfs and has a Belgian shepherd? He is kind of dreamy.”
“Dreamy?” None of my savage cousins could ever be considered dreamy.
Rosie’s cheeks turned a darker shade of red.
How the hell is my friend acquainted with one of the members of the Martín clan? Unless …
“Lucas?” I sputtered, immediately remembering that I had shown her a few of his Instagram stories. But it had all been because of Taco, his dog. Not because of him. “Lucas, the one with the buzzed head?”
My friend nodded casually, shrugging her shoulders.
“You are too good for Lucas,” I hissed. “I’ll let you take part in the kidnapping of his dog though. Taco is also too good for him.”
“Taco.” Rosie giggled. “That’s such an adorable name.”
“Rosie, no.” I retrieved my hand and reached for my bottle of water. “No.”
“No, what?” Her smile was still there. Hanging on to her lips as she thought of my cousin, I supposed, in ways that—
“No. Ew. Yikes, woman. He is a barbarian, a brute. He has no manners. Stop daydreaming of my cousin.” I took a cleansing gulp of water. “Stop, or I’ll be forced to tell you some horror stories from our childhood, and in the process, I’ll probably ruin the male specimen for you.”
My friend’s shoulders fell. “If you must … not that it woul
d help my case anyway. I don’t think I need extra assistance for that.” She paused, sighing sadly. Making me want to reach out again and tell her that her prince would eventually show up. She just needed to stop picking up only the assholes. My relatives included. “But before that, we can actually talk about your horror story.”
Oh. That.
“I already told you everything about it.” My gaze fell to my hands as I played with the label on the bottle. “I gave you a play-by-play recap. From the moment I blurted out to my parents that I was dating a man who doesn’t exist to the moment I somehow made my mom believe his name was Aaron because of a certain blue-eyed jerk who had appeared out of thin air.” I scratched harder, ripping the label completely off the plastic surface. “What else do you want to know?”
“Okay, those are the facts. But what’s on your mind?”
“Right now?” I asked, to which she nodded. “That we should have picked up dessert.”
“Lina …” Rosie placed both arms on the table and leaned on them. “You know what I am asking.” She glanced at me sharply, which, when it came to Rosie, meant patiently but without a smile. Or a smaller than usual one. “What are you going to do about all of this?”
What the hell do I know?
Shrugging, I let my gaze roam around the coworking space, taking in the chipped, old barn tables and the hanging ferns adorning the red brick wall to my left. “Ignore this until my plane touches Spanish ground and I have to explain why my boyfriend is not with me?”
“Sweetie, are you sure you want to do that?”
“No.” I shook my head. “Yes.” Bringing both hands to my temples, I tried to massage away the start of a headache. “I don’t know.”
Rosie seemed to take that in for a long moment. “What if you actually consider him for this?”
My hands dropped from my temples to the wooden surface, and my stomach plunged to my feet. “Consider who?”