The Spanish Love Deception

by Elena Armas

  And I wouldn’t have found it in me to care.

  That was how ironic life could be sometimes.

  When I entered the building on day two without Aaron—which I realized was my new way to count down time—I waited for the whispers of my colleagues to reach my ears and their fingers to be pointed at me for no reason other than Gerald’s public accusations. By the time the clock hit five p.m.—after I spent the day wishing I’d get a glimpse of Aaron and dreading it, all at the same time—nothing had happened. None of my colleagues had batted an eyelash at me. No disgusting rumors, no nasty accusations, nothing. Not a flash of Aaron either.

  On day three without him, an odd kind of restlessness burrowed itself in me. I missed Aaron. I missed the possibility of what had been growing between us, and that started overweighing everything else. It didn’t seem so important that the incident with Gerald had not led anyone to treat me any differently. I couldn’t find it in me to be relieved. What did it matter when there was a hole in my chest?

  I missed Aaron’s face, the ocean blue in his eyes, his stubborn frown, the way his lips puckered when he was lost in thought, the wide line of his shoulders, how he effortlessly stood tall and big as life wherever he went, and his smile—that smile that was just for me. So much that I set camp in my office, left the door open, and waited for him to walk down the hallway at some point in the day. Or to hear his voice even if in the distance. That would have been enough to appease that need burning inside of me. But none of that happened.

  On day four, I finally gave up and knocked on his office door, going unanswered. And when I asked Rosie if she had seen him around at all, she hugged me and said she hadn’t. Neither had Héctor or the few other people I had somehow found an excuse to ask.

  That was exactly why I was pacing from one corner of the hallway to the opposite one as I waited to be called into Sharon’s office. Just like I had been doing at home last night. Or that morning in my office. Because he had disappeared. And I hated not knowing why, not seeing him, not having him around, not … having an excuse to call and ask him because I had pushed him away and the last thing he probably wanted to do was talk to me.

  “Lina, darling,” Sharon called as her head peeked out of her office, jerking me back into the present. “Please come in and take a seat.”

  Following her inside, I let myself fall into one of the chairs. I watched the blonde lady sit down and lean over her desk with a secretive smile.

  “Sorry about the wait. You know how some people think HR has the answers for everything.” She chuckled with bitterness. “Even for things like New York City Council deciding to repave the part of the road right outside their window.”

  Any other day, I would have laughed too. Perhaps make a joke about how only the fittest could survive the city that never slept and always closed some road to keep you awake at all times. But I simply couldn’t muster the energy for that.

  “I’m sure it makes up for a few awkward conversations.”

  Sharon’s eyes scanned my face, something like understanding dawning in her features. What exactly she found or understood, I had no idea.

  “All right, let’s cut to the chase.”

  Good. I liked that. Just like I had always liked Sharon too.

  “I’ve called you here in light of some serious allegations that have been made, which directly involve you.”

  Something dropped to the bottom of my stomach, and I felt myself blanch.

  “Oh … okay.” I cleared my throat. “What do you want to know?”

  The woman inhaled deeply through her nose, as if she was readying herself for something.

  “Lina,” she said, using a tone that I had heard from my own mother—comforting but also admonishing—“we both are aware that Gerald knows the right kind of people, and frankly, I will never understand how someone so horrible manages to make so many good ‘acquaintances.’ ” Her fingers air-quoted that last word. “But as much as he has remained untouchable so far, that doesn’t mean that he can’t be knocked down. For that, however, we must do something. We should at least try.”

  I felt myself nod, still trying to process what Sharon was telling me. She was admitting to being on my side. Not only that, but also she wouldn’t remain a silent bystander.

  “If that’s something you want to do, we can work together on an employee formal complaint. I can help you. You’d need to sign it and submit it to us, and after that, I’d try to push for a thorough investigation. I know many complaints are ignored, but more than a few people having your back will make a difference.”

  More than a few people?

  “What …” I trailed off, shaking my head. “What people? I don’t understand.”

  She flicked her nails on the table, tilting her head. “After the altercation in the coworking floor, a number of people came by my desk to inform me of what had happened. Half of them wanted to file the complaint themselves, but just like I told them, it has to be you.”

  “I … I just …” My gaze fell on my hands, resting on my lap. I felt my heart expanding with gratitude. With something else too. Realization. “So, they are on my side? They have spoken on my behalf and not Gerald’s?”

  “They are, Lina.” Sharon smiled. “And they have. I know people like Gerald often go unpunished; it’s how the world works sometimes. But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying to change that, does it? Doesn’t mean that we stop fighting.”

  Her words reminded me of the ones someone had told me, begged me to believe, only a few days ago. Words that I had chosen to ignore.

  “You can think about what I just told you. Okay? Take your time to decide what you want to do.”

  “Yeah, I will.”

  There was so much to think about. So much to process. To anybody else, this might have been nothing more than a bureaucratic process I should have thought of before, but to me? Learning that my colleagues—those who had witnessed everything—were actively taking my side, it meant something. Although it didn’t change what I had done. How I had thrown away everything I could have had with Aaron. How I had denied him of the one thing he had asked of me. My full trust. My faith in us. And over what? He would have given me that much, and I had just given up without a fight.

  “And please,” Sharon said, “if you could tell Aaron to come by as soon as he’s back. I can’t seem to get ahold of him.”

  As soon as he’s back?

  “Oh, erm, I don’t … I just …” My words tumbled out of me, mixing with the questions spinning in my head.

  “It’s all good, Lina. He was very clear about your relationship. Came here first thing this week to ask if there was any kind of company policy or contract clause that would perhaps complicate things.”

  The heartbeat that had flattened, accompanying me during these days without him, came back to life, peeking out. He had come to HR to be sure that all fronts were covered. To reassure me. Because he’d known that I’d need exactly that. Because he had wanted me to feel safe.

  Tears that hadn’t been there before were in a rush to get to my eyes.

  “Hey, it’s okay, Lina. There aren’t. There’s no reason for you guys to worry. No stones in the way.”

  No. The only one taking those possible obstacles on our way and turning them into impediments we couldn’t get over was me.

  “Okay,” I muttered, willing my eyes to hold tight a little longer. “That’s good.” Nothing was good. Not a single thing because I had ruined it anyway.

  “All right, good.” Sharon’s blonde head bobbed, her motherly eyes warming up. “But please, do tell him to call me back, yes? I know these are hard times, but it’s about his promotion.”

  Hard times. Those two words echoed through my mind.

  Sharon’s earlier request bounced right back. “Tell Aaron to come by as soon as he’s back.”

  “Did … did Aaron leave? Did something happen?”

  Sharon’s eyes widened, confusion mixing up with shock. “You don’t know?”
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br />   I shook my head, feeling my skin pale. “No.”

  Her head shook. “Lina, this is not my place—”

  “Please,” I begged, now desperate to know what was wrong. Need clawing at my skin. “Please, Sharon. We had a fight, and I just … messed up. It doesn’t matter. But if there’s something wrong, if something happened to him, I need to know. Please.”

  She looked at me for a long moment.

  “Darling,” she finally said, and that alone made all the alarms in my head go off, “he had to fly home. His dad is … he has cancer. He has been in a critical state for the last few weeks.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  There was this show I’d loved when I was a teenager. It was an American TV series we got on one of the Spanish national channels—naturally, dubbed. I absolutely loved it. High schoolers with big dreams and bigger egos—or hearts, depending on who you asked—angsty plot twists, and a level of drama someone at sixteen shouldn’t have been experiencing, at least not in a small town somewhere in North Carolina. Or in the north of Spain for that matter. Which was perhaps why it all resonated so much with me.

  There was this one episode in particular that had somehow stuck in a way others never did. It started with a voice-over narrator who asked something along the lines of, “what’s the minimum length of time with the power to change your life? A year? A day? A few minutes?”

  The answer to that question had come to be that when you were young, one single hour could make a difference. It could change everything.

  And I … wholeheartedly disagreed.

  One didn’t need to be young for their life to change in the span of an hour, a handful of minutes, or nothing more than a few seconds. Life changed constantly, wickedly fast and terribly slow, when one least expected it to or after a long time of chasing that change. Life could be turned around, inside out, backward and forward, or it could even transform into something else entirely. And it happened regardless of age, but most importantly, it didn’t care for time.

  Life-altering moments spanned from a few seconds to decades.

  It was part of the magic of life. Of living.

  In my twenty-eight years of life, I had experienced few but very different life-altering moments. Some had lasted seconds, no more than glimpses or moments in which a realization dawned. And others had lasted minutes, hours, even weeks. Either way, I could count those moments with both hands. Recite them from memory too. The first time I’d dipped my feet into the sea. The first math equation I’d solved. My first kiss. Falling in and out of love with Daniel. All the terrible months after. Boarding that plane to New York to start a new life. Watching my sister walk down the aisle with the biggest, happiest smile I had ever seen on her.

  And then there was Aaron.

  I thought I wouldn’t be able to pick one single moment when it came to him. Because it was him, the one thing that made that span of time important. Life-altering.

  Falling asleep in his arms. Watching his lips bend into that smile that I knew now had only been for me. Waking up to his voice, to the warmth of his skin against mine. Watching his face crumbling down. Him walking away. His absence.

  All of them had left a dent in my heart. In me. All of them had changed me. Shaped me into someone who allowed herself to open up, to love, to needing and wanting to give herself not to anybody, but to him.

  But as much as all those moments that had made me fall helplessly in love with him left a mark I’d never be able to erase, one that I didn’t think would ever fade, it was the split second when I had known I needed to get myself on a plane to Seattle and find him, the one moment that felt … transcendental. The realization that I had let him go too soon, too carelessly. So foolishly. The moment it had dawned on me—like a blow straight to the middle of my chest—that nothing else besides going to him mattered. That nothing should have stopped me from running into his arms. From being there for him when he needed someone the most.

  But was it too late? Was the clock still ticking on my life-altering moment, so I could turn it around, or had I lost my chance?

  My head spun with that question for six hours on the flight from New York to Seattle, continuously bouncing from blinding hope to the dread that could only come from anticipating loss. And when the plane touched ground, I still wasn’t sure whether to feel hopeful I was closer to him or whether I should have employed that time to ready myself if Aaron told me that it was too late and asked me to walk away.

  I thought about it some more as I waited for a taxi, drove to the first hospital on my list of medical centers with oncology specialists in Seattle, and asked in reception for Richard Blackford—a name I had dug out from the internet from what Aaron had told me about him and his past.

  That question kept whirling in my mind as I turned around, got myself into a new taxi, and repeated the whole process with hospital number two. Then with hospital number three.

  And right as my knees almost doubled with a mix of relief and trepidation at finally hearing the nurse at the counter of hospital number three ask if I was family or friend, that question that was stuck in my head was still screaming at me to be answered.

  It still was now as I made my way to the waiting room on what would soon become the longest elevator ride of my life.

  Did I throw it all away out of fear and stupidity? Am I too late?

  So, when the polished and metallic doors finally opened, I stumbled out of the elevator like someone walking out of an interminable road trip. Limbs numb, skin sticky with dry sweat, and the sense of not knowing where you were. My gaze anxiously scanned the space along the hallway before me, all the way to the waiting room, where I had been told he’d probably be—my Aaron, the man who I had to get to, to get back. And there, right there, sitting on a chair that barely accommodated his size, was my answer.

  With his arms on his knees and his head hanging low between his shoulders, there was my life-altering moment.

  And I realized as I stared into the distance—my heart feeling as weightless and hollow as ever when I saw him there, alone, without me—that as long as I had him, my life-altering moment would never be a measurement of time. It would never be as simple as marking a few points in the timeline of my life that I could identify as transcendent. It was him. Aaron. He was my moment. And for as long as I had him, my life would constantly be changing, be altered. I’d be challenged, cherished, loved. With him, I’d live.

  And I’d fight for that. I’d fight for him like I hadn’t when he asked me to. I wouldn’t take no for an answer. He was stuck with me. Just like he had promised me in Spain, in front of the people I loved the most in this world. I’d prove that to him.

  “Aaron,” I heard myself say. Let me be your rock. The hand that holds yours. Your home.

  My voice was barely a whisper, too low and quiet to make it all the way to where he was. But somehow, it did. It reached him. Because Aaron’s head snapped up. As he sat in that rigid plastic chair, his back straightened, and his neck turned around. I could see the disbelief in his profile, as if he thought he must have imagined me calling his name.

  But I hadn’t. I was right here. And if he let me, I could take care of him. I would caress his back while he sat in the dull and impersonal waiting room, brush his hair with soothing fingers, and make sure he ate and slept. I’d comfort him with hugs and be the shoulder he leaned his forehead on as he grieved the dad he might lose soon. The one who had missed so much, the one I knew Aaron felt like was already gone.

  His gaze scanned the space that separated us with the sheer determination I knew only he was capable of. And I’d never know why, but I waited. I held very still as he swiped around. And then, after what felt like an eternity and at the same time not enough time to prepare myself, blue eyes locked with mine. My heart toppled over itself, and I felt the commotion inside my chest.

  I watched his legs straighten, bringing him up.

  Then, his lips parted with my name. “Lina.”

  It wasn’t the L
ina instead of Catalina. It was the anguish in his voice—the need, the way his hair was ruffled, the bags resting under his eyes, the wrinkles in his clothes that screamed they hadn’t been changed in a couple of days—that propelled me forward. My legs sprinted across that hallway that separated us like they had never run before. Toward him, right into his arms. Just how he had asked me to. And when I reached him, I launched myself at him. I locked my body around his.

  It wasn’t appropriate. It wasn’t the time or the place, and he was carrying so much on his shoulders already. There was so much we needed to talk about, but it was right. I knew it in my bones as his arms closed around me.

  He lifted me off the floor, squeezed me into his chest, held me in his arms.

  I buried my face in his neck as I kept murmuring into him, “I’m here. I’m here. I’m running toward you. I trust you. I love you,” hoping it wasn’t too late.

  And he kept repeating my name. “Lina, baby. Lina, are you really here?” Hushed and broken, sounding like he still didn’t believe it was me in his arms. That it was me who had finally come to him like I should have done days ago.

  No. Like I should have done an eternity ago.

  Aaron walked backward, sitting back down as he held me in his arms. As I held him into mine. My body curled into his lap, and his palm cupped the nape of my neck.

  “I’m so sorry, Aaron,” I breathed into the skin between his shoulder and the underside of his jaw. “For everything. For your dad and for not being here, by your side, earlier. How is he? Have you seen him?”

  I felt his throat swallow against my temple.

  “He’s …” Aaron shook his head. “I have seen him, but he’s been out of it all this time. I just …” He trailed off, sounding exhausted. Defeated. “Are you really here, baby?” he repeated, holding me tighter. “Or is this my imagination playing tricks on me? I haven’t slept in … I don’t know how many days. Two? Three?”