The Spanish Love Deception

His jaw clenched, fury seeping into his features again. “Things don’t need to be that way. Gerald is not everyone else, Lina.”

I closed my eyes, not able to work around the lump in my throat.

Aaron continued, “I’m not downplaying your fears, baby. I swear I’m not. But we can’t give up at the first sign of adversity. We can’t let everyone else matter more than we do. Not without giving us a fair shot.”

But what if we don’t even get the chance of giving this a shot? I wanted to scream.

“I need you to trust in us, in me. Can you do that?”

“I trust you, Aaron.” I shook my head and stepped out of his reach. “But this is just … too complicated. I don’t think I can do it. Go through it again.” My heart would never recover if this didn’t work. If Aaron fled the ship like Daniel had.

More hurt poured into the blue of his eyes. “You don’t then,” he whispered, his voice broken. “If you mean that, then you don’t trust me.”

Silence weighed down on us. Aaron’s shoulders eventually falling.

“I love you, Lina.”

A crack sliced its way across my poor, beaten heart at how wrong those four words sounded. How void of happiness and full of sorrow they were when they shouldn’t have been.

“How is it possible that it feels like you are breaking my heart, and I haven’t even had you yet?”

My soul shattered. I broke in a hundred million pieces.

“I can’t make you trust me like I need you to. With your whole fucking heart.” He searched my face, those blue eyes missing their usual light. Reflecting only hurt. “I can’t make you run into my arms instead of in the opposite direction. I just … can’t make you love me enough to give us a chance.”

A hole opened in my chest, my knees almost giving out at the earth beneath my feet tilting the wrong way. Unbalanced.

We stared into each other’s eyes for a long time, our hearts in each other’s fists for all the wrong reasons. It all felt unreal. Like a cruel nightmare I’d wake up from any minute now.

But it never happened. At some point, I thought I heard his phone ringing, and I watched him ignore it until it rang again. And again. Then, I thought he pulled it out of his pocket and peered down at the screen. But I wasn’t sure.

My head kept chanting, Trust him, trust him, trust him, making it hard for me to make sense of anything else but that.

I was trapped by my own mind. Sucked in a vacuum where I didn’t grasp time or space. Although I did remember one thing. And that was Aaron’s back moving away from me. His legs walking him down the empty hallway and him not looking back.

Not even once.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Rosie came home with me that night.

We curled under a blanket on my bed and rewatched Moulin Rouge! on my laptop. How tragic—to find love and see it slip through your fingers before your eyes. I always wondered what Ewan McGregor would have done had he known since the moment he met the love of his life that their story wouldn’t last more than one hundred thirty minutes. Would he still take her hand in his and jump? Would he still hold on to every moment left even if only a few? Would he still lie down by her side, knowing that

when she was gone, that space would never be filled again?

Rosie didn’t even think before giving me her answer. “Yes,” she whispered. “When you find that kind of love, time stops mattering. Come what may, Lina, he would love her regardless of how long they had.”

Then, we both bawled our eyes out. Rosie because she could never hold it in when “Come What May” kicked in, and me … well, mostly because I had welcomed the excuse.

So, I cried. I let those tears fall as I held my phone in my hand. Waiting for a call, a message, a sign that I knew I didn’t deserve. But that was what dumb chickenshits like me did. They cowered, hid under a blanket, and cried to “El Tango de Roxanne.”

Ugh. I didn’t like myself one single bit.

But come what fucking may, I’d still have to live with myself for the rest of my life. Find solace in the little time I had shared with Aaron. Past tense. Because when he had asked me to run into his arms instead of in the opposite direction, I hadn’t. When he had asked me to trust him—in us—wholly, I hadn’t been capable of doing it, even when I thought I had. And that had pushed him to walk away.

I pushed him away. I was the only one responsible for that.

Fuck. I wanted him here. With me, mending the broken pieces of this mess together. I wanted him to tell me that he believed we could still be fixed. Glued back together and good as new.