I told myself not to look back.
But I did.
Mateo was still standing there, his hand raised. He then put his hand on his heart.
My breath hitched painfully and I forced myself to get in the backseat. The door closed, a barrier between me and the man, the love I would never see again.
We pulled away from the curb and I watched behind me, craning in my seat, until Mateo disappeared from view.
Part Two
Vancouver
Chapter Eighteen
I’d gone crazy.
Absolutely assfuck crazy.
After eighteen hours, no sleep, three layovers, and abused tear ducts, I finally landed in Vancouver as a complete zombie, drained of emotion and numb to the world. Though it was a nice change from the hours of crying into my shitty airline food and downing beers in an attempt to drown my feelings, it didn’t help my mental stability whatsoever. I kept feeling this pain that wanted to come out; my brain kept wanting to dwell on things I was too afraid to embrace.
The culture shock, though, was immediately jarring. And surprising, since I had lived in Vancouver my entire life. Suddenly I was looking at things written in Mandarin and hearing Canadian accents spoken at a rapid pace. Everything was sterile looking, modern and boring. People barely smiled and they didn’t make eye contact. When I grabbed my pack from baggage claim and stepped outside to wait for my brother, I was hit with damp air and dark grey skies. It was July. It was raining.
Thankfully it didn’t take long for a black VW Golf, just as my brother had promised, to come roaring up to the curb.
Josh got out of the driver’s seat and raised his arms. “I’m here!”
And finally, I had my first smile in what felt like a very long time. Josh. Despite everything, I had fucking missed him.
“Shit, you’re tanned,” he said, coming around the car to hug me. When he got closer he grimaced. “You also look like shit.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I said, giving him my backpack. He threw it in the trunk then gave me a big bear hug.
For some reason I thought he’d look different after six weeks, but he looked the same as always. Josh had been a fairly awkward teenager until he was nineteen. Then he stopped growing (thank God, cuz he was 6’2” at sixteen), gained muscle, his face cleared up, and his stutter disappeared. He had my dad’s ice blue eyes and my mother’s dark brown hair which he died black. He had a lip ring that he sometimes wore, and full sleeves and a ton of other tattoos, thanks to my influence. I knew Jocelyn thought he was a total “bad boy hottie,” but that description of my brother honestly made me want to barf. Josh, in some ways, was a bad boy, but the hottie thing was beyond what I was willing to admit.
“Good to have you home,” he said. He pulled away and frowned. “I’m guessing the feeling isn’t mutual.”
“I’m really tired,” is all I managed to say.
I didn’t speak much during the forty-five minute car ride through the city to our house. I couldn’t speak. My chest felt empty, everything felt hollow inside me. It was like I was suffering the worst emotional hangover of my life. In fact, it was like a life hangover. Is this what it felt like to die? When our lives were over, did we feel this same loss, this same ache for all the experiences we had just gone through?
Josh talked though, conscious of how I was feeling and needing to fill the car. He was good at that, picking up on other people’s feelings. I didn’t listen, I just stared out the rain-splattered window of his new car. The buildings here looked so plain and boring, no history to them at all. Everyone was rushing to get somewhere, stomping through puddles. Though Vancouver was beautifully green, it looked dark and gloomy under the skies. Even the sight of the North Shore Mountains, normally breathtaking above the shiny glass high rises of downtown, didn’t stir anything in me. I was just a shell.
I really needed to sleep.
When we pulled down the alley toward the back driveway of our house, Josh told me our mother had planned a surprise that wasn’t really a surprise. She had ordered in sushi. Now, my mother didn’t cook and never had, so ordering in was nothing new, and we often ordered in or got sushi for take-out several times a week (you, like, have to eat sushi in Vancouver or they’ll boot you from the city). I knew he was just trying to make me feel better about being home, so I gave him a quick smile and then brought out my phone again. Now that airplane mode was off and I wasn’t roaming, I was desperate to see if I’d gotten any texts or emails from Mateo.
I hadn’t.
I sighed and put it away. Josh noticed as he parked behind the house and nodded to my purse. “I never saw you update very much on Facebook. I thought you would have been all over that. No drunk photos of the Spanish flag wrapped around you or drinking sangria. Nothing.”
I shrugged. “There wasn’t really any time to go on Facebook.” And besides, this life here didn’t exist at all when I was at Las Palabras.
Our house was pretty nice—a narrow three stories with a small front lawn and a tall solid fence for privacy—but the lot it was on was worth an absurd amount of money. My mother, being a real estate agent and all, planned on sitting on the lot so she would “really make a killing.” With the way the real estate market kept rising, then stalling, then rising again, it looked as if she’d be trying to make a killing for years to come.
Josh got my pack out of his trunk and swung it up on his shoulder with ease. Guess he’d been upping his workouts at the gym. “You never said a word about Herman.”
I raised a brow. “Herman?”
“My car. He’s German, ya?”
“Aren’t cars supposed to be chicks?”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re so sexist.”
“Look, do you really want to say, ‘I’m going to go take Herman for a ride,’ or ‘I love filling up Herman?’”
He shrugged as we walked through the single-car garage where Mom’s Volvo was kept. “I’m not a homophobe. Besides, Kit, Hasselhoff’s car in Knight Rider, that was a guy. Shit, so was Herbie in the Love Bug.”
“All right, all right,” I said, waving him away. We walked up the stairs to the main landing. It looked the same as before but the familiar was now foreign to me.
My mom was in the kitchen, nursing a glass of wine and on the phone with someone. Once she saw me, she gave me her beautiful and genuine happy-to-see-you smile but then turned her back and continued to talk on the phone. From the tense way she carried herself, I could tell she was talking to a client.
My mother was a gorgeous woman, even for her age. Though she was tiny and she’d gained a lot of weight on her lower half over the last few years, her face was unlined and her eyes behind her square glasses were youthful. She had long, dark brown hair that she always kept tied back in a bun. I knew she did this because she thought it made her look more professional and polished, but it also showed off her high Hungarian cheekbones.
She was dressed well as always, too—she had a closet full of sharp suits, and she was wearing a slick navy one at the moment. This realization made my mind conjure up an image of Mateo, standing in the dining room at Las Palabras, wearing a silver grey suit that fit him like a second skin. In my head he smiled at me, a wide stretch of white teeth against golden skin.
So breathtaking.
And just like that, the bereft feeling encased my heart. All of that, all of him, felt so far away. Impossible to get back.
“Are you all right?” Josh asked, putting a supportive hand on my shoulder.