Because really, even though there’s a villain in this story, I only have myself to blame.
Not saying I’m still beating myself up over it, because three years is a long time to live with guilt and shame, and besides, I know something good came out of us being apart. It takes time to see the positives when life hands you a bunch of shit. Sometimes you don’t even know that there’s something precious buried in there, something you need to have, need to see, and only time separates the good from the bad.
I knew that when I returned to Madrid and first laid eyes on Luciano (and by that, I mean first laid eyes on him for the third time), that this time it was going to stick. That if fate had her way, if we were truly meant to be, if we were really one and the same, just as I always believed, that this was when we’d come together and stay together.
I just didn’t think we’d have a week together and be torn apart, again.
But there was a change this time around.
I loved him.
He loved me.
And that made all the difference in the world.
When you know someone loves you, you behave differently, think differently, feel differently. Love changes the cells in your body, imprints itself on your skin. Sometimes it feels like all you are is a container for love. But soon, you realize you don’t contain love—love contains you.
It contained me and Luciano, keeping us together even when we were five thousand miles apart. Actually, four thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight. I know because each of those miles made themselves painfully aware, and I often imagined myself on my flight to see him again, the jet burning through those miles of pain and separation, leaving them in the stratosphere.
Of course, back then I thought he’d stay in Madrid.
I didn’t think he’d retire from the game and end up on the island of Madeira.
Life is what happens when you’re making other plans, I suppose.
“I hope you have a lovely time here with your fiancé,” the elderly woman in the seat next to me says. She nods at the black line tattooed around the ring finger on my left hand. “And I hope you get a chance to cover up that tattoo.”
The woman, I never even got her name, is going with her husband for two weeks in the sun. I managed to tell her my whole life story on the flight, while her husband snored loud enough for the whole cabin to hear. They’re from England and got on my connecting flight from Lisbon. For some reason she’d been super fixated on the fact that I got a tattoo in lieu of an engagement ring, but you have to make do when your fiancé lives on the other side of the ocean.
Speaking of Lisbon, boy was it ever a trip to be back in that city. It had been so long, but of course it had lost none of its beauty, grit or charm. I was in such a rush to get to Madeira to see Luciano, but as it happened, my layover was a long one. So, I hopped on a train and, twenty minutes later, I was in the city.
Originally, I was just planning on just getting some pastéis de nata from the closest shop, since they are a dime a dozen in Lisbon, and I had been absolutely craving them.
But then I got a text from Marco.
Yes, Marco Ribeiro.
And he wanted to grab a coffee and pastéis de nata with me at one café that he insisted was the best one in Lisbon. Of course, I wasn’t going to pass that up.
It felt good to see him. Really good. Like the both of us finally got some closure on our strange relationship, especially as I never got a chance to say goodbye to him, or apologize in person for giving him the run around.
After I got on that plane out of Madrid, after the fight that went down with Luciano and his stepfather, Luciano went straight to Marco’s place.
He explained everything that happened.
Everything. From the start to the end, with all the ugly details in between. He left no truth buried, he was ready to admit his mistakes, admit that he’d been a shitty brother.
They fought too.
The Portuguese are passionate.
Marco got Luciano in the nose, much in the same way that Luciano got Tomás. But Luciano held back. He deserved to get hit and he took the punches.
But Marco was quick to calm down.
The thing that Luciano told me was that it wasn’t that Marco was especially heartbroken over me. For someone who had told Luciano he was in love with me, he didn’t shed a tear over the fact that I left him for his brother. His pride was damaged, that was certain, and their relationship as brothers was put to the test.
But Marco was most upset about his father.
About what he did to me before, about what he did to me then.
That he was a monster in disguise.
Luciano said that Marco had a lot of reckoning to do with Tomás, and sadly, their father-son relationship was broken. Maybe irreparably.
Perhaps it was needed in order for Marco to see the ugly truth about his father. He finally had the chance to cut the strings that his father was pulling, seeing that he’d been manipulated all this time by his father’s own greed and spite, that he was trying to groom him into being something he wasn’t.
As for me, though, I never had the chance to apologize, until now.
I expected Marco to hate me just a little bit, but he doesn’t. We talked about his father, how he’s distanced himself from him, practically disowning him, we talked about how his work is going as an
