briefly. “But what’s this about, Sara? I don’t
understand” he asked looking around, to the nice and romantic setting that Sara
had prepared for him.
“I wanted to have dinner
together.”
“I’ve already had dinner. When I
work, I have dinner at eight” he saw disappointment in her eyes and added: “But
many hours had passed since I had dinner. I think I can eat again.”
Sara smiled at him with an
expression full of—hope? She was happy of having him there, it was obvious, but
that only disconcerted Roberto even more. His hurt heart yelled at him that he
shouldn’t get carried away by false illusions. Despite he had answered by
instinct with a smile to her smile, he got serious and said:
“But this looks as a romantic
dinner, Sara.”
“Because it is.”
They held each other’s gaze for
several seconds, trying to understand the implications of those three simple
words. It was her who eventually broke their eyes bond and invited him to sit
next to her.
“I have a gift for you” she said,
taking out of the picnic basket a rectangular and thin package. She handed it
to him. “Open it.”
Roberto ripped the wrapping paper
slowly, as if he was scared of what he would find inside. When he finished, he
found a photo frame with a picture of them both when they were kids. They were sat
on a bus during a school trip. They had their arms around each other’s
shoulders and they smiled so much that their cheeks seemed about to explode. He
couldn’t avoid a smile.
“Turn it.”
He obeyed and on the other side of
the photo frame he saw the picture he had taken her under the sea, the one she
had forced him to remove from the Internet.
“Eventually you made a copy before
I deleted it” he said.
“Susana downloaded it so that I could
see it. Do you like the gift?”
“Yes, but what does it mean
exactly? I don’t understand anything, Sara, and I don’t want to think what is
not only to get disappointed.”
“Open it” it was the only thing
she said.
“Open it? How?”
“Open the photo frame and look
what is inside.”
Bewildered, Roberto took off the restraints
of the photo frame and opened it. He didn’t know what he would find there, in
such a tiny space, but as soon as he separated both sides he knew what Sara
wanted him to see. She had broken in half the fuck buddy contract and on the
back of the sheet she had printed the photos. Looking inside the photo frame,
he could see the contract broken in half and crossed out with a black marker.
He raised his face to look at Sara
and she knew that it was her time to speak, to explain herself, to stripe her
soul before him as she had done so many times with her body.
“I told you what I thought about
love, that it was only an illusion and that it didn’t really exist. But the
truth is that I was only trying to convince myself of that. Love hurts and I
guess that I decided that if love didn’t exist, it couldn’t hurt me anymore.
But love is there, call it a feeling, call it a chemical reaction, but we can’t
deny its existence. What I told you in the beach is truth, any girl could fall
in love with you, including me if I only allow my heart to feel freely, without
ties of my mind, without fears of getting wounded.” Sara grabbed one of
Roberto’s hands and took it to her heart. “When you told me that you had been interested
in me since before high school, that you had been in love with me for so many
years, I didn’t answer because I didn’t know what to say. I was afraid,
terribly afraid, and at the same time— something moved inside my heart. I
started to think that I would like to feel how it is to be with someone who has
loved me in such an irrational, crazy and incomprehensible way for years. That
I would like to love that person, that I would like to let that person love me—
and then I realized that I could do it, that I could love you and let you love
me, that I could believe in love— she stopped and looked at him during