Page 92 of That Last Summer

“He did. But does it matter who made the first move? Maybe it was me just by coming back to town. The problem is that in the end, it turned out Jaime was wrong.” I give Jaime a sideways glance. “It wasn’t the end of our story, it was the beginning of something; I feel it in here,”—I point at my heart—“and that something won’t go away. Not anymore. The other day, Alex was resting because of his knee, and I went to his house—Dark had run away, and I took him home.” This time I look to my brother, letting him know that was the moment he caught us red-handed. “We slept together again, and we swore over and over that it was going to be the last time, but if Alex wanted me again—today, tomorrow, next week—I would say yes. I’d do it without hesitation. So where does that leave us, huh? Where?”

I exhale and breathe deeply for the first time since I started talking.

“Fuck, Pris, this is nuts.” Adrián says, bereft of other words.

“It’s perfect. And just what I expected,” Jaime adds.

“What do you mean?” I ask my friend, unable to grasp his point.

“Are you going to let me talk freely about what I really think about this, or are we going to keep pretending it’s all in the past?”

“What?”

“Priscila,” he says warmly, in a voice he only uses when he says he loves me, “you’re crazy about him. I have no fucking idea what happened to you and him four years ago, but I can assure you that almost from the beginning, even before I knew you were married, I knew something huge had gone down between you and neither you nor he had gotten over it. Damn, it’s so obvious it’s fucking unbelievable no one else has noticed. Everything I said the day of the bar opening, about your needing a goodbye fuck to get over him? It was bullshit, shit as big as the fucking Empire State Building. I just wanted to give you the push I thought you needed.”

“No, that’s not true,” I say, vehemently. “I’m not crazy about him. Not anymore.”

“A bit risky, don’t you think?” my brother asks Jaime. “Is this something you do on a regular basis? Meddle in people’s lives, just like that? Without measuring consequences? Without knowing what really happened and how serious it was?”

“Not in people’s lives, in my best friend’s life. And no, I don’t think it was risky. I had a hunch and went for it. And if getting laid could be the solution to something that happened a long time ago, so be it.”

“I’m not in love with Alex,” I insist. “And there’s nothing to fix.”

“Of course you’re not,” my brother corroborates. “It’s just attraction. You and Alex had a hell of an attraction in the past. It was stupid to think you wouldn’t still be drawn to one another.”

“Attraction?” Jaime repeats. “I don’t think so. But, okay, let’s pretend I believe this is just attraction.” Yeah, let’s pretend I believe it too. “And now I really need you to tell me what happened between you and Alex four years ago. The ‘oh, I can’t talk about it, it hurts so much’ cartridge has run out, Priscila.”

I click my tongue. This whole situation is getting more complicated with every passing second. Also, Jaime may be right.

“Okay, I’ll tell you everything. From the beginning. Do you have a couple hours?”

“I have all the time in the world.”

And I need to get it out of my system. I’ve got too tight a hold on it, and it weighs a ton. So, I tell him. And I give him an uncensored version, no detail overlooked, nothing left out. Or almost nothing.

I talk about when I first saw the neighbor from the house across the street.

I talk about that bump I felt in my heart.

I talk about those first times that neighbor and I interacted.

About our first kiss.

I talk about how I fell in love with him without realizing it.

About all my colorful summers.

I talk about Alex’s crazy marriage proposal.

How I accepted.

How happy we were, those first few months as a married couple.

And I talk about what came after that.

About what happened that day at the end of September in our garden.

That damned day.