The One That Got Away: A Novel

by Halle, Karina

  “I know,” I tell her, pressing my thumbs against her cheeks as I hold her. “I know it won’t change anything in that way. It doesn’t matter. I want to marry you.”

  She blinks at me, her lashes wet. “Are you sure?”

  I can’t help but smile at her, even though it makes my head spin. “I’m more than sure. I want you to be my wife. I want to give you children. I want to live with you, wherever you want, have a future with you, the whole fucking future. Lost and stumbling, you said it yourself. That’s us. Together. Always.”

  She looks down for a moment, her chest heaving.

  In the past I would have been worried about her silence, worried that I pushed things too fast, came on too strong.

  But I’m not anymore.

  She’s what I want.

  I’m not fucking around.

  She licks her lips and glances up at me, brows raised. “Yes?”

  “Is that a question?”

  Hope dances in my heart.

  She breaks into a grin. “It’s not a question. It’s a yes.”

  “You’ll marry me?”

  “Yes, I’ll marry you. Of course I’ll marry you.”

  I laugh. It’s sharp and loud and full of joy, straight from my soul.

  I kiss her. Hard. Soft. Full of love for her.

  Her hands go to my face, cupping it, holding me.

  For a moment it’s pure joy. It’s the most honest, deep, pure love I’ve ever felt in this world.

  For a moment it’s everything I’ve ever wanted, and then some.

  It’s everything.

  I’m crying, she’s crying, and it’s sweet and it’s happy and my heart is going to burst.

  And then her tears turn wild.

  Raw.

  Rivers of sorrow.

  She presses herself into me, her hands at my shoulder, digging in hard, holding me tight as the sobs wrack through her, and I’m hit by it too.

  Realizing the joy is tempered by the cold, hard truth.

  She has to leave.

  She still has to leave.

  “I can’t do it,” she cries out. “Three years. I’ll be banned for three years. I can’t do it.”

  “We’ll make it work,” I tell her. “I promise you we will. I’ll come and see you. No one can stop me from doing that.”

  “You have your team, your game.”

  Fuck.

  Everything I ever wanted.

  The winning team, the cups, the status.

  All my dreams came true, at a cost.

  The cost of that one final dream.

  The one that counted the most.

  “You have to stay here,” she says, taking in quick, panicky breaths. “There’s no way around it, you have to be here with your team and I have to go home. How am I going to do this without you?”

  I don’t have any answer for her.

  I don’t know how I’m going to do this without her.

  But we have to find a way.

  That’s all we have.

  “It’s going to work,” I tell her, putting all the conviction I can muster in my voice. “It’s going to work. I promise you. I’m going to marry you Ruby.” I kiss her hard, stare into her eyes. “Three years. In three years, we’ll be together. In three years, we’ll get married, I promise you this. We can do this. We’ve done two, we’ve done seven. We can handle three more.”

  “It will kill me,” she whispers. “They say whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but that’s not true. Whatever doesn’t kill you leaves wounds. It can leave you weaker than before.”

  “Not this time.” I kiss her forehead. “Not this time. You’re going to go home and you’re going to make amends in your life, you’re going to face the things you’ve tried to run from, and you’re going to come out stronger in the end. And I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing, knowing every single morning I get up is one morning closer to seeing you.”

  “You promise?” she manages to say, her voice so low, so raw.

  “I promise.”

  I get to my feet, the towel nearly slipping off from around my waist, and then grab her under the arms and pull her up to me. I hold her, hands on her cheeks. “The only offense we have right now is a good defense. That’s the only thing we can control. I’m going to go get changed and we’re going to go to your place and get packed. Bring your stuff here. Then we can be with each other until they make you go.”

  “Do you really think immigration officers are going to end up at the door?” She looks terrified.

  “I do. They don’t fuck around.” I hesitate. “Or we can be even more proactive and get you on the next plane to Houston.”

  She shakes her head vigorously. “I can’t. My passport expired so long ago.”

  “I know. And they’re going to give you shit at the airport and you’re going to get banned. But at least this way it is on your own terms. At least this way we’re in control of it. Not them, not my father. It’s really the only thing we have, Ruby.”

  She nods slowly, understanding. “Yeah. You’re right.”

  So I get changed. I have a bruise forming on the side of my face where Tomás got me in the temple, and I’m lucky he didn’t fucking kill me by doing that. The back of my head hurts too, so I don’t think I’m fine to drive, just in case I have a concussion.

  We end up getting an Uber that takes us to her place. Luckily there’s no one there yet. I help her pack and then we go down to her car to get another bag out of the trunk. I take the keys, promising her I’ll take care of the car while she’s gone. It’s such a silly thing, but it gives me some sort of purpose, some piece of her while she’s gone.

  All the while I’m searching flight after flight, trying to get her home. Most of the flights heading from Spain to the US leave in the morning, but I manage to find one flight with one seat left that goes to Dallas, then Houston, three hours from now. If we hurry, we can just get her on it, including all the shit she’ll probably go through with her expired passport.

  Another Uber takes us to the airport, us together in the backseat, and in the distance I can see the lights of Valdebebas. It feels like an icy hand is reaching up and clawing at my heart.

  In my dreams of dreams, I have the team and I have her.

  But that’s not life.

  It doesn’t work that way.

  Life is a fucking crapshoot.

  It’s never a straight line.

  It’s a meandering, twisting mess that takes you in on one side and spits you out the other.

  It’s a short trip in the end, but there are enough chances to make it feel like a long one.

  The only thing that really matters is if you have the right person with you, along for the wild, chaotic ride to the finish line.

  “I love you,” I whisper to her, a sob rolling through me. “I always will.”

  She turns her face to mine.

  We kiss.

  We cry.

  We hold on for the rest of the ride.

  Part Four

  Madeira, Portugal

  Three Years Later

  “Let it never be said that romance is dead”

  – “Ruby” Kaiser Chiefs

  Twenty-Four

  Ruby

  The plane touches down on the island of Madeira, wheels screeching on the runway.

  I stare out the window at the dry, craggy mountains, my heart leaping with relief that we’re no longer in the air. The turbulence was insane coming down, winds buffeting us from all directions, and it was at the last minute that I realized half the runway is a platform over the Atlantic Ocean. If I had known that ahead of time, I probably wouldn’t have asked for a window seat.

  The plane taxis and we get closer to the tiny international airport. I’m not even off the plane yet and I’m so acutely aware of how isolated this island is. Even though it belongs to Portugal, it’s waaaay down there off the coast of Morocco, sitting all alone in the wild Atlantic with only slivers of other islands for company.

&n
bsp; I drum my fingers along my thighs, wincing at the chipped red nail polish. I’d gotten a manicure the other day, but they never last long with me. I got the whole shebang—a bikini wax, pedicure, body scrub, mud wrap, you name it. All the things you get done to yourself when you’re about to see the man you love, a man you haven’t seen in three years.

  Fucking hell, I think to myself. It’s been three years.

  I did it.

  We did it.

  We survived it.

  There were times that I missed Luciano so acutely, so deeply, it was like a sickness I couldn’t get rid of, one growing and festering inside me. There was no treatment, and the cure seemed so far off. I felt like I’d bought into some snake oil by some peddling salesman, except the salesman was God, and he was only trying to give me a fix to a problem I brought on myself.

  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 agent (with Luciano retired, he’s now Alejo Albarado’s agent, and that’s going pretty damn well for him).

  And he accepted my apology, chalking up our tangled web to the messy side effects of love.

  It helps that he’s happy and in love now.

  He’s married. Again. This time to a woman that’s a bit older than him, a successful artist. They have a baby together, Alice, named after Marco and Luciano’s mother, who sadly died six months ago, after her breast cancer returned. I hate saying that people “battle” cancer like they’re at war, since it doesn’t care if you’re weak or strong or brave or how much of a “warrior” you are—it takes what it wants. But their mother did fight till the bitter end.

  It was the reason why Luciano didn’t come see me in Houston.

  He came once, about two weeks after I returned to the city and was trying to sort out the ashes of the life I left behind. We had a bittersweet week together, and he wanted to stay longer.

  But then she fell ill again. At this point, she was living by herself on Madeira, Tomás and her having separated. I guess when the going got tough for him, the rat bastard decided to opt out, leaving Luciano and Marco to take care of her. So, Luciano spent his summers in Madeira until he retired as captain of Real Madrid about a year ago. Then he moved there and took care of her until the end.

  Anyway, I think Marco enjoyed the fact that he saw me before Luciano would. I’m sure he’s been rubbing that in Luciano’s face the entire time I’ve been in the air.

  The plane comes to a stop and we start the deboarding process, which takes forever, and all I want to do is be off this plane and in Luciano’s arms. Alas, everyone stands up all at once, taking their bags out of the bins in mass chaos, and I have to sit here squished by the window, waiting, and then waiting some more when my elderly seatmates
take their sweet time getting into the aisle.

  By the time I’m off the plane and into the airport, I’m breathless.

  My pulse is ticking along in my throat, my stomach a whirlwind of nerves.

  It’s happening.

  I’m here!

  I’m also super early, so I prepare myself to not see Luciano right away. I grab my bags from the carousel, my whole life packed into one suitcase, which isn’t too different from when I first stepped foot in Europe twelve years ago.

  Since I already went through customs in Lisbon (which was a nerve-wracking experience as they scanned my passport, but luckily I had no problems), I go right through the exit and into the crowd of people waiting at Arrivals.

  Nervously, I scan the heads, looking for Luciano. Part of me is scared that he’s changed somehow and I won’t recognize him, but I have been Facetiming with him every single day for the last three years, so somehow I doubt it. Still, finally seeing him in person, finally being able to touch him in the flesh, makes me feel like I’m going on a first date or something. I am a giddy mess of butterflies.

  But I don’t see him. I keep walking around and searching, but I don’t see him.

  Then again, the flight was early, and Luciano did say he was quite far from the airport.

  That gives me another nervous thrill.

  For the last year he’s lived on this ranch, but it’s only now that I’m realizing, like really realizing, in the heart of me, that this is going to be my home.

  This island, this country, this is home now.

  It brings tears to my eyes.

  I wipe at them hastily, not wanting to lose it and cry before I even see him.

  I drag my suitcase out into the dry, hot sunshine outside and look around.

  I bring out my phone and check for any new texts.

  There’s one from him.

  Almost there.

  I smile, slipping the phone in my pocket, and I wait in the pick-up area, turning my head up to the bright blue sky, marveling at how crazy it is that I’m here on this rock in the Atlantic, Africa to the east of me.