Page 80 of Fruit
Ironically, work seems easier when I know I won’t have to do it forever. I contact Hikari about doing a gallery show of my own. I think about the fear paralysing me and how useless it is.
I tell the guys and Jack about my plans for the gallery show and for the Master’s program. Joaquin isn’t surprised, as I’d already talked about it with him, but everybody else perks up from their couch slumps.
“Iva! That’s amazing,” Ezra cries out, moving to my couch to hug me. Jack, who’s sitting beside me, squeezes my shoulder.
I get caught up in the effervescence of the celebrations around me. Iván offers to help me pick out the paintings for the gallery if Hikari gives the go-ahead, which I gladly accept. They rib me about moving up in the world, and I roll my eyes at them.
“Right. Iva. About this Sebastián guy,” Ezra says, ’cause he can never leave well enough alone.
“Stop,” I groan.
“Come on, we want to meet him.”
“You will, shut up.”
Iván turns to Isadoro. “Remember when she called us stupid boys for being oblivious?”
“I wasn’t there for that, but I can imagine it,” Isadoro replies. I blow a mature raspberry at all of them.
“Fuck off, all of you, or I’ll sic Nina on you.”
“No, please,” Joaquin deadpans, “Not that evil creature of the night.”
“You haven’t seen her when she gets hyper. She almost scratched me once.”
Ezra laughs. “Shealmostscratched you? Might as well put that crazy animal down, then.”
“Don’t even joke about that,” I hiss at him.
Luckily, the subject of Sebastián drops. It’s only later, when I’m alone with Isadoro in the kitchen, that it surfaces again. Isadoro is the one I’ve spent the least amount of time with, as he only started socialising regularly in the past few months, and being, along with Joaquin, one of the more reserved ones in the group. Which is why I start slightly when he begins talking suddenly as he passes me another clean plate to dry.
“I wish I’d told Iván sooner. About how I felt,” he says. I take the plate from him slowly.
“Oh?”
“I felt…there were so many years. And we went through so many things—not alone, exactly, but…we could have been sure. We could have made the most of our time. Every leave I was here…it could have saved us a lot of nonsensical pain,” he says.
I look at him, but his eyes are on his hands as he cleans the next plate.
“And,” he adds more softly, “I hate that I hurt him by keeping silent.”
“It’s different for you two,” I say, because I understand he’s talking as much about me and Sebastián as he is about himself and Iván.
“How?”
“You guys are, like…meant to be,” I say, not having any better way of putting it. They had known each other since they were children, had fallen in love, had maintained their friendship through years of war. Something had always tied them together, no matter what happened.
“What does that even mean? ‘Meant to be’?We’ve had to fight for everything we have. Everything. We still do. After I returned…what we have wasn’t given to us by fate or whatever. We dug it out of the earth with our bare hands.”
I bite my lip, taking the next offered plate silently. It stretched for a while, framed by the sound of the running water.
“I get what you’re saying,” I tell him. “But…I’ve never had a relationship before. What if I—”
“Neither had I. And I’m not saying it’s wrong to be scared. He probably has his own reasons to be scared.”
“You don’t know—”
“I can guess. Look, Iva, I’m not telling you what to do. I’m just telling you what I would have done if I could do it again.”
