Keep Cool, Stay Tough

“I am not in love with you.”

“I know.”

“I was not jealous that day.”

“I know.”

“It was just a bad mood, and you flaked on me last minute.”

“I know.”

“I have a date tomorrow tonight.”

“I know.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake stop saying I know!”

I giggled and took a sip of sangria. I was wondering just how long our conversation could go on like that before he lost his cool. Admittedly it went on much longer than I had anticipated.

He paused, glancing up from his plate, putting down his fork, a confused look dominating his face,
“Hold on, how could you possibly know about my date? We haven’t said a word to each other since the Athleti game.”

“You asked out a friend of a friend, and you’re taking her to some show where you claimed you have box seats so it’s going to be super private for you guys,” I repeated with a smile, the girl’s excited expression appearing in my mind’s eye.

“Trust me if someone gets asked out by the Cristiano Ronaldo, they’re going to want to tell everyone and their mothers,” I insisted.

“Wow, that’s creepy,” Then he actually thought about it and added, “But understandable.”

“No secrets amongst friends of friends,” I teased.

“Hey, so you know, I was thinking that maybe I can set you up…with someone that doesn’t call kicking a ball up and down a pitch a living,” He teased back.

“No, thank you,” I answered, not amused.

“Relax, I think I was joking.”

“You think?”

“If you had said you were interested, obviously I would have come up with someone to send you out
with,” Cristiano explained earnestly.

I laughed, “I’m tempted to say yes just to see who you can come up with now.”

“I never doing anything halfway,” He promised.

“Rain check,” I returned not even meaning it.

“So what did you guys even talk about?”

“Who?” I decided to play dumb, just because I could.

“Torres,” He was trying so hard to be nonchalant about asking. He wouldn’t even look up from his plate. All of a sudden, grilled salmon and couscous were the most fascinating things he’s ever laid his eyes on.

I thought about what to say as I gripped at my glass of sangria. I took a generous gulp and thought about what we did actually talk about, about Fernando’s so subtle I missed it suggestion about throwing this odd, I have no idea how it works, but it does, relationship out the window for the sake of something bigger and far scarier. And then I thought about how I didn’t want to tell him any of it.

I noticed Cristiano was grinning up at me. He had on the type of grin that took over his entire face, like the Cheshire cat; he looked fanatical, for what I couldn’t fathom. I was suddenly terrified that Cristiano could read minds.

“Nothing you would be interested in hearing about,” I assured, acting as noncommittal as him while hoping he would drop the grin that was beginning to creep me out.

“You guys talked about me, didn’t you?” He asked instead. I could practically see his ego blowing up before my very eyes.

“He saw us arguing,” I corrected.

Cristiano’s expression darkened quickly after that, “Oh.”

“Yeah,” I nodded gravely. There was no way that Cristiano would ever take me seriously regardless of what my feelings were changing into. All I told him was someone saw us argue, and his face fell instantly. I could only imagine what his reaction would be if I were to mention Fernando’s advice.

“Well, what did you tell him?”

“I was having an affair with you, and I was the reason you broke up with Irina,” I spoke solemnly as I stared him directly in the eye, unblinking, unsmiling.

Cristiano nearly choked on his Perrier.

I burst out laughing seconds after he managed to control his coughing, it sounded forced to my ears, but Cristiano didn’t seem to catch on, “I’m kidding, I promise I’m kidding!”

“You have a very jaded sense of humor, Senna” He muttered as he wiped his mouth.

“I know, but really I didn’t say anything. I just tried to avoid you as a topic,” I lied easily, hating myself for it in the process. Cristiano and I were better off staying the way we were.

“And he just let you?” He pressed.

“After the third time, yeah, he did. Why?”

He shrugged, “I was interested to see how you would describe this.”

“How would you?” I countered.

Cristiano shrugged again,”Are there even words?”

I rolled my eyes, “You’re a footballer, not a poet, stick to what you know, please.”

He chuckled, glancing down at his phone before locking his eyes on mine, “I’ve fooled girls much smarter than you.”

I wondered if he was expecting a call from Gemma. Was he going to go see her tonight after our dinner? I smiled wider, hoping to offset the frown that was threatening to drag my lips down.
I wasn’t ignorant to the fact that he ever so cleverly avoided the question, and he certainly wasn’t ignorant to the fact that I did the same. Why couldn’t he have just labeled us as friends and put my mind at ease? There was a sense of hope budding in me that I was helpless to get rid of now.

Even after getting dropped off home by Fernando last week, I couldn’t drop the idea that he had planted in my head once I had realized what he had actually been on about. That was the power of suggestion for you, I guess.

I had avoided the training grounds all week. That turned out to be really simple to do because Martha would give me a death glare if I so much as glanced at my phone instead of scanning files into the system like the good little worker bee I usually was. On the slim upside, Mina and I managed to stay on top of our daily workload to avoid sticking around after hours. I had assured myself that avoiding the grounds was just a temporary fix. We were giving each other space, and after the blowout on Tuesday night, it seemed like the best choice.

Without Cristiano and the extra hours of work to coordinate my schedule around, there was a massive hole of time that I spent filling in with Zoe and Chloe instead. That was how I found out about the new girl getting sweet talked by Cristiano. I still have no idea how I managed to remain so cool and collected as that girl continued to go on and on and on about what a sweetheart and a gentleman Cristiano Ronaldo was with her. I just wanted to shout at the top of my lungs, “I know!” But somehow I refrained. Somehow I managed to keep cool.

Just as I was finally beginning to accept that maybe it was up to me to take the first step on the road to making up with Cristiano, I discovered a very curt, straight forward text from him on my phone on Saturday night a couple hours after Real Madrid had beat three more points out of Malaga in front of a home crowd. Fast forward about half a day and I was sitting across from him having fish and stepping back into our bubble as if it had never even popped in the first place.

Neither of us bothered to pretend to be sorry about what happened at the Calderón. We barely even talked about the argument; apparently a lot can happen in a week for Cristiano Ronaldo. We instead talked about the fans that had stuck out in his mind, about the interviews he wanted to complain and forget about in the same instant, and about how he had seen Irina at a restaurant opening two days after the first leg against Athleti.

“Is that why you asked out this new girl, Gemma?”

“Is that seriously her name?

I snorted, “Yeah I’m pretty sure it is, why?”

“Huh,” Cristiano tilted his head, “I thought it was Emma.”

“You’re messing with me?” I asked, half laughing, half aghast by his casualness.

“She was drunk and mumbling when I met her, I was only half paying attention at the time too,” He laughed at the memory.

“You don’t seem so smitten,” I returned with a raised eyebrow.

“I’m not,” His expression was impassive.

“Then why…” I trailed off, suddenly feeling like a complete child, “Never mind. I think I got it.”

He reached over and patted my head, as if I had just shown him the gold star I had gotten on a spelling test. I rolled my eyes, and he laughed. I surprised myself by how much I had missed him. It was easy to not allow myself to think about it, but once I did, the realization hit me like a ton of bricks.

“Tell me who you think my ex-boyfriend is,” I demanded abruptly. I could take talking about his brand-new potential relationship for so long after all.

“No,” He was as obstinate as ever.

“I might go visit him.”

“Are you serious? Didn’t you decide against it?”

“Yes, well, now I decided against deciding against it. People are capable of changing their minds, Cris.”

“What’s got you wanting to go see him?” He asked instead, and I noticed his expression harden and his voice go flat, losing all inflection of emotion.

“I want to tie up loose ends. I’m stuck. I can’t move on, and I’m ready to, but I need to hear him out before I do,” I blurted out.

“He tied all those loose ends up for you years ago,” Cristiano pointed out.

“I need to know what I did for him to think it was okay for him to do that to me, and in a really weird way, I had made it okay for him to walk all over me. The person I am now doesn’t understand the person I was then, and I don’t know when I made the jump, but I’m hoping if I talk to him, it’ll make some sense,” I explained with furrowed brows and a jutted lip.

“You’re making a mistake. You’re only going to complicate things and go back to being that person you used to be,” Cristiano insisted.

“What makes you say that?”

He didn’t answer.

“I’m going to see him,” I confirmed, almost daring him to prove to me that it was a terrible idea.

He refused to continue the conversation beyond that. I got frustrated and changed the subject. I forced on a smile and cracked a joke about Gemma. Even after that small blimp of discomfort, we still had a pleasant meal together. It wasn’t until we were parked a street away from Martha’s house that he broached the subject about Cesc.

“I’ve been in this situation that you’re in right now, Senna, and it embarrasses me to remember that person I was because of her, and I made the mistake of going back, of trying to figure out what went wrong, of trying to tie up loose ends, and you know what happened?”

“What happened?” I whispered, as I stared up at his face watching the streetlight’s golden light catching the gold flecks in his light brown eyes.

“I wasted an entire summer with her when I could have been with the people that really mattered to me,” He finished and continued to stare straight ahead, lost in thoughts and memories that he would never tell me about.

I was pretty sure I knew who he was talking about. Cristiano was tabloid fodder all over Europe, and of course people obsess over his arm candy of the week, or in this case, of the summer.

“Oh.”

“That’s probably not enough for you to change your mind,” He chuckled, shaking his head once, twice, before turning to look at me, “I know, but I thought I’d tell you that you don’t understand anything anymore than you already do by going back. You only waste more time and create more confusion to accompany more what-if scenarios.”

“It’s just that this is something that’s been on my mind for a while now, and if I don’t talk to him properly I feel as if I’m never going to be able to move on with my life. Maybe the love of my life is a person that kicks a ball up and down a field, and I’m depriving myself because of one bad incident. I need this to be pushed into the past and not interfere with my present.”

I felt defensive of Cesc all of a sudden. Sure he had been a crap boyfriend, but maybe I had been a crap girlfriend. There were a million possibilities, and if I could just narrow it down, then I wasn’t going to count a visit to London as a waste of time.

“You know best,” Cristiano relented, but it was blaringly obvious that he didn’t agree with me.

“Your opinion matters to me.”

He nodded his head once, and I took that as my cue to go.

I considered Fernando’s advice all over again. I had been pushing it out of my head ever since reading Cristiano’s text yesterday, and now in one swift shove, it was back in the forefront of my thoughts.

“What’s wrong?”

I realized my hand was on the door handle, but I was still gawking at him. His hand had gone to turn the car’s ignition on, but I had yet to get out of the car.

I shook my head, trying to shake out all of the inappropriate thoughts, “Too much to think about mixed with too much wine.”

“You’ll at least get a good night’s sleep out of it,” He assured, and I heard his phone notification announce that he had an unread text.

I smiled, “Probably, so I’ll see you.”

“See you.”

I opened the door and heard him say my name. I turned back and he was watching me with a strange conflict of emotions playing across his features. It was almost as if he was holding himself back from saying something.

“Senna we’re good, right?”

I nodded, “Yeah, of course. Why?”

He smiled, “No reason. Good night.”

“Good night.”

This needed to be addressed, and I needed to stop saying things needed to be handled and not doing anything about anything. Was my no footballers rule a good rule, or maybe just maybe…Cristiano was the one possible exception? Why was this beginning to sound less and less crazy every time I contemplated it?

I walked inside and Martha was still up, and so was Mina. They were sitting in front of the television watching the on demand program’s selection play on a loop.

Mina was the one that turned around first. I waved hey. She looked relieved and alarmed to see me all in the same instant.

“You’re home, mom, Senna’s home.”

Martha jumped up, a wide smile popped onto her face.

“Sweetheart, hi, had a good evening, I trust?”

“Better than expected, how are things here?”

They both nodded a bit too vehemently.

“Good.”

“Great.”

They looked at each other and laughed at the accidental unison.

“I think I need to go for a run actually,” I blurted. And escape the twilight zone episode unfolding in front of me.

“It’s past midnight,” Martha started.

“I run fast, it’ll be fine, I just can’t seem to wind down. Something feels off, and I can’t put my finger on it.”

Of course my thoughts were initially running circles around Cristiano and any potential bizarre, budding feelings for him, but now as I stood in the hallway watching Martha and Mina exchanging glances, my circles just kept going wider, and I was losing all inclination to sleep.

“So is everything alright here?” I asked again.

They both nodded again, but didn’t go verbal this time.

I shrugged. Maybe it’s just me. I just needed to clear my head, and just be satisfied that I was back on level terms with Cristiano.