Doubt Me Not

Sergio Ramos always marveled at how another person’s decision could so drastically alter his own life. He was angry and fuming over the callous ousting of one of his best friends and his club captain Iker Casillas. He had wanted nothing more than to spend his summer as far from Spain as he could because of other people’s choices.

Although it seemed as if every time summer came around all he wanted was distance from Spain and time away from football; the reasons changed but his actions did not. The summer of 2015 kept his tradition going. Sergio hadn’t even bothered to really deal with any of the offers to stay at Real Madrid, any of the excited talks of captaincy, or even hear any of the lucrative offers to leave for England or Italy. He ignored his agent’s calls, texts, and emails until he finally gave in and let Sergio be.

So Sergio spent the start of his summer away from it all in the company of friends. And in a blink of an eye it was the start of the preseason, and the young footballer settled back into the swing of things for most of July and the first week of August.

He was back in Spain, back in a Real Madrid uniform with the captaincy looming ahead of him. Offers from clubs would continue to pour in as long as the transfer window remained open, but Sergio would not leave Real Madrid. As angry and as frustrated as the departures of not only Iker, but also his manager Carlo Ancelotti made him, he simply could not leave the club that he considered his home.

There was a two week lull in the middle of August before the La Liga season began, and Sergio sat with a group of friends to contemplate where to go. His phone began to sound, and with one look at the ID, he knew better than to dodge the call.

“Hello, mama,” Sergio quietly greeted as he left the table where his group of friends barely smothered their chuckles.

And of course try as he might, Sergio could not refuse his mother’s pressing invitation to return to his hometown to visit his family. One week, she said, give me one week because she knew her son would not deny her request.

She understood the departing of her son’s close friend and teammate had left a strong impact on him, and all she could ask for was the chance to see for herself just how well or how awful her son was coping. When people abruptly departed from Sergio’s life, he had a difficult time getting past it.

There were times where she was certain that he still hadn’t really forgotten about the girl that had disappeared from his life so many summers ago, leaving nothing but a letter in her wake. It would certainly explain why he refused to return to Sevilla during the summer. To this day, she had no idea what had been written in the letter, her son had kept the contents a heavily-guarded secret, but she saw the resulting grief on her son’s face. She could only hope that one day that girl would be held culpable for the manner in which she had left her son.

Sergio was surprised that upon returning to his old home during the August heat he began to feel a sense of calm rush over him. He hadn’t felt this way during the entire preseason; maybe even during the entire summer. As the week escaped from him in laughter and games with his family, the sense of calm contentment remained as strong a presence as the heat that clung to the air.

“You won’t be as relaxed anywhere else,” Paqui immediately jumped on the opportunity to convince her son to stay until Real Madrid’s final friendly of the preseason against Fenerbahçe at the Bernabéu.

“I won’t be able to find your cooking anywhere else either,” Sergio complimented with a wide, content grin as he sat back against his chair and pushed the completely cleared plate away from him.

“Stay,” Paqui insisted with an eager smile, “Don’t leave.”

The next day when Sergio had assured himself he would be on a flight to Monte Carlo, Mykonos, or even Las Vegas – just anywhere outside of Spain for just a little while longer, he found himself walking down a familiar tree-lined street that he swore he would never tread again. His walk had started out innocently enough with a craving for coffee. There was a café that made an amazing macchiato; a place that she had introduced him to so long ago. Curiosity and yearning mingled discordantly in his mind as he struggled against visiting the places he had frequented with her.

Sergio had given up his search for the girl that had left him behind ten years ago with the hurtful understanding finally dawning on him that if someone does not want to be found, they will not be; no matter how many times you shout their name, no matter how many times you read the letter to look for clues. Yet somehow even after of all the hurt, all of the disappointment, and especially after that damned letter that left him wallowing for something that was never really his, his feet still led him down the familiar tree-lined street to the all too familiar dance studio that he used to frequently wait outside of as a teenager the summer before he left for Madrid. Just a glance, he promised himself, just to see if anything had changed.

As he drew closer to the building at the end of the road he noticed that a class was in session, and a bass beat was just barely thumping past the street noise around him. And then he noticed the slender brunette moving her hips in the doorway with her back facing the street as she occasionally glancing behind her to the road.

Sergio froze, his breathing stopped, and he could have sworn his heart had skipped a beat when he realized he could put a name to the face glancing around. After so many broken leads, broken promises, disappointing double takes all over Spain, he finally saw her again at her old dance studio in Sevilla of all places, and he knew it was her and somehow still he could not believe his eyes. He needed to move closer, and so he chucked his drink in the nearest trash bin with his eyes never leaving the dancer in the doorway. A part of him still believed she was a figment of his imagination and he didn’t even risk a blink as he picked up his pace with a million and one thoughts hurtling around in his head.

Sergio needed her to answer for the letter that had broken his heart. The letter that claimed she loved someone else. He wouldn’t, he couldn’t believe a single word written in that letter until she said the words aloud herself.

“Ximena!” Sergio’s eyes were focused only on the brunette spinning and laughing in the doorway and nothing else as he sprinted across the road, hoping that his eyes weren’t once again teasing him. At this point, he had lost count of how many brunettes he had mistakenly ran up to only to be faced with yet another bewildered stranger. Every time he told himself it would be the last time that he would ever allow himself to hope it was Ximena, yet he still found himself shouting out her name as he broke into a sprint. He didn’t know what he would do if he showed up and found that the dancer in the doorway just was a stranger. His hope was too far gone to reign back now.

“Mena!” Sergio waved his hand, hoping to catch her attention.

Sergio heard the brief screech of brakes against pavement, but it didn’t immediately occur to him that the car was braking for him. He didn’t realize he was in the middle of the street. He was so stubbornly focused on the dancer in the doorway, that the rest of the world had disappeared for him in those few, disbelieving moments. The last thing he was conscious of was a sharp ache at the back of his head and side as he hit the hot cement with his eyes shutting out the bright sunshine.
A car door slammed shut and a panicked voice just kept repeating, “Oh my God, I’ve killed Sergio Ramos. Mena, get out here! I can’t tell if he’s breathing!”

The dancer that Sergio had been so intently focused on picked up on the name and ran over as quickly as she could. She breathed heavily from running outside of the studio in such a panicked, breakneck speed as she quickly considered her options. She thought she was seeing his face in another stranger’s face when she had glanced outside; it certainly wouldn’t have been the first time she had made that awkward mistake. But it was really him. Yet, he looked so different since the last she had seen him in person, but it was really, truly him.

Ximena dropped down to her knees and stared down at the footballer with wide eyes and a dropped jaw as he lay on the ground. She pressed her two fingers to his neck to check for a pulse and find a stead beat.

In the ten years that had separated her from Sergio, she had imagined billions of ways of reuniting with him, but finding him unconscious on the ground had never occurred to her.

“I’m going to go to jail in fucking foreign country, oh my god, but I swear, he just ran right in front of me, I didn’t see him, I wasn’t even texting this time,” The young girl with the long black hair paced and babbled and glanced at the footballer as she nervously twisted her hair into a loose braid, the hysterics building and bubbling out of her like a carbonated drink escaping an open, shaken can.

“Sasha, shut up, help me get him in the car.”

Ximena realized she was being ridiculous, but she hadn’t been this close to him in ten years, and the difference time had inflicted on him was astounding and distracting to her. She couldn’t focus on what she needed to do long enough to make a decision.

“Are we going to bury him?”

“Don’t be fucking stupid and quit panicking; he’s breathing just fine, we need to get him to a hospital to get his head checked,” Ximena finally decided as she stumbled to her feet.

“Why can’t we call the paramedics?”

“You just hit a famous footballer now is really not the time to be questioning me,” Ximena bent down and lifted one side of Sergio with the younger girl quickly following suit as people started to slow down and glance over.

“Sit in the back seat with him,” She ordered, “And do not ever drive the way I am about to drive.”