The next day, I woke up to find that Giulia had already gone home. I looked at my cellphone screen and realized that it was almost noon already. I really had overslept. Also, a notification on the screen showed me that I had a text from Giulia.
Gigi:
Valerie, I’m sorry that I had to leave before you woke up. I had some work due today that I still had to put some finishing touches on, and you just looked too peaceful in your sleep, I didn’t want to wake you up.
Thanks for staying with me yesterday, even though I was a huge mess. It meant a lot to me.
Anyway, I wanna make it up to you. I heard that tomorrow night there’s gonna be a blues concert downtown. You wanna go? Tickets are on me ;)
I sighed. Of course I wanted to go. I’d love to. The girl I had feelings for was asking me out on a date, with music involved. In any other situation, I’d have agreed to that without a second thought. The problem was that this girl I had feelings for actually had feelings for someone else.
Declining her invitation was probably one of the hardest things I’d ever done up to that point. I wrote, erased and rewrote my reply to her at least fifteen times before finally mustering up the courage to press the send button. And once that happened I had to strive to keep myself from deleting the message anyway.
Sorry, Gigi. I’m really busy with the new album right now.
That was a lie. The album was pretty much done, already. I just had to record a couple more sections for the newer songs, but even that wasn’t going to take too much of my time. I was simply avoiding her.
It was ironic, thinking about it. I’ve had girls confess to me, in the past, and back then I was never interested in anything more than being friends and having sex. And now that I actually had feelings for someone, friendship and sex was all I could ever hope for with her. That was never going to be enough for me. I didn’t even want friendship and sex if I couldn’t have her love in the first place. So I was going to casually get myself out of the picture.
And boy, did that hurt.
I’ve broken hearts before. But with Giulia I was actually breaking my own heart. That was new for me.
I laid back on the mattress, and was almost falling asleep again when my cellphone vibrated in my hand.
It was Giulia’s reply.
Gigi:
Ok.
Damn. What did that mean? Was she angry at me? Did she figure out that I was avoiding her? Or was it that she really didn’t care that I had declined her invitation? Did I actually expect her to care? To reciprocate my feelings? Because if I was, I was setting myself up for a fall.
I dropped my phone on the nightstand and went back to sleep. Even though it was broad daylight outside, for once I didn’t feel like leaving my bed at all. I hoped nobody would call me. I wanted to be alone. To mourn for the inevitable demise of my feelings for Gigi.
When I finally woke up and managed to get out of bed, it was already past sundown. I had four missed calls from Zack, which I ignored for the time being, and not one call or message from Giulia. It hurt to be with her, but it also hurt to be ignored. Unrequited feelings were possibly one of the stupidest things that could ever happen to a human being. You know when you get a bruise, or a sharp pain somewhere in your body, and you just start rubbing the skin around it in order to lessen the pain? Well, this felt exactly like that, only there was no skin around the wound to rub, and no way I knew of that could make the pain fade.
I went to the kitchen and prepared some food out of whatever ingredients were left in the cabinet. Halfway through my meal, I heard the doorbell ring. I got up and opened the door, only to find Zacks standing on the other side of it.
He hugged me before I had a chance to react.
“Thank god,” he said. It sounded funny, because he didn’t believe in any gods. “I thought something had happened to you. Why weren’t you answering any of my calls?”
“Sorry, I… was out of sorts,” I admitted. “I didn’t hear you calling me.” That was a half-truth. I knew he had called several times because it showed in my call registry, but I honestly hadn’t heard the phone ring, since I was asleep at the time.
“Is this still about that girl?” Zack asked me.
Surprisingly, I began to cry. Really, really cry. I sobbed and wept and tears streamed down my cheeks as if I was a leaking ceiling during a downpour. I cried and cried and cried some more, all the while Zack hugged me and patted my back, telling me everything would be all right. I wish I could have believed him, then. Instead, I just felt miserable.
I breathed deeply a few times, before calming down enough to sit down on the couch next to my best friend.
“Bro…” I called him, “what do I do?”
“What do you want to do?” he asked me.
“I want her,” I told him, flat out.
“Then tell her that,” Zack suggested.
I laughed. “It’s not that simple, Zacks…”
“You won’t know until you try, sis.”
“No, Zacky, you’re wrong. I know already. She’s in love with her friend, and she doesn’t look at me the way I look at her. It’s all so obvious it’s painful. I wish, Zack, I wish I was brave enough to tell her about my feelings, to get that closure you spoke of yesterday. But I’m not brave. I’m scared. I’m terrified of things that can hurt me, and I know that this will hurt me, if I tell her.”
“Then how are you going to get closure, if you don’t talk to her?”
I opened my mouth to talk, but my voice didn’t resolve itself into words. I closed my eyes, breathed in deeply, then sighed, letting go of my frustration. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “At least, not yet. But I’ll figure it out.”
“Well… then you’d better figure it out quickly,” Zack said.
At first, I simply nodded in agreement. My feelings for Giulia were essentially eating me alive. The sooner I found a way to put an end to those feelings, the better… But then, something struck me as odd, specifically in Zack’s statement. I don’t think that my feelings are the only reason behind that statement.
“Zacks,” I called him, “what do you mean by that?”
“By what?” he said, looking away at some random point in the room, aloof. The nerve of it. I knew Zack well enough to realize when he was feigning ignorance.
“All right, Zack, just tell me what you have done.”
He winced. “You sure?”
“Spill it, boy.”
“Well…” Zack stroked his hair awkwardly, still looking away. “You weren’t answering me, earlier, so I kind of called your girl to see if she knew something about you… She told me that you said something about being busy with the album, and seriously, Val, you’re not a really good liar, so I think she realized that wasn’t truth.”
I pursed my lips, nervously.
“Is that all?” I asked him.
“Not quite… Well, when I said I was going to look for you, she kind of wanted to help and… I’m pretty sure she’s on her way.”
“She’s what?!” I exclaimed, baffled. “You mean, she’s coming here? To my place?”
Zack shrugged. “What’s the problem, eh? It’s not like she has never been here before.”
I had to restrain myself in order not to punch him. Zack might have been essentially my brother, but he was still a huge idiot sometimes.
“Call her,” I told him, handing him my phone. “Tell her you found me. Tell herI’m not here. Make something up. Just… make sure she doesn’t come. Dammit Zacks! Way to put me on the spot, you jerk.”
“I can’t call her!” he protested.
“You can and you will, bro. You had no trouble calling her earlier today.”
“Well, I didn’t have to lie to her, then.”
“News flash: now you do. Now call her and tell her not to come. And make it quick, before she’s actually here.”
Zack hesitated, but did not dare defy me. He took my phone, scrolled through my contacts list, and was about to call Giulia when I stopped him. “What am I thinking?!” I exclaimed, taking my phone from his hands. “You have her number! Call her from your phone, it’s less suspicious that way.”
He nodded, and complied, taking the phone from his pocket in order to place the call.
The phone rang for a long time. Giulia didn’t answer, it just went to voicemail instead. Zack called her three times. After the third, I got up from the couch and walked away to my room.
“Keep trying,” I told him.
I opened my wardrobe and started to change out of my pajamas. I just threw on a t-shirt and a pair of jeans, then decided to add a leather jacket. If Giulia really was coming to my apartment, then I just had to get myself away from it. She’d obviously go away if she arrived and found out that nobody was home.
The doorbell rang. I panicked, and dashed to the bedroom door.
“Zack don’t you open that–” I started to say, but was interrupted once I saw Giulia staring at me from the other side of the doorway.
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