Love Never Fails

Chapter 8: Nick

Deep down, I like it.

I know I said earlier that this trip had started off wrong. My hopes of it ever getting any better were below zero this morning, but joining Sarah and Dara has been a nice refreshing change. And going out to the sunny outside to see things other than the brown, boring, deserted surroundings of the town the hotel is in, is also welcome.

True, I'm still sleepy. Jet lag is draining me. But I'm trying my best to stay awake. I had two coffees this morning for breakfast, as dry and dark as I could make them with the limited instant coffee options in the buffet. Then, after we got off the shuttle to Madrid city center, I got another one quickly in a corner shop, this time a proper espresso, so thick I could have cut it with a knife. It's so dark that even I am struggling to finish it. I'm not saying I won't need a couple more coffees to get me through the day until we go back to the hotel, but it's all worth it. For once in a very long time I'm starting to have fun.

After this morning's quite dark episode, I was seriously thinking of curling into a ball and not going anywhere until the plane took me back home. Now, we've hopped onto an open city tour bus, seeing a beautiful city at a bird's eye, leaving worries behind and best of all, catching up with an old friend I had not seen in forever. And making a new one.

Every bit I get to know from Dara is better than the previous one.

He seems like a genuinely great guy. My first impressions of him being a truly caring and fun young man all continue to check today. He's funny, tactful to the point of apologizing too much —particularly when the topic of my parents comes up— and a good listener. He's one of the few transparent adults I've found, willing to put others first, even if his outward image of perfection is affected. Even with his sister, which, let's be honest, uses every opportunity to push his buttons. Like she did with me back in the day. The best, however, is that he doesn't even know how rare he is. I feel drawn to him in many more ways than I initially thought.

I mean, he's very handsome, OK? He's got a blend of understated perfection mixed with some trademark good looks that's difficult to get past by. And dreamy, big expressive eyes. But he's much more than that. With anyone else before him, I've been able to separate the real world from my feelings. I've let my mind imagine one-thousand and one stories while keeping things civil and, above all, "straight," in many situations like this before. But for some mysterious reason, with him I can't. He somehow feels like family, as if live had always meant to be lived close together, and I don't want to imagine not keeping him around, not even in real life. Maybe it's all in my head, but it doesn't seem he feels any different. Maybe it has something to do with the history I have with his family, and his sister, that they basically knew me since I was born. I don't know. In any case this kind of warmth is something I hadn't felt since...

Well, since my mum gave me that last hug.

We've been catching up about everything that's happened in the past... Ugh. Twenty-three or twenty-four years! I feel like an old man now. But it's good to talk about those old good times when we had less worries. And to get to talk about my parents in a time where remembering them doesn't hurt so much.

"So, basically in the end your dad conducted my dad's study, and started mine too, but I was useless." I tell Dara, who's sitting besides me in the open area of the bus that's going around the center of Madrid. "He actually left it halfway when you guys moved to Spain, and my dad never picked it up."

"What?" Sarah says, I don't know why she puts that horrified face.

"My dad had only just got baptized. He didn't feel he'd do it right. Plus he was very much a country kind of guy, never a study-type. I didn't get to study until we moved to Canada and a family close-by restarted it."