WILDEST FANTASIES

TWELVE

Nina Alvarez is not a bad person.

Born as the second child and first daughter to her Colombian father and American mother, she has worked for recognition and acknowledgement her whole life, wanting nothing else than to be the first in something or for someone one day.

Her brother, Angelo Alvarez was four years older than her, a true athlete to the core. Growing up, he played all kinds of sports but he was the absolute best in football. To get the best out of his talent, the whole family's life was built around his practices, his games and meetings with potential sponsors and coaches who always promised to turn him into the biggest football star the country has seen.

Nina was happy for her brother's success, but she couldn't help but often feel like she was forgotten. Every achievement she has earned, Angelo had a bigger one that took the spotlight. She tried herself out in so many things to find that one field where she would be as successful as Angelo was in football, but she just never got there. Dancing, drawing, debate or drama club, track running, softball and basketball, Nina was good in several of these, but never exceptional enough to earn the same amount of attention and acknowledgement her brother got.

Her desperate need for validation somehow brought her many great academic success, which she combined with her love for literature and that's how she ended up teaching.

She met her ex-husband in high school, but they only started dating after graduation. She was head over heels in love with Damian and it started off like a fairytale. He proposed when she was just twenty-two and they got married a year later. She finally felt like she was someone's number one priority, that for once, she was enough as herself and she didn't have to keep proving that she was worth just as much as everyone else.

It was until Damian started going on all of these business trips and she could feel him distancing himself from her, but she refused to believe that the man she loved could be up to something. They even talked about starting a family recently, but the trips were happening more and more frequently and then she found out about the other woman.

And just like that, she felt like she was worthless again, like she was just second even to the man she chose to marry. It broke her and absolutely destroyed her self-confidence. Definitely took her the most energy to build it back up and move on instead of blaming herself for what happened.

Harry was there for her when she needed a friend the most. After the devastation of her divorce and having to start all over again, she really needed all the support she could get. Her girlfriends all told her the same thing.

"It's his loss!"

"You're better off without him!"

"You'll find your person, don't worry about it!"

It felt nice that they believed she could find her happiness again, but still, she hated hearing these. They made her feel like she was a loser who needed a whole cheerleader group to get herself up from the ground. And starting over in her thirties was harder than a decade ago when she knew she had all the time in the world. All of her friends were settling down and starting a family while she had to go out to the dating field again and go over the same awkward stages she had to struggle with when she was younger.

She felt like Damian took her best years and that she had nothing left in her.

But Harry brought her a sense of joy with never even bringing dating up. When she was around him, she knew she didn't have to worry about feeling like she was behind in life, because one, Harry never really brought it up, it wasn't the only thing he wanted to talk about unlike her friends. And two, the detail that brought Nina closer and closer to him, he seemed to be just as single as she was and being almost the same age, Nina felt like she had someone to relate to. She admired how he didn't seem anxious about not being a father already or even married. She saw Harry just going through life with a calm, accepting attitude that she desired for herself as well.