Izan and Mist

Chapter 1 (Mist): To My Home

I wasn't an actress by any stretch of the imagination. I'd always been the kind of girl whose every emotion played out on her face, nothing held back. The way I'd been raised, you expressed yourself freely.

Until tonight.

Tonight, I was forcing myself to keep my face neutral, my expression only slightly quizzical as if I didn't understand the conversation taking place around me. As far as my boyfriend's family and friends knew, I didn't speak a word of Spanish.

As far as my boyfriend knew, I didn't speak a word of Spanish.

But as things became more serious between us over the last two years -- or so I'd thought -- for the last year, I'd secretly taken Spanish lessons at the local college, listened to countless "learn Spanish" language apps, watched TV shows in Spanish with the English subtitles on and read novels written in that beautiful language. I'd even begged my friends who spoke the language to speak to me only in Spanish and to correct my responses to them.

"Don't try to translate each word," one of my professors advised. "You lose meaning, lose what's being said. Listen carefully but don't try to translate a word at a time. At first, you'll pick out certain words, then more and more as you learn."

I'd wanted to save it as a surprise for someday special -- maybe the day he finally proposed to me, if he ever proposed to me -- and I could accept in his native language and then we could speak to each other in both languages. As I listened to the conversation going on around me, I began to realize that maybe that day would never come.

My first clue tonight was going to be a bit of a clusterfuck was when Yvette Ortega had walked through the door.

Six months ago, Izan had stopped by my place, his face concerned. Yvette, his oldest friend, a girl he'd grown up with, had stopped by his parents' house when he'd been there helping his younger brother with a brake job and had asked to speak with him.

She'd told him that she was pissed that he'd stopped spending much, if any, time with her one on one. She'd actually read him the riot act, as if she had more of a right to his time than his girlfriend. Me. On the many occasions we'd met, she'd been subtly rude to me, unwilling to return my overtures of friendship, looking at my clothes as if I'd gone dumpster diving for them. Yvette loved to rub it in my face that she spoke Spanish (thanks to her father), French (thanks to her mother), and English.

"With your education, it's astounding you can even speak English as well as you do," she'd said to me when Izan was off talking to one of his cousins, letting me know that it'd been a mistake to tell her I'd been homeschooled. Only private school educations counted to her. This woman found fault with me every way she could.

She also always spoke only in Spanish with Izan, leaving me out. Or so she thought, lately. Izan, for his part, had translated for me, and he answered her in English after I told him that she did so to deliberately leave me out of conversations.

But that day she'd argued with him had finally opened his eyes. As he and I talked about it, I told him that her saying she wanted them to spend more time together made me feel really uncomfortable, especially given her treatment of me. Izan had told me that he was feeling the same and thought it good to distance himself from her for a while.

"She can see I'll either cut her off completely or she can accept that I prefer to spend most of my time with you," he'd said. Somewhere down the line, he said maybe they could be somewhat friendly again, once she was over her jealousy of the time he spent with me.

But now, she'd just walked through the door of his parents' home for his birthday party, carrying a gift bag for him.

So she'd known.