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I arrived at a beautiful coffee shop that sells a wonderful Mocaccino.
Suddenly, I saw a very well-dressed woman enter, with a specular attractiveness that captivated everyone who saw her pass by.
She looked familiar, so I tried to detail her better without looking like I was being forward. I had to rub my eyes, it was Marlene, my girlfriend from my teenage and college years and the one I hadn't seen in over 30 years. She and I had broken up after a heated fight and a vow to never speak to each other again.
She turned around and when she saw me, she didn't even give me a smile. That intimidated me, but I wanted to be polite and invited her to sit with me, even though I felt a discomfort in my stomach like when my life is in danger.
She accepted the invitation and came over, I stood up and held out my hand to greet her. She did her thing but added a kiss on my cheek. I was so surprised by the kiss that I didn't even make a foolish move.
My heart began to pound and I was overcome with emotion. I didn't know what to do, what to say. All sorts of ideas were going through my mind, but none of them came to my mouth to speak.
She, with her penetrating gaze, the same one I met her with, made me feel like she was stabbing me. I decided to wait for her to start talking and I would just answer. I felt she was going to claim something from me after 30 years.
Her first words were to compliment me on my appearance, she even told me that I was handsome. I just replied that wine gets better with age and that she looked wonderful.
After a few minutes of flattering each other, the moment I didn't want to come. He remembered the last time we had spoken, the argument, the hurtful words we had said to each other. I wanted to run away, I was sure I was going to be shot at point-blank range.
Silence filled the air for a few seconds, but for me, it felt like hours and my best way out was to ask him what he wanted to drink.
She told me to choose mine and my mind wandered to the Mocaccino, an excellent coffee combined with chocolate to sweeten any beast. I asked the waiter for two.
But the tension was still there, hovering in the air. The coffees came super-fast, I thought that was very apt, her piercing gaze and icy silence mortified me, apart from the fact that I seemed to have a paralysis of the tongue; I couldn't speak fluently.
Finally, she decided to break the ice with a few kind words in her gentle voice, and from then on, the conversation flowed more easily.
We talked about our lives, about what we had done in all those years, about the things that had happened to us. We discovered that we had more in common than we thought and that somehow we were still connected.
But even so, the tension was still there, like a shadow hanging over us. Until, suddenly, she finished drinking her coffee, got up from her chair, and reached out her hand to me.
She told me that she sincerely regretted everything that had happened between us.
I shook his hand and expressed that I felt the same way. In an instant, all the tension was gone.
We realized that we had been carrying the grudge for years, not realizing that it was pointless. As time went by, things changed along with us.
We had overcome the upset and had discovered that, despite everything, there was something that still connected us.
I couldn't hold back and the unexpected for her came out of my backpack. It was something I had had with me for years, specifically since we broke up and I could never throw it away. Maybe I had hoped that one day I would show it to her.
I handed it to her unopened, a small black suede box. She could not disguise her face of questioning and surprise.
I always had it with me, the idea was that the night we broke up would be the most wonderful night of our lives, but it wasn't like that.
She opened the small chest curiously and burst into tears.
That night of the fight, I wanted to propose to her, but our destinies changed because of an ill-intentioned comment, which made her doubt my love and she began to insult me and I didn't have the wisdom to keep quiet.
I told her that at that moment I wanted to marry her, that I wanted a future together for eternity. All these years I had kept the engagement ring as a token that I had loved passionately, but that I was not brave enough to defend myself against the false comment that had been made to her and let it all end.
She looked at him with tears in her eyes, moved by those memories that had been hidden for so long.
I was still in love with her and the crazy thought crossed my mind that I should ask her to marry me at that moment.
But she spoke up, interrupting my beautiful thought, and told me that it was a good thing I didn't take the ring out then because she had realized that she had never really loved me and provoked the fight to end it.
I took a long sip of my coffee, took the ring from her, and left her talking to herself. Further on I passed an old woman on the pavement and gave her the ring. The old woman shouted at me and she accepted.
If I fall in love again, let it be with a good coffee.
Original content is written exclusively for #STB Creative Writing Prompt Week 35 - Option 2
I use CANVA to edit the images you see in my publications. I have also used remove.bg for the ring image.
It is my responsibility to share with you that, as a Spanish speaker, I have had to resort to the Deepl translator to share my original content with you.