ADRIANA
“I mean, seriously, who irons their underwear?” Willow uses her stage whisper, which is only marginally quieter than her normal voice.
“Inside voices, Will.” Adriana shoots her friend a look as the teacher tuts loudly at them before demonstrating how to transition into a downward dog.
“I’m just saying, he’s not normal. Besides, he doesn’t like Chinese food. I mean, who doesn’t like Chinese food?” Willow asks the question with wide eyes and no sense of irony.
“Yes, he’s clearly an alien.” Adriana throws the teacher an apologetic shrug, as she wonders for the hundredth time why she still goes to yoga with Willow. She’s the least restful person Adriana knows, but she also happens to be her best friend.
“Exactly, so I had to kick him to the curb.” Willow sighs loudly, as she executes a perfect sun salutation. “And that’s why you have to go out with me tonight.”
Adriana shakes her head at her friend. “Not that I’m not sorry that you’re heartbroken that you and Jon—”
“Jay,” Willow corrects her friend without a trace of annoyance.
“Right, Jon was last week.” Adriana rolls her eyes. “Anyway, it’s not that I’m not sorry that your relationship of twelve whole days is over, but I’m working tonight, my shift finishes late.”
“You’re such a bad liar, Adrie. You blush like a virgin whenever you try!” Willow looks pointedly at her red-faced friend. “And what if tonight is the night that I meet my soulmate? What if you’re stopping me from finding the man that I’m supposed to spend the rest of my life with?” Willow shakes her red hair cut in an achingly stylish bob as if she can’t believe how selfish Adriana is being.
“Jeez, Will, guilt trip much?” Adriana frowns at her friend over her shoulder. Willow knows how to play on Adriana’s over-developed sense of responsibility. They have been pretty much inseparable since Adriana moved to Miami almost eight years ago. She had answered an ad in the newspaper for a roommate and rocked up to the house in South Beach that looked so out of her price range as to be in another stratosphere. She would only find out later that Willow’s rich father bought her things to make up for the fact that he never had any time for her. The house had been one of those things. She’d arrived to find Willow crumpled on the floor a crying mess. She had just broken up with the supposed love of her life. Adriana had talked her down and dried her tears, and they’d been best friends ever since.
“Besides, you know I don’t believe in that stuff. Soulmates are something that only exist in films like The Notebook, that are strategically designed to make you feel bad about your love life or lack thereof.” Adriana knows the spiel by heart; they have been the words she’s lived by for ten years, since that day, since that day that he disappeared without a word, like she didn’t even matter.
“Ms. Garza, is there something we’re keeping you from?” The disapproving tone in the yoga teacher’s voice snaps Adriana out of her nostalgia, a place where she would rather not spend much time. She feels like a naughty schoolchild that’s just been berated by her teacher in front of the whole class.
“Sorry,” Adriana mumbles the word under her breath, sounding like a sullen teenager. Despite Willow generally being the instigator of things, it’s inevitably Adriana who always takes the heat.
Willow carries on talking as if the exchange with the increasingly irate teacher hasn’t even happened. “Adrie, please.” Willow makes her blue eyes as wide as she possibly can, looking the picture of innocence. “Just come out for a little while. I need something to cheer me up, please? Besides, when was the last time you let that beautiful hair down and had some fun?”
“Fun? What’s that?” Adriana plays along, knowing what her friend is leaving out; that she needs to loosen up and get laid. It’s something that Willow tells her repeatedly, as if getting under some random guy is going to solve all her problems.
“Come on, Adrie, just say yes. Drinks are on me, and I bet I can get us in to that hot new club over on Miami Beach.” Willow dangles the promise in front of her friend like a carrot on a stick.
“Which hot new club?” Adriana already knows that she’s lost the battle. Willow doesn’t usually take no for an answer, and it doesn’t look like she’s planning on starting anytime soon.
“I don’t know, but there’s bound to be one! Places come and go on that strip faster than even I can keep up.” Willow shrugs dismissively. Her position in a high profile PR agency means that she has her ear to the ground about anywhere and everywhere that’s hot, new, or up and coming. She has an endless list of contacts who can get her in to any club, bar, restaurant, or sold-out concert. “Come on, Adrie, what have you got to lose? It’s just a night out, not an agreement to a life of indentured servitude!”
“Fine, fine! I’ll go, if only for the sake of you not talking for the rest of the class. This is supposed to be relaxing!” Adriana hisses the words at her friend, trying to concentrate on what impossible position she’s supposed to be contorting herself into. She isn’t very good at yoga, never has been, but she needs something to help counter-balance the stress of her job at the hospital.
The tanned, sinewy teacher gives Adriana another look that would freeze hell over, and she ducks her head down in submission. She has never been good at confrontation and hates getting into trouble, even as a kid at high school. Her dad had always encouraged her to blend in and not draw attention to herself—good or bad. It was a hangover from smuggling himself into the U.S. from Cuba. He had tried to be more American than apple pie and made sure that Adriana knew to keep her head down and her grades up. He had lived under the radar, doing his best to give her the life that he never had. He’d given up everything so that she could have it all. As soon as she was old enough, she had made sure that he was taken care of. She worked as a waitress to put herself through nursing college, and once she’d qualified, she’d sent him money every month, almost half her paycheck.
It was a cruel joke, that after so many years busting his ass for her, he wasn’t even able to enjoy the fruits of his labor. He had dropped dead of a heart attack just a year after Adriana had taken up her nursing position. Even now, so many years later, she couldn’t help but wonder if she would have been able to do something to help him if she had been there and not hundreds of miles away.
Willow always asks her what she has to lose, what it is that she is afraid of, but Adriana can never put into words that what she fears most is losing someone she cares about. That is the trouble with relationships; once you care about someone, you have so much more to lose. The only two men that she’s ever really loved in her life she’d lost—one to a blocked artery and the other to, well, that was the problem, she has never known what she’d lost him to. All she knows is that one day he had disappeared, and she’d never seen him again.