Cold as Ice

Love is blind. Unfortunately I’m not. I wish things could be so simple. If they were, I wouldn’t be sitting here. Murilo wouldn’t be holding my hand and looking at me with those big puppy eyes. Sometimes they were so pretty, and then other times I saw the truth. Murilo scared me with his cryptic sayings and the way he dressed all in black. Was he tearing up? Oh Jesus. I didn’t need this crap on top of everything else. I was a good college student, holding down two jobs, maintaining a 4.0. The last thing I needed was an attached, sensitive and overly persistent man trying to woo me when I already had a boyfriend.

My parents were going to kill me if I didn’t get home soon. I was sitting in the passenger’s seat of an old beige Camry. The passenger’s window was permanently stuck about two inches open. There was a gentle wind blowing snow through the crack, onto my shoulders and in my hair and I reminded myself that it could have been worse. After all, at least the window wasn’t completely rolled down. The snow was coming down in thick bundles of crystals, piling in around the car and I couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of the windshield. We were sitting in the parking lot of an abandoned movie theatre and we had been there for over two hours, trying to wait out the storm.

I squirmed uncomfortably in my seat. Murilo was giving me the eye again. This is what I get for trying to be friendly and agreeing to hang out “just as friends”.

I took a moment to reflect on what happened when I had first gotten in the car tonight. “Murilo, you look so bright,” I smiled, noting that he wasn’t wearing his usual black shirt, black jeans, black heeled boots and black jacket. Murilo was a self-proclaimed Goth. He hated all things color and protested my love affairs with Ralph Lauren and Louis Vuitton. His long, dark and usually unkempt hair was pulled back neatly into a ponytail and he looked clean in a crisp white button up and blue jeans.

He breathed hard. “I wanted you to be more comfortable tonight.”

The statement came out oddly. I tried to shrug it off, remembering that I was here getting into the car with a strange, slightly older man because I wanted to add color and variety to my life and list of friends. Even as ugly and weird as Murilo was, there was something intriguing about him. He was smart, a mechanical engineering major and we had agreed earlier in the semester to work on our Calculus homework together. During our study sessions, he spoke so passionately about the corruption of corporate America and those damn label slaves that it was actually a bit refreshing. I also liked to talk to him because he was Bolivian and I needed a speaking partner to brush up on my Spanish. Originally, I thought he would be a good source for new Latino Pop, but I quickly learned that his true love was German Techno.

He shifted toward me a little, trying to scoot his large frame into an upright position as he realized that he was slumping in his seat. His long legs were crammed into the little crevice underneath the dashboard and it was impossible for him to sit up perfectly straight because he was so tall that his head hit the ceiling. It was a lose-lose situation and I did feel a little bad for him. But then again, he was the one who got us into this situation. He was the one who had brought me to an abandoned movie theatre, turning to me as he pulled in and saying “Gosh, I didn’t realize that this place was closed. You know, we can go back to my apartment and watch a movie there if you’d like. My roommate moved out last month, so I have the apartment to myself.”

Get out of town buddy. “I think I better get back to campus.” I shook my head. “I just remembered that have a problem set that I need to do.”

“Christina” Murilo reached out a gloved hand to my fleece mittens. I felt like a small child compared to him. “I feel like you don’t take me seriously enough.”

My eyebrows raised in disbelief before I could stop them. I was about to argue with a man more than twice my size. He was pushing three-fifty. It was my fault I was even here in this man’s car. Why did I have to be so damn nice? I started to realize that the whole reason why I had decided to go out with him to a movie was pity. I wanted to be the one nice person to him that showed him that the world wasn’t really all that bad and that people with money weren’t the two-dimensional characters he depicted them to be.

Murilo had made his intentions obvious from the beginning. From the moment I first met him, with that little twinkle in his eye, to the day he brought me a box of chocolates and a bouquet of flowers “just because”, I knew what was going on. Through some stroke of bad luck he had become smitten. He thoroughly creeped me out, and I tried to assure myself that he was simply misunderstood. But then I remembered all those weird moments where he said or did something that just didn’t seem to fit with our “just friends”’ rule.

It was Halloween. I met the ugliest pirate I had ever seen. He was huge in length and width, a round belly protruding from a white shirt, a shimmering black vest and those awful false teeth with rotten gums and blackened spaces where the tooth was missing. I shivered. Murilo was the ugly pirate. My eyes moved up and down, studying him intensely. I was horrified by the fact that I had ever even considered any sort of relationship beyond being study buddies.

“Do you like my sword?” He grinned.

“Excuse me?” I choked.

He pulled out a long sword and pressed the point against my chest. “I will kidnap you, and you’ll be my fair maiden. We will sail the seven seas together and I won’t let you go for all the kings’ ransoms in the world.”

Clearly Murilo liked role play.

“Do you have a nice dress?” I could hear him grinning through the telephone.

How the hell had he gotten my phone number? “A few,” I answered honestly. “Why?”

“What are you doing tonight?”

“I’m not sure. What’s up?”

“Well, there’s this medieval reenactment thing I’m going to tonight and I’d like you to come with me.”

“And watch? Sounds neat.” Two years of acting classes were carrying me through this conversation and actually sounding interested in what he was talking about. All the while I asked myself why I even humored him.

There was a silence on the other line. I wondered for a moment if I had lost the connection when he finally spoke up. “Well actually, I was hoping to be the dragon slayer and you could be my damsel in distress.”

And then there was tonight’s disaster. The storm, the car battery, my cell phone and then: “Christina, I need to tell you something.”

Oh Jesus, here it comes. I knew he would say it eventually, but tonight of all nights was the worst. He smiled. His eyes twinkled. And then it came out in a sort of verbal diarrhea. Splat. “Christina I love you. I truly love you like no one else ever will.” I watched his heart crumple when I shook my head. He knew that I didn’t feel the same way.

“No.” Quickly, I realized that I had let this whole situation go too far. I scrambled for a reason. Somehow, being nice had turned into leading him on, and now I was faced with the awful truth. Murilo was the only person who had ever actually loved me. The feeling was intense, and it scared me more than his ugly pirate outfit and his weird fantasies.

But this was wrong and I knew it. Murilo was simply a confidence-booster. He complimented me without even saying a word. Just the way he looked at me made me know that he appreciated me. He thought I was pretty and he said so when no one else would. It was such a stark contrast to high school when I sat alone at the lunch table. No boyfriends, not even a second glance in school. And suddenly in my first year of community college a man, a grown twenty-six year old man was paying attention to me. But I had to make it right.

“You don’t love me?” He stuck out his lower lip like a child in the candy aisle, begging his mom for a Snickers bar. It was pathetic to see a grown man -a giant really- cry. To tell him the truth was going to hurt, to pretend I liked him would eventually hurt more.

“No.” I decided that the role of the cold-hearted bitch was the role I seemed to play best at the moment.

His cheeks turned red and his eyes grew narrow. It was the first time I had ever heard him raise his voice. “No one will ever love you the way I do Christina. You know that!” His pout turned into a frown and then he furrowed his eyebrows in a mix of anger and frustration. Murilo pursed his lips so tightly they are nearly blue. Suddenly, I wondered if he is as cold as I am.

“What do you want from me Murilo? I represent everything you hate. I’m a label addict, I love money and I hate the color black. It depresses me.”

“But Christina,” he nearly begs, realizing he had made a mistake when I scowled. “You bring color into my life. You make me want to be a better man.” What cheesy romance movie have I heard that in before? “Don’t be an idiot. You’re a total fool if you don’t stay with me.”

I reached for the door handle, attempting fruitlessly to open the door as my mitten paws slipped from the metal handle every time I yanked at it. For the love of Joe, what more could go wrong with this night? Tears of frustration began to well up in my eyes and I turn back to Murilo sweeping away the little droplets.

“You don’t believe it now, but trust me Murilo, you deserve better than me. I’m a bad person.” I slip off my mitten and opened the door.

A teardrop traces my cheekbone, stinging all the way down as the cold air freezes the water to my cheek. I don’t know where I am and I certainly don’t know where I’m going. All I care about is that creepy Murilo is out of my life and I have learned my lesson about love.

A heart is not toy. I repeat to myself sophomorically.

“Christina!” Murilo calls out through the crack of his window as I begin to tromp through the knee-deep snow on my journey to god-knows where. A light bulb appears over my head as I remember the grocery store across the street, maybe a good five hundred feet away. It would take me a while to get there through the snow, but at least I would be away from Murilo.

The wind whips violently, cracking at my body and pushing me away from the car. I pull my jacket in tighter. Fuck its cold. I swear I’ll have icicles dangling from my chin when I arrive at the building, but I don’t care. I can hear him whimpering but I don’t look back. Believe me, I want to because I swear as I leave I hear the wind carry Murilo’s message to my frozen ears.

“I don’t care how long it takes Christina. I’ll wait for you forever.”