Chapter 2: The Man Who Forgot How to Love
I watched the Madrid skyline and wondered if loneliness ever changed its color. From my apartment on the twenty-third floor, the city looked alive and vibrant, as if everyone below had a purpose I didn't. The sun glinted off steel and glass, and the streets moved like veins carrying ambition through a body that had never known me. I felt invisible, though I had built this life.
The first months were a blur of airplanes, buses, and hotel rooms. The moment I stepped off the plane, I carried all the pieces of myself that Laura had shattered, wrapped them in neat boxes, and promised I would never open them again. The city demanded focus and results, and for the first time, I let it consume me.
I worked in a business technology firm. The job was brutal at first: early mornings, late nights, and presentations I would spend hours rehearsing in the mirror of my tiny apartment. My colleagues spoke quickly in Spanish and English, mixing slang and technical jargon in a way that made my head spin. But work was precise. Numbers didn't mock you. Deadlines didn't betray you. Projects were tangible victories that built themselves on merit, not charm.
I learned to measure my worth in performance metrics and quarterly reports. My apartment became a laboratory for self-reinvention: new clothes, stricter routines, and a vocabulary for success. I ate alone at minimalist cafés, drank espresso like it could power my heart through the ache, and walked the streets late at night feeling anonymous yet untouchable. The city had a rhythm, and I fell into it like a soldier learning to march.
Loneliness was a constant companion, though I rarely acknowledged it. In the evenings, I sometimes replayed fragments of the past Laura laughing with that other man in the mall, her words cutting through me like a precise scalpel but I pushed the memories into compartments labeled "irrelevant." I wasn't ready to grieve. I couldn't afford it. Not here, not now.
It was during one of those endless evenings in the office, the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, that I first noticed her. Annalucia. She walked past my desk and for a moment the world shifted slightly. She had a presence that was impossible to ignore: tall, graceful, and utterly confident. Her hair was dark, cascading in waves, but it was her eyes that stopped me. They were enormous, almond shaped, and enchanting. They weren't just beautiful; they were curious, sharp, and seemed to peer straight through pretense.
I caught her watching me once by accident, I told myself and for a second, the numbness in my chest stirred. I didn't want it to. My life was precise, measured, and controlled. Emotions were liabilities. And yet, I felt something I hadn't allowed myself to feel in years: awareness.
The office was a machine of deadlines and small victories. I arrived before the sun, left after it had dipped below the horizon, and even then my mind spun with the problems of integration modules, software updates, and client meetings. I built spreadsheets like they were walls around me, isolating the part of me that had once believed in love. Annalucia became a brief intrusion into this order, a reminder that the world could still surprise me, that people could still command attention without demanding anything in return.
I noticed the little things first: the way she corrected a client politely but firmly, the soft laugh she gave when she caught a typo I had overlooked, the elegance with which she carried herself between cubicles. I didn't speak to her much. Politeness and the desire to avoid distraction kept my lips sealed. But I felt the pull of her presence. It was maddening.
Weeks passed. I grew in my job, learned the rhythms of my new life, and steadily became someone even I could respect. I could handle clients without anxiety, lead teams without doubt, and make decisions that mattered. Madrid was changing me. I was no longer the boy who waited on porches. I was a man who built doors of his own. And yet there was that spark.
It appeared suddenly, one Thursday evening. I had stayed late again, my eyes bloodshot from staring at lines of code and reports. The office was quiet, the hum of the air conditioning my only companion. I was walking toward the elevator when she appeared from the stairwell, carrying a stack of files and looking as though she belonged nowhere but here.
"Late again?" she asked, her voice melodic but teasing. I startled because I hadn't expected anyone to be in the building, let alone her.
"Yes," I said, trying to sound casual. "Deadlines."
She laughed softly, a sound that seemed to echo off the stark white walls. "Madrid doesn't sleep, apparently."
We walked toward the elevators together. The silence between us was unusual comfortable but charged. I wanted to speak, to say something clever, but my mouth was dry. I had forgotten how to flirt, how to engage beyond superficial conversation. Yet her presence made the numbness in my chest flicker with something like life.
"Do you ever get tired of it?" she asked suddenly. "All the numbers, all the work?"
I considered the question. Tired? No. Exhausted? Sometimes. But admitting that would feel like weakness. "It's what I'm good at," I said finally. "What about you?"
She shrugged, her eyes glinting in the fluorescent light. "I like it. Keeps me busy." She smiled, a subtle curve of her lips. "But sometimes, yes. I wonder if I'm missing something outside these walls."
I nodded, not because I had anything profound to offer, but because I understood entirely. Her words resonated with a truth I couldn't articulate. I had built walls around myself that even I had trouble seeing over.
The elevator doors opened, and she gave a polite nod, stepping inside before me. I followed. We rode down in silence, a faint electricity in the shared air. She didn't touch me, didn't linger beyond professional courtesy, yet the spark was undeniable.
When the doors opened, she looked back at me and said, almost casually, "See you tomorrow."
I wanted to tell her something, anything that wasn't professional. But I didn't. I simply nodded and walked toward the street. Outside, Madrid was alive, humming in orange streetlights and the muted glow of distant cars. Rain threatened to fall, but the air was warm, carrying the faint scent of café pastries and the city's restless energy.
I walked home alone, thinking about her eyes. Almond-shaped, alert, and impossible to forget. They had the power to unsettle me in ways Laura never could not because of love, but because of potential. Potential that reminded me of the boy I used to be. The boy I thought I had buried in rainy streets, beneath flowers, beneath rejection.
I didn't know her name yet. I didn't speak to her beyond a few polite sentences. And yet, I couldn't shake the feeling that she might be the first person in years who could find the part of me that Laura had destroyed.
I made myself a late dinner, microwaving a frozen meal I didn't care about. I ate standing at the counter, staring out at the skyline. Lights blinked like distant stars, and for the first time in months, I allowed myself to wonder if the numbness would last forever.
Maybe someone could reach me.
I didn't know it yet. I didn't even know her. But as I cleaned the plate and put it in the sink, I thought of her eyes, and for the first time in a long while, I didn't feel entirely invisible.
The city hummed below. I was still broken. I was still raw. But the faintest flicker of something new had appeared. Something dangerous. Something human.
And somewhere, in that same city, she was walking toward the unknown, unaware of the man whose heart she might one day touch, unaware that the boy who had once waited on porches in the rain was beginning to build walls that even she might one day breach.