33- Alice Place

33- Alice Place
"I remembered her kisses and bit my lips, holding back a smile that tickled my mouth. I wanted to kiss her again. It was already daytime, and she probably wouldn’t want to. I turned around, and the man at the next stand was staring at us. He had been watching us at the first stop while we waited to get on the bus. I shrugged.
I wanted to ask you something… - she started to say while playing with my hand. She paused – You haven’t done any of that, right? – I understood she was referring to drugs.
No – I simply replied, not knowing if it was the answer she wanted to hear, but it was the truth. I looked down.
I felt like Little Red Riding Hood brushing the wolf’s teeth.
That’s fine – she let go of my hand and opened the curtain to look out the window. I felt disappointed; I was too naïve and proper to be with her. I looked out the window; the streets and buildings indicated that we were arriving at the Mérida terminal.
We arrived in Mérida at ten in the morning. I felt relieved not to have to pick up luggage from the trunk; for the first time, I was traveling light, although compared to Rocío, I was still overloaded. My phone had died, and I needed to contact Alice to find out where she was, meet up with her, and go to her house. Pandora was very kind to me and kept me company until my phone charged. Alice lived in the hills; she had a lovely house that was on a mountain. You had to go up a very steep incline, and you could only go up in a van or a Jeep. Her mother picked her up from the university every day so she could go home, and today I was going to go with them. I didn’t know Alice’s mom in person, so I was nervous; I hoped to please her despite my sexual orientation, which was the same as her daughter’s: Lesbians until graduation. Alice was my only lesbian friend; at my university, the girls had adopted me as the “gay” of the group, and I loved that we were so close and so different. I didn’t trust those lesbian friendships very much; you tended to call “friend” that ex-girlfriend of your girlfriend, or a failed romantic attempt, and in case they hadn’t hooked up, you had to make sure your girlfriend or friend wouldn’t fall in love, ending up at a three-way party where you weren’t the guest of honor. The gay world was very prone to that promiscuity, which I was quite phobic about; however, Alice had studied with me since elementary school. We were good friends and never knew the other was a lesbian until we got to university and came out of the closet. She was a true friend, and I cared for her a lot."

After waiting for about fifteen minutes for my phone to have enough charge, I contacted Alice. She was waiting for me at a mall with her mom, Mrs. Tania. They were worried because my phone had been off all morning. I said goodbye to Ro, and we agreed to go out dancing the next day at Jackos; we would meet there. When I arrived at the mall, Alice was waiting for me at Subway. I greeted her with a warm hug; she looked really pretty when she put on makeup to go to university, where she studied design in Mérida. We ate at Subway and asked her mom for something while she canceled the parking ticket.
Alice's mom was very nice, and I felt relieved that she wasn’t the typical prejudiced mother who sees you as a bad influence. Mrs. Tania expressed a certain air of youth in her words and her way of dressing. She started talking to me about her daughters when the truck began to climb the steep road to their house. She had three lovely daughters, and the youngest was the only one they had "made" in the city of Mérida. I understood that a mother who could talk about sex so comfortably would always be welcome to share a breakfast conversation with me without taboos or inhibitions. We were climbing the mountain, and the rocky road made us bounce in the truck. It was a pretty rough road to climb; I felt that I was alarmingly distancing myself from the city every time we ascended a new curve. I looked out the back window of the truck and noticed how the buildings and houses of the city began to shrink into tiny dots on a flat land surrounded by mountains. I wondered how many hours it would take to walk down if I didn't have transportation to get back. The idea didn't please me; I didn't have proper shoes to descend a mountain. At least the road was paved; I began to see large houses on very spacious lots as we went deeper into the hill. There were beautiful country houses, some abandoned, or built with purely German materials. My favorite was a huge country house that occupied an entire hill; the house was abandoned, Alice's mom told me, but young people went there to party. I understood that the idea of going out dancing for them every weekend wasn't something that excited them much, so they chose to throw parties in some abandoned house.

Alice's house was really nice and cozy, they had lived in Mérida for a year, they had moved from Caracas when her father was presented with a great job opportunity. Now they had a considerable piece of land with their own blackberry patch and in the back was the laboratory where they made blackberry wine and a warehouse where they kept the bottles and the processed wine. Your own vineyard. Alice and I had kept in touch since childhood and were very good friends, although I suspected that the fact that we were both lesbians was what had really kept us together in recent years. Now that weekend at his house I would drink blackberry wine for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and I had kissed my Romantic Lyric the night before, I couldn't be happier.