Chapter 8 The Distance of Ice

CLAUDIA

I haven't slept a wink. For the past six hours, the hotel sheets—which felt so soft yesterday—scrape against my skin like sandpaper.

Every time I close my eyes, I feel the brush of her fingers peeling off her glove, the feverish heat of her palm against my cold cheek, and that split second where the world stops between her lips and mine.

And then, the crash. The gold cross. Her look of terror, as if I am the devil himself dragging her straight to hell.

Morning sunlight filters through the window, but it doesn't bring any light—just a heavy, leaden gray that matches my mood. My phone buzzes on the nightstand.

Javi: Morning, beautiful! What time does your train get in? I’ll pick you up at Chamartín and you can tell me all about the conference. Love you.

I stare at the screen. Love you. Two words that used to warm me now sound like a foreign language I’ve completely forgotten how to speak.

I text back a quick, automatic reply, feeling like the most miserable person on the planet.

I can't think about Javi. I can only think about the hallway separating my room from the one next door.

At nine sharp, I step into the corridor with my suitcase. Mercedes’s door is wide open. Housekeeping is already inside, stripping the bed. She is already gone.

I go down to the lobby. Mercedes stands by the reception desk, talking to Dean Valenzuela.

She wears her sharp gray suit, her coat buttoned all the way to the top, her hair pinned back with a perfection that feels like an insult to last night's storm.

There is no trace of the pale woman who trembled beneath the cathedral arches. The professor is back. The stone saint.

As I approach, her gray eyes sweep right over me as if I am a total stranger, just another piece of lobby furniture.

"Ah, Miss de la Vega, finally," she says, and the sudden use of my last name drives a spike of ice into my chest. "Dean Valenzuela will be joining us in our compartment back to Madrid. Get into the taxi waiting outside. We can't miss the train."

"Good morning, Dean. Good morning, Dr. Almeda," I manage, my voice barely recognizable.

Mercedes doesn't even nod. She turns right back to her conversation with the dean, leaving me alone with the weight of my suitcase and a hollow ache in my stomach that threatens to swallow me whole.

MERCEDES

Keep your distance. Don't look at her. She is Miss de la Vega. You are Dr. Almeda.

I repeat the words to myself like a penance, a mantra to shield me from the abyss that opened beneath my feet last night.

I feel Claudia's eyes boring into the back of my neck as we walk down the platform at the Salamanca station, but I force my head high, laughing politely at Dean Valenzuela's mind-numbing small talk about the local cured meats.

My fingers trace the cross beneath my blouse. The skin of my chest is still sensitive, bruised from how hard I pressed the metal into my own flesh last night to purge the desire.

We board the first-class carriage. I am endlessly grateful for the dean’s presence; his relentless chattering is the perfect shield. We take our seats. Valenzuela claims the window, I sit beside him, and Claudia sits directly across from me.

The geometry of the compartment is identical to the journey out, but the air we breathe is poisoned.

"Your lecture yesterday, Dr. Almeda, will truly mark a before and after for the department," the dean says, adjusting his glasses. "The way you handled the tension between the flesh and the spirit... absolute mastery."

"Thank you for your kind words, Dean," I reply, forcing a professional smile. I avoid looking straight ahead, but the corner of my eye betrays me: I see Claudia’s bare hands, empty of gloves, gripping her notebook tightly against her knees.

The very knees I desperately wanted to press against mine last night.

"It is merely a humble reading of Saint Augustine. "

"And you, Miss de la Vega," Valenzuela continues, turning toward Claudia, "are very lucky to have the doctor as a mentor. I trust you are taking advantage of every single minute of this trip to polish that thesis."

"I am, Dean." Claudia’s voice sounds raspy, wounded.

I glance up for a fraction of a second, and what I see tears me apart.

She has faint shadows under her dark eyes, and she stares at me with a mix of confusion, pain, and a raw intensity that steals my breath.

There is no accusation in her gaze; only a silent, unbearable question: Why are you doing this to me?

"Miss de la Vega still has many conceptual flaws to correct," I interject, a harsh edge in my voice that makes the dean blink in surprise.

I clench my fists in my lap. "Her approach is entirely too.

.. immature. She lacks critical distance from her subject matter.

She doesn't know how to separate theory from personal experience. "

The silence that follows my words is so heavy that the train's rhythmic clatter against the tracks seems to amplify. I am being cruel. I know it. I am trampling her brilliance just to protect myself from her proximity.

Claudia swallows. I watch the subtle movement of her throat—the same throat I wanted to kiss senseless last night.

"I understand, Dr. Almeda," she murmurs, lowering her eyes to her notes. "I will work on establishing the... distance you consider necessary."

CLAUDIA

Immature. Lacks critical distance.

Mercedes's words burn my skin like acid.

Last night she caressed my cheek with trembling fingers, and today she reduces me to a mediocre student in front of the department dean.

I stare out the train window, watching the Castilian landscape blur past, blinking back the tears of rage and humiliation I refuse to let fall.

I can't deny it anymore. Javi was right about one thing: this woman can destroy you without blinking.

But he is wrong about everything else. She isn't a bitter, uptight conservative. She’s a snow-capped volcano, and I've felt the heat of the fire burning inside her. That’s what infuriates me the most: knowing that last night wasn't an hallucination.

She felt it too. She was shaking. Her breath was searching for mine.

I pull out my pen and pretend to write in my notebook so I don't have to look at her marble face. But instead of thesis notes, my fingers draw chaotic lines, sharp, nervous scribbles.

Why are you running, Mercedes? What are you so afraid of?

The train plunges into the Guadarrama tunnels, swallowing the carriage in sudden darkness.

In the reflection of the window glass, I see her face.

She isn't looking at her papers. Utilizing the shadow of the tunnel, Mercedes is staring straight at me.

Her reflection meets my gaze with a sadness so deep, so desolate, that the anger vanishes from my chest in an instant, replaced by a painful ache of compassion.

She is hurting. She is punishing herself for what happened at the cathedral. Her icy mask isn't meant to wound me; it's the only wall keeping her upright.

When the train bursts back into the blinding Madrid light, we both look away at the exact same time, as if we've been caught committing a crime.

"Well, we're almost there," the dean announces, stretching his arms. "A highly productive trip, ladies."

The train brakes slowly along the Chamartín platform. The hiss of the brakes signals the end of our bubble. As we step off, the chaotic hum of Madrid engulfs us. Amid the crowd, I immediately spot a gray hoodie and a hand waving in the air.

It's Javi.

MERCEDES

I watch her freeze. Following her gaze, I spot the boy in the gray hoodie. Her boyfriend. The pizza boy, the boy with the simple life, the one who doesn't have to spend his nights praying on his knees to save his soul from damnation.

He runs toward her with a bright, clean smile, wraps his arms around her waist, and lifts her slightly off the ground.

Claudia lets him hold her, but her body remains completely rigid.

When he leans in to kiss her lips, she turns her head slightly, offering her cheek instead.

The kiss lands flat against her cold skin.

Claudia looks over her boyfriend's shoulder, straight at me. Her dark eyes search for mine through the sea of commuters with a silent desperation—an invisible thread pulling tight across the distance of the platform.

"Shall we, Dr. Almeda?" the dean asks beside me, tucking his leather briefcase under his arm.

"Yes, Dean," I reply, turning my back on the reunion. My voice is nothing more than a choked whisper. "Let's go."

I quicken my pace along the damp Chamartín platform, feeling every single step pull me further away from the only truth I have ever known, as the crushing weight of reality drags me right back into my prison of loneliness and lies.