The One Who Got Away is Back

Memory 11 ♡ The Almighty Power of Spite

I arrived early at the Business Plan class and chose a nice spot in the middle of the back row. Today wasn't going to be a typical lecture and the idea was to use the full two hours as a working session. I spread the magazines and books I'd collected on our topic and put my iPad before me. After the fiasco of the sketch pad, I decided it was time for me to go fully digital and never sit in the balcony again. So until the class started I spent my time tweaking my designs for the fashion showcase. I'd lost all my original ideas, but spite was really fueling my creativity these days.

I could officially say that Adele Holt had enough of letting life bring her down. And from all the recent setbacks, this one was the easiest one to tackle. My designs were lost, but their essence lived within me and all I had to do to recover them was get to work.

The setback to my love life was a bit more complicated than that, but at the end of the day I realized that however I let it affect me was in my control. See, life was all about perspective. The moment I decided that my crush on Miguel Bernal was on the same plane of impossibility as my thirsting for Chris Evans, was the moment I was finally able to move on from my hurt feelings.

Thanks to that realization I wasn't even nervous about seeing him anymore. When he and his roommates walked into the classroom I was able to confidently wave him over and ignore the little twist in my gut. Fake it till you make it, type of thing. If I pretended to be unaffected by his presence, one day I would be for real.

"Hey," he said as he settled on the chair next to me, looking around at all the things on the table. It wasn't that what he addressed next, though. "How you holding up?"

I figured he wasn't referring to seeing the hope of my unrequited feelings possibly being reciprocated poof in front of my face.

Pointing to my iPad I said, "I'm okay. Trying to put everything I remember into digital format."

Miguel's green eyes stayed fixed on me for a long moment.

"I feel guilty, is there anything I can do to help?"

"Very kind to offer," I said with a smile. "But no, not really. You can help me start reading all of these, though."

He picked up a lingerie magazine with a twinkle in his eye. It made me laugh.

"Including that one, yes."

The teacher came in and gave us the instructions. After today's special lesson we were required to deliver the first draft of our initial proposal, so it wasn't like we could just fool around. As the different groups started to discuss, I explained to Miguel that I'd been doing a lot of research about sustainable fashion and had found that the idea was fairly recent, and yet retail was one of the top polluting industries.

"Although it's leaps and bounds behind oil," he said with a grimace.

Maybe this was touchy but I still asked, "Isn't your dad this big oil guy?"

"Not anymore." Miguel picked up a different magazine, though I noticed he kept the lingerie one close by. "Bernal Industries is getting in on the wind boom."

"We could've done our project about that," I mused. "I bet you know a lot about it. Don't you work for your dad?"

"Yeah." He leaned back in his chair and got lost in his thoughts for so long that I just went back to working. It was like I feared and I'd really gone and put my finger on some sort of wound. I hoped it wasn't a deep one.

Then he said, "Dad's doing great things and the business is going well. I'm the natural successor."

"I sense a but," I said.