trigger warning: rape and sexual assault

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned."

The confession booth amplifies the heat lulling in the heavy air. Father Guerrera, beads of sweat rolling off his furrowed brow, listens carefully on the other side of the screen.

"It has been eight months and six days since my last confession." I pause. "In truth, I don't even know if I want to be here. I don't know if this is the right place to be."

"Our God is a merciful God," the priest's gentle voice responds. "Tell me, my child. What burdens your heart today?"

I close my eyes.

━━━━━━━

Teresa Segura Sabaté enjoyed her life, once upon a time. Tucked away in Barcelona, with two languages to her tongue, she built herself into her family's world. Just where they had always been.

She was twenty-six-years-old when she realised her relationship with Marc Ivorra was not normal. He was violent and controlling, and tried to convince her to move to Bilbao with him. She refused to go, seizing the opportunity to end the relationship.

A brave woman, she chose to tell him instead of leaving in the night – she was not going to be shouted down into a shrivelled woman, though his fists often tried to pummel her into that very form.

He pinned her against the door and he raped her.

When he was finished, he dropped her naked body, letting her fall to the floor in tears he did not care for. He stormed out, expecting her to be in the same place when he returned. Tere clutched her stomach, fingers digging into the soft flesh that had been tainted over and over again. She wondered if this counted for anything.

However, she got up, stuffed the stack of cash he kept behind the headboard of their bed into a small purse, pulled on some clothes, and got into a taxi.

She called her mother to tell her she was leaving Barcelona, and that she wasn't coming back. She said no more than that. She resolved to forget the feeling of Catalan in her mouth. Maybe it would help her forget how he was inside of her. How he took what she did not give him.

Teresa booked a coach ticket from Barcelona to Madrid. There, a man working in the coach station café suggested that if she was going to run away, she should try Córdoba. Nobody would look for her there. His brother owned an apartment in the centre of the city that she could rent – it was tiny but it was cheap. It would do.

She got on another coach and started her new life. With no qualifications to her name, and a passport forgotten in a place she refused to think about, she found the simplest means to survive; a cleaning job in a school.

Two months later, the crippling realisation came upon her. She was not starved enough to have not bled. She was pregnant. Alone, in Córdoba.

She dropped the mop she was holding.

Sat in the church near her building, she sobbed, alone in the pews. The priest laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. He asked her what was wrong. She told him everything. He promised to help. He was more concerned than outraged at the circumstances of the baby's conception. Still, she decided not to break the silence with her family; ashamed and resigned to leaving for good.

Six months in, she could no longer work. Instead, she volunteered at the church in exchange for a meal. She promised to bring her daughter – she had a feeling I was a girl – to visit as soon as she was born.

Manuel was by her side throughout her labour. The midwife called me blessed.

I would call myself the child of a monster. 

━━━━━━━

Sweat rolls down my neck.

I think back to the conversations I have had these past few weeks. With Alexia, about her childhood, my childhood, Clàudia. With Eli, to teach me some Catalan. With Mapi, running high enough off the Champions League victory to not be put out by her horror stories of Vilda and the camp I am soon to be situated in.

With Mamá.

When I asked her something that broke her heart. When I realised that I could not do any further damage.

When I backed out and introduced her to my new friend.

"Manuel," I croak. He will remain neutral until it is too late. He is a good priest.

I lurch out of the confession booth. He hesitates, and then follows me to the pews.

He cannot sit too close to me; Córdoba is too hot.

"Manuel, I lied to her. I told her," I breathe in deeply, "Manuel, I told her that she was my friend. She isn't my friend. She is so much more than that." He lets me continue. "Manuel, I cannot be a monster to her. I already am. I should never have been born. I hate that I was born."

"Mamá." We sit under the shade of Abuela's orange tree, comfortable in two white, plastic chairs. She has just told me everything. I wish the darkness would swallow me whole. "Do I look like him?"

Her alarm is not what I want to see.

"If I... If I look like him, I can walk away. You don't have to see me. We can... We can talk on the phone, or I could wear–"

"Talia, mi cielo, stop." Her hands are calloused and hard-working. She cups my cheek tenderly, looking straight into my eyes. Hers are not the same colour. "You have kindness in your eyes, you have passion in your soul, and you have love in your heart. You are not him." Her voice breaks, and I can feel the rest of the family watching on from an unobtrusive distance. "You will never be him."

Manuel's weathered face wears nothing more than sympathy, and is stoic if anything. He hears, clearer than the ringing church bells, the shame in my voice.

"Talia, there is no shame in being who you are." Tears well in my eyes. I think of the suitcase in the apartment. I try to remember my flight details to Madrid, where we will go in First Class to Australia. I want to escape, and pull these words from the air so that God, nor Manuel has heard them. "Living a lie will torment you."

"She lived a lie."

"She protected you."

I stare at him.

"She..." The anger fades. I try to stand, but I do not manage it. "You should have taken her to the nearest hospital and told her to get an abortion." He does not react to the venom I lay out in front of him. "I torture her every day by existing. How am I to live happily?"

"She loves you more than she hates the man who," his words fail him then, and he trails off. "And I love you, of course. As though you are mi hija. I named you." I wish he had torn me from her grip and thrown me into the river, as far from her as possible. I wish I had sunk to the bed at the bottom, and that she did not have to spend decades watching a face morph into his, haunting her though she was striving to forget.

"Manuel, monster of rape or not," I cut in bitterly, "I am a lesbian, and that is reason for her to turn her back on me."

Clàudia, though her smile did not reach her eyes, told me to take as much time as I needed. "Don't rush it," she had said. I know she cried. I know it upset her.

"You are allowed to love whomever you wish." He is matter-of-fact. I hate it.

Maybe I am searching for reasons for Mamá to tell me that she never wants to see me again.

"What if she is disgusted by what she hears?"

He thinks for a moment, and then he speaks. "What if she does not care?"

I am so guilty.

I suffer the consequences of a crime I did not commit. I tried to find the man that did this to her, only ceasing in my search once the reason for it being so difficult came to light.

I have spent countless nights lying wide awake, though Clàudia has given me everything she can to coax me into closing my eyes.

I have watched my breakfast, lunch, and dinner hit the water inside the toilet. The drain in the kitchen sink. The grass of the pitches in Córdoba I have been training on.

I am so, so, so guilty, but it is worse that I cannot quite name what pains me.

Is it that she never wanted me, but somehow found it in her to raise me all the same? Is it that I know I have broken my girlfriend's heart by pretending our relationship does not exist? Or is it that Jorge Vilda called and I answered, though others' integrity made it so that their phones had not even rung?

Playing the World Cup is a dream. It is Clàudia's dream, and Mapi's dream. Patri's dream. Just as much as it is mine.

"Natita, I am proud that you have confided in me." I look at him with tears in my eyes. "I am honoured to be trusted not as a priest, but as a father."

"I don't know what to do."

He clicks his tongue. That is where my habit comes from.

Heat be damned, Manuel wraps me in his embrace, the faint smell of sweat lingering on his skin as I sob into his neck. I cry, and I cry, and I cry, and when I am done, he pulls out a small notepad and a pencil, prepared to help me plan the way forward.

notes:

a little time skip never hurt anyone...

but really i do need to get a move on with this lol

if you're confused about the period we're in, it's currently late june. talia misses the spain camp after a convo with vilda about needing to sort out her belongings (she moved back to cordoba after the season ended but only until she decides on a club)

thanks for reading!!!