(This is our very first translation to English, so feel free to let us know about any mistakes you may find... thx a lot!)

The metallic sound of the cymbals was the last thing that resounded in the air. Her voice gently faded into a descending staircase of low notes, while the echo from the microphone faded as well.

"Thank you, thank you very much..."

Emma tucked a strand of dark hair behind her ear while she was still smiling. The applause resounded wildly through the walls of the bar.

"Katz Under the Bridge, everyone," the host said as he waved his hands at the band, still smiling and clapping. "Don't forget to follow them up at their social networks."

Emma and the boys walked down the platform accompanied by a bohemian-looking man with a carefree face amid the torrent of applause. He was their agent.

"Do you hear that?" he said once in front of the bar, pointing to his ear and the air around. "Euphoria, what a splendid sound. Today you were even better than yesterday, so congratulations. I already spoke with the owner, the house invites, so go on the lash! it's alright, it's all fine..."

The minutes passed. Everyone celebrated with laughter surrounded by the fans who wanted to get closer and ask for photos and autographs. When the first round of drinks arrived, the four of them cheered with their drinks held high. Rick was holding a groupie with his arms whom he gave access to their VIP side, much to Emma's annoyance. She watched him with an indignant laugh as she reminded him that her girlfriend had asked him to call him as soon as they finished the presentation, but, as usual, he was busy in the arms of another girl.

"Pff... numpty," Emma thought. The truth is that, despite getting a little annoyed from time to time with her friends and colleagues, her life was magnificent; even despite the eventual discussions or the differences about the mood of the night or what song she would be the best closing song; it was so shiny that it almost felt like gold. That's how she felt it deep down, as she watched the night become alive and let herself be carried away by the taste of the same ecstasy that is felt every time one is on stage, and above all, after coming down soaked with the energy of your public.

She was thinking about all that when, suddenly, she heard her name ringing in the air. The timbre of the voice sounded distant; so much that, perhaps, it could have been lost in oblivion forever, or the middle of the events of another gig night full of joy and ecstasy like such, and, even so, she couldn't miss that sound again...

"¡Emma...!"

She turned to confirm with her eyes what the reminiscence of her body already insinuated.

"E... Emma."

The memories...

"Alex," she whispered on a surprised sigh.

Her eyes were quickly lost in the deep and dark ocean that was the gaze of the newcomer. She knew those eyes perfectly, but she never imagined before that moment that it would be right there, in that ocean of his eyes, where her thoughts would shipwreck again.

"Yes, they were deep," she thought, remembering a bit of the lyrics of that first album that Katz Under the Bridge recorded in the summer of 2008, "An Ocean Far & Near", with which they had managed to capitalize on quite a bit of comfortable success. Enough so it wasn't easy to walk around the streets of London and not being able to avoid being recognized since then.

And yet, none of that mattered; no more than the calm and the storms that arose from Alex's gaze, a little frightened and a little wet, somewhat a little hollow. The last time Emma saw those eyes they were spilled in uncontrollable tears, overflowing and soaking the cheeks of their owner, who couldn't accept a goodbye as an answer to her question...

"How...? how are you?"

Emma felt longing and fondness in his words. He didn't stop and rushed to hug her, a little clumsy and nervous, but full of longing.

"Still using the same perfume," she thought as she returned the hug with some embarrassment and without being able to do anything else.

By instinct she buried her head in Alex's neck, and let her nose be impregnated, after so long, with the same intimate scent that she remembered: an aroma of dry wood, coffee, and green apples that pushed her back to her past... to her home.

Her mind filled with a carousel of images, such as the first time she'd seen Alex's eyes in the middle of the school hallway, his rosy cheeks in the winter, the dimples he got when he laughed mischievously, the way in which he held her when she needed him most, his strong hands caressing her with a delicacy she never believed capable of, the first time she kissed him, the taste of his lips, the firmness of his neck, the first time she was united with a man, the first time she was united with him.

On all those occasions that same perfume was always present, filling the few empty spaces that remained between them. It was his, without a doubt, one of the aromas that she remembered most from her youth, and the memories that came with him were the most intense, the most valuable of that distant life that she once had in her past before fame, or the prestige, or Cody and his indecisions, or everything else anyway.

"Sorry, mate, but this is a reserved area," said Willis, the band's agent, breaking the hug and bursting the bubble of memories Emma had immersed herself in.

"Oh, sorry," Alex apologized immediately with a sheepish smile. "I didn't mean to bother. I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to see you face to face again and not by an advertising poster..."

"It's alright... Don't worry, Willis," Emma said quickly. "Alex is one of the good ones... a special one." She put on a smile of those that are painted with character.

She couldn't stop grinning at the image of Alex, because even though ten years had passed, he was still smiling like a bit of a childish boy; all despite the beard and those new small wrinkles that she could already see at the corners of his eyes. "Stays as honest as ever," she thought as she regretted somehow that her eyes could no longer shine as bright as his at that precise moment.

"I didn't think it was possible, but you are much more beautiful than I remembered you. Not in a million years could my memory have done you justice," he said with a nervousness in his voice and a slight tremor in his hands.

He didn't want her to realize how upset he was. In his mind the same scene had played out a thousand times before in a different way: he looked calm and sure of himself, and she was always waiting for him, yearning and fascinated by the possibility of their reunion. But as much as Alex told himself otherwise, perhaps it was true and he had never really been able to get over that cruel goodbye.

"Shall we sit?" he hastened to say. "I'd love if we could have a pint together... For old times' sake, I mean..."

"Maybe..." Emma asked to stall, even though she already knew what she would answer. "Is there someone else at your table?"

She wanted to talk to him too, but she had always been better at hiding her emotions than he was. And now that things at home looked grim and freefalling, Emma didn't want to let the gloom get her. Music was always her escape, her way of staying above the vicissitudes of life, and when "Sad Lonely Galaxies" ended and she had to step off the platform, the minutes before the song came back to her: the phone call, the recent breakup, Cody's voice and the whole question about what's going to happen with the tours, and that there's less and less time to be together, and that the future looks smaller and smaller and those kind of things, anyway; life issues, monotonous, tedious, sterile...

"No, I'm not with anyone. I came alone."

Emma looked into his face and held his gaze.

"If the future recedes and the past approaches..." She thought between mental sighs, on type of those that are decided at the last minute and with a certain taste of melancholy.

"Yeah, just give me a moment," she replied after nodding slightly with her face.

With a gesture she said goodbye to the members of the band; then she took Alex by her arm and took him to the local tables, hoping that he would be the one to guide her to his.

"Let's go..."

They both sat at his table, from where he had watched the concert of a beautiful artist who was once his high school sweetheart. Now alone, the silence of that entire decade that had passed between their lives suddenly overwhelmed them. The two remained silent until the waiter poured two glasses of whiskey and placed the bottle on the table. After giving way to the first drinks, the words began to structure once again in a continuous and carefree flow.

"At the end... did fame turned out to be what you wanted?" Alex asked once.

"I wouldn't say I'm famous, that would be exaggerating."

"Oh no? So how do you call a person who has just returned from a very successful tour around the country. Thank your dad for bragging all the time that he has a star daughter..."

"My dad has always been a bit of happy guy, Alex, you know..."

Emma's phone vibrated on the table. After checking she noticed that they were messages from Cody. She didn't even bother to read them.

"Truth is that I always listen to you on the radio," Alex commented as he watched her review the device, "or I see the announcements of your concerts on the street, or you appear giving an interview at the television, and as much as I try to avoid you, your presence always reaches me in some way, so I think I have reasons to defend my argument."

Emma sighed with a restless smile, a little anxious, perhaps proud, as she lazily rested her face on one hand. Alex immediately understood the message that that gesture (so familiar to him) meant.

"Well, whatever, let's toast," she said, and reflexively, she put the phone in her pocket to escape from the locked screen. "Famous or not we have nothing left to celebrate, so here's to us, to you, to the fact that we're here..."

When Alex lifted his glass, Emma noticed something she hadn't seen before: a small gold wedding band on her date's ring finger.

"I see you've got married," she commented in surprise.

It sounded like a question, but whatever it was, it was overshadowed by the sound of glasses colliding in the air. Alex looked away before answering.

"It's been ten years, Emma... I couldn't wait for you forever."

The light in his eyes darkened with the melancholy that came from his voice.

"That would have killed me."

She looked through the window fogged by the rainwater that fell that night on the city.

"Ten years," she muttered in response. "A whole decade...and yet I still feel like the same girl who just left her town to chase a foolish dream. I haven't changed a bit."

"Emma, are you mad? But of course you've changed. We've all done it in one way or another."

They both looked at each other in silence. For several minutes no one said anything. They just drank from their glasses until the impertinent gleam of the ring ended up tearing Emma's words from her lips, as if the anxiety and impatience of feeling like a loser in a game she never played really shook her.

"Tell me, who was the jammy one?" she asked carefully, trying to hide her uneasiness. "Do I know her?"

Alex chuckled before answering, anticipating what would happen when she said his wife's name.

"I married Samantha," he said as he tried to hide behind the liquor. "This summer we celebrated two years of marriage."

"Samantha? Samantha Tinker?" She asked without being able to hide her surprise; then she regretted it.

"Yeah, her. She is my wife."

Emma sighed through a bitter, resigned smile.

"I suppose it have the most sense," she said at last. "She was always very much in love with you."

Alex held the words for a moment, until he finally couldn't take it anymore and fell exhausted before the power of the doubt and dissatisfaction that burned him from the inside and for a long time.

"Do you ever think of me, Emma? Of us? About what we could have been?"

She didn't know how to approach those questions. She wanted to just melt into her seat to disappear.

"Alex, I... I... I don't know what to tell you," she said sadly.

He watched her intently, detailing every feature of hers and every feature of her face, seeing how her lower lip still quivered when she got nervous.

"It's always happening to me," he confessed.

He turned to see the people at the bar and saw them. There were the members of the band, Emma's friends, the proof that her dreams had indeed come true, and, perhaps, those who had taken his away if he were to wear the glasses of stubbornness and envy.

"Even after marrying Samantha, there are still days when I just feel your perfume on the air and I can't get you out of my head, not even sleeping..."

His voice sounded almost as grim as Cody's an hour ago.

Emma didn't know what else to do except to extend one of her hands and lace her fingers with Alex's. She wanted him to know that she was there...and she hoped that, perhaps, he could see back in her eyes without shame, without guilt, without fear. After all, Emma remembered him well too, and she didn't want to miss the opportunity to apologize for never doing what might have been better ways to say goodbye.

"I loved you too, Alex," she blurted out, unable to prevent a tear from betraying her. "I loved you a lot."

"But no more than music, ah?" he answered, and she felt something break inside her chest.

"Uh-mm... Will that phrase never stop haunting me?" she thought calmly and wrapped in a feeling that was born in frustration and died in shame, as if for some reason it was something that she had to take into account.

"No... no more than the music," she answered as she squeezed his hand tighter, "but that doesn't take away the much I loved you..."

Alex smiled. That night they both laughed and drank until their bodies couldn't take it anymore. When they left the bar, they walked clinging to the staggering body of each other in the middle of the laughter and the tripping of the alcohol that flowed through their veins. The phone kept vibrating in her pocket, and though every word that Emma had said might have been the one to say through the microphone of her cell phone, and not to some distant visitor from the past, her footsteps didn't stop.

The cold, misty London night quickly covered them as they wandered aimlessly. Their indiscreet hands roamed areas that no longer belonged to them. Without realizing it, the memories pulled them into a party of which they weren't sure they wanted to be a part of. In the middle of one of the many London bridges that cross the Thames, the cold rain fell over them with savagery, penetrating their bones, causing them to reach in an intimate embrace.

They both could see how their breaths condensed into an icy mist that came out of their open mouths. Seen like this they looked like two betrayed and helpless vagabonds. Alex smoothed Emma's drenched hair behind her ears as he caressed her damp face. She couldn't stop chattering her teeth. Her eyes silently claimed an intimacy he had once possessed in her. Without further ado, the moment their eyes met, there was no going back.

Embraced as they were, in the middle of that bridge and with the rain soaking their bodies, both Emma and Alex gave themselves up to the embrace of martyrdom in a passionate kiss. They kissed as they had done ten years ago in that unforgiving farewell. Their lips were like dancers in a ballet that moved to the rhythm of the pattering of raindrops on the wet ground.

In Emma's mind everything was light and glitter and colorful memories of their younger days, when they were barely seventeen. In Alex's mind the only thing that shone was the red of those sinister eyes that had healed him and returned him from the dead when he felt his heart was chewed up and spit out on the ground.

In ecstasy, he remembered the words: "her soul in exchange of freedom to this immeasurable pain," and with that in mind, and with the figure of the snake woman still fresh in his memory, Alex slid a sharp blade consecrated to the fire of the Averno through the woman's wet clothing held in his arms, until her hot blood spilled over his hand.

Emma didn't scream. She just opened her eyes in confusion as her body languished in the arms of the man. But, when she searched for answers in the dark ocean of her blue eyes, they were gone. In their place there were two red headlights that shone through the rain, like the lights of a taxi in the distance, speaking to her without the need for words.

"I loved you, I always have," was the last thing Emma heard from those lips of his

And just before she closed her eyes and was lost forever, one last thought crossed her mind...

«Alex... Don't love me too much...».

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