When I studied abroad in Barcelona, I went there with a very specific plan: I was going to meet a Spanish prince and never come home. Well, I did come home. And I got surprisingly close to meeting that Spanish prince.
This was 2018-ish; I was 20, and living in a dorm with maybe 12 Americans and more than 200 students from all over Spain. The cafeteria had a rule that you weren’t allowed to sit alone, which was terrifying at first because I barely spoke Spanish. But it meant that every day I had to sit down with random Spanish people and figure out how to talk to them. By the end of the semester, I was basically fluent.
This becomes relevant later. Especially the fact that I could understand the phrase, “Who the fuck is this bitch?“
One of my American friends had met a Spanish guy on Tinder or Hinge, and one night he invited all of us to hang out with him and his friends. They were all musicians, and we went to one of their apartments to pregame before heading out to a club. Except instead of everyone just standing around drinking warm vodka sodas, people had guitars, there was a drum set, and pretty soon everyone was playing music together.
One of the guys immediately caught my attention. He was tall, with dark hair and these beautiful brown eyes, pretty buff, and he wore a lot of leather. Just a very classic tall, dark, and handsome Spanish guy. And he was hot.
We started singing together. I’m definitely not the best singer in the world, but I can sing, and someone took a video of the two of us singing while everyone was playing. We were definitely flirting, but it wasn’t like I was thinking, I’m going home with this guy.
Then we all went to a club. At around four in the morning, he came up to me and said, “Te vienes a casa conmigo, ¿no?” or “You’re coming home with me, right?”
And I was like, Oh. Okay.
We went back to his apartment and had sex. It was really good. We just had great chemistry, and he very clearly knew what he was doing. He was also the first uncircumcised guy I’d ever been with, which was a new experience for me, but honestly, the thing that felt much more exotic was having sex in Spanish. I’d never had sex in another language before. I don’t even remember what I said, exactly, but apparently my semester abroad had prepared me for more situations than I’d anticipated.
Afterward, he picked up his guitar and started playing for me. We sang together in Spanish, harmonizing in bed, then started having sex again. There was this intertwining of music and sex and another language that was just incredibly hot. I was 20 years old, in Barcelona, in bed with this beautiful Spanish guy who was literally serenading me between rounds of sex. I was like, This is why I came to Spain.
We eventually fell asleep, and it wasn’t until I woke up the next morning that I really took in where I was. His apartment was stunning. There were these enormous windows with translucent curtains, and the morning light was streaming through them and filling the whole room. I remember lying there looking around at this beautiful apartment, with this beautiful man next to me, in this beautiful city, and the whole thing felt almost embarrassingly cinematic.
Then he picked up the guitar again. We hooked up again, and eventually it was time for me to go. And because apparently this man had been assembled specifically out of things a 20-year-old American woman studying abroad would find attractive, he had a motorcycle.
Obviously.
He drove me back to my dorm, and when we got there, he did the whole turn-around, dramatic goodbye kiss before driving away. At this point I was basically like: Wow. Great. Spanish prince acquired.
We kept texting, and around this point my friends and I figured out that he wasn’t just some guy who played guitar. He was actually a fairly well-known musician in Spain. He had a record deal. People knew who he was. This only improved the Spanish prince situation.
The following weekend, I went to Amsterdam with some friends. They all decided to do mushrooms because we were in Amsterdam and apparently that’s the law. I wasn’t really into psychedelics back then, so I volunteered to trip-sit. While everyone around me was on mushrooms, I was sitting on the couch scrolling through Instagram completely sober, which is how I discovered my Spanish prince had a girlfriend.
Back then Instagram had this feature where you could see what posts people were liking and commenting on. I saw that he’d commented “babe” on some girl’s photo, so I clicked on her profile.
Girlfriend. Very much girlfriend. I immediately messaged him: “You have a girlfriend.”
His response was basically: It’s fine.
I was like, “It’s not fine with me.” I didn’t even know she existed when I hooked up with him. So I told him we should stop talking, stopped responding, and that really should have been the end of the story.
But the next day, he posted the video of us singing together on Instagram. To his public account. The video from the night we’d hooked up.
At first, part of me was like, Oh, that’s actually really cool. Then I was like, Wait. Why the fuck are you posting this?
His Instagram wasn’t full of random women. It was basically pictures and videos of him. He didn’t even post his girlfriend. Yet for some reason he’d decided that now—immediately after I’d discovered said girlfriend—was the perfect time to publicly post a video of the two of us gazing into each other’s eyes and singing together.
And people started commenting. A lot.
Luckily, after months in that cafeteria, I could understand every single word.
Who the fuck is this bitch? Where’s your girlfriend? Who is this girl?
My friends back home started messaging me like, “What the hell is going on?” I messaged him and asked, “Does your girlfriend know that we hooked up?”
“Yeah.”
“And she’s fine with this?”
“It’s fine.”
It did not appear to be fine. At least not with her friends. I asked him to take the video down. He wouldn’t, so I blocked him. Then he posted selfies of all of us from that night.
At that point I almost had to respect the level of chaos. I had specifically removed myself from the situation and this man was continuing to release archival material that implicated us both
Eventually, I unblocked him because I had reconsidered something. I messaged him and said, basically, “Fine. If you’re going to keep the video up, could you at least tag me?”
And he did.
I mean, people were already calling me a homewrecker in Spanish. I might as well get the followers.
Eventually he deleted the video. I came home from Spain. I never got my Spanish prince. But for one night, I got a gorgeous Spanish musician with a motorcycle who serenaded me in bed and kissed me dramatically outside my dorm.
Honestly, if he’d just mentioned the girlfriend, it would have been perfect.
