Chapter Two: Days of Grief
1199 Words
I had been sitting beside Camilla's mother when she finally slept and my mind had gone, the way minds go in grief, wandering without permission back through years of memories spent with Camilla.
Then I remembered at a dinner table three years ago, wine still warm, she leaned forward with her voice dropping to a whisper, the sound she usually made when she was sharing something she loved.
He has this apartment in El Arenal. Right over the river. I am not supposed to tell anyone where it is. A pause. That smile. The one I had loved seeing for twelve years. The spare key is under the pot on the terrace.
He always keeps one there for me.
I stood up. Found my car keys and drove through the rain.
This was not for his sake and certainly not because I felt anything for him beyond the cautious respect Camilla's love had earned him. But because Camilla deserved to have someone stand in front of this man and ask. Someone who had loved her had to look him in the face.
I was the only one who knew where to find him.
The apartment was located exactly where Camilla had described it. I searched for the key under the pot and opened the door. The stone door shuddered when I pushed it, groaning before it gave, releasing the smell of old wood and rain and whiskey and something beneath all of it that I could not name. It speaks of something that had existed in the walls of a place two people had loved each other in.
I had stepped inside and seen him at the window and I had spoken and he had not answered and now I was standing in a dead woman's love story in the dark, soaking wet, with my heart going faster than grief alone could explain.
I moved closer still, careful not to make a fool of myself by knocking the flower vase over.
I was close enough now to see the way his knuckles had gone white around the bottle he was holding. Close enough to see the set of his jaw, that hard tension of a man standing at the edge of something he dare not allow himself to fall into.
"I have been trying to reach you," I said, and I heard the shake come into my voice and I let it be there because I was done pretending to be okay tonight.
"Everyone has been trying to reach you”. I said calmly
“You disappeared in the middle of burying her” I said barely choking on my tears
“and her whole family is out there falling apart and I need you to tell me what happened to her. I need to hear it from you."
"Is that why you drove here?"
His voice stopped me mid breath.
It was low. So low I was still trying to figure out what he just said. But I did hear him, and it was processing in my mind in a way I was completely unprepared for. Cutting through me warm and deep, it was nothing like the words I had been bracing myself for.
"You could not wait until morning?"
There was almost something funny about it. Like he genuinely wanted to know. Wanted to know why I was standing in his apartment at nearly midnight in a soaked black dress, It was a thing he was trying to understand rather than dismiss.
"No," I said.
"It cannot wait." I replied firmly
He turned to me.
I had thought I was ready for his face. I had been looking at it from a careful distance for three years, across dinner tables and birthday evenings and the kind of gatherings where Camilla moved like sunlight and he moved like the space around her, steady and watchful and completely focused on her. I had never been alone with him. Never had the full weight of his attention with no one else between us.
This was different.
His features were everything people said and none of what I had prepared for. Cut sharp, jaw tight, dark eyes that in any other context might have read as controlled and cold. But there was nothing cold in what was on his face right now. There was grief, raw and unguarded, the kind that lives beneath a man's skin when he has been holding himself together for two days and it is very late and there is no one left to mask it for.
He dropped the whiskey bottle on the desk.
He took two strides toward me and I held my ground. I made myself hold it. Two strides and he was close enough that I had to tilt my face up to hold his eyes, close enough to feel the heat coming off him in the cold wet air, and something in my chest did something I cannot explain with words.
"I am sorry," he said.
His voice broke. Just slightly. Just on the last word, at the very edge of it, I could hear the regret in his voice, the pain it carried.
I saw the tear before I could prepare myself for it.
One, very slow and deliberate, tickled down the side of his face in the amber light, and I felt my chest contract so fiercely that whatever I had planned to say next left me completely.
My hand moved before I could control it.
I reached up and caught the tear drop. My fingertips at the edge of his jaw, tracing the path of it, and I felt him go absolutely still beneath the touch, the kind of stillness that is not calm but its opposite. Every part of him paused, I can feel his face hardened beneath my touch, like a man who has not been touched in a very long time and has forgotten what it does to him.
“What am i doing”, I thought to myself,
My eyes dropped to his mouth.
I caught myself staring at it and looked up and he was already looking at me.
I tried to pull my hand back.
His hand closed around my wrist.
It was not hard, not demanding. Just holding. He held my hand against his face, and I felt my breath go short and uneven and I stood there with my heart making itself known in a way I had no control over,I was fixed in place by the steadiness of his eyes and the warmth of his skin under my palm.
He drew my hand slowly inward, pressing it flat against his chest, and I felt his heartbeat there pounding fast as well. Unsteady. Nothing like the man the world described. Nothing like the composed dangerous certainty he carried in every room I had ever watched him enter.
I was shivering, not from the cold but from the heat of him against my hand. From the closeness we currently shared
Then he leaned in until his forehead almost touched mine
“Julie” his lips were but a breathe away from mine.
“I want to kiss you”.
- Writer
