Page 15 of Meet Me in Another Life

They kiss like they’re starved for each other. Thora walks him backward into the bedroom, shrugging off her jacket. He’s already undoing the buttons on her shirt. As he turns his attention to her neck, Thora tilts her head back and laughs and laughs and laughs.

Afterward, she lies in Santi’s bed. It’s afternoon: no darkness to cover her escape. Damn him, he should have fallen asleep like every ex-boyfriend she’s ever had, but he’s looking across at her with an irritating smile. He reaches for her hand, turns it over to trace the dots of the tattoo on her wrist. “What does this mean?”

“It’s a constellation. Vulpecula, the fox.” She gives him a look. “I don’t do this, by the way.”

“What?”

“Jump into bed with men I’ve just met.”

Santi shrugs. “That’s okay. Neither do I.”

“With men?”

“Men or women.” He looks uncertain. “Why, is it different for you with women?”

“Yes.”

He looks at her to check if she’s joking.

“I’m not joking,” she says, to help him out.

Mild surprise, but no judgment. “I’m honored to be the exception.”

“You’re just lucky I happened to watch that movie about the hot mariachi at a formative age,” Thora says with a teasing smile. “In a universe where I hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t even be interested.”

Santi moves closer to her. “Please don’t kick me out of my own bed for what I am about to say.” He curls a strand of her purple hair between his fingers.

“I make no promises,” she says.

He looks at her earnestly. “It really doesn’t feel like I just met you.”

The thump when he hits the floor is immensely satisfying.

“Tips on dating women,” Thora says, “from someone who knows. You’re supposed to come out with that bullshit in an attempt to get meintobed.”

His tousled head appears over the horizon, followed by the rest of him. She admires the view as he climbs on top of her, one arm propped on either side of her head. “What if I want to get you into bedagain?”

She looks left and right, pretending to notice for the first time the pillows, the headboard, the bedside table stacked with Borges and sci-fi.

“Well,” she says, looking up into his amused brown eyes. “You seem to have succeeded.”

The next morning, Thora wakes in an existential panic. It’s not that she doesn’t know where she is. She knows exactly where: she is in Santi’s flat.

All her life, she has fled from anything that felt significant. Now, everything is so significant it hurts: from the black cat curled up between them, to the crochet rug where her clothes lie scattered, to the way Santi breathes unevenly in his sleep. It is as terrifying as looking up at the stars and seeing her name written there.

Her breath hitches. She has to get out. She slides out of bed and tries to dress silently, but Santi is a light sleeper. He opens his eyes and reaches across the bed, startling Félicette into flight. “Where are you going?”

“Out to get coffee,” she says. “What kind do you want?”

“Just black.”

“Okay. Back in a bit,” she says brightly. She pulls on her boots and walks out, down the stairs, through the green door onto the tree-lined streets of the Belgian Quarter. She keeps walking, across the park where feral parakeets swoop between the trees in the slanting sunshine, past the mosque into her own neighborhood of Ehrenfeld. She doesn’t stop until she passes the lighthouse, relic of an electric company’s whimsy, rising above the city roofs two hundred kilometers from the nearest sea. Safe inside her flat across the street, she closes the door and slumps against it, breathing hard as if she just escaped a fire. Her eyes move across her familiar mess: the television she only uses for rewatchingContact; the scarf her dad gave her, balled up in the window to block a draft; the scented candles Jules left behind that she can’t bear to burn or give away. She thinks of Santi lying awake in his flat half an hour away, waiting for her to come back.

“It’s okay,” she tells herself under her breath. “I don’t ever have to see him again.”

She stops going to Der Zentaur. It’s a wrench—she likes the wine and Brigitta treats her like a local—but she can’t face theidea of finding him there again, waiting for her to fall in with the universe’s plan. Fuck the universe’s plan. She finds a new bar on the other side of the old town to sit and drink her wine alone.

Three weeks later, she is with Lily in the Turkish café down the road from her flat. She must have been staring out of the window too long, because Lily clicks her fingers by her ear, startling her back to the present.

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