Текст книги "Just One Night"

Автор книги: Gayle Forman

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 3 страниц)

They’d spent the day lugging boxes up four flights of steep stairs. (W would have to be moving into the top-floor flat. Broodje had remarked that if they weren’t hungover, the flat would’ve been garden level. W spent fifteen long minutes poking holes in the logic of such a statement.)

Now Broodje is back at his flat. Not his, exactly. His for the next two weeks until he moves back to Utrecht with Henk. He doesn’t really want to go to Willy’s show again tonight, but he will because it’s Willy. At least he has a few hours free to rest. All he wants to do is take off his dusty, sweaty clothes and climb into bed.

He is already pulling off his shirt when he walks in the door.

And then he screams.

“Oh, shit, sorry,” he says, putting the shirt back on. “I didn’t know Willy had company.”

It’s a bit of a déjà vu this, walking in on one of Willy’s girls. It used to be like this all the time. But not for a while. Not for a really long while.

“Sorry,” the girl says. “I didn’t know anyone was coming.”

Then Broodje looks at the girl for a longer moment. “Wait, I know you. You were at the play last night. In the park.” He’d invited her and her friend to come to the party. He’d talked more to the friend, who was very cute, though he still missed Candace, his sort-of girlfriend, but she lived in America so they were trying to figure things out. When did Willy hook up with the friend?

“You’re Broodje,” the girl says.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Broodje says. He is tired and hungover and his muscles ache and he doesn’t want to entertain one of Willy’s girls. “Who are you?”

“I’m Allyson,” she says. Then she seems to reconsider. “But you might know me as Lulu.”

Broodje looks at her for a minute. And then he tackles her in a hug.

* * *

When Willem comes home, he finds his best friend and the girl his best friend tried to help him track down sitting together, eating. Broodje has emptied the kitchen, it seems: cheese, crackers, sausage, herring, beer. He is feeding Allyson, which is what Broodje does with people he loves. Willem sees Allyson has received a fast pass to his best friend’s heart.

“Willy!” Broodje calls. “We were just talking about you.”

“You were?” Willem says. He steps forward and his instinct is to kiss Allyson. He does not want to enter or leave a room without kissing her. This, too, is something new. But he doesn’t because this is all so new, even though the way Broodje and Allyson are sitting there, smearing cheese on crackers, it seems like they’ve been doing this for decades.

“I was telling Lulu, sorry, Allyson, what a sad sack you’ve been all year.”

“Not all year,” Willem says. (Though, really, it was almost all year.)

“Okay. Maybe not in India. I wasn’t with you in India. He went to India for three months to see his ma,” Broodje explains to Allyson. “He was in a movie over there.”

“Are you famous in India?” Allyson asks.

“I am Brad Pitt in India,” Willem says.

“And maybe not since he came back. But shit, after he got back from Paris, he was a mess. And in Mexico, when he couldn’t find you—”

“Okay, Broodje,” Willem says. “No need to give away all the family secrets.”

Broodje rolls his eyes. “Far as I’m concerned, she’s family now.”

* * *

Speaking of family, Allyson loves watching Willem with Broodje. Not that she needs reassuring exactly, but seeing him with Broodje is reassuring.

“I was going to take you out to eat,” Willem says to her. “But Broodje beat me to it.”

“We can still go if you want,” Allyson says.

“I have to be at the theater in less than an hour,” Willem says. “We can go out after? Just us.”

“Not just you,” Broodje says. “W, Henk, Lien, they’re all coming. And they will all want to meet her.” He nods to Allyson. “You are like the business we all invested in and now you’re paying off so . . . you can be alone later.”

“Wren called, too. The friend I was in Amsterdam with” Allyson says. “She wants to meet up.”

And, Willem thinks, there would also be Kate and her fiancé.

Allyson and Willem look at each other, the invisible chain connecting them pulling hard. Why hadn’t they taken more advantage of those quiet hours this afternoon? Why had they just sat there, her feet in his lap, when there was a perfectly good empty apartment here?

Except Allyson wouldn’t have exchanged those hours with Willem for anything in the world.

And neither would Willem.

* * *

All too quickly, they part again. Willem will go ahead to his call at the theater. Wren is meeting Allyson and Broodje at the flat. Everyone will meet at the park, and after the play, they will all celebrate.

Saying good-bye is less fraught this time. They have done it now once, like normal people: leave, come back. It builds confidence.

This time Willem kisses her good-bye. It is quick, a peck on the lips. It is not nearly enough. He wants all of her. From her lips to her feet.

“I’ll see you after the play,” Allyson says.

“Yes,” Willem says.

But they both know they will see each other sooner than that. That they will find each other during the play, once more, in the words of Shakespeare.

* * *

Wren arrives not long after Willem has left. She squeals and hugs Allyson, squeals and hugs Broodje. She kisses the saints on her bracelet. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. Anthony, patron saint of lost things. She kisses all the saints. They all came through.

“I knew it,” Wren says in that fluty voice of hers. “But I thought you were going to find him on the train, like you did the last time.”

“I sort of found him at the train station,” Allyson says. And then she explains how she’d been about to catch the train to the airport when she’d opened the packed breakfast Winston, the guy from their hotel, had made for her. And it was the hagelslag that did it. The bread with chocolate sprinkles, the very first thing she and Willem had talked about. It had been the sign, the accident, the nudge to go to Willem.

“How did you know where to find him?” Wren asks

“Because you told me the address, and that the name of the street was a belt.”

Wren turns to Broodje. “You told me that.”

“Foreigners can never remember Ceintuurbaan otherwise,” he says.

“As opposed to the many other pronounceable street names here?” Allyson asks.

They all laugh.

They clean up the mess from the snacks and prepare to make their way to Vondelpark. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Allyson knows she has a flight home out of London tomorrow, at 4:00. She will have to figure out how to get there. She has a few hundred dollars left. If she has to blow it on the fast Eurostar train, so be it. It was a last-minute impromptu decision to go to Paris from London that had gotten this entire ball rolling. It took two hours to get from one world to another. She is fairly confident she’ll be able to get back in time.

When Broodje goes to have a quick shower, Wren pats the sofa next to her. “Did you find out who the woman was, the one with the flowers from last night?” she asks.

Allyson hasn’t. Last night, seeing Willem with the woman had been a deal breaker. It had seemed to confirm everything she suspected about him, the way that Ana Lucia’s fury had. But now Allyson doesn’t really care who that woman is. She has seen Willem. She has spent an afternoon with him. She knows that what happened to her last year, in a way, has happened to him.

“I didn’t,” she tells Wren.

“You could ask Broodje.”

She could, but she doesn’t want to. It no longer matters.

She can almost hear Melanie’s scoff from across the Atlantic. Melanie had been with Allyson last summer when she’d met Willem, had been suspicious of him from the start, had not been able to understand why Allyson wouldn’t let go of that one guy, that one day.

Whatever. She isn’t listening to Melanie. Or her mom. Or Dee. Or Céline. Or Ana Lucia. She is listening to herself. And she knows that everything is okay.

“You know what we should do?” Wren says, that manic mischievous smile of hers spreading across her face. “We should get him flowers.”

For a second Allyson thinks this is some sort of duel, to win against the red-haired woman from last night. But then she understands what Wren means. They should get him flowers. At the flower market. Where Wolfgang works.

* * *

They ride on Wren’s bicycle, Allyson sidesaddle on the rack behind. (She thinks this might be her favorite thing about Amsterdam. She wants to import the tandem sidesaddle riding back home.) It is early evening when they arrive at the flower market, but a Saturday night, and bustling. Wolfgang is there, wrapping up a big bouquet of lilies.

When he looks up and sees them, he doesn’t seem the slightest bit surprised, even though Allyson is supposed to be in Croatia. He just winks. Allyson waits for the crowd to disperse and when there’s a break, she hugs him. The smell of him, tobacco and flowers, feels so good and familiar that it doesn’t make sense that she only met Wolfgang three days ago (except that it does).

“She found him!” Wren announces. “She found her Orlando.”

“I was under the impression she found what she was looking for already last night,” he says in that rumbly heavily accented voice.

Wolfgang looks at Allyson, a silent understanding passing between them. He is right. Last night, even when she’d thought Willem was a ghost she’d been chasing, she still felt like she’d found what she’d been looking for. Something harder to lose. Because it was connected to her. Because it was her.

“It turns out, I found us both,” Allyson tells Wolfgang.

“Double good news then,” he says.

“Double happiness,” Allyson says.

“That too,” Wolfgang says.

“We are going to see him perform Orlando again. Can you come?” Wren asks.

Wolfgang says that one night of Shakespeare is enough for him. And he has to shut down the stall tonight. But he’ll be free after ten.

“Then meet us after,” Allyson says. “A bunch of us are going for dinner. You should be there.”

She thinks of what Broodje said, the dinner like a banquet for the investor’s circle. Wolfgang should be there. So should Dee. And Professor Glenny. And Babs. And Kali and Jenn, her roommates last year. Maybe she’ll hold another investor’s dinner when she goes home.

“I wouldn’t miss it,” Wolfgang says. “Now, would you like some flowers?”

* * *

At the amphitheater at Vondelpark, Allyson spots Broodje. He has saved several seats, up front this time. He is with a group of people, a guy even taller than Willem, a short-haired girl, another guy. He has brought a basket of food and several bottles of beer.

He kisses Allyson and Wren three times, cheek-cheek-cheek. And then he turns to the group. “Everyone. This is her. Lulu. Only she’s really Allyson. And this is her friend Wren.”

They all sort of stare at each other. The girl speaks first, sticking out her hand. “I’m Lien.”

“Allyson.”

“Wren.”

Lien stares at her. “You really do look like Louise Brooks.”

“Huh?” Wren says.

“The silent film actress,” Allyson explains. “My hair was like hers then. That’s why Willem called me Lulu.”

Lien looks at her, remembering that Louise Brooks movie Willem dragged them all to. She’d known then something was up with Willem. No one had believed her when she’d said he had fallen in love.

They believe her now.

* * *

W is having a hard time understanding.

After all the methodical work they put into it, calling all the American tour companies, finding the barge captain in Deauville, the charts of all the connections, this didn’t make sense. Willem going off to Mexico to look for her hadn’t made sense either. It would’ve been one thing had the girl visited a small town during a quiet time of year, but a resort area at Christmas? The odds were ridiculous. But at least that adhered to a logic. The Principle of Connectivity, albeit stretched very thin.

But he doesn’t understand this. All the looking they had done, and from what Broodje had said, the girl had done her own looking. But then she’d just happened upon him at the play last night? The play Willem was not even meant to be performing in? He’d been the understudy until last night.

It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make any sense at all.

* * *

Backstage, Willem is thinking about accidents again. And things that seemingly don’t make sense, except they do. Like right out there in the fifth row. All of them, together. That makes sense.

He doesn’t see Kate yet, but she has texted that she and David will be there but must leave right after the play. David is catching a late flight back to London, and she’s seeing him to the airport.

Willem’s cast mates slap him on the back, offer congratulations from last night, and condolences for next week. He accepts them both.

Max is by his side, as always. She is the other understudy, for Rosalind, and Willem’s best friend in the cast. “You win some, you lose some. And sometimes you win and lose at the same time. Life’s a bloody cockup,” Max says.

“Is that Shakespeare?” Willem asks.

“Nah. Just me.”

“Sounds like the Universal Law of Equilibrium,” Willem says.

“The what?”

When Willem doesn’t answer right away, she says, “Sounds like a bunch of shite.”

“You’re probably right,” Willem agrees. And then he asks her if she’ll come out after the show.

“I’m still hungover from last night,” Max complains. “How many parties does one man need?”

“This is different,” Willem says.

“How is it different?” Max asks.

Max has become one of his closest friends these past months, and yet he hasn’t told her a thing. There is nothing to do now but to tell her everything.

“Because I’m in love.”

* * *

Kate and David arrive just before curtain. She’d meant to come straight from the airport, but when she’d seen David, she had been overcome. It was a bit silly, really. It had only been a few days since she’d seen him, and they’d been together for five years. But she’d been feeling roiled since last night. A good Shakespearean performance was known to have aphrodisiacal effects. So when David arrived, she’d hustled him back to her Major Booger hotel and had her way with him. Then they’d fallen asleep and gotten themselves massively lost on the way to the park (someone should mention to city planners that Amsterdam was laid out like a rat’s maze, albeit a very pretty rat’s maze) and now here they are.

I hope I haven’t oversold it, Kate thinks as the lights go down. She has essentially promised Willem an apprenticeship based on last night’s performance, but David has to agree. She is sure David will agree. Willem had been that good. But she is nervous now. They’ve offered apprenticeships to foreigners before, but sparingly, because the visa paperwork and union issues are such a headache.

Willem enters the stage. “As I remember . . .” he begins as Orlando.

Kate breathes a sigh of relief. She hasn’t oversold it.

* * *

It is better than last night. Because there are no walls. No illusions. This time, they know exactly who they are speaking to.

“The little strength that I have, I would it were with you”.

She is his Mountain Girl.

“What would you say to me now, an I were your very very Rosalind?”

No more pretending. Because he knows. She knows.

“Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe I love.”

She believes. They both do.

“I would kiss before I spoke.”

The line is a kiss. Their kiss.

“For ever and a day.”

For ever and a day.

* * *

“Holy shit,” David says to Kate when it is over.

Kate thinks I told you so, but doesn’t say anything.

“And this is the hitchhiker you gave a ride to in Mexico?”

“I keep telling you, he wasn’t a hitchhiker.” David has been giving her grief about giving a ride to a stranger for months now. Kate keeps reminding him that all people are strangers, initially. “Even you were a stranger to me once,” she’d said.

“I don’t care if he was three-legged ape,” David says now. “He’s unbelievable.”

Kate smiles. She loves lots of things, but she especially loves to be right.

“And he wants to apprentice with us?”

“Yep,” Kate says.

“We can’t keep him off a stage for long.”

“I know. He’s green. The training will do him good. And then we can sort out union issues and get him up there.”

“He’s really Dutch?” David asks. “He has no accent.” He stops for a second. “Listen to that. They’re still applauding.”

“Are you jealous?” Kate teases.

“Should I be?” David teases back.

“That boy is hopelessly in love with some American girl he found and lost in Paris. As for me, I’m hopelessly in love with some stranger I met five years ago.”

David kisses her.

“Do you really have to go back tonight?” Kate asks. “You could come out after with Willem really quickly and then we could give the squeaky bed at the Major Booger another go.”

“Just one?” David asks.

They kiss again. The audience is still applauding.

* * *

Allyson notices the kissing couple. It’s hard not to, because people are starting to meander out of the theater and they are still kissing. And because, much as she’s looking forward to getting to know Willem’s friends, what she really wants to do is what that couple is doing.

And then the couple breaks apart, and Allyson gasps. The woman! She’s the woman from last night. The one she’d seen Willem with. The one she’d thought he was in love with. As of this afternoon, she no longer thought that. And now she really doesn’t think that.

“Who is that?” Allyson asks Broodje, pointing to the woman.

“No idea,” Broodje says. Then he points to the stage door. “Look, here comes Willy.”

Allyson feels paralyzed all of a sudden. Last night, she’d stood at that very stage door and Willem had breezed right by her, into the arms of that other woman. The one who is now in the arms of that other man.

This is not last night. This is tonight. And Willem is walking right toward her. And he is smiling. Wren thrusts the bouquet Wolfgang prepared (an enormous bouquet; it almost capsized the bike on the ride to the park) into her arms.

The bouquet is smashed in about five seconds. Because Willem doesn’t seem to give a shit about the flowers or the crowd of people waiting for him. He seems to be heeding Orlando’s words tonight.

“I would kiss before I spoke.”

And for the second time in a day, he does.

And, oh, what a kiss. It makes the one this morning seem chaste. It makes the flowers smashed between them bloom all at once. Allyson could live in that kiss.

Except she hears laughter behind them. And a voice, an unfamiliar one, though Allyson knows at once that it belongs to the redhead.

“I take it you found her then,” the voice says.

* * *

It takes ages for them all to troop out of the park. There are so many of them: Willem, Allyson, Broodje, Henk, W, Lien, Max, Kate, David. Wolfgang and Winston, the guy from the hotel whom Wren has been spending time with, are joining them later. The logistics are complicated. This one left a bike back there. This one is meeting them over here.

But it’s the introductions that take longer.

Kate is a theater director. Whom Willem met in Mexico, while he was looking for Allyson.

David is her fiancé, whom Willem has never met, who is going on about how good Willem was tonight, the vulnerability he brought to Orlando, what a brave way to play it.

Wren is the friend Allyson met in Paris and bumped into again in Amsterdam. “I wouldn’t have found you if it weren’t for her,” Allyson tells Willem. “I was about to give up but she made me go to the hospital you were at.”

Willem thanks Wren.

Wren curtsies.

W listens to all the introductions and still doesn’t understand.

Neither does Max. “This is too bloody confusing. Can someone draw a chart?”

“That’s not a bad idea,” W says.

“I was kidding,” Max says. “What I really need is a drink.”

* * *

Wolfgang has arranged for a table at a café run by a friend of his in a neighborhood off the shrinking red light district. It is on the Kloveniersburgwal, not far from the bookstore where Willem found the copy of Twelfth Night, and where the bookseller inside told him about the auditions for As You Like It that were happening at the theater around the way.

It takes about an hour for them to get there, because they all walk together, instead of splitting up into taxis and trams and onto bikes. No one wants to be separated. Something about the night feels magical, as if a bit of Shakespeare’s fairy dust has settled over them.

Wolfgang is waiting at the table, along with Winston, a pitcher of beer between them.

Everyone sits down. Allyson snaps a picture and texts it to Dee. Wish you were here.

She is about to put her phone away but then she texts the photo to her mother. I am having the best day of my life, she writes. She hesitates before hitting send. She is not entirely sure how welcome this message will be, from a bar, no less. But she thinks (hopes) her mother will be happy that she is so happy. And with that in mind, she presses send.

Wolfgang has ordered a bunch of food, pizza and pasta and salads. It starts to arrive, along with lots more booze.

Willem has hardly eaten all day and is famished. But Allyson is sitting next to him, and with everyone jammed at the table, she is right up close. And then she slips off her sandals under the table and sort of nuzzles her foot against his.

He loses his appetite, for food anyway.

The conversation is disjointed. Everyone wants to tell their part of the tale, and they tell it out of order and, as the booze flows, with increased drunkenness.

Allyson and Willem sit back and listen to this story.

“I didn’t even know her, but I knew I was supposed to go with her to the hospitals,” Wren is saying.

“I knew something was up as soon as Willem came back,” Lien says.

“Hey, I did, too,” Broodje says.

“No you didn’t,” Henk says.

“I did. I just didn’t believe it was a girl.”

“I knew something was up because he didn’t want to shag Marina,” Max says. She looks at Allyson. “Sorry, but have you seen Marina? Rosalind?” She shakes her head. “Maybe I’m biased because I’d like to shag her.”

The table laughs.

“You have nothing to worry about,” Kate tells Allyson. “He was a miserable mess in Mexico after he didn’t find you.”

“He was even worse after the food poisoning,” Broodje says.

“You got food poisoning?” Kate asks. Willem nods. “The mystery meat? I knew it!”

“I got really sick right after you dropped me off,” Willem says.

“You should’ve called me,” Kate says.

“I ended up calling my ma, in India, and that’s why I went over, so it was a good thing, the food poisoning.” Sickness leading to healing. The truth and its opposite again.

“At least it paid off in the end, because at the time, that Mexico trip seemed like a disaster,” Broodje says. “At that New Year’s party, you were a mess, Willy.”

“I wasn’t a mess.”

“You were. You had girls coming at you and you didn’t want any of them. And then you lost your shoes.” Broodje looks at the gathering. “There were these giant piles of shoes.”

The hair on the back of Allyson’s neck goes up. “Wait, what?”

“We went to this party on the beach, in Mexico. New Year’s Eve.”

“With the piles of shoes?”

“Yeah,” Broodje says.

“And the Spanish reggae band. Tabula rasa?” Allyson asks.

It’s noisy in the bar but it goes quiet for a second as Allyson and Willem look at each other and once again understand something that they somehow, somewhere already knew.

“You were there,” she says.

“You were there,” he says.

“You were both at the same party,” W says. He shakes his head. “I cannot even begin to calculate those odds.”

She’d been thinking of him. But it had felt like ridiculous wishful thinking. Delusional wishful thinking.

He’d been thinking of her, too. In the water, he knew she was close, but not that close.

“I cannot believe you were at that party!” Henk says. “I cannot believe you went all the way there and you didn’t find each other.”

Kate and Wolfgang have only just met. But for some reason, they catch each other’s eyes.

“Maybe they weren’t ready to find each other,” Wolfgang begins.

“And so they didn’t,” Kate finishes.

“That makes no sense whatsoever,” W says.

Except that even W—mathematical, logical, analytical W—somewhere understands that it does.

* * *

The night goes on. Pitchers of beer. Bottles of wine. The novelty of the Allyson-Willem hunt takes a backseat to more prosaic matters. Soccer. The weather. There is a debate about what Wren and Winston should do tomorrow. Allyson tries not to think about leaving tomorrow.

It’s not that hard, because Willem’s hand has snuck under the table where for the last hour, it has been playing lightly on the birthmark on her wrist. (Allyson never knew her wrist had so many nerve endings. Allyson’s wrist has turned to jelly. Allyson can’t really think of much except for Willem’s hand, her wrist, except perhaps for the other places she’d like his hand to go. Meanwhile, both her feet are now completely wrapped around his right ankle. She has no idea what that is doing to him.)

Wolfgang gets up to leave first. He has to work tomorrow, not so early, because it is Sunday, but early enough. He kisses Allyson good-bye. “I have a sense I will see you again.”

“Me, too.” Allyson has a feeling she’s coming back to Amsterdam. She’ll have to get a job on campus, pull double shifts at Café Finlay during school breaks to afford the ticket. The thought of coming back makes her happy, but she can’t really think about the year of not being here. So she doesn’t. She just concentrates on her wrist, the little circles Willem is drawing, which are reverberating through her body in ever-growing waves, like when a pebble is tossed into a pond.

Kate and David, who have been doing their share of under-the-table canoodling, use Wolfgang’s departure to make their own excuses. There are hasty kisses good-bye.

Before she leaves, Kate says to Willem: “I’ll be in touch on Monday. We’ll have to start working on your visa paperwork right away, but we can get it expedited and probably have you out for October.”

“Definitely,” David says.

Willem has known since yesterday, since before he even asked Kate if he could join up with Ruckus, that this was the right thing, that it would happen, but now with David’s enthusiastic support, it has become very real.

“What visa paperwork?” W asks after Kate and David leave. Dutch nationals don’t need visas for tourist trips to the States.

At that moment, Allyson snaps out of her wrist-related haze (maybe because Willem has stopped caressing her wrist).

Willem has not had time to tell anyone about his apprenticeship with Ruckus, not his friends whom he will leave behind, and not Allyson, for whom the move has different implications. Which is maybe why he feels so nervous now. He isn’t sure how she might react. He doesn’t want her to feel pressured, like the move means he has expectations. (He has hopes, of course, especially now that he knows how close she is to where he will be, but hopes are different from expectations.)

Willem doesn’t realize he’s left them all hanging until Broodje says, “What’s going on, Willy?”

“Ahh, nothing. No, not nothing. Something big, actually.” The faces are expectant, even those of Wren and Winston, people he did not know of until tonight. “Kate and David run a theater company in New York City, and I’m going to be an apprentice there.”

“What does that mean?” Henk asks.

“I’ll train with them, build sets, do whatever is needed, and eventually, perhaps, perform. It’s a Shakespearean theater company.” He looks at Allyson now. “I forgot to tell you that.”

He forgot to tell her everything. He was terrified to. He is terrified now. The ominous silence hanging over the table isn’t helping. And Allyson having unraveled her feet from his ankle really isn’t helping.

Maybe they aren’t so in sync. Maybe what for him is good news, a reason to hope, is just too much too soon for her.

He vaguely hears people around the table offering congratulations.

But he can’t process it. He is looking at Allyson.

And Allyson is not congratulating him. She is crying.

* * *

Allyson sees Willem’s face, his panic, and she knows he is misreading her. But she is helpless to explain right now. Words have left her. She is emotion only.

And it is too much. Not Willem moving to American, not Willem moving a bus ride away from her. It’s that this happened at all. How it happened.

Allyson has to say something. Willem is looking so upset. The table is so quiet. The restaurant is quiet. It seems like all of Amsterdam is holding its breath for them.

“You’re moving to New York?” she says. She keeps it together for an entire sentence before her voice cracks and she dissolves into tears again.

It’s Winston who gently touches Willem on the shoulder. “Maybe you two should go now.”

Willem and Allyson nod, dazed. They offer halfhearted farewells. (It doesn’t matter; good-byes with these two aren’t to be trusted anyhow) and leave amid promises from Wren to call in the morning and Broodje to crash at W and Lien’s place tonight.

* * *

Silently, they walk to the bike racks outside in the narrow alleyway. Willem is desperately trying to think of something to say. He could tell her he doesn’t have to go. Except he does have to go.

This isn’t about her. It was catalyzed by her, and she’s woven up in it, but this is ultimately about him and his life and what he needs to do to make himself whole. He’s stopped drifting, he’s stopped being tossed around by the wind.

But he doesn’t have to see her. It doesn’t mean that. He’d like it to mean that. But it doesn’t have to.

Allyson is thinking about accidents again. Which aren’t accidents at all. Allyson’s grandma has a word for it: beshert. Meant to be. Allyson’s grandma and Willem’s saba could’ve had entire conversations about beshert and kishkes.

Except Allyson doesn’t know about Saba (yet) or about kishkes (officially speaking, though she knows what they are and how to listen to them and she will never ever stop doing this). And she doesn’t have the words to tell Willem what she needs to tell him.

So she doesn’t use words. She licks her thumb and rubs it against her wrist.

Stained.

Willem grabs her wrist, rubs his own thumb against it. Does the same to his own wrist, just to make it clear.

Stained.

They slam into the wall then, kissing so intensely that Allyson levitates off the ground. (It feels like the kiss that is making her airborne, but really it is Willem’s arms, which have grabbed Allyson’s hips, though Willem can’t even tell that he’s lifting her because she feels weightless. Or like part of him.)