Scorpionfish, стр. 28

I walked home fuming. Dimitra had invited me back for lunch but didn’t insist after I politely declined. Rami had closed himself off to us and I could tell Dimitra simply wanted to get him home. To retreat to their family.

I was fumbling for the key to my building when I heard a car door slam shut. There was Aris, stepping out of a new black car parked across the street. Somehow it’d been spared the red Saharan dust that had blanketed the city.

He called to me.

I turned to face him. He wore jeans and a gray T-shirt, hair wet and combed back. “Nice car,” I said. I stood inside the foyer of the building while he stood outside, beneath the awning, the door open between us.

“My God, Mira. What in the world?”

I looked down at my bandaged hands and knees, raised my fingertips to my cheek, feigned nonchalance. “What are you doing here?”

“Alexi and I play basketball together.” Rami and Fady also played basketball. Was everyone in the city playing basketball together? Why had I never noticed this before? This city’s secret network. “We usually have a beer afterward. I was just leaving, about to go, but then I saw you.”

I brought my hand between my eyes and squinted. It hurt my face. I wondered how long he’d actually been sitting in his car, but I was too rattled to be callous. “I’m going upstairs,” I said. “I don’t feel well.”

He touched my cheek. I winced. I’d been given some pain pills but I had taken only half of one, and now I felt loopy and woozy and the pain all at once, as if the smaller dose had given me a random sampling of both pain and numbness.

He followed me inside, and I was too exhausted to argue with him. We waited for the elevator. I did not want the Captain (Alexi? Had he never told me his name?) to hear Aris’s voice, particularly after what happened between us the other night. Whatever that was.

Aris didn’t mention that night at the taverna, the way he had accused me of wanting to pick a fight, cause trouble. All those years together we had never acknowledged a fight. Usually we just fell back into a rhythm. Things never got resolved, but I don’t really believe things ever get resolved. Dissolved, maybe. Even as a child, when people would say something had a happy ending, I didn’t understand. But now what? What happens after the book? The after was always the most interesting thing to me. Now what happens to the people in the book when I’m not reading about them? It was always perplexing.

Endings are false, anyway. Only beginnings ring true.

There of course was a problem. We never really fought, except those first few years we were together in Chicago. We had disagreements; sometimes we’d have misunderstandings. But we were always in a sort of visiting, vacation mode. We never had those difficult conversations.

It was not time to have the conversation we were about to have, but Aris and I had never been good with timing. I pushed the button for the elevator but then grew too impatient to wait for it. Aris was saying something as I turned to take the stairs. But I did not want to talk about our failed relationship now. I raised my hand to stop him from speaking. My cheek throbbed, and the three stitches felt massive, as if they traversed my entire face. I could feel bruises forming, thickening, underneath my skin.

At my apartment door, I could barely get that giant key into the lock. My hands were scraped and bandaged, and in my knee I felt a dull throb.

“Fucking help me, please,” I said. My swearing in English in particular bothered him, though he swore in Greek all the time. I told him once it was a sign of intelligence, but he’d only shrugged. Aris turned the key and we went inside.

“Who did this to you?” he demanded.

“Bar brawl. Soccer match.”

“What match. Come on.”

“Run-in with Nazi thugs.”

“I can’t tell if you’re kidding.”

“I’m fine.”

I felt light-headed and walked out to the balcony, sat down at the little table. I wanted air. Aris didn’t say anything. He placed his hand over mine. I had to fight back tears. It was all too much. I didn’t pull my hand from under Aris’s, but I didn’t look at him either.

“Mira,” he said. “I don’t want to lose you. I never imagined it would happen this way,” he said. At first he wondered himself if he were simply doing the right thing, he said, when Eva got pregnant. “I mean, I have feelings for her.”

“Then why won’t you just let this go?” I asked.

“Because you’re my best friend,” he said.

I told him he was crazy, pulled my hand away, and stood up.

He sighed, deeply. “This is not easy for me.”

“Aris, I think I need to lie down.”

I went inside, lay on the bed. He sat on a chair he’d brought in from the dining room, his head in his hands, as if for the first time aware of our boundaries. “Everything just happened so quickly,” he said. “I had no one to talk to about it.”

Because I was the one he talked to.

I stood up unsteadily from the bed, pushed past him into the bathroom, where I soaked a washcloth and held it against my bruised face. I could hear him outside the door. I leaned into the mirror and examined the black stitches on my cheek.

“Mira.”

He opened the door and I watched him step behind me in the mirror. I turned to face him, propping myself up on the counter. He gently touched my knee, my cheek.

Something came over me then, something dark and devious.

He saw it in my face and I think it turned him on. I opened my legs slightly and he leaned in between them. He placed both hands on my thighs.

Yes, he was about to