Whispers in Port
The Baltic sun was a pale coin behind a sheet of cloud, and the port town rose from the water in shades of ochre and rust, its church spires needling a sky that had forgotten how to be blue.
I stood at the railing and watched the crew throw lines to the dockhands below, men in thick sweaters whose breath plumed in the cold air.
The ship's horn sounded once, a low note that vibrated through the deck plates and into my bones, and somewhere behind me a child shrieked with delight.
Two days. Two days since I'd stood in my dark cabin with Julian's kiss still warm on my cheek and wondered whether I was being brave or foolish.
The question had stopped mattering somewhere between the second dinner and the third, between the walk along the promenade deck when he'd pointed out a fishing trawler on the horizon and told me its flag was Danish, and the afternoon he'd found me reading in the lounge and sat down across from me without a word, just opened his own book and stayed there, his knee nearly touching mine, for an hour and a half.
I'd stopped cataloguing the moments. That was the thing. I'd stopped holding each one up to the light to check for cracks.
"You're smiling," Julian said, coming up beside me at the rail. His shoulder brushed mine. He smelled of coffee and something sharper, a citrus cologne I'd come to associate with the sound of his voice.
"I was thinking about Stockholm."
"You were not."
I turned to face him. He wore a dark sweater and a scarf I hadn't seen before, charcoal wool that made his eyes look lighter than they were. "How do you know what I was thinking?"
"Because Stockholm was three days ago, and you didn't smile like that in Stockholm. You smiled like that in Helsinki, at the market, when the old woman gave you an extra pastry for free."
"She felt sorry for me. I couldn't pronounce 'kiitos' properly."
"She was charmed." He leaned his forearms on the rail. "Everyone's charmed by you. It's exhausting, honestly. I have to work twice as hard to stand out."
The line was practiced, the kind of thing a man like Julian said without thinking, but I took it anyway.
I'd been taking everything he offered for two days, filling the hollow places Richard had left with the easy warmth of Julian's attention.
It wasn't the same shape. It didn't fit quite right.
But it was warm, and I was tired of the cold.
"What's the port?" I asked.
"Tallinn." He pronounced it with the faintest roll of the L, the way someone does who's said it before. "Estonia. Medieval old town, cobblestones, a castle on the hill. You'll like it."
"You've been here."
"Once or twice. Work." He straightened and checked his watch, a slim silver thing that looked expensive and old. "Speaking of which. I need to make a call before we disembark. Five minutes, no more. Will you wait?"
"Of course."
He touched my elbow, a brief pressure through my coat sleeve, and walked back toward the interior of the ship.
I watched him go. He moved differently than other men, I'd noticed.
Not faster or slower, but with a kind of economy, no wasted motion.
Richard had been the opposite, always fidgeting, always circling back to something he'd forgotten.
Julian moved like he'd already decided where he was going and saw no reason to hurry.
I turned back to the port. The gangway was being lowered, a slow hydraulic whine, and passengers were beginning to gather near the exit, clutching maps and cameras.
A woman in a bright red coat was arguing with her husband about which direction the old town was.
The husband kept pointing left. The wife kept shaking her head.
The call took longer than five minutes. I waited near the gangway, watching the crowd thin, and tried not to check my watch.
At twelve minutes I checked it. At seventeen I started wondering if I should go look for him, and then he appeared, striding toward me with an apology already forming on his lips.
"Longer than I thought. I'm sorry."
"Everything all right?"
"A supplier in Hamburg. They can't seem to get a shipment through customs." He offered his arm. "It's boring. I refuse to bore you with it. Shall we?"
We descended the gangway together, and the cold hit me properly for the first time, a dry wind off the water that cut through my coat and made my eyes water.
The pier was crowded with tour groups and vendors selling wool scarves and amber jewelry from folding tables.
Beyond them, the old town rose in layers, medieval towers and red-tiled roofs climbing a gentle hill toward the castle Julian had mentioned.
We walked through the Viru Gate, two round towers of pale stone that had stood since the fourteenth century according to a plaque I stopped to read.
Julian waited, patient, his hands in his pockets.
The streets beyond were cobbled and narrow, lined with buildings painted in faded pastels, pink and green and yellow, their upper windows dark.
A church bell rang somewhere, three notes that hung in the cold air.
"I could live here," I said.
"In Tallinn?"
"In a place like this. Somewhere old. Somewhere the buildings have seen things."
"Phoenix doesn't have enough history for you?"
I laughed. "Phoenix has strip malls and air conditioning. The oldest building I've ever lived in was built in 1972."
He was quiet for a moment, looking up at the towers. "History's overrated. Most of it's just people doing terrible things to each other in beautiful places."
"That's a grim view."
"Realistic." He smiled, and the smile changed his whole face, softened the sharpness around his eyes. "Come on. I want to show you the castle."
We climbed the hill slowly, stopping at a café where Julian ordered for both of us in what sounded like passable Estonian, and the waitress, a young woman with tired eyes and a quick smile, brought us coffee so strong it made my teeth ache.
We sat by the window and watched a man in a wool cap play an accordion on the corner, his case open at his feet, a few coins glinting inside.
"Do you miss it?" I asked. "The travel? When you're home, I mean."
"I'm never home long enough to miss anything." He stirred his coffee, though he hadn't added sugar. "What about you? Do you miss Phoenix?"
The question caught me off guard. I hadn't thought about Phoenix in days.
The apartment, the balcony, the clock on the cable box stuck at 12:00, the dial-up connection whining its way toward a connection that takes forty-three seconds to resolve I didn't really need.
The silence of the rooms. The dust on Richard's desk.
"No," I said. "I don't miss it at all."
We walked the castle grounds after that, the cold deepening as the afternoon wore on, the cloud cover thickening until the light turned flat and gray.
Julian told me about the Danish king who'd supposedly founded the city, about the Teutonic knights and the Hanseatic League, and I listened without retaining much of it, content to let his voice wash over me, to let the history be his and the moment be mine.
By the time we started back toward the pier, my feet ached and my cheeks were numb, and I was happier than I'd been in months.
Maybe longer. Maybe since before Richard got sick, before the hospital visits and the waiting rooms and the quiet, awful hope that curdled into something else, something I still couldn't name.
The pier was busier now, passengers streaming back toward the ship in clusters, their arms full of shopping bags. The vendors were packing up their tables, folding scarves and boxing amber. The light had gone thin and watery, the sun a faint smear behind the clouds.
"I need to use the restroom before we board," Julian said. "There's one by the terminal. I'll catch up with you."
"I'll wait."
"Go ahead. Get warm. I'll be five minutes." He kissed my forehead, a gesture so casual and intimate it stopped my breath, and then he was gone, weaving through the crowd toward the low concrete building at the end of the pier.
I didn't go ahead. I stood near the gangway and watched a fishing boat chug into the harbor, its nets piled high on the deck, gulls wheeling in its wake.
The wind had picked up, and I pulled my coat tighter, thinking about the coffee waiting in the ship's lounge, about the dinner Julian and I had planned, about whether I'd packed the right shoes for the formal night the cruise director had announced that morning.
And then I saw him.
He was standing near the terminal building, half-hidden by a stack of shipping pallets, and he wasn't alone.
Two men faced him, both in dark suits that looked wrong for the setting, too formal, too severe.
One was older, gray-haired, with a face that seemed carved from something harder than flesh.
The other was younger, thinner, his hands clasped behind his back in a posture that read military.
Julian's body was different. That was what I noticed first. The economy of motion I'd admired was gone, replaced by something rigid, almost defensive.
His shoulders were set. His hands were still at his sides.
He was listening, not speaking, and the older man was doing the talking, his mouth moving fast, his head inclined toward Julian in a way that suggested urgency, or anger, or both.
The conversation lasted less than a minute. The older man said something final, something that made Julian's jaw tighten. Then the two men turned and walked away, toward a black car that had pulled up at the edge of the pier, its engine idling. They didn't look back.
Julian stood alone for a long moment, staring after them.
Then he rolled his shoulders, once, the way a boxer might after a hard round, and his face rearranged itself into something I recognized.
The charm. The ease. He turned and walked toward me, and by the time he reached the gangway he was Julian again, smiling, his hand finding the small of my back.
"Sorry about that. Long line."
"Who were those men?"
His hand didn't move, but I felt something pass through him, a flicker too quick to name. "What men?"
"By the terminal. The two men in suits."
He looked toward the terminal, then back at me. "I didn't notice anyone. Probably port officials. They're always lurking around."
"They were talking to you."
He laughed, a short exhale that didn't quite reach his eyes. "No one was talking to me. I was in the restroom." He squeezed my back gently. "You're cold. Let's get on board."
I let him guide me up the gangway. I let him steer me through the security checkpoint and into the warmth of the ship's atrium, where other passengers were shedding coats and comparing purchases, their voices loud and cheerful.
I let him pour me a cup of tea from the station near the elevators and wrap my hands around it, his fingers closing over mine.
"Better?" he asked.
"Better."
He smiled, and it was the same smile he'd given me that first night in the lounge, the one that had made me feel seen in a way I hadn't felt in years.
But something had shifted. A door had opened, just a crack, and I'd seen something I wasn't supposed to see.
Two men in dark suits. A black car idling at the edge of a Baltic pier.
Julian's body rigid with something that looked like fear.
I told myself it was business. A supplier in Hamburg.
A customs problem. The kind of thing a consultant in international trade dealt with every day, unremarkable and dull.
Julian had told me his work was boring, and I'd believed him, because I wanted to believe him, because believing him meant I could keep the warmth of his hand on my back and the sound of his voice in my ear and the feeling, fragile and new, that I might not have to be alone anymore.
We rode the elevator to my deck in silence. He walked me to my cabin door and waited while I fumbled for my key card.
"Dinner at seven?" he said.
"Seven."
He kissed my cheek, brief and warm, and then he was gone, his footsteps receding down the corridor, and I stood in my doorway with the tea cooling in my hands and tried to convince myself that I hadn't seen what I'd seen.
I'd seen it.
I closed the door and set the teacup on the dresser and sat on the edge of the narrow berth.
Through the porthole, Tallinn was receding, its towers and spires shrinking against the gray sky.
The ship's engines hummed beneath me, a vibration I'd grown so used to I only noticed it now, in the quiet, when there was nothing else to listen to.
Two men in dark suits. Julian's jaw tightening. A conversation he'd denied having.
I replayed it in my mind, the image already going soft at the edges, and told myself it didn't matter. Whatever Julian's work demanded of him, whatever minor dramas played out between him and his colleagues, it had nothing to do with me. It had nothing to do with us.
I believed it. Or I chose to. The difference, I was learning, was smaller than I'd thought.