23. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I was alone. And what was worse? I wasn’t surprised. The lack of it did nothing to quell the panic that had made a home for itself in my chest last night. I wished I could serve it an eviction notice.
I dressed slowly and only noticed a scrawled note on top of my bag when it fluttered to the ground.
I’m downstairs , it read.
I followed the staircase to the bustling breakfast room and had no trouble finding Emil. He sat in a corner, his hands folded beneath his chin as he stared out the window. I watched him for a moment from the doorway, scrutinizing his immutable face. Eventually, whatever was so engrossing outside lost its appeal, and his hand dipped for his coffee. I moved, not wanting to get caught staring. I filled my plate at random from the buffet and grabbed a glass of orange juice before heading toward Emil.
The smile he gave me as I walked up staggered my steps. Had I imagined the coolness between us last night? I returned the smile, hoping this was a sign. Then I noticed up close that his didn’t quite match his careful gaze. My hands shook as I put down my breakfast.
“Morning,” he said softly .
“Hi.”
I picked up my fork and started poking at my eggs, but my stomach was already full of knots. I took a bite anyway and tasted nothing.
“Did you sleep?” There was a note of worry in his question, and I peered up at him. Concern flickered behind his walled gaze, hidden, but still there.
“Yeah, thanks. You?”
He nodded, taking another sip of coffee.
My fork tapped an annoying rhythm against the plastic plate. “Emil.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “I’m sorry.”
“For?”
“Making you think I was angry last night.”
“But you weren’t?” I pushed, my tone skeptical.
“Not with you. I’m sorry I made you feel that way. It won’t happen again.”
“You’re still doing it,” I pointed out, done with playing the walking-on-eggshells game.
His mouth gaped as he fought for words, which were colored with shame. “I didn’t realize I was. I’m sorry.” He cleared his throat, his expression reworking itself into a blank mask striving for lightness. It wasn’t working. He drained his coffee, setting it down with a clatter. When he spoke, his tone was friendly. “Did you have anything you wanted to do today? We could go up to the church and look around inside it. I know we weren’t able to do that on the tour yesterday.”
I waited for him to meet my eyes. Eventually, when he did, there was nothing. Nothing there to hint at our moments together, the heat gone, the humor between us laughed out. Or maybe the joke had just been on me the whole time, but he didn’t find it funny anymore.
“Are you ready to move on?” I asked formally. “To the next spot, I mean?” The magic of Prague had turned into a curse. Perhaps a new location might be able to transform whatever had morphed black and dark .
He chewed his bottom lip. “We can leave, if that’s what you want. Where did we talk about heading next?”
“Bruges.”
Deciding our plans was like organizing a shopping list. Check, check, check. We packed quickly. The desk attendant bade us farewell with a simple kindness that felt far too cheery for the mood at hand. The streets flooded with the sounds of joyful people heading out to explore. Their warmth touched no part of me.
The contrast between arriving and leaving the city was bleak. Even the weather had turned a steely gray, flat clouds hanging overhead, blocking out the sunlight. Lost in my own thoughts as I stared outside, it took me a moment before I realized Emil was speaking.
“Sorry, what?” I asked, turning to him.
He pointed at a sign ahead for a rest area. “Do you mind if we stop?”
“Oh, no. Of course not.”
In the bathroom, I fixed my haphazard bun and ran some water over my face. When I went outside, Emil was at the other end of the parking lot, pacing in a loop across the grass. His hands were again stuffed deep in his pockets, and fear spiked in me. I wasn’t a gambler, but even I could recognize his tell.
Half of me wanted to go to him, to close my arms around him and feel, as well as give back, the comfort I had found there once. The other half of me was on high alert due to the uneasy distance between us, worried physical touch might do more harm than good at this point. Maybe it was just me who had felt comfort, after all. Smothering someone wouldn’t help.
So I stood next to the car, facing away from him. I sensed his approach before I heard his footsteps.
“Ready?” he asked, sliding the keys into the door.
I nodded.
More silence followed us until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I switched on the radio, scanning through stations until one came in crystal clear. My hand hovered over the dial in surprise. “Still Loving You” reached through the static like an old friend.
My favorite song.
Thanks to my rock ’n’ roll fan of a mother, I’d run through the apartment more times than I’d admit mimicking the lead singer’s impressive range.
“Is this all right?” I asked out of fairness.
“You like the Scorpions?”
“You know this song?”
“Sure. It’s a classic.”
The spell of the music seemed to soothe the tension in the car while it lasted.
But eventually the song faded away, and loneliness closed in again. I forced myself to focus on the lyrics of an unfamiliar Gothic rock ballad now playing. It wasn’t really my thing, but I didn’t care. Distraction was the key. It worked. A little.
I lost sense of time as my mind wandered, hypnotized by the endless landscape whizzing by outside my window. But when Emil’s phone stuttered to life, buzzing insistently in the cupholder, I looked at the clock and noticed only an hour had passed.
“Zdravo?”
The muddled sound of a woman’s voice tittered on the other end. As she spoke, Emil’s forehead creased, deep frown lines denting the corners around his mouth.
His answers were short and curt, but his tone wasn’t angry. He caught my eye, and I mouthed, “ What’s wrong? ” He looked out the window as he wrapped up the conversation.
When he hung up, I waited impatiently. He let his phone drop into the cupholder, then grasped the steering wheel in a death grip.
“There was a break-in at the shop.”
“Oh no!” Panic struck my chest.
“Amin was there. ”
“Is he all right?”
“He got a bit of a beating. They’re not sure yet the extent of the damage, but it looks like he’ll recover okay.”
My mind was racing, running through all the possible outcomes.
“I have to go back,” he said quietly.
I didn’t think my worry could have stretched further until that stone dropped.
My mouth instantly went dry.
“Oh.” Of course he did.
I’d done a pitiful, one word question-and-answer series about the incident, but Emil didn’t know much. By the time I’d grown quiet, we were twenty minutes outside of Cologne. The silence was disrupted by static music playing on the radio. I wasn’t paying attention to it. Neither, it seemed, was Emil, who stared through the windshield in a trance. Suddenly, he reached down, fiddling with the map directions. He programmed in a new course and began to follow it.
“Where are we going?”
“Cologne.”
“Why?”
His throat worked, but he didn’t answer.
And it came crashing down.
I’d wanted a sign. Here it was.
Be careful what you wish for.
But this didn’t feel right. I wanted to go with him. Was it only because I wasn’t ready to say goodbye? Or because he was my safe space? Or was it something more? If he asked me to go along, would I?
My stomach twisted.
If I did, then what? I would still have to leave. This—him—it was all an impossible fantasy, one I wasn’t even sure I wanted, hadn’t had any time to consider it before the decision was being thrust into my lap. My life, reality, was waiting for me back home, everything I’d ever desired. So why did it suddenly feel like there was an empty space inside of me that hadn’t been there when I left?
I stiffened, remembering my mother’s tearful farewell.
Don’t fall in love, Mallory. My poor, prophetic mother.
I winced, fighting tears as I stared out the window. I had fallen into the trap, become the girl with a crush, thinking this could be more. It was a delusion of the grandest kind.
Where before the minutes had dragged along in silence, now they sped up double-time. We were weaving through the city’s traffic, my mind a blur. When Emil parked, my eyes searched wildly through the windows.
We were at a train station.
I folded my hands in my lap, holding a breath to suppress the barrage of emotions urgently seeking their release. I wanted to cry, protest, beg—anything to keep him from leaving.
He didn’t owe me anything.
The thought hit me with all the tenderness of a truck barreling down a freeway. It had been a fun game between us in the beginning, those little moments of banter back and forth— I owe you . Now it was a tough reality pill to swallow. But even as my mind fought against it, I knew he needed to go. And I also knew that, if he did ask, I wouldn’t go with him.
“You can get a train from here. It’s only a few hours to Bruges, I think.” He spoke quietly, his body still except for a finger picking at a seam in his jeans. His voice was dead, his eyes trained down.
“Thank you,” I said, my tone detached.
He nodded.
There was nothing else to say. I got out of the car, hearing the driver’s side door open and snap shut. He moved to the trunk, pulling Bertha out and helping me to put her on. His hands lingered on my exposed shoulders. His fingertips were cold, and goosebumps broke out across my skin. I turned, and his hands slid from my arms as I took a step back.
“Tell Amin to hang in there,” I said. “Let me know if you have any questions. Well, I guess you have Dr. Tanovi? for that.” I twisted my fingers in front of me.
He cleared his throat, looking down again. “I don’t have your number.”
What? Surely we had—but no. All his scribbled notes. And then we’d never really been far apart, so there’d been no need to…
I shook my head. How on earth had we gotten here? I knew his body and his smell, the way his moods shifted on a dime, his family history, all the little things he’d never done, and the ones he hoped to. Had I only tricked myself into believing I knew him? We hadn’t even covered the simple basics. Thank you, life. Once again, the joke was on me.
“Here,” I said, reaching for his phone. I entered my information, then gave it back. My hand landed in his, his fingers contracting around it, like he wasn’t ready to let go.
Slowly, my eyes raised and locked with his. His gaze was pained, lost even.
He stared at my lips, as if they might hold the key to unlocking this predicament. White-hot heat pooled in my stomach when our eyes met again. Inside, everything was at odds. Desire versus self-preservation, fantasy versus reality. But this was real, it was happening, and we both knew where we needed to be.
“He’ll be okay,” I whispered. He blinked, the tension in his face easing ever so slightly.
“Yeah,” he said, dragging out the vowels into a question.
I bit my lip. I couldn’t take a drawn-out goodbye. The bandage needed to be ripped off. A hard shell began to fold around my heart. The softness wouldn’t last. I could only fight against it for so long. “You should get going. It’s a long drive.”
He nodded, the car keys clinking in his hand. He took a step away. “Do you…”
“What?” Traitorous hope jolted through me.
He looked at the pavement. “Do you know where to go?”
The balloon filling me deflated. “I’ll figure it out.”
He sighed. “I know you will.” He opened his door. “Good luck, Mallory Roth.”
I swallowed down a sob, and my defenses held. “Goodbye, Emil.”
His jaw locked, and he got into the car.
As he drove away, the hollow space began eating its way bigger inside me. I walked into the station, everything growing a little duller, like my life was fading into a black-and-white silent film. The sound of my feet against the laminate was muted, the shimmer of neon and sunlight subdued. The cacophony of voices and announcements were relegated to the background as I purchased my ticket to Bruges, the next train leaving in minutes. I didn’t hurry, barely making it aboard before we were zooming out of the city.