Page 77 of We Shouldn’t Do This Again

My body is on fire. I caress the back of her neck slowly, tangling my fingers in her hair, feeling her skin bristle beneath my touch.

“Oh, what a delight… your lips.”

Her lips tremble into a soft smile, and then she kisses me. It’s not an urgent or desperate kiss, nor is it filled with that wild hunger that has accompanied us these past few days. It’s a slow, deep kiss, one that tastes of home, of “I’ve found you again, and this time I don’t plan on letting you go.” The whole world disappears around us. All that exists is her mouth, the softness of her lips, the way she sighs when she feels me, the hand that squeezes my waist a little tighter, as if she, too, feared this would fall apart if she loosened her embrace.

The music keeps playing. Someone is clapping nearby. There’s laughter and glasses clinking. But everything comes through muffled, distant, as if we were inside a bubble that finally protects us from everything that has separated us before.

And then it breaks.

“Barbara?”

The woman’s voice falls on us like a glass of ice-cold water right in the face. I pull away slightly, still dazed. Barbara freezes in my arms. So stiff that I feel her body suddenly stop moving in time with mine, as if a switch had been turned off inside her.

I frown and follow the voice with my eyes. It’s a tall, elegant woman in a navy blue summer dress. Her long hair is loose. Her face is contorted by something I can’t quite make out at first. At least not until she speaks again.

“Can someone please tell me what the hell is going on here?”

I can hear the English accent in her voice, and that’s the first thing that throws me off. The music plays on for a few more seconds, but the atmosphere has already turned tense. The conversations gradually die down, as if someone had turned down the volume of the world just to eavesdrop. Eyes start to fix on us—curious, surprised, hungry for drama.

I still don’t understand a thing. I look at Barbara. She’s pale, so pale that for a second I worry she’s going to faint right here.

“Well… now I understand why your hands were so busy,” the woman adds, glancing at Barbara’s hands, which are still resting on me. “And here I was, like an idiot, thinking something bad had happened to you.”

My stomach lurches violently. Something inside me begins to tense, like a string stretched to its limit.

“Who is she?” I ask, though I can feel the question scratching my throat as it comes out.

Barbara opens her mouth, but says nothing.

The woman laughs. A bitter, short laugh, devoid of any trace of humor.

“Seriously? Are you such a coward that you don’t even dare to tell her?”

A silence falls so thick it almost hurts my ears. And then the woman looks straight at me.

“I’m Ingrid. Barbara’s girlfriend. And you must be Lidia, or am I mistaken?”

The world stops. Really. Everything falls silent: the music, the voices, the sea, my own breathing, my pulse. I feel the ground opening up beneath my feet and I’m falling with nothing to hold onto.

I blink. Once. Twice. As if my brain needs time to process what I’ve just heard.

I look at her, searching her face for something, anything: a denial, an explanation, an excuse that will fix everything. But I find only guilt, pure and raw, written in every line of her expression.

“Lidia, I…” she begins, taking a step toward me with her hand outstretched.

I instinctively step back, as if her closeness were burning my skin.

“It’s not what it looks like,” she says.

“Don’t touch me.”

My own voice sounds cold, broken, alien to me.

Barbara turns even paler, if that’s possible.

“Please, let me explain…”

“Explain what!?” I scream, feeling the pain rise from my chest to my throat and choke me. “What have you been lying to me about? That you’ve been fucking me while your girlfriend was in London? That you’ve been using me for your own pleasure during the trip?”