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“Am I allowed to want this?” she asks.
Luca looks at her, face turned into the palm of Florence’s hand. “Of course not,” she says gently. “But when has that ever stopped you?”
Florence crashes back into her body with a gasp. It takes her a moment to remember where she is. The hostel room looks like every other room they’ve spent the past two weeks in, shabby and anonymous. It’s stiflingly hot even with the hum of the AC. Her hair is plastered to her neck. The confused knot of shame and longing in the pit of her stomach only coils tighter when she remembers who she’s in bed with.
Luca is still asleep, her chest rising and falling evenly against Florence’s back. Florence bites her tongue to hold back a helpless whimper when she realizes that, somehow, Luca’s leg has ended up slotted between hers. Her arm is flung across Florence’s waist, like she was afraid Florence was going to fall off the bed in the middle of the night.
The position does nothing at all to alleviate the overly warm feeling. Florence can’t remember the last time someone held her like this. Her only long-term relationship fell apart when she was eighteen and moved to London. She’s had plenty of sex since then, but she doesn’t make a habit of staying over at anyone else’s place—somehow, the sharing of a bed feels more intimate than the main event.
This, though . . . it’s nice. There’s a part of her that wants to melt into the mattress and stay tucked against Luca until their alarm goes off.
But that means risking being seen like this by the others. The idea fills Florence with a vague sense of dread.
She allows herself another minute to soak in the feeling of Luca’s body, fitted against hers like they’re pieces of a puzzle. Her plan is to detach herself as stealthily as possible—except, when she tries to squirm out from beneath Luca’s arm, Luca makes a sleepy noise of displeasure and pulls her back against her chest.
Florence scrunches her eyes shut. Luca’s leg between her thighs is giving her body all kinds of unhelpful ideas. The vestiges of her dream still cling to her like perfume after a long day, and she hasn’t been able to touch herself in almost two weeks, and if the circumstances were any different, she would roll over right now and do something about the heat simmering beneath her skin.
But they made a promise. The scorpion on her arm itches like a warning.
Gritting her teeth, Florence makes another attempt at extracting herself. Luca is still stubbornly clinging to her, but after a few minutes, Florence manages to writhe out from underneath her arm and sit up. Her heart skips a beat when she turns her head and looks at Luca. Her hair is sticking up in every direction, and there’s a small furrow between her brows, as though she’s experiencing the same sense of loss as Florence. She looks soft and small and so touchable, Florence has to dig her nails into her palms to keep from reaching out.
In the bunk above theirs, Izzy makes a quiet, sleepy noise as she turns onto her side. Sunlight is filtering in along the edges of the blackout curtains. It’s only a matter of time until the first alarm goes off.
Florence gives herself another few seconds to stew in her self-pity. At last, she flings her legs over the edge of the bed and slinks, near-soundless, into the bathroom. Turning on the light, she finds her own reflection staring back at her in the mirror, hair a sweat-matted tangle and cheeks fire-engine red.
She splashes her face with cold water before bracing herself on the sink and whispering, “Fuck.”
Up until now, her attraction to Luca has felt more like an inconvenience than anything else. But between the dream and her reaction to waking up next to her, the situation is worse than she feared. Somehow, and without noticing it, she has hurtled down the slippery slope from physical attraction straight into unbridled yearning.
“Get it together,” she whispers to her reflection. In ten days, they’ll be back in London. After that, she’ll have a week to get over whatever this is before they finish the tour in the UK. She can make it that long. She has to make it that long.
After a quick breakfast at a quaint little café down the street—although their definition of breakfast varies, with Izzy (coffee and a chocolate bar) on one end of the spectrum and Toni (a green tea and a balanced smoothie bowl with plenty of protein) on the other—they spend the remaining hours until the show doing chores. Life on the road isn’t as glamorous as Florence once pictured it; four hours before they’re expected at the venue, they’re in a laundromat, waiting for the dryer cycle to finish. It took them ten minutes to figure out how to work the washing machine.
(Toni: “I thought you grew up here ’til you were ten.”
Izzy: “Yeah, well, I wasn’t doing the frickin’ washing then, was I?”
“But you talk to your family in Polish all the time.”
“I know this is hard to believe, but I don’t ring my brothers to chat about what program they use to wash their knickers.”
“Maybe you should.”
“Shut up, muppet. What the fuck is steam clean?”)
Florence still isn’t confident they haven’t shrunken all their clothing to children’s sizes.
“So,” Miray says. She’s sitting next to Florence on one of the white plastic chairs, fanning herself with one of the little paperback books she always carries with her. “I was thinking about Toni’s birthday.”
“Oh, right,” Florence says. “I almost forgot. It’s the day after tomorrow, right?”
Miray nods. “We should do something to celebrate. I thought we could go out after the show? Maybe get dinner and go to a bar. She likes karaoke, right?”
“Sounds good,” Florence says. “We could ask Juno and her band if they want to come with.”
Miray’s face lights up. “Yeah. That’d be nice.”
Florence leans back in her chair, adjusting her claw clip to keep her hair from sticking to her neck. The air inside the laundromat feels thick enough to cut, humid and heavy with the clammy scent of wet laundry and detergent. The heat has followed them from one city to another, relentless and oppressive.
