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“Next time I get sick, you can tell that to me. You can be my girl in the mountains.”
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll be your mountain girl and take care of you.”
He smiles, like it’s another joke, another volley in our flirtation, and I smile back, even though I’m not joking.
“And in return, I will relieve you of the burden of time.” He slips my watch onto his lanky wrist, where it doesn’t seem quite so much like a prison shackle. “For now, time doesn’t exist. It is, what did Jacques say . . . fluid?”
“Fluid,” I repeat, like an incantation. Because if time can be fluid, then maybe something that is just one day can go on indefinitely.
Ten
I fall asleep. And then I wake up, and everything feels different. The park is quiet now. The sound of laughter and echoes of handballs have disappeared into the long dusky twilight. Fat, gray rainclouds have overtaken the darkening sky.
But something else has shifted, something less quantifiable yet somehow elemental. I feel it as soon as I wake; the atoms and molecules have rearranged themselves, rendering the whole world irrevocably changed.
And that’s when I notice Willem’s hand.
Willem has also fallen asleep; his long body is curved in the space around mine like a question mark. We aren’t touching at all except for his one hand, which is tucked into the crease of my hip, casually, like a dropped scarf, like it blew there on the soft breeze of sleep. And yet now that it’s there, it feels like it belongs there. Like it’s always belonged there.
I hold myself perfectly still, listening to the wind rustle through the trees, to the soft in-out of Willem’s rhythmic breathing. I concentrate on his hand, which feels like it’s delivering a direct line of electricity from his fingertips into some core part of me I didn’t even know existed until just now.
Willem stirs in his sleep, and I wonder if he’s feeling this too. How can he not? The electricity is so real, so palpable, that if someone waved a meter around, it would spin off the dial.
He shifts again, and his fingertips dig in right there into that tender flesh in the hollow of my hip, sending a shock and a zing so deliciously intense that I buck, kicking his leg behind me.
I swear, somehow I can feel his eyelashes flutter open, followed by the heat of his breath against the back of my neck. “Goeiemorgen,” he says, his voice still pliant with sleep.
I roll over to face him, thankful that his hand remains slung over my hip. His ruddy cheeks bear little indentations from the grass, like tribal initiation scars. I want to touch them, to feel the grooves of his otherwise smooth skin. I want to touch every part of him. It’s like his body is a giant sun, emitting its own gravitational pull.
“I think that means good morning, though technically it’s still evening.” My words come out sounding gaspy. I’ve forgotten how to talk and breathe at the same time.
“You forget, time doesn’t exist anymore. You gave it to me.”
“I gave it you,” I repeat. There’s such delicious surrender in the words, and I feel myself slipping away to him. Some small part of me warns against this. This is just one day. I am just one girl. But the part that can resist, that would resist, I woke up finally liberated of her.
Willem blinks at me, his eyes dark, lazy, and sexy. I can feel us kissing already. I can feel his lips all over me. I can feel the jut of his sharp hipbones against me. The park is almost deserted. There are a couple of younger girls in jeans and head scarves talking to some guys. But they are off in a corner of their own. And I don’t care about propriety.
My thoughts must be like a movie projected on a screen. He watches it all. I can tell by his knowing smile. We inch closer to each other. Beneath the chirp of cicadas, I can practically hear the energy between us humming, like the power lines that buzz overhead in the countryside.
But then I hear something else. At first, I don’t know how to place it, so discordant is it from the sounds in this bubble of electricity we are generating. But then I hear it a second time, cold and jagged and bracingly clear, and I know exactly what it is. Because fear needs no translation. A scream is the same in any language.
Willem jumps up. I jump up. “Stay here!” he commands. And before I know what has happened, he is striding away on those long legs of his, leaving me whiplashed between lust and terror.
There’s another scream. A girl’s scream. Everything seems to slow down then, like a slow-motion sequence in a movie. I see the girls, the ones with the head scarves, there are two of them, only now one isn’t wearing her scarf anymore. It is on the ground, revealing a fall of black hair that is wild and staticky, as if her hair is frightened too. She is huddled with the other girl, as if trying to disappear from the boys. Who I now see aren’t boys at all, but are men, the kind who sport shaved heads, and combat fatigues, and big black boots. The essential wrongness of these men with these girls in this now-quiet park hits me all at once. I pick up Willem’s backpack, which he’s just abandoned there, and creep closer.
I hear the soft cries of one of the girls and the men’s guttural laughter. Then they speak again. I never knew French could sound so ugly.
Just as I’m wondering where he went, Willem steps between the men and the girls and starts saying something. He’s speaking softly, but I can hear him all the way over here, which must be a kind of actor’s trick. But he’s also speaking in French, so I have no idea what he’s saying. Whatever it is, it’s gotten the skinheads’ attention. They answer him back, in loud staccato voices that echo off the empty handball courts. Willem replies in a voice as calm and quiet as a breeze, and I strain to understand just a word of it, but I can’t.
They go back and forth and as they do, the girls use the cover as it was intended and slip away. The skinheads don’t even notice. Or don’t care. It’s Willem they are interested in now. At first, I think that Willem’s powers of charm must know no bounds. That he has even made friends with skinheads. But then my ear attunes to the tone of what he is saying as opposed to the words. And I recognize the tone because it’s one I’ve been privy to all day. He’s teasing them. He is mocking them in that way that I’m not even sure they fully recognize. Because there are three of them and one of him, and if they knew what he was doing, they wouldn’t still be standing there talking.
I can smell the sickly sweet odor of booze and the acrid tang of adrenaline, and all at once, I can feel what they are going to do to Willem. I can feel it as if they are going to do it to me. And this should paralyze me with fear. It doesn’t. Instead it fills me with something hot and tender and vicious.
Who takes care of you?
Without even thinking about it, I’m reaching into Willem’s bag and grabbing the thickest thing I can find—the Rough Guide—and I’m striding toward them. No one sees me coming, not even Willem, so I have the element of surprise on my side. Also, apparently, some serious fight-or-flight strength. Because when I hurl that book at that guy closest to Willem, the one holding a beer bottle, it hits him with such force that he drops the bottle. And when he raises his hand to his brow, there’s a welt of blood blooming like a red flower.
I know I should be scared, but I’m not. I’m oddly calm, happy to be back in Willem’s presence after those interminable seconds apart. Willem, however, is staring at me wide-eyed and slack-jawed. The skinheads are looking right past me, surveying the park, as if they can’t quite believe that I could be the source of the attack.
