Einar stroked my cheek with his fingertips, and the soft lines around his mouth suggested tremendous compassion, more than I was used to seeing even in the faces of my close friends.
“That’s one of the hardest and most unfair things to go through in life. And you’re only so young,” he said quietly, but not before giving me a chance to add anything if I wanted to.
We stayed silent for a moment or two.
“What happened to your partner?” Einar asked.
I recounted to him Petr’s decision to leave Pisa, saying that I hoped he was alive and uninfected but knew it to be an unlikely outcome.
“The truth is that I lost him a long time ago. We were only bonded together by the life we wanted to share. Once it became clear that I could never give him such a life, there was nothing left between us but a vacuum that no amount of travelling or hobbies could fill.”
Einar’s face was illuminated by the mellow candlelight.
“Did he make you feel bad then? For not getting pregnant?” he asked me bluntly.
His question left me momentarily speechless, feeling as if my breath had been knocked out of me. It was a reasonable question. So reasonable in fact that it made me wonder why I had never asked it myself.
“Everyone did,” I replied, my voice barely a whisper. “Not just him. Everyone.” I was almost unaware of my voice increasing in volume. “All those relatives telling me it would happen when the time was right. Friends advising me to just relax, asking me jokingly if we were doing it right. Other friends, telling me that I was lucky and what they wouldn’t give for a lie-in on a Sunday morning. Aunts proudly suggesting that wejustadopt, in the same off-hand way they would suggestjustswitching shampoos, and as if that were some kind of a groundbreaking revelation that we didn’t know was an option. Family members saying that everything happens for a reason, as if that were any comfort, even if true. All those people that weresupposed to be close to me and suddenly none of them were.” Words rushed out of me with the vehemence of a landslide.
I took a deep, steadying breath.
“Most meant well, I realise that. And they’re likely all roamers now. Or dead. It doesn’t feel fair to resent them. But I won’t deny that the virus has done me a huge favour by shutting them all up,” I spat, tasting vitriol on my lips.
I cast a worried look in his direction, but the pools of his eyes were once again bottomless with understanding, and I sank into them gratefully.
“Sorry for saying all that. I don’t mean it, of course. Sometimes I have so much rage inside of me, I may as well be a fury myself.”
Einar chuckled, his shadow’s chest heaving on the pastel-green wall. But he gave me a distinct sense of laughing with me rather than at me.
“Becoming a fury is an improvement for most people,” he told me, and I huffed with amused outrage. “For you, darling, it certainly would not be.”
He reached for his glass of water, and as his hand passed near them, the little flames of candles on the nightstand flickered. I didn’t know how, but suddenly I realised with absolute certainty that he knew from experience what I was talking about. People who haven’t been through the same were never quite so empathetic.
“So, who was it in your case? Your partner or you? Or both?” I raised my eyebrows at him inquisitively, but with what I hoped was a smile every bit as kind and reassuring as the one he gave me when I first told him.
But his eyebrows rose up his forehead in surprise, hiding themselves underneath the waves of his hair.
“Neither, Ren. Not me. But someone close to me. See, I’m from Iceland originally, but before the Outbreak, I’d lived inEdinburgh, and I had ... an affair with this marvellous married woman. She and her husband had done four rounds of IVF in as many years, and in a way, I was there to watch what it did to her.”
His features mellowed out with the recollection.
“I’m not one to judge, but she was trying for a baby with her husband while having an affair with you?” I blinked hard.
“Ah ... well.” The sadness melted away into a grin. “Let’s just say that the things I did to her, things she wanted me to do, she wouldn’t have wished from her husband,” Einar drawled, and my innards sizzled with revived desire at his words. “Me, I would’ve been happy to treasure her in daylight and ruin her come nightfall. But she found it more comfortable to keep her excursions into the less conventional bedroom activities separate from her tame, suburban marriage. I was her escape.”
I nodded, swallowing heavily as his words reverberated through the darkest corners of my mind.
Let me treasure her in daylight and ruin her come nightfall...
Before I found at least a somewhat dignified way of telling him just how appealing that sounded, creases appeared on Einar’s forehead, making him look younger and vulnerable.
“I hated watching what it did to her.”
He took a few sips before setting his almost empty glass of water back on the nightstand.
“Before I met her, I never realised it was possible to grieve not only a life lost, but also a life that should have been but wasn’t. That kind of sorrow is mostly invisible to others. Must have been brutally isolating.”
And just like that, I felt closer to Einar than I had to anyone in several years, my heart swelling in my chest like a sponge soaking up new affection.
