Finally Lydia could feel the long, cavernous days of winter ebbing away. Through her office window she could see a smooth blue sky and she could feel the warmth of the afternoon sun warming the carpet by her feet. Queenie sat right in the middle of it, as if it belonged exclusively to her, this long-awaited pool of golden light. Lydia stretched her legs out in front of her and stared in dismay at her winter feet. They had the semiopaque, grayish-whiteness of lard and her toenails were tinged yellow. She needed to sort out her feet. Now that she was sharing her house with another human being, it was vital. How could she display these bony, misshapen lumps of meat and bone to another human being? She had already invested in new pajamas. Not sexy pajamas. The last thing she would attempt to be at seven in the morning was sexy. But just smart pajamas. From Toast. Smart, but kind of cool. Pajamas that spoke of scraped-back hair and reading glasses and serious bedtime literature.
Lydia sighed. Bendiks had moved in four days ago. He had arrived with three very smart suitcases, one of which appeared to be a real Louis Vuitton. He’d unpacked silently in his room, emerged at six o’clock all spruced up and smelling of expensive aftershave, and then not returned until some unimaginable hour the following morning. She’d heard him about the house since, his door opening and closing every few hours. And she had stood, for a short while, outside his bedroom door that first day, her knuckles poised beside it, steadying herself to ask him how he was doing and if there was anything he needed, but she’d lost her nerve and backed away, silently, toward her own room. And then she’d bumped into him yesterday morning, thinking, wrongly, that he’d already left for work, when she was wearing her Toast pajamas and looking like a total fright. She’d slept so deeply the night before that her face felt like a full sponge. She’d jumped at the sight of him, pristine, fresh, and on his way out the door. He’d smiled at her broadly and said, “Good morning, Lydia! At last I see you! I was beginning to think that you had moved out!”
“Oh, no!” she’d replied overbrightly. “Just here. Just, you know, hanging around. Working. That kind of thing. Everything okay?”
“Yes,” he replied simply, “yes. Everything is okay. I will see you later. Okay?”
“Okay!” she’d babbled.
She was constantly on edge.
The edginess was compounded that moment by a gentle knock at her door. She jumped.
“Lydia,” came a low, male whisper, “it’s me. Can I come in?”
She quickly tucked her ugly feet away beneath her office chair and picked up a sheaf of paperwork. “Yes!” she said, in that strangely high-pitched voice. “Come in!”
And there he stood, in a simple T-shirt and distinctly heterosexual jeans, his hair messed and whorled like the coat of a guinea pig and his bare feet smooth and tanned.
“Hi,” he said.
“Oh. Hi.”
“Is this a good time?”
She looked at her desk, somewhat pointlessly, and then back at Bendiks, shrugged and said, “Yes. It’s fine.”
“Good,” he said. “Is it okay for me to come in?”
“Er . . .” She glanced around her office again, searching for errant items of discarded underwear or rotten food or bunched-up gym socks or anything that could in any way be construed as an indication of sluttishness or freakishness. Finding none, she returned her gaze to Bendiks’s and said, “Yeah, sure, come in.”
He sat immediately on the leather chair in the corner and pulled his feet up onto the seat. She looked at them momentarily and tried not to allow any strange noises of longing or desire to escape from between her lips. “So,” he began, running his hands up and down the arms of the chair in a way that seemed designed deliberately to stoke the coals of her imagination, “I just wanted to say hello. I’ve hardly seen you. And it feels a bit strange, to be living here in your house and never to see your face.”
“Yes,” she agreed, “I know. It’s just, well, I suppose I don’t really get out much. What with work and the fact that Juliette does all my shopping and . . .” She drifted off as she ran out of normal-sounding reasons for rarely leaving her house and started to run up against the weird ones, like the fact that she had no friends and no family and no hobbies and no interests.
“Oh”—he smiled and folded his arms across his chest—“good. Because I was starting to think you were trying to avoid me.”
“Oh, no. No no no no. Not at all. I’m always like this. Honestly. Just a little hermit. Locked away in my office. You know. It’s nothing personal, I promise you.”
“Good.” He smiled again and then leaned forward and appraised her so frankly with his dark brown eyes that she felt herself blush. “Because I am so grateful to you for everything, and I would hate it if I was making you feel uncomfortable by being here.”
“You’re not! Really! It’s good having you here.”
He looked at her quizzically, clearly still not entirely convinced. “Well,” he said, rubbing his chin and smiling at her, “that is okay then. But you, you are a very hard woman to read. It is impossible to know what you are thinking.”
Lydia smiled, partly with relief. It was a blessing, she felt, that Bendiks could not see what she was thinking as for most of the time when she was in his company she was thinking about him lying on top of her.
“So,” he said, rearranging his feet, “how are you? How is everything going?”
“Oh, fine. Not bad. I’m, er . . .” She smiled at him apologetically almost, as if about to break some bad news. “. . . I’m seeing my brother this afternoon!”
“No way!”
“Yes! He got in touch! Last week! And we’re meeting for a drink this afternoon.”
“Oh my God, but that . . . that is amazing. You must feel so happy.”
Lydia considered his choice of words for a while. It had not occurred to her to feel happy. She had felt only fear mixed with mild excitement. Her brother’s name was Dean. He’d written her a very sweet e-mail the week before. Sweet, but not exactly inspiring. She hadn’t really known what to expect. It was probably unrealistic of her to imagine that these people should be particularly interesting just because they were her genetic siblings. But then again, she reasoned, a lot of people weren’t that expressive with words. Maybe when she met him she would be pleasantly surprised. She did hope so.
“So,” said Bendiks, “what time are you leaving?”
She looked at the clock on her computer screen. “In about forty-five minutes,” she replied.
“Oh, my goodness,” he said, leaping to his feet. “Then I must leave you alone, to get ready. To prepare yourself.”
“Oh, no, honestly. You don’t have to . . .”
“Well, actually, I am going out now too,” he said, “to meet a client. I might just jump in and out of the shower before I go. But, listen, wow, good luck for this afternoon. I’ll be thinking of you. And I’m going to send you a text message. What time are you meeting him?”
“Five thirty.”
“Good. Then I am going to text you at exactly five forty-five. If you do not like this boy, if you want to come home, just tell him that it’s an emergency and you have to go, okay? But if you’re happy, please reply, so that I know.”
Lydia smiled. She was touched by his instinctive desire to protect her. “Thank you, Bendiks,” she said, “that’s really sweet. And I will, I promise.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Sick,” she replied.
He smiled. “I’m not surprised. I am feeling sick too and it is not even me who’s going to meet his brand-new brother.” He smiled and then he put his hands in his pockets and turned to leave. “Good luck, Lydia,” he said. “This is an amazing thing that is about to happen to you.”
Then he was gone and Lydia slowly unfurled her feet from beneath her office chair and exhaled. She waited in suspended motion until she heard him leave his bedroom ten minutes later and then the front door bang closed behind him and then she ran down a flight of stairs and into her bedroom to watch him from the window. He had on a denim jacket (gay?) and white trainers (more gay?) and carried his gym bag over his shoulder. He was talking to someone on his mobile phone and he was laughing. He turned the corner and Lydia let herself flop down backward onto her bed.
She ate a peanut butter sandwich just in case it turned out to be the sort of night that required a lined stomach, and then she showered and changed and brushed her teeth and tried to ignore the distorted feel of her stomach and the knot in her bowels. She’d already decided what to wear. Jeans. Just ordinary blue jeans. And a billowy long-sleeved black jersey top and wedge-heeled sandals. She combed out her dark hair and she applied a little mascara and a little lip gloss and she stared at her face in the mirror for a little too long, until it looked warped and wrong and not at all the sort of face to be showing to a twenty-one-year-old man who just happened to be your brother. The edges of her world became more and more vague as she went through these ordinary machinations. She felt normality drifting away from her, like a dissembling dream. But it did not occur to her for a moment that she would not go. She was going. That was about the only thing that felt real.
At 4:50 she left her house and walked to the tube station. She was meeting Dean at a bar in the London Bridge Hotel, a pleasingly bland-looking place she’d uncovered on the Internet on being informed that this was where his suburban train brought him. Dean lived in Deptford. As a relative newcomer to London, Lydia wasn’t entirely sure where exactly Deptford was but felt it had a slightly loutish ring to it. Just the sound of the word as compared, for example, to a word like Chelsea, put her in mind of tower blocks and juddering overhead rail lines.
She arrived at the Borough Bar at exactly 5:30 and scoured the room. Dean had been unable to e-mail her a photograph of himself as apparently he didn’t own a digital camera and his phone didn’t have a camera on it, but he had described himself as tallish and slim with short brown hair. Lydia deduced that there was no one in the room who could conceivably be him so she headed for the bar and ordered herself a large gin and tonic. She took the drink to a small round table positioned close to a window so that she could scan the street for his arrival and, as she rested the tumbler on the table and was about to sit down, she saw him.
He looked like an overgrown lemur, thin and lean with a face full of eyes. He scanned the room with those big, scared eyes, hands at the ends of long arms stuffed into the pockets of a thin cotton jacket, long legs draped in overlarge denim, a small silver stud in his left earlobe, big feet in blue trainers, and a shopping bag hooped into the crook of his arm. He had the face of a 1960s rock star, all lips and eyes and cheeks and skull, and his body was so spare it might easily have been made of nothing more than bone and muscle. He looked malnourished and shrunken but, beyond the cheap clothes and downtrodden demeanor, he was undeniably and ethereally beautiful.
He spotted her and smiled. He took a hand from his pocket and raised it to her in a kind of awkward salute. She raised hers to him and echoed his smile.
“Dean,” she said as he approached. She got to her feet and offered him her hand to shake, as though he were a student hoping for work experience rather than her own flesh and blood.
“Nice to meet you,” he said.
His hand was clammy and his face was set with fear.
He’s more nervous than I am, she thought.
But she saw his features soften as he looked at her. “You’ve got my nose,” he said, and she could hear a hint of childish delight in his voice. “Look.” He turned to the side to show her his profile. “Don’t you think? It’s the same?”
It was.
She turned sideways too and he examined her nose and smiled.
“Yeah.” He smiled. “Yeah. I was kind of hoping there’d be something, you know, something the same. Just to make me feel like this wasn’t just . . .”
“Meeting a total stranger?” she offered.
“Yeah.” He smiled and sat down.
“Let me get you a drink,” Lydia said. “What would you like?”
“Oh, right, yeah. What’s that you’re drinking?” He pointed at her glass.
“Gin and tonic,” she replied.
“Yeah. I’ll try one of those. Thank you.”
Lydia brought the drink back to the table and Dean took it from her with two outstretched hands like a toddler reaching for a cup of juice.
She watched him peel off his thin jacket to reveal a shirt. Worn specially, she couldn’t help thinking, to impress her.
He lifted the glass to his lips and took a sip. He grimaced. She lifted her glass then and held it aloft. “A toast?” she suggested.
“Yeah, why not?”
“To us.”
“To us,” he concurred, and they knocked their glasses together. Matching drinks, matching noses.
“Couldn’t believe it when I found you on there,” he said. “I have to be honest with you and say that I was pretty wasted when I signed up.”
“Me, too.” Lydia smiled.
“What, really?”
“Well, actually, no. I was wasted the first time I went to sign up, but I didn’t go through with it then.”
He nodded his understanding. “I don’t even remember doing it.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, I know. Luckily the person I was with when I did it remembered.”
“Pretty impressive that you could remember all that detail, though.”
He tapped his head with his index finger. “It’s all up there. Donor number. Clinic. Address of the clinic. It’s been sitting in there for three years.”
“That’s when you found out?”
“Yeah. When I was eighteen. My mum told me. What about you?”
“Three months ago.”
“No way?” His thick eyebrows pressed together. “That late, huh?”
“Yes. Been in a state of ignorant bliss up until then.”
“So what . . .?”
She shrugged, and then appraised him with widened eyes. “I got an anonymous letter. Well, not even a letter. Just some paperwork. From the clinic. And an article about the Donor Sibling Registry.”
His eyes widened in sympathy. “Jesus,” he said, “and you’ve got no idea who from?”
“Not really. All I know is it was someone in Wales. Someone from home. Which could be absolutely anyone, I suppose. My mum and dad are both dead and I’ve totally lost touch with all my relatives so,” she shrugged, “I don’t suppose I’ll ever find out who it was. But I have my suspicions.”
“Yes, my uncle Rod. My dad’s brother. He was very close to my mum and dad. If anyone had known about this it would have been him.”
“And your dad? Did he know?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “He never told me he knew, but now I think back on it, he obviously did.”
Dean shook his head slowly from side to side, in disbelief. “And I thought my life was fucked up.”
Lydia smiled at him. Of course his life was fucked up. You could tell just by looking at him that his life was a stinking mess. But for now his face was sweet and soft and Lydia could tell that he was enjoying her company and that this experience was turning out better than he’d imagined or hoped. She felt the same way too. From the moment he’d turned sideways to show her his nose, she’d felt fine about everything. And the longer she looked at him, the more she shared with him, the more relaxed and comfortable she felt, not just about this meeting, but about herself. Dean was her, ten years ago; too thin, badly dressed, hunched and apologetic for her existence. And then she felt it, plunk, another piece of the jigsaw falling into place. An overwhelming sensation enveloped her, took the breath from her. It was new and it was remarkable and it was something she’d waited all her life to feel.
She felt maternal.
Here it was finally, for the first time since her dog had died, a sense of love and affection. She wanted to touch this boy. She wanted to hug him. She wanted to hold him to her bosom and keep him safe.
She finished her gin and tonic and Dean finished his and then he went to get them some more. She watched him at the bar. He was a pathetic specimen. Pathetic and beautiful. She smiled fondly at his back. Her brother. Her baby brother.
He put down another gin and tonic in front of Lydia and a pint for himself. She wouldn’t let him buy another round. He was clearly penniless. She remembered only too well the sense of painful extraction she’d felt paying for drinks in pubs when she had no money. She remembered the days of pulling out a solitary £10 note from a hole in the wall and squeezing every last drop out of overdrafts and borrowing crumpled fivers from friends. She remembered it all as though it were yesterday. She had, after all, been poor for a lot longer than she had been wealthy.
“So, what made you decide to go through with it?” she asked him. “I mean, I know you signed up when you were drunk, but afterward, when you had to get tested and stuff. What was your motivation?”
She saw something flash through his eyes. It looked like pain.
“Oh, God,” he said, smiling apologetically. “I don’t know where to start. It’s been . . . Fuck.” She watched him struggle to find some words to use. “Three months ago I was living with my girlfriend and we were about to have a baby together. Then she went into labor early and started losing blood and next thing I know, she’s, well, she’s dead.” He shrugged and smiled at her pitifully.
Lydia felt her gut twist itself into a knot. “What about the baby?” she whispered.
“Baby’s fine,” he said. “Baby’s good. She was in hospital for ten weeks, you know, until her due date.”
“And where is she now?”
“With my girlfriend’s mum. Yeah.” He tapped the side of his pint glass with blunt fingertips.
Lydia was speechless. “God,” she said, eventually. “That is . . . I don’t even know how you must be feeling. I mean, you’re so young.”
“Yeah, well,” he said, “shit happens. Happens to everyone. Maybe I just got my shit out the way early. And that’s part of what this is about.” He gestured to Lydia and then to himself. “Everything’s gone, you know? My flat. My girlfriend. My job. My future. Even my mum, a bit. She’s getting used to me not being around, doing her own thing, dating and stuff. It’s all going or gone and I think I just wanted to start something, you know? And the minute I saw those people . . . you, and the other girl, the young one . . . it, I don’t know, it felt like the next thing? Not to say I wasn’t totally crapping myself about this. I haven’t eaten since yesterday, you know? I just kept thinking . . .” He paused. “I was really scared you’d be . . .”
“What? A cow?”
He laughed. “No, not a cow. Just thought you might be a bit . . . aloof? Had this image of you. In pearls and stuff.”
Lydia laughed out loud. “Never worn pearls in my life!” she said.
“Yeah, well.” He smiled. “I can see that now.”
Lydia’s phone made a twittering sound and she pulled it out of her handbag, smiling apologetically at Dean. It was a text, from Bendiks, the escape text he’d promised her. All okay? it read. She smiled again and typed the simple response: Very okay. She switched off her phone and slipped it back inside her bag. “So,” she said, turning her attention back to Dean, “your baby, who does she look like?”
He smiled, understanding her need to ask the question. “She looks like me.”
“And who do you look like?”
He paused, seemed about to say something, then stopped. He stared down at his feet and then he looked up again. He appraised her, uncertainly, and then he said: “I look like you.”
∗ ∗ ∗
Lydia fed her brother that night. She bought him a pie at the bar and watched him eat it with some satisfaction as she herself fiddled with a wooden board piled with unhappy slices of salami, cracked olives, coiled anchovies and a cluster of punch-bag-shaped caperberries. She put her card behind the bar and, when it was time to settle the bill, she did it surreptitiously, gently dismissing Dean’s objections.
It was nine o’clock when they left the hotel and it felt like they had covered only a small fraction of a percent of the things they wanted to talk to each other about; that if their relationship was a slice of cake, their time together so far had been a mere crumb.
Lydia had considered the idea of inviting Dean back to her house but lost her nerve on the cusp of saying it. He was her brother, that had been proved scientifically, anecdotally and officially. They had the same nose. But still, she reasoned with herself, he was a stranger.
So they parted with a promise on both sides that they would meet up again very, very soon.
“Maybe that other one will be in touch by then,” Dean said, hopefully.
“The girl, you mean?” asked Lydia.
“Yeah. The young one. Then all three of us could meet up.”
Lydia smiled. She couldn’t quite imagine it. She felt that she and Dean had formed a kind of exclusive club of two tonight. It seemed less likely than ever that there was another member, let alone another two.
“I wonder who the fourth is?” she asked.
“Yeah.” Dean touched his chin and pondered the concept. “The mysterious fourth. The other boy. Maybe he doesn’t know?”
“I guess so,” she agreed. “Or maybe he doesn’t want to know?”
Dean shrugged.
They were outside London Bridge station. It was getting dark. People passed either side of them, seething like rapids, homeward bound. It was time to say good-bye. They smiled awkwardly at each other. They’d drunk enough to lose their initial reserve, so they pulled together in an embrace. Lydia tried her hardest to give her body a more yielding form. She was not designed to be hugged and she didn’t want to give her brother the sense that she was resisting him. But as they came together she felt it coming from him too, the strange stiffness of a person uncomfortable with physical affection. They came together like two coat stands, digging into each other with sharp elbows and stiff arms. But inside the gauche embrace there was real affection, and as they separated they smiled at each other warmly and with emotion.
“I’ve really, really loved meeting you,” said Lydia.
“Likewise,” said Dean.
“Next week?” said Lydia.
Dean shrugged again. “Yeah,” he said, “anytime. I’m not exactly busy, you know . . .”
“Me neither,” said Lydia.
They laughed and then touched each other’s arms and Dean turned away first. It seemed that should be his role as the younger. And her role as the elder was to watch him leave, cover his back, to see him safely into the maelstrom of the commuter station.
Lydia stood for a moment after he’d gone. She had one hand in the pocket of her jeans, the other holding the strap of her handbag. As the sun fell behind the horizon, leaving its lingering residue of inky blues across the city, the temperature fell and Lydia felt the late-evening breeze chill her skin. She unfurled her heavy scarf and covered her shoulders and her arms with it, then hitched her bag closer to her body and stepped out onto the street, her eyes peeled for the reassuring glow of a vacant taxi.
∗ ∗ ∗
Lydia’s house greeted her like an old friend as she approached it thirty minutes later. After the strangeness of the evening, it looked safe and familiar. She felt her body relaxing as she walked up the front path toward the front door. She pictured herself in less than a minute, collecting a glass of water, kicking off her shoes, padding up to bed, peeling off her clothes, laying down her head, closing her eyes, pondering the evening, letting it all sink in while making new sense of her life. But as she turned the corner into the kitchen she saw that Bendiks was sitting at the table there, wearing a white T-shirt and combat shorts. He had lit a candle and was reading a paperback which was held in the crook of one knee, and when he heard her walking in he looked up slowly and smiled. “You’re back,” he said, somewhat unnecessarily.
Lydia smiled at him uncertainly. “I am,” she replied.
“I stayed up,” he said, again somewhat unnecessarily.
“Yes,” said Lydia, unhooking her handbag from her shoulder. “I can see.”
Bendiks closed his paperback and uncrossed his legs. He looked at her warmly. “I know it is silly,” he began, “but, I don’t know, I was worried about you. I know you sent me that message but that was a long time ago. And I just wanted to . . . well, make sure you got home all right. And that you were feeling okay. Are you,” he continued, “are you feeling okay?”
Lydia put down her handbag and smiled a smile of relief. “Yes,” she said. “I’m feeling absolutely okay.”
Bendiks’s smile also softened and he leaned across the table toward her. “So,” he said, “how was it? How did it go? Unless you’d rather not talk about it?”
“No.” Lydia sat down and ran her hands across the smooth tabletop. “No. I do want to talk about it. I’m just not sure what to say.”
“What was he like? Was he nice?”
Lydia looked at Bendiks’s expression of concern and felt a rush of pleasure soar through her. How sweet, she thought, how very sweet. “He was,” she said. “He was really nice. Quite shy. Quite quiet.”
“Ah.” Bendiks laughed and leaned back again against his chair. “Just like you then!”
“Well, yes, I suppose,” she said. “He was very like me. Very like me when I was his age. But lovely. Really lovely.”
Bendiks eyed her thoughtfully, almost dreamily. “Wow,” he sighed. “This is amazing! You know that, don’t you? What is happening to you, it’s amazing.”
Lydia smiled. “Yeah,” she said. “I know. It feels like a dream.”
“It is like a dream. It is like an amazing dream. And now, you still have two more to meet. The other brother and the sister.”
Lydia rubbed her elbows and shrugged. “Doesn’t seem quite real,” she said. And it didn’t. The sister seemed less real than ever in the light of her meeting with Dean.
Bendiks smiled at her and then got to his feet. “Can I get you anything?” he said. “A cup of coffee? Maybe a herbal tea?”
“No, thanks, I’m fine. I think I’d better get to bed actually. I’m feeling a bit tired.”
“Something stronger?” he suggested playfully. “A schnapps, maybe? Come on, we could take them out onto the terrace, it’s not too cold out.”
Lydia considered the offer and then Bendiks’s motivation. He was staring at her not quite beseechingly, but certainly with some depth of intent. She wondered why he wanted to drink schnapps with her on the terrace and almost asked him, almost said: but why? Why would you? She cast her gaze around pathetically, looking for a suitable response. Part of her wanted nothing more than to sit on the terrace with the object of her desire and for them to get slightly drunk together. Another part wanted to grab her handbag and scamper upstairs to her room, closing the door firmly behind her.
“Er, okay then,” she said, somewhat involuntarily. “Yes, why not?”
He beamed at her and clapped his hands together. “Good,” he said, “great. I will be back in a minute.” She watched him through the kitchen door, taking the stairs to his room two at a time. She watched the muscles in his thighs straighten and harden with each flex and felt a lurch in her stomach at the possibility that lay ahead of her; that she might one day get to feel those thigh muscles straining against hers. She gulped and turned away from the door, staring through the blackness of the kitchen window and trying to talk herself down from a state of heightened nerves. When she heard him returning she breathed in deeply and greeted him with a fulsome smile. He was clutching a tall, thin bottle of clear liquid. She fetched two shot glasses and followed him out onto the terrace.
Lydia sat down first, and Bendiks chose not the seat opposite but the one right next to her so that his body was only a few inches apart from hers. He poured the schnapps into the shot glasses and told her something about its provenance but Lydia was not listening. She was instead running a scenario through her mind, in which she would open her mouth and say, “Bendiks, are you gay?” And he would look at her askance and say, “No! Of course I’m not!” And then he would prove it by bending her backward over the arm of the sofa and kissing her neck urgently while simultaneously running his hand up and down her bare thigh. She shook it from her head as she sensed that he was waiting for her to answer a question, and said, “Sorry? What?”
He raised his eyebrows at her and laughed. “Nothing,” he said, “nothing. I can see you are miles away. And it is perfectly understandable, given the evening you’ve just had.”
She smiled at him wanly. “Well, yes,” she said, grateful for his misinterpretation of her silence. “It has been quite a night.”
“Well,” he said, handing her her glass and picking up his own. “I propose a toast. To your brothers. To your sister. And of course to you: the amazing Lydia.”
“Ha!” she snorted. “Right!” She hadn’t meant it to sound so disingenuous. She genuinely did not know why anyone would refer to her as amazing. But he swooped on her self-deprecation anyway and quickly shooed it away. “You are amazing. You may not think so, but I can assure you, from my perspective, as an objective onlooker, you are quite remarkable. Seriously, it is rare to meet a woman like you, so independent and clever and sexy and young.”
Sexy. Lydia stared at him. “Oh, stop it,” she said.
“Why?” replied Bendiks. “It is just the truth.”
Lydia felt almost nauseous with the density of his compliment. It was as though she had eaten six doughnuts in a row after years of living on cabbage. Delicious and remarkable, but too much. She smiled at him awkwardly and his expression changed. “I am really sorry,” he said. “Have I offended you?” And as he said this his hand moved toward her and caressed the skin of her arm. It was an innocuous gesture, no more than you might make to a stranger you’d brushed past in the street, by way of apology. But as his skin touched hers it was as if every light in the dark house of her body had suddenly been switched on. It was as though electrodes had been wired up to every nerve ending and activated. It was as though she’d been asleep and now she was awake. Wonderfully, terrifyingly awake. She brought in her breath so deeply and so quickly that it was audible. Bendiks looked at her in alarm. “Are you okay?” he asked, once again bringing his hand down against her skin, this time leaving his hand there, this time caressing her lightly.
“Yes,” she said quietly, “I’m fine.”
His hand remained. And so did his gaze.
“You can see it,” he said, “in your eyes. You can see something . . . foreign.”
She blinked at him and laughed.
“Seriously,” he continued, “in most ways you are so very British. But when I look at you, like this, in there,” he pointed out both of her eyes, “I can see something different. Something exciting.”
She flinched slightly at the word. She did not want anyone to think she was exciting, because she was not exciting. And anyone thinking that she was would be horribly disappointed.
“I am sorry,” he said, pulling away from her, releasing his grasp from her arm. “I am embarrassing you. I apologize. I am just . . .” He turned away and searched for words. “I am just slightly in awe of you. And slightly, well, I don’t know how to put it. I think a lot of you. That is all. Please forgive me.”
She smiled at him. “Of course I forgive you,” she said. “There’s nothing to forgive. I’m just tired, that’s all.”
“Of course you are,” said Bendiks. “Of course. You said you were tired and I still dragged you out here to drink with me. I just really wanted to spend a few moments with you, because I feel we are constantly like ships passing. And it would be a shame for me to move on from living with you not knowing any more about you than I did before I moved in. But if you’d rather just stick with the passing ships, just tell me. I won’t take offense.” He threw her a sweet smile.
She smiled too and said, “No. I don’t want to stick with passing ships. It’s lovely having you here. And we should do this sort of thing more often.”
“Good,” said Bendiks, pouring another shot into each glass. “Good. Then another toast. To you and me. More than just ships. But hopefully also friends . . .”
“Yes,” she said, “friends.”
And as she said it the luscious, illicit thoughts of legs entwined and lips parted and bodies conjoined slipped from her consciousness and away from her. Friends.
She tipped the schnapps down her throat and tried to look like she wanted nothing more.