part0050

H avilah kissed her aunt goodnight, picked up her black dress and shoes, and quietly tipped across the hall to her room. After she showered, she found she wasn’t sleepy, as she was still wound up from the bedlam of the last few hours as well as from her long sleep on the train ride to Venice. She tried breathing in deeply to relax as she put on the hotel’s bathrobe. She knew Thierry was not asleep. His room was right next to hers. He’d still be listening out just in case some other ruffian popped up on the scene. They had said their goodnights in the corridor, right before she entered her aunt’s hotel room. She had thanked him again for all his generosity.

She thought about what her aunt had said in Paris and this morning. She thought about her silent dance with Thierry under the silver Venetian moon, and his wanting them to wake up together. She crossed the room, while pulling her long curls into a scrunchie atop her head for the night. She could hear the lapping of the lagoon’s waves in the still night from the opened balcony. She walked out on the wrought iron balcony and looked over towards St. Mark’s Square. Venice was magical and mysterious, at night or day. It was decadently elegant with its tumble-down palazzos and villas. She intended to have a leisurely breakfast on the balcony whenever she decided to wake up and eventually face the media music.

She thought she had heard a tap at the door— the one that connected her room to Thierry’s. Or perhaps she had imagined it or simply willed it to happen. Either way she rushed to the bolted and chained door to open it before he changed his mind.

He stood there in his robe, green eyes staring her down. His hair was still wet from a shower. She got a slight whiff of him. It had become an obsession with her, smelling everything he touched after he’d gone. His face broke into a smile when she seemed to blush from the intensity of his staring. The blushing, though, was really from the memories of her private preoccupations with him. She had catalogued everything about him. His walk. His nearly unaccented American English. The deep and soothing timbre of his voice. His sea green eyes and smooth olive skin. His self-assurance and calm. His ravenous reading of American, British, and French nineteenth-century fiction and all things philosophical. The lightness of his touch when it needed it to be and the firmness otherwise when she needed him to be.