They were in Branko’s car, on their way to the ferry terminal after their shifts had ended, when Anja grabbed Branko’s hand. She couldn’t go home to her mother that night. The image of Dominique’s face had haunted her all week. Dominique, peering out from the photo frames in the bedroom. Dominique, lying in the glass box. Dominique, reduced to mist and air.
Anja had never met her. Dominique had been leading the Club when Anja joined, but by then, she had already been lying low. She’d thought that if she distanced herself from the Club, they wouldn’t follow through on their threat to force experimental Third Wave treatments upon her. But the Ministry was persistent. Anja’s main source of direction came from Mrs. Jackman, who, at a hundred and seventy, was unafraid of anything the Ministry could threaten. But even so.
She’d known Dominique remotely, mainly through secondhand accounts. After Anja had the idea for the first video, after she executed the second, she’d received bottles of expensive Argentinian wine in the mail, with long handwritten notes from Dominique thanking her for her work. The handwriting had been looping and girly, old-fashioned, that of a bygone era when children were trained to write cursive in schools. She’d signed off with a large D, followed by “XOXO,” as if they were teenage pen pals and not antisanct activists running a criminal organization. Anja had always wondered what Dominique was like in person. She’d always assumed she would meet her one day, but now she never would.
She felt the tendons in the back of Branko’s hand stiffen at her touch, sensed him glancing at her surreptitiously while still pretending to look at the road. She ran her fingers up his forearm. It was warm and solid, comforting. She slid her hand around his bicep, to feel the inside of his upper arm, where the skin was smooth and soft as a baby’s. She squeezed gently, felt him flex imperceptibly under her touch, smiled at the vanity that this betrayed.
Branko didn’t speak. She could hear his breathing grow slow and shallow. He didn’t move, either, except to gently steer the car to the side of the road. When they had come to a stop, he folded his hands in his lap and looked at her.
His lips were rough and chapped when she brought her mouth to his, but when he parted them his tongue was warm. He let himself be kissed, shyly. Anja was struck by the thought that Branko was at least thirty years younger than her, despite his thinning hair and crinkled skin. There was no bravado in the way he brought his hand to rest gently on her knee, the way he kept his tongue behind his teeth as she probed his mouth. There was something chaste in it, something hesitant.
She wasn’t the only one who hadn’t touched another person’s skin in years, Anja realized. The thought made her soften inside, made her warm toward loud, crude Branko, who made braying jokes in the diner but secretly pined for his long-gone brother, who spent his days and nights working to support the niece he had left behind.
* * *
Branko’s apartment was not much larger than hers, but the air inside was fresh and cool, and she could tell that in the day, it would be a bright, airy space. She imagined waking up on the rumpled futon by the window, a breeze caressing her bare skin, the room lit up by the early-morning silence. She would stay the night, Anja decided.
The thought made her turn to the man standing next to her, turning his keys in his palm. The crunching metallic noise stopped when she placed her hand on the small of his back. As the soft slugs of their tongues curled around each other, she wondered what it would be like to run away with a man, leave the small, cramped apartment, the diner job, the Club. Give her mother’s body up to one of the farms. She would live with someone in an apartment like this, one where the living room was separate from the bedroom, one with its own modest toilet and shower. She would give violin lessons to neighborhood brats, spoiled in the way that only kids from slightly deprived families were, where guilty parents overcompensated by giving in to their every request.
Branko pulled away from her. He rested his thumbs in the hollows of her collarbone.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
It was dark enough that Anja couldn’t see his face, but still she could feel his gaze on her.
“How do you ever know—” She paused.
“Know what?”
“How do you ever know—anything? How to do the right thing?”
Branko was silent. His hands were warm and heavy on her shoulders. She felt the sturdy solidity of him, the opaqueness of his skin, the stale heat of his breath. She felt him as a weight, anchoring her, binding her to the earth.
“Never mind,” she said hastily. “I was just thinking out loud.” She pulled him toward her again, pressing her thighs against his, resting one foot gently on his toes, claiming him for her own.
He led her over to the futon, lifting and swinging her to the ground as if she weighed nothing. Then he knelt over her in the dark, stroking her hair, thumbing her cheek. She waited for him to climb on top of her, to press his mouth against hers again. But instead, he lay down next to her, pulling a thin sheet over their bodies. They lay side by side in the dark, staring up at the ceiling in silence for a long while. His breathing was deep and steady. She relished the sound of it, the sound of those long, robust breaths traveling in and out of his lungs, no wheezing, no rattling, no uneven starting and stopping. She thought he was asleep until he spoke again.
“I think,” he said slowly, kindly, “whatever you decide to do, your mother would understand.”
Then he turned and gently kissed her clothed shoulder.
“Good night, Anja,” he said into her skin.
“Good night,” she answered, closing her eyes.