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It was two silhouettes, two mouths, two sets of lips.
A kiss. Ours. Depicted for eternity.
I held my breath, sat on the bed, leaned into the wooden headboard. I grabbed the notebook and started to flip through the pages. Leah was on every one of them. Her anger. Her pain. Her hope. Her excitement. I looked at the outlines of some of the drawings, all of them done in charcoal, some melancholy, even those that showed close-ups of lips breathing, joined hands, timid touches.
And when I’d seen her, nude in that visceral way, all I could think was that love tasted of strawberry, was nineteen years old, and had a gaze the color of the sea.
78
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Leah
Lying in bed, i closed my eyes and remembered that kiss. His soft anxious lips, his warm mouth, his hands traveling my body, pulling me into him. It was blue and red and green. Breathing sped up, the taste of him, his gruff, sensual voice in my ear. And then sky blue, magenta, and yellow. We were somehow the perfect pairing, like when something seems chaotic, but then there’s a kiss and it all falls together. It didn’t matter if I saw stormy skies and he saw clear ones.
Then we, everything, turned white. Us.
79
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Axel
I spent the whole week shut up at home working, trying to recover the routine I’d had six months before, before she set foot in there and everything changed forever. I finished most of my commissions. And even though I didn’t have anything to do, when Oliver called me on Friday night to go grab a drink, I said I didn’t feel well. Was I a coward? Probably. But telling him what was going on wasn’t an option unless I wanted him to kill me.
There was an alternative.
Not going any further. Stopping it.
But I couldn’t. I could have tried if I didn’t live with her, if I didn’t want her more and more every day, if I hadn’t started needing her. Because when the sun rose and Leah wasn’t there, the charm of it was gone, and the nights without her on the porch were cold and silent.
On Saturday, I called my father.
I did it for no particular reason. Maybe because I hadn’t stopped thinking about what my brother had said. Maybe because I felt confused and alone, and I wasn’t used to it.
We agreed to meet for dinner at an Italian place. He was there when I arrived, sitting at a corner table with an absent expression, but he lit up when he saw me and gave me a hug.
“Hey, dude. Come on, sit down.”
“You order anything to drink?”
“No. You feel like a glass of wine?”
“Better a bottle,” I said and grabbed the menu.
“Everything okay?” For the first time in a long time, my father let down his smile. “Your mother was worried when you called me. She says there can only be three reasons why you might want to see me alone.”
“Really? Let’s hear those three.”
“You know how your mother is,” he said before starting. “Maybe you’ve gotten a tourist pregnant, or you’re in trouble with the law, or you’re dying from a disease and you don’t want to tell her so as not to worry her.”
“Mom’s nuts,” I said and laughed.
“Yeah, but you’ve got to admit, you don’t call me often,” he said, slightly anxious.
I felt a little guilty. I sighed. “I should do it more.”
The waiter returned with a bottle of wine and we ordered dinner.
