And I didn’t know yet what that looked like, or where it would lead.
The quiet of the flat settled around me again.
“I’ll call you after the meeting,” I promised.
“Good. Try to get some rest.”
“I will.”
We said goodbye, and the line went dead.
I let the phone fall onto the cushion beside me and lay there for a moment, not moving, not thinking in any structured way, but aware of the shift in me, the space I was in.
My life was waiting for me, that much was true. But for the first time, I wasn’t sure I wanted it back. Not as it had been, at any rate. Not without… change.
I turned my head, my gaze drifting to the piano across the room.
I wondered what my life will sound like tomorrow.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Stefan
Romeo und Romeo’swas enjoying its habitual Sunday night kind of busy, which was precisely why I’d chosen it. I needed the distraction.
The apartment was the last place I wanted to be. Everywhere I looked, I saw him, at the piano, in the kitchen—in my bed.
I don’t need reminding right now.He’d only been gone a few hours. I’d come straight from the train station to Romeo’s, where the conversation flowed around me, voices layered over low music, and glasses caught the light as people shifted and leaned into one another. It was familiar, predictable in its rhythm, the sort of environment that usually required just enough attention to keep everything else at bay.
Usually.
I sat in the window, a glass of wine in front of me, except I’d barely touched it. My attention drifted more often than it settled, my focus returning, again and again, to the same place.
My phone.
It rested on the table within easy reach, its screen dark, offering nothing and yet demanding more attention than anything else in the place. I had no reason to pick it up, no expectation of a message, and yet I found myself glancing at it anyway, as though repetition alone might alter the outcome.
Of course it didn’t.
I wrapped my fingers around the glass and took a measured sip.
This is unnecessary. The situation hasn’t changed.
Nothing had shifted since I watched him board the train.
Calling him wouldnotbe casual.
There was no version of that conversation that didn’t move things forward, that didn’t ask for something I had not yet decided I was prepared to give.
That was the clear, uncomplicated reality of it. And it still didn’t kill the impulse to pick up the phone and call him. I shifted my hand closer, not reaching for it, but close enough that the intention was there, unacknowledged but present.
I wasn’t ready to act on it. Not yet.
“Careful,” a gruff, familiar voice said beside me. “If you stare at that thing any harder, it might start talking back.”
I didn’t turn immediately. “Good evening, Dieter.”
He slid onto the empty chair next to mine, and placed his glass of beer beside my wine. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d fallen off the face of the earth. Or worse, you’d found something more interesting than this place.”