Chapter 8: Awake

Nils looked at me across the whole shop.

"I asked you for coffee once," he said. "At a party, three years ago. Before I knew you were with him."

I remembered nothing at first.

Then I remembered a man with a red-brown beard holding two plastic cups.

I remembered my own voice saying, "I'm sorry, I just said yes to someone."

"That was you," I said.

"That was me."

"You never said."

"You were happy. It wasn't the point."

Clemens laughed softly, the way he laughed at weak dinner jokes.

"Three years of watching her," he said to the customers. "Draw your own conclusions."

I picked up the tulips from the counter.

I walked around the end of it and across the shop, and I opened the door, and I held it for him.

"Out," I said.

"Marit..."

"Out, Clemens."

He went. He took his tulips back from me, and the door chimed behind him, and the whole shop stood without moving.

My boss put her head out of the back.

"Take the afternoon," she said. "Go on."

I did not argue.

Nils walked me home through the cold with the lunch he had bought, and neither of us said anything for four streets.

"I'm sorry about that," he said at last.

"You didn't do anything."

"I should have told you when you moved in."

"What would you have said?"

He didn't have an answer, and I didn't want one.

I spent the afternoon on the sofa under the blanket.

At six Florian came home and put a pot of soup on the stove without being asked.

We ate at the small table by the window and talked about the tram strike.

All three of us were careful not to say what we were waiting for.

Keep reading free with an account. Start They Thought I Was Asleep, So I Let Them from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.