Today I’m going to cheat on my husband. I’m going to make love to a man, that I’m not allowed to love. I’ll meet the morning after blinded by my act, which I’ll carry with me for a long time; after showering I’ll recognize his smell, that will remind me of us, I’ll carry collected guilt and bitterness as I walk down the street and, finally, I’ll bring them into my apartment with me.

I was sitting opposite Igor, looking at a curtain with a red rhomboidal pattern, avoiding looking him straight in his eyes. It seemed that our breathing was matched, in spite of the fear creeping between his focused gaze and my absence. I was looking for a sign for what was about to follow, something other than the cruel chemistry that reigned supreme over the room and was there right away, when we first had met, irrational and strong. I had planned this, weighing each of the options from several perspectives, arising ahead of us in the midst of eruption of time and closeness, as powerful as lava.

‘Come here,’ he said as I was taking off my sandal’s ankle strap. I remember the time when I bought the sandals; I was walking in the city with Vedran, hand in hand, summer gluing our palms together.

‘I’m scared. Our emotions will be more than just the words.’

‘Me too.’ He looked at a place on my neck. Maybe he thought of his wife, her hands, as she tightened sheets on their bed, folded pyjamas under memory foam pillows, cooked quickly before he went away on a business trip; he thought of his kids having trouble writing homework from their required reading. They had been married for six years. She’s a housewife, cocooned in a two-storey house, with no zeal or resistance; all will had died in her after she had given birth to their second child. They were two separate worlds, he once told me.

‘There is no going back after this,’ I continued with my version of events, not paying any attention to the expression on Igor’s face. His gaze was drifting aimlessly, as an empty boat in the open sea, swaying from one end of the room to the other, looking for a stronghold. He was sensitive and I was particularly attracted to it; he was soaking up my emotions like a sponge, getting me right and understanding me without verbal communication. Emotions were just thoughts before they became words, he used to say.

Outside, sultriness was turning off the day; fresh air was somewhere out there, in another city, abandoned as it didn’t exist, just like our marriages. He was sitting in an armchair next to the bed, jitters on his dark skin. I was looking at his regular, white teeth; pleasure spread all over my body as an announcement. We were discussing this for a long time, almost a year. Here we were now, sitting in a hotel room …

I met Igor in my third year of marriage, when my husband’s hand on my thigh still stirred a desire inside me as we talked and argued, roared like animals, climaxing even when tired, devouring garlic sausages at midnight, slamming the doors, leaving and returning. I was fulfilled emotionally, giggled a lot, ate healthy and took care that my baby-birth love handles would not be noticed in my little black dress on parties we always went to together. At that time, I had never even imagined that somebody else could rouse in me something bigger and stronger.

He turned up unexpectedly, on a sultry evening in August, on a stone terrace at a party hosted by joint friends. He approached me as I was standing by myself on the southern side of the terrace. An unpleasant hovering feeling in my head, caused by sweltering air, took me away from the heated faces of the crowd, close to the rail from where the view opened up towards misty sky above the silent sea. He leaned on the rail and asked me how long we would have to wait for the sea air to climb up to the terrace.

***

‘It can help you with your promotion, though I’m not so sure. Last year, you were writing a novel, now you’re being promoted as a teacher. You’re wondering all the time,’ Vedran told me as I put my clothes in a suitcase with my sweaty hands. I was folding T-shirts as if it was something of vital importance; neatly ironed and folded clothes gave me back a bit of stability, that I was far away from at that moment.

‘I guess you’re right.’ I continued folding my stability. I had been spinning in circles for some time now and I was not sure that my circles were expanding at that. On the other hand, spinning in an emotional circle was similar to a ride on a roller-coaster; adrenalin stimulated my bodily receptors, causing addiction I could not get away from, keeping me awake all the time, ready for close combat or escape. And that was why I persisted in getting more.

‘Do you remember how often we‘ve quarrelled this winter? It’s not like that anymore. It won’t be so difficult forever. It’ll pass.’ He pronounced his sentences quickly, caught up in the role of a caring husband, quite different from the one who wouldn’t even notice me when I walked past him naked the very same winter. I could run, sing, scream as loud as I could, dance around a pole – he would simply sit. Tired and chewed by the last year that exhausted us, from many litigations, business trips and days spent in courtrooms, wearisome arguments, sudden growth of the loan instalment due to which we struggled in the suburbs.

‘Of course.’ I kept busy by packing my business clothes for a seminar. The suits I folded the best, in the end, above neatly folded shirts. Vedran and I communicated on high frequencies, with a dose of alienation lurking behind every tone, that was later watered with reports on faults and deficiencies of the other person. In those rare moments we spent together, we dug holes in each other’s souls, like moles.

***

We sat without moving. Igor was looking at my body, I was studying a black and white framed photograph of an island behind his back; the moment when wild waves splashed over cliffs behind the pier, tightly moored boats swaying along long and fat waves, and the locals crowded on a shore looked at the sea raging in front of their eyes.

‘Come,’ he interrupted the silence as if everything was all right. His voice was pleasant, often calming me down with long conversations and its stubborn presence. I was reading hope from his facial expressions, he had been planning our intimate relations for months, wrestling with every single act of my cowardice. It seemed to me that he had been here forever.

I would give him a call whenever I was left in my apartment by myself. He talked to me whenever he could, patiently and calmly, as I would sit on my couch after a stressful working day and Vedran was on a business trip, because of some law suit in another city. Our thoughts were swarming around us persistently just like bees around flowers; first the innocent thoughts, that didn’t draw out the guilty conscience, were uttered, and then conversations in crazy hours and drinking coffees accompanied by harmless touches, quarrels and platonic make-ups followed. I would look forward to it as I rushed heedlessly to the school yard, hanging strongly to our intimate moments.

I tried running away more than once, pushed him away from myself, yet I was here, in this place, with him, and not sitting at my own living-room table in a spacious suburban apartment, preparing a light dinner, reading a bedside story to my daughter, after which I usually slumped over the couch next to my husband, the man I loved.

***

‘What are you going to buy me? What?’ Mirta had wailed as I had tried to untangle the fishbone braid in the middle of her head. This morning I had glued the braid to her head with hairpins; her curls had dropped out of her braid holder. The pins had been everywhere. She had looked at me with her sparkly eyes, had tugged at my skirt and bounced: ‘Buy me Elsa’s castle!’ and had kissed me in the centre of my forehead.

I had left the room.

‘Mom, the door!’ she had yelled.

‘Okay.’ I had opened the door slightly and had looked at her once again. She had closed her eyes tight.

Mirta was afraid of the dark. Before going to bed, when Vedran was away, I would leave the light on in the living-room. I had lain in my bed and had heard her ask a question through the door I had left slightly ajar: ‘How many times do I have to wake up before Dad comes home?’  I had kept hearing this in my head long after she had fallen asleep, like a rhyme.  

***

squeezed himself into the armchair, probably thinking about everything. Although he never admitted it, I felt that he was scared of my unstableness; that always followed us. He won me over with his calmness, his rational approach to our possible future. Sometimes it seemed to me that I fit perfectly into his world of figures and computer operations, just as if I was an equation with several unknowns and only one exact solution. I got lost in the analyses of our relationship, I turned around my axis, spun in a circle, and Igor was very realistic when he thought about us, the after, the morning that would bluntly kick us out from the bed and onto the street – the outer world. He stood up and opened the curtains. I thought that I was so fucking in love with this man.

‘We can go for a drink, there is a bar at the lobby,’ I said. My muscles pulsated, ready to face another challenge, carefully planned by myself in order to finally calm down, as I loved to explain to myself. Maybe now was the time, I thought. This had to go away at one point.

‘Did you talk to him last night?’ he asked me as we were sitting behind the counter, and only a quick shadow passing over his face showed how uncomfortable he was.

‘No, I didn’t,’ I replied and ordered a double vodka. I squirmed in my chair, lighted a cigarette; I felt smoke scratching me inside my throat. I looked around and caught his hand. A strange tenderness lurched over our heads. We were alone at the hotel bar.

‘It’s difficult to talk to you, I don’t understand you. First, you look for me, then you push me away, then again you look for me. What do you want?’

He moved a curl from my cheek, I sucked in my stomach and stopped breathing, as particles of his perfume diluted in my nostrils and travelled all the way to my brain. His touch was natural, his desire finally emerged to the surface, brought us together in the moment that we thought about for so long, and then it seemed that it just materialized right in front of us, quickly and suddenly. We had been in love with each other platonically for too long, now the time when there was nothing to talk about had come, words became just sets of sounds with no meaning, irrelevant, uttered so many times before.

‘Kiss me.’ I realised right away that this was said by some other woman.

He came close. He kissed me, I felt his warm tongue in my mouth, his fingers on my skin, his rigid muscles next to my thighs. I stood back.

Now, when our intimate relationship was supposed to be fully realised, we were practically silent. He was spinning a glass of whisky on the wooden counter and I was looking outside, towards the hotel terrace.

‘You love him,’ he said.

I felt a strong blow to my stomach and straightened my back. All the mosaic pieces were slowly finding their places, somewhat like our betrayals. I looked miserably into Igor’s eyes. No, definitely he wasn’t the one.

‘Come on, nobody will ever know,’ he tried to pull me towards him.

‘We’ll know.’

I stood up. Igor was standing next to a bar stool in the hotel lobby, slightly glancing towards me over his shoulder. He sat at the counter and turned his back to me. I went out, low fluffy clouds were hanging in the sky, like curtains, covering the tops of the nearby hills and most of the land. Scirocco was raising dust on the terrace, the waiters were picking up white tablecloths and dishes from tables, the air was warm and wet. Further away in the open sea, the wind raised waves.