When she told me she was done and I should get dressed, I was a little disappointed. Out of all the people in the world, was it possible that Lara got scared of her own feelings and chickened out?
I thought about my homoerotic arousal when I drove home. Desiring Lara felt natural and fully in line with myself. It was a mixture of admiring her savage and fragile beauty and being attracted to her near masculine strength in both physique and personality. Maybe I was even a bit narcistically in love with what I recognised of myself in her, and also with the now confirmed suspition that this adorable creature fancied me, too.
------
That was six years ago. Yesterday, Lara had called in tears, she needed a place to stay. I had not heard from her in months, but last time we spoke she had been living in Düsseldorf with her boyfriend.
Unsurprisingly, Lara had commitment problems. Most of the time, she saught out casual love affairs with similar minded partners, or, to my disapproval, she maintained relations with married men. She swore that it was less complicated, and I suppose she was right. Every four years approximately, however, Lara would proclaim she had found the love of her life, and these relationships tended to last up to a year. She was now in her third cycle of this pattern, her boyfriend was her dad's squash buddy, 48 years old, a dentist, a yuppie and not in the least suitable for her. They had been seeing each other for maybe 15 months, so break-up was overdue.
When Lara arrived a couple of hours ago, she looked like a mongrel, abandoned, helpless, maltreated. I sent her to take a hot shower and I cooked a strong meal, mashed potatoes, bangers, spinach, eggs, gravy. We ate, I did not make her talk, and she seemed grateful about it. Now, she was asleep, wrapped in a downfeather duvet on my sofa-bed. I paused clearing the table, to look at her delicate features, in peace, looking unusually vulnerable.
Over the next days, she stayed at home when I went to work. She read, slept, watched TV. She knows me, knows I am hard-working, had been prepared, but it was obvious, she needed more attention, someone to talk to, someone to distract her from her emotional turmoil. I, for my part, tried not to be my anal self, not to think about the extra expenses and hastle she caused me, tried not to get annoyed that it never occurred to her to use the free time at her hands to help me out with the housework and forced myself to go home early despite approaching deadlines, so we could spend the evenings chatting, laughing, analysing her emotions and debating our ideas and visions. Two times, we went out for a drink with my friends.
On friday, we had actually intended to go clubbing, but after dinner Lara felt tired, and I was more than happy to stay in and watch a movie on my laptop. We started with 'Atomised', which I had in the English translation, and I could not help feeling that German cinema has a long way to go if the same four actors were cast for every single film produced. Then we watched some film in which Nicole Kidman interprets for the UN and accidentally uncovers a dirty conspiracy, I cannot remember, I fell asleep half way through.
I woke up, Lara's head against my shoulder. We were sitting on the sofa that would have to be transformed into her bed again, which felt like a lot of action. She looked at me
"We have to move my bed back!"
I mumbled something, but did not move. Neither did she. We fell asleep again.
I woke up again and it must have been the middle of the night. I could just have moved over to my bed, but I preferred to find a more comfortable position on the sofa. Lara woke up to. There was not a lot of space on the sofa, so we ended up lying next to each other, tight like sardines in a tin. We were spooning, me behind her. She said
"I can feel your heart beat."
I went back to slumber, but stayed half awake, because my heart really beat at quite a high rate.
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