Mercenaries

At the slamming of the door, her five senses avidly took in each little detail of the scene: the white glare entering the curtainless windows, the smell of mould eating away the walls, the hammering noise of a radiator somewhere in the building, all added on to her confusion. A half-naked man ran up and down the room, going through drawers and cabinets, not finding whatever it was he was looking for. At least two attempts at saying something were cut short in her throat by the shattering of an object or an angry interjection in a language she couldn’t understand. The man had begun to gather his scattered clothes and to shove them into a backpack when he suddenly noticed her presence in the far corner of the bed, as if he had just seen her for the first time. He dropped the bag and a pair of pants and put out his open hands towards her, softly moving them up and down as he approached the end of the bed in short and restrained steps.

—   I’m sorry, I really am…

—   …

—   I have to go, do you understand? They’re coming after me and I have to go now.

—   …

As he got closer to her, he pulled the sheet that covered her up to her nose. Her white skin revealing itself to the morning gleam reacted to the slightest change of temperature, the brushing of the fabric, the eagerness of his stare. His meticulous gestures contradicted his words.

—   You must forget everything you know about me. Do you understand? Everything. If they find you, you must pretend that this never happened.

—   …

—   We never met at the Place des Voges and we didn’t visit together la maison de Victor Hugo. We never walked to the Quartier Latin to have lunch at the petit resto sénégalais that you like so much. It was never our plan to buy a bottle of wine and spend the afternoon lying on the grass in Trocadero, waiting for the Tour Eiffel to light up. I never kissed you with the pretext of hiding my face from the police that walked by us on the rue Goethe.  I never convinced you to come to this rat hole on the rue du Fabourg Saint Denis where, I never said that I was writing a novel about a long lost war.

—   …

He sat next to her on the bed and she listened to him in silence, holding her knees against her chest. He caressed her legs with the back of his hand as he talked, letting her feel the warmth emanating from his own skin. Holding one of her ankles between his thumb and his middle finger, he signalled her to stretch herself on the bed, which she did dutifully. He ran his eyes over her body from her toes to her face as if trying to capture it for remembrance in a long distant future. He then did the same with his nose, his lips and his tongue and, finally, with his open palm, which he wrapped around her neck, pushing down gently but firmly, holding her gaze.

—   I don’t have much time…

It was her voice. Without letting go of his grip, he knelt down in front of her open legs and, holding himself with his free hand on the mattress, he began to cover her body with his own until finally he buried his face in the space between the back of her neck, the pillow and her hair. Outside, the snow fell heavily on the streets of Montreal, buffering the cries and the moans coming out of a small hotel window on la Main. One hour had passed when they stepped into the street and parted ways without saying goodbye. As he walked north on the Boulevard Saint Laurent thinking of what he would like to be next time, he looked back for a moment and saw her jumping into a cab westbound.