Mamihlapinatapai.
On the Path.Her : the morning after.
Mamihlapinatapai (n); Yaghan. The wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are reluctant to start.
Feigning ignorance ceases to be an option, when a halo of forlornness adorning raven-dark curls and dark eyes miserably squinting at a tattered map, feeds on her zealous inclination to play the good Samaritan.
In the age of apps for everything, a young man relying on old-school map for directions is an oddity.
The meltdown and his burst of nonsensical insults, clinch it for her, send her sprinting into the café, fetching a floral-printed umbrella. She shields him from the rain, dresses a helping hand as a casual invitation to coffee.
The blinking of deep-set, despondent brown eyes makes for the lack of a verbal answer.
The kiss is a thunderbolt to her nerves, awakens the impetuosity she sealed in the coffin of youth, buried in the grave of ruinous mistakes and caution makes for headstones.
A decent, respectable married woman would recoil in disgust and embarrassment.
She likes—wants—seeks it, like a long-lost lover of a Shakespearean tragedy.
She keeps pushing against the unwritten boundaries fenced around propriety, teasing the barb-wires with a scythe, one fluttering eyelid at a time, and how long, what does it takes, before she withdraws from committing a fatal sin or he sees through her façade and imminent rejection is made into reality.
He’s so unbelievably pliant under her touch, the discovery is a pleasant find. There is an eagerness, all clumsy and awkward, in him. An excitable human-like puppy awaiting commands. Wholesome and endearingly charming man he is.
She runs her fingers through his crow-black hair, tugging, twisting enough for his scalp to prickle, leaving fingerprints like petals all over his long neck. He fashions her a necklace of starved kisses and blunt fingernails digging crescents on her spine.
Somewhere in between their kisses and tangled limbs, he gains a boldness to pursue all of her glass-shard edges.
She graciously embraces his lascivious pursuit.
Koo Nara wakes up to a diadem of blinding migraine—moulded from overcaffeinated buzz, bleary-eyed college nights and strenuous retail part-time jobs—crowning her head. The absence of clothing itself is a bewilderment. Both relics of her youth.
Outside, indistinct blue and a smidge of soft bronze, the mark of dawn, tint the skies, not quite an unusual sight. She’d attuned herself to rise before anyone else. There are conversations best left unspoken. Resentment serves no master, only out to poison its tasters.
Her bed-mate stirs in his sleep, mumbling too low for her to decipher. Much of him is buried under an avalanche of hard-won blanket and rumpled pillows.
Before anything else, she slips out from the bed, aims for the bathroom.
Plotting is a second nature, ingrained deep, into her, like a voluntary muscle. There is a multitude of ways a step taken could veer away from her intended vision—rashness has no place in her life.
Yet, she’s all impulsiveness wrapped in alcohol-decisions.
It’s a series of missteps leading to a night of questionable vices and wanton tangling of porcelain and adonised ruggedness. The covetous exit point for the regret blossoming in her ribs is alas missing.
Her brief reprieve is in the shape of a windowless, sunflower-tiled bathroom.
Even after steam fogged the mirror, lavender hugged her skin like freshly laundered scarf and foamy thick shampoo thoroughly rinsed off from her hair, all she has is a paltry offer to breakfast.
He emerges from the covers, half-daze. His dark hair sticking out and curling into wild directions. Slumber still clinging to his darkened lashes, he stretches his limber arms over his head and another yawn thrown into his palms, drawing to his full height.
“Morning,” she says, flits an appreciate gaze at him. “So, your clothes are still damp,” she debates a flickering second to admit her mistake and doesn’t, “and I’ve stuck them into dryer. Gonna take a while for them to dry.”
The first few words he has are jumbled muffle knotted with drowse noises. No indication of a single word heard and understood.
Nara drapes the towel over his broad shoulder, grinning. “Toilet’s to your left.”
A pool of sunlight, streaking through the parted windows, shimmers on his well-toned, lithe body and the entirety of him is sculptured by the hands of Grecian master artist.
“Hmm,” he mutters, dragging his feet along.
“Why do you have a man’s clothes?” he says, tracing a finger along the lapels of a wholly, tartan blazer, his forehead furrowing with apparent perplexity. “Did you go shopping for these when I was still asleep?”
“Why can’t a girl like a man’s blazer? Is it a crime?” She seizes the blazer from his large-boned hands, a reflex born by warring partners. “It looks good on me.”
He curls his lips into an adorable pout. “But this dress shirt and chinos fit a six-footer man than a woman of your size, on you—”
She bites my ex’s down and cobbles a toothy smile for him. “They’re my brother’s,” she lies.
“—you look like a misshapen lump,” he finishes, snatches the blazer back with a lopsided grin. Then averts his gaze almost instantaneously, his cheeks burn crimson. He always seems to stagger in wringing up apologies, and she can’t decide if that’s a quirk or a front.
“Never thought you’d be a prude behind the veneer of a striking man,” she comments, the loose towel wrapping around her is never in danger of dropping.
“Get dressed and I’ll buy you breakfast.”
He sputters. He does that a lot too.
Her intention to perturb him is completely accidental, but his reaction to her partially exposed shoulders confirms one of her hypotheses.
She selects a Florentine square-topped maxi-dress, out of childish amusement.
He looks dashingly handsome, less like a lost puppy dripping in rainwater or a clueless tourist floundering with an old-fashioned map, though the shirt hangs a little loose on him.
“Shall we?”
“Is it far?”
“Walking distance,” she says, curving an arm around his.
The memory of last night’s coupling lingers in her periphery like a shadowed watcher, splinters her emotions into faintly pleasing wonder and a slightest treble of shame. But, she remembers exhilaration in the slightest brush of blunt-tipped, calloused fingers against her wrist. How his eyes resembled glossy, bright obsidians in the dim room, when he sneaks furtive glances—convinced she does not notice them.
She doesn’t examine his face too closely, not willing to discover the truth in his gaze, if the reverence she sees is just a figment of her imagination. A scorned lover hisses in her ears, you’re worthless without me, just another trophy wife material, no one will love you the way I do.
“I swear I will pay you back,” he avows, bugged-eyed and practically salivating at the thought of breakfast.
“You don’t need to,” she grins.
“I must,” he insists, pushing his bangs away from his eyes.
“Why are you so hung up with chivalric notion?”
“Because you deserved the same kindness you’ve shown to me,” he say, as if it’s a valid explanation. “It’s not that rocket science, it’s common sense.”
She forgoes the sidewalk cafés, quaint bistros and chic brasseries lining the streets, in favour of the privacy afforded by the labyrinthine backstreets garnishing the city’s landscape.
Still he has not utter a protest.
They settle on the middle steps of a brick-mortared stairs, flanked by the assorted verdant trees, shading them from the summer heat. Sitting side by side, with coffee cups and a nondescript paper bag of croissants as a divider.
Silence, oddly companionable, slinks between them. Perhaps did bring some measure of closeness—or an illusion of such.
Under the sunray playing on his clean-cut features and his distractible parts fully clothed, he’s terribly pretty, she decides. Perchance he sees her in the same light, beautiful, undamaged. She wonders if the sentiment is shared or it’s all just self-indulgent delusion.
“You got there—” He brushes his thumb against the corner of her lower lip. “—chocolate sauce,” he confesses, it from his thumb.
“You must think I’m a klutz.”
“No. I think messy suits you,” he replies, biting into his croissant.
She opts for an exaggerated show of a vain woman insulted. “Messy?” she accuses, narrowing her eyes into angry slits.
“N-no, I meant to say, natural. Like, like unkempt.” He flusters so easily and the bright reddened ears give it away, it’s borderline criminally adorable. “Never mind, I mean, no offense,” he continues, reaching for his cup and gulping his stammering down. His face falls at the first sip, nose crinkling into disgust.
“That must be my double expresso,” she grins.
He grimaces, eyeing the cup with utmost dislike. “How can you drink something so bitter?”
“I like it. It’s as bitter as my soul,” she says, smile dimming a little as she passes him his latte.
Recognising her retort as a joke, he laughs a hearty boyish one.
She can’t help to mirror his mirth with her own.
“You’re terrible, you know that,” he sighs, his currant lips already parting to a smirk.
She snorts, unladylike. “And you’re gullible around a pretty lady.”
There’s a beat of stillness where dark gazes met, twines into red strings and a tune of ‘what-ifs’ strumming along its threads. Every second ticking, the chasm between them widening and soon, this remains another memory to reminisce, a path left unexplored.
An apology at works, forming at his Adam’s apple. Something elegiac enters his expression—and she knows, intimately familiar with such melancholia, it is one reflected on hers for the longest time.
She moves to break the silence first. “You don’t have to say sorry for everything. It’s not your fault.”
“I’ve never done this before,” he admits, finding a stray linen on the blazer far more fascinating than her stare.
She’s not quite sure what this refers to, but pitches an answer anyway. “One night stand?”
Anxiety colours his chuckle, when the stray linen no longer interests him. “Spontaneity. And that.”
She clicks her tongue. “You don’t have to think too hard. I used you. You used me,” she says, and it’s the first admission she’d made containing a grain of truth, straightforward as an arrow.
“Why?”
“You looked lonely,” she says, not unkindly. Because one night cannot truly chiselled all his hurt away. But one honest man gazing at her like she’s diamonds sparkling in the lowliest of wretched nights, reignites the flame extinguished by a lover’s careless, cut-throat words.
He lifts an eyebrow. “What about you?”
“I’m finally free,” she smiles, and this is an omission.
“I don’t think I got your name. I slept in your bed, ate your food, drank your beer, made you paid for breakfast,” he pauses, extends a hand out, “I’m—”
She presses a finger to his lips, cutting his introduction off. “No, don’t. Let this be a mystery. This is perfect. We’re strangers last night. And we’re still strangers now. Today is just another strange case.”
He stares at her hard, squinting like the first time she saw him under the mercy of the harsh French showers, and breaks into some sort of a grin—perhaps understanding, perhaps resignation.
“Let’s leave it at that,” he agrees.
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