by Lana Popovic
My lungs burned and my head went light from lack of air, but I didn’t stop pulling until the constellations came alive, blooming into silver fireworks that arced down toward us. I had never wondered how far I could take the gleam, what would happen if the fractal bloom actually touched me, but I wondered now as it came surging down.
I ran out of air before I could find out. Two kicks launched me back above the surface, gasping and laughing through salty water as I rubbed at my stinging eyes.
“What a glory,” Fjolar was saying breathlessly, laughing low in his throat. “What a work of wonder you are.”
“Thank you,” I replied, running a hand over my head to slick the hair back, licking the salt off my lips. “I—just, thank you.”
We stopped laughing at the same moment, rising and dipping as we faced each other, kicking to stay afloat with little fin-flicks of my feet. There was nothing but silence, the quiet splishing of the water right around us. His hair had slicked back too, and he was shining with sluicing water, his cheekbones curved and thick as ribs, his lips and lashes glistening as he watched me. My insides went tight with hunger.
I swam toward him in one quick burst, pushing his back against the pier. He gasped a little, and I wondered if the barnacles that clung to the concrete had cut him. I didn’t care. His nearness and that bright jolt of uncut tobacco, the quality of the night, had made me bold.
I cupped his face in my hands, feeling reckless and wild in the way I’d always pretended to be but never fully felt. I swept my thumbs over his cheekbones as his hands ringed my waist.
“Iris . . . ,” he said, an exhale of my name.
“Quiet,” I said, then kissed him. His lips parted beneath mine and the kiss went deep, tongue against tongue all silky wet. Beneath the lacing of smoke, he tasted fresh and sweet, and I kissed him like I was parched, like drinking a glass of cold water down in long and greedy gulps.
He groaned low into my mouth, and my hips writhed against his in response. He drew me closer and turned us around twice, until we were on the pier’s other side, him sitting on the steps and me straddling his lap. I pulled back just enough to look into his face, still breathing into his mouth.
“Is this what you were thinking about, this morning?” I barely recognized my own voice, so low and rough. “Is this what you wanted? Malina heard you wanting me. So you can’t lie.”
“Why would I ever lie about that?” he said. “Of course it’s what I wanted. Just like I want you now, any way you like.”
A thrill pierced through me, like a red-hot needle pulling fiery thread. All that permission. All of it mine. I wound my fingers through his hair and pulled, licking the salty water from where his neck met the thick muscle of his shoulder, sucking on his skin until he hissed between his teeth. I even used my own teeth, biting down until I felt him tense beneath me, hoping that I’d leave a mark. He let me kiss him wherever I wanted, my hands tight in his hair in a way I knew must hurt. But his own touch stayed infuriatingly light.
There’d been two boys before this, tourists who’d come through the café and stayed for a week or two. One of them I’d slept with when I turned sixteen, but nothing with either of them had come even close to this driving need. I wanted him so badly I was afraid of how fast my heart was beating.
“Why won’t you touch me harder?” I demanded, nearly panting against him.
“You’re the one on top from where I’m looking, flower,” he said, brushing his thumb over my collarbone. “If that’s what you want, then tell me so. Though it seems like you could use a little softness.”
“That’s true,” I whispered, suddenly near tears. It was the oddest combination, wanting him so much while also wanting to nest my face into his shoulder and cry into it. “I don’t get very much of that.”
He traced his fingers over my profile, over my forehead and down the straight line of my nose, dipping above and below the crests of my lips. He even fanned his fingertip through my spiky lashes. “I think you might need some now.”
I kissed him again, slower this time, lingering and long. His lips felt so soft against the stubble that surrounded them. “It’s not fair,” I whispered. “I’ve already given you more than the allotted two.”
“I have been known to be a very wily son of a bitch,” he teased. “Maybe all this tenderness is entirely to my benefit.”
“Maybe. But thank you anyway. It’s been . . . I don’t know how to feel anymore. With everything that’s happened with my mother. And then my sister upset me tonight, made me so angry at her.” I paused. “I could tell you what happened, if you want.”
“Doesn’t matter what it was. It brought you to me. And if this is what comes of such upset, could be I’ll write her a thank-you note.”
“I don’t think she’d appreciate any kind of note from you,” I admitted. “She doesn’t seem to like you very much.”
“She doesn’t need to,” he said simply. “I happen to like you lots more than her. She seems nothing like you at all.”
That shouldn’t have made me so happy—she was still my sister, and usually a very good one—but I’d never had this, someone who would so clearly rather have me. Someone who looked at me as if I blazed against the night, like a trailing comet. Like I was blinding.
“And what do I seem like?”
“Like wildfire. Like beauty that dies as soon as it’s curbed.”
“I guess we know what you’ll need to do with me, then.”
He ran his fingers down the ridges of my spine. “And what’s that?”
I rested my temple against his. “Don’t curb me, and you can watch as long as you want.”
SEVENTEEN
LINA WAS STILL AWAKE WHEN I CREPT BACK THROUGH THE window—I was really getting to be an expert at avoiding doors—my tunic clinging to my damp bra and panties. She’d turned a lamp on, one of Čiča Jovan’s whimsies, its base a bottle with a schooner trapped inside it and the shade in the shape of a mast and sails.
In its faint light, her cheek was striped with dried tears, and with her lips still trembling she looked like a lost and desperate little girl. I found that I just couldn’t be angry with her anymore, as if it had become physically impossible to summon that much spleen. Fjolar had bled it out of me with tenderness. Instead I felt a smooth, vast sense of peace, like a windless desert at twilight—anything unruly had burrowed deep underground, an expanse unruffled by living things.
Her eyes narrowed as I sat down on her side of the bed, her thick lashes nearly meshing. “I think you’re not mad at me anymore,” she said, each word blunt and careful, like a child picking out marbles.
“No,” I agreed. “I’m done with that, for now.”
Her brow wrinkled. “Why?”
“Does it matter why? We could just agree to be okay.”
“But you never just stop this way, Riss. Not without hashing things out, not without a fight. It’s not like you.”
The digging should have irritated me, but I couldn’t find any residual embers to fan, nothing that even threatened to grow into a flame. “I’m just feeling peaceful, is all. Can you let me have that, after everything we’ve been through for the past few days? It’s not that I’ve forgotten about you and Niko. I just don’t have it in me to care at this very moment.”
“That’s what I mean.” She scraped at her lower lip with her teeth. “I wanted to tell you that you were right, before. I shouldn’t have told her—especially not without asking you first. She’s my best friend. But you’re my sister. I should have been protecting you. I’m selfish like that sometimes, you’re right. Being sorry doesn’t always fix everything, and I know that I—that sometimes I use it like a patch.”
I stood and peeled the tunic and underwear off, shivering a little as the air hit my still-damp skin. “So, we’re good then.”
She was still frowning as I slipped back into bed, the heavier cotton of my borrowed nightgown wicking the last of the wet from my skin. “I just . . .” Her voice sharpened. “D
id you go see that boy, Riss? Is that where you went?”
She wouldn’t like it, but I couldn’t be bothered with a lie. “Yes,” I said simply. “I smoked with him out on the beach. Then I made the water bloom for him, and then I kissed him on the pier stairs, and then I slept with him. See that? That’s honesty, right there. You could take notes.”
“But you only just met him!”
“So what? I wanted to. And we were safe.”
“Fine, okay, you always do what you want. Everybody knows that. But you made the water bloom, and he could see it? You don’t think that’s something to talk about?”
“Not at this moment, no.”
Her mouth went slack with incredulity. “He shows up out of nowhere right before Mama’s attacked, right before she goes missing, and you don’t even think twice about him? How do you know he doesn’t have something to do with this?”
“Why would he have anything to do with Mama? He’s just visiting from Iceland. His mother was from here. It’s the start of the season, there’s probably hundreds of tourists who showed up in the last few days.”
“Not ones who can’t get enough of you all of a sudden, who think about you like you’re made for dessert.”
I felt a distant bolt of fury, like a glimpse of lightning two mountain ranges over. “Because that’s such a crazy thing to consider, that a boy I met might want me?”
She dug both hands into her hair. “That’s not what I meant! I’m just saying—”
I reached over her to flick off the lamp, feeling her flinch as my wrung-out hair dripped salt water onto her face. “I want to go to bed. We’ll talk more tomorrow.”
I WOKE BLEARILY, squinting against the glare of late-morning sunlight. My muscles felt dull and sluggish, a hungover ache more intense than I would have expected from the wine and single cigarette I’d had the night before. All the stress and exhaustion of the past few days finally crashing over me, most likely.
Lina was already up and about, for a wonder, wearing a peach maxi dress with a tiered skirt, patterned with tiny wild strawberries, ferns, and sleeping mice with curled forepaws. A corded bracelet of braided leather and silver thread had been wound around one wrist, and I could see the peep of her silver espadrilles beneath the dress’s hem. Čiča Jovan must have brought over some of our things yesterday, while we were still out.
She turned to me cautiously, hands stilling on the shirt she’d been folding to put in the dresser. Her hair was in a loose braid, its curling ends and ribbons trailing over her chest, and with it drawn back she looked even more like a watercolor version of our mother.
I could see the moment she felt my stab of pain; her face softened with sympathy. “There you are,” she said. “How are you feeling?”
I dug a knuckle into one crusty eye. “Pretty far from phenomenal, actually. Not sure what’s wrong with me. I never sleep this late.”
Malina had always been the one able to plunge into sleep like an Olympic diver, willing herself into oblivion whenever the world around her grew too intense. But this morning I still felt half asleep even with my eyes open, the waking world around me tilting swimmy and unreal.
I stretched my arms gingerly over my head, wincing. “And I feel like I spent last night in a mosh pit instead of . . .” Gleaming for Fjolar, I didn’t say. Just thinking of him revived a surge of lust, and I dug my nails into my palm, trying to quell it before Lina caught its sound. I didn’t want to disrupt this fragile peace between us.
It was futile as usual, and I could see Lina’s nostrils flare in response before she chose to let it go. “Well, if you’re feeling up to it, Niko said she’d meet us at the Prince. She’s bringing her mother’s book with her. Do you want to come with me? You don’t have to, I could go alone while you keep resting—”
“No, I want to come. If you don’t mind. If she’s found anything, I’d like to see it for myself.”
“Sure. I put up your clothes, too—I hope that’s okay? They’re all in these two drawers, next to mine.”
I dredged up a smile for her. “Thank you for that. You didn’t have to do that.”
She flicked one shoulder in a tentative shrug. “I was up anyway. I think Jovan’s made breakfast for us, if you want to eat together?”
“I do. Let me just take a quick shower first.”
I dragged myself to the bathroom, feeling like a prizefighter who’d lost a particularly vicious bout. Despite all the sleep, my eyes were heavy with plummy bags, and my temples felt tender. In the shower, I let near-scalding water pound over me until my skin turned red. By the time I’d wriggled into shorts with radioactive symbols stamped onto the pockets and a black tank with a mesh racerback, my head had cleared a little.
Outside, Čiča Jovan had laid out a breakfast banquet for us, as if we were actually starving orphans. He’d been cooking lavishly for himself for years, since his wife, Anita, had died so young, and even when I worked with him in the studio he was forever interrupting to spoon-feed me bites of whatever he had simmering. We ate with him at the wrought-iron table in his garden, between patches of neatly tended vegetables and wildflowers trailing tendrils everywhere. He watched us like an anxious mother hen, offering us feta cheese omelets, spooning extra sour-cherry preserves onto our plates. Lina had loaded her plate with a chocolate Eurokrem crepe, and was carefully dotting mayonnaise onto her toast, which she’d smeared with Carnex vegetable pâté.
“What?” she said through a mouthful, catching my look. “Why are you looking at me like I’m eating roadkill or something?”
“I think Carnex pâté might be worse than that. Roadkill is too close to organic.”
She shrugged. “Well, it’s delicious. Better than your crepe of the Spartans there, for sure.”
“I know not of what you speak. Cocoa and sugar is a classic.”
Čiča Jovan frowned at me over a steaming sip of black coffee. “You’re barely pecking at that, Iris. Have some of the omelet, my girl, you’re beginning to look like a whalebone corset. Or I can cut you some gibanica from yesterday if you want.”
My insides turned over at the thought of the cheese pie leaking grease. “No, thank you. I’ll eat more at the Prince, I promise.” I looked up at him, gauging his reaction. “Lina and I were thinking of spending the day there. It helps to be around Niko and Luka, and they’re both working today.”
It was painfully easy to lie to him, when he was so clearly unmoored when it came to us—how to keep us both safe and happy, now that we were in his care. “I would rather you stayed with me today, at least until we hear something from the police or the hospital. I know you want to be with your friends—”
“Jovan, please?” Malina broke in softly, reaching across the table for his knobby-knuckled hand. “We’ll be with Niko and Luka, and their father will be there too. It’s such a public place, who’d come after us there? It might even be safer for us there, maybe?”
His eyebrows drew together at the thought that he might not be able to protect us on his own. He’d always been a fiercely proud man, and even though I’d only ever known him old, I’d seen how it frustrated him that age had stolen so much of his skill and strength—his once-steady fingers trembling and a stoop hunching his tall frame. But he’d never let the prickling of his pride get in the way of keeping us safe.
“All right, then,” he said stoutly. “But I’ll walk you there, and take my battle cane. Let someone try to cross either of my girls’ paths with me standing in their way.”
THE PRINCE WAS a little busier than usual, for so early in the day, but it was Friday; the flood of tourists would be swelling over the summer weekends, regular as the tide. There was already a group of giggly Dutch girls in one of the nooks, nibbling on biscuits and coffee as they puffed on a peach-mint nargileh.
Otherwise it was just us, Luka tending the bar and serving while Niko knelt on the tasseled cushions with us, striking in a scarlet wrap dress and a choker of tambourine zils strung on black cord; it had the look of Koštana’s
handiwork, and I wondered if she had made it for Niko, if Niko was wearing it in her mother’s memory.
Niko’s collection of her mother’s writings sat on the floor between us. I had been expecting something more mystical, somehow, maybe a leather-bound grimoire with tarnished clasps. But I’d forgotten that Niko had been barely thirteen when she made it, out of a simple black binder that she’d plastered with a collage of Koštana’s photos. Koštana was smiling in all of them, so widely you could see her one gold molar glinting—Luka had once told me how much it mortified him that she adamantly refused to swap it out for a regular white cap—and her children’s faces pressed next to hers like a gradient of color. Luka’s tan skin, Niko’s olive, and their mother’s even deeper brown. Her right ear was cuffed with piercings, from the shell down to the lobe, just like Niko’s was.
There were even gummy bits of glue where a younger Niko had bejeweled the binder with little plastic gems that had dried and fallen off, though a few clung to the edges. At the very top, she’d written in sparkly, looping cursive, “My Mother Koštana’s Book of Everything.” And beneath it, the saying, “Jedna je majka.”
There is only one mother.
It broke my heart to look at it, to know what she must have been feeling, both now and when Koštana died. Niko’s face was painstakingly placid as she flipped it open, but Lina’s eyes swam with held-back tears.
“Thank you for showing this to us,” she said. “Really. I know how precious this is to you.”
Niko leaned her temple against Lina’s shoulder. “It doesn’t do anyone any good moldering in the dark, does it? She would have wanted it to be useful. Especially to you two.”