Mental Affairs

Chapter 11

I stared at the shadowed ceiling, trying to guess how much time had passed since Alexi’s breathing had evened out. He had taken forever to fall asleep. Had it been an hour? I found myself counting his breaths. Two, ten, thirty, one hundred. I would miss him. If things had been different, if Keith hadn’t ruined me for good… I ran my fingers under my collar, over the physical reminder that ensured my memories would never fade.

Two hundred, two hundred fifty. There was no point in delaying the inevitable. If I waited too long people would begin moving again. I sat up and tried to slip out of bed without disturbing Alexi. He rolled over. I stood, holding my breath and counting each rise of his chest. It moved evenly. He was still asleep.

I moved over to my pack, blessing the fact that I hadn’t bothered to remove much of anything after we had arrived. I could sacrifice my book, which was still in the living room, and the few toiletries I had put in the bathroom. The floor creaked when I hoisted my bag to my shoulder and I winced, looking back at the bed. Still asleep.

There was no reason why I couldn’t grab my toiletries, I thought while I tried to move silently into the hall. And I should probably use the bathroom before I leave. No telling when I would find another. I set my pack on the bench by the door, jumping when the metal keychain on the front zipper tapped against the wood. Why did I always make more noise when I tried to be quiet?

In the bathroom, I flipped on the light, relieved myself and splashed water over my face. The image staring back at me was pale and almost difficult to recognize as my own. This girl’s eyes were still rimmed in red, and her expression was sad. I looked at her and wished she didn’t have to be me.

The blackness in the hallway was absolute. I put a hand on the wall to keep my bearings while I walked cautiously back towards the door, wishing I hadn’t destroyed my night vision by turning on the bathroom light. I had almost reached my pack when a bright oval appeared at my feet.

“April?” The voice was Alexi’s. I traced the beam back to where he sat on the bench next to my pack. I felt a sense of desperation mixed with something else I couldn’t quite identify. “What are you doing?” Alexi asked.

“It’s better this way,” I said. Would he let me pick up my pack and walk out the door?

“What do you mean?”

“You’re better off without me,” I said.

“You don’t mean that.” I moved forward and reached for my bag, but his hand grasped my wrist. I yanked back.

“You don’t need me. You need to choose someone stable.” Alexi got up and stood in front of the door. Damn him.

“Maybe I would have chosen differently. But you’re the one I dreamed about,” he said.

“Don’t stay with me out of obligation to the dreams.”

“I’m not obligated to anything.”

“Then let me go.” He was better off without me. He had no reason to be standing in front of the door.

“No. I won’t give up that easily. So you have problems. Don’t we all?”

“I haven’t seen you freak out at the drop of a hat and get lost in memories,” I said, my voice bitter. If I could have controlled myself, if I’d had a different past…

“No, but you didn’t mention seeing my face everywhere you looked in the weeks before we met.” It took me a moment to grasp what he meant.

“You mean you saw me outside of dreams?”

“Yeah. Multiple times a day.” Alexi stepped closer to me and inched his hand toward my shoulder. I watched it rise, fighting the urge to step back and flinching when it finally landed. “We’re both a bit off kilter, all right? We can work through this together.”

“I can’t fix myself, Alexi. Maybe I’m too broken.” The thought had lurked at the back of my mind for weeks, but speaking it was so painful that my breath caught in my throat.

“You’re not too broken,” Alexi said. “If you were too broken, you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t be going on a European backpacking tour. You wouldn’t have graduated.” I didn’t know how to respond. How could he be offering me a second chance, when he had every right to walk away? “Look, come with me to Aunt Crina’s,” Alexi continued. “I’ve found peace there before. Give us a few weeks, all right?”

“And when those few weeks are over?”

“Hopefully we’ll know what comes next. I don’t want you to walk away from us, April. Promise me you won’t.”

“I won’t,” I whispered.

*~*

Cinque Terre was one of my favorite places in the world, but I’d imagined a far different scenario when showing it to April. She hadn’t said a word about our conversation the next morning, or about her overreaction from the prior evening. Instead, she put on an act to rival the shows Raze gave, hugging Kaia for a long moment at breakfast and donning the mask of a concerned friend while we drove north to Florence. Once we had dropped Kaia and Paul at the airport and turned in the rental car, though, she became quiet and withdrawn. We bought a quick lunch in Florence and wandered into the Duomo before catching the train to Vernazza.

I was content to keep the silence, for now. It let me consider in more detail what, exactly, I was going to do.

April needed more help than I could give her; that much was clear after last night. I wasn’t a psychologist, and at the end of the summer I wouldn’t be on the same continent. So, I reasoned, she needed to agree to seek out help when she returned to the US. What else could I do? It would be nice if she could tell me what had happened to her. Maybe she didn’t even remember. I had heard stories of people who went through such severe trauma that they erased the experience. I took my eyes away from the passing scenery to watch April, wondering if parts of her memories were missing.

Knowing more about the knife thing would be good. I tried to think of something I could do to help her with that. Maybe we could do some sort of conditioning until she was, if not comfortable around knives, able to assess what constituted a danger to her. I had no idea whether that might work, but it sounded logical. Leave that one until Crina returns, I thought, just in case it backfires. Crina would be in Rome on business for another four days. That would give me time to try to get the story from April while we were alone.

I traced the profanities someone had scratched into the glass on the window. How had this gotten so complicated? Maybe Paul was right, and I should have put April on a plane and gone back to Bucharest. I would have felt awful doing that, though. April wasn’t just some random girl I had picked up for the summer. She was the girl from my dreams. God, wasn’t that the supreme irony? Here I was, trying to keep the girl from my dreams from falling apart in front of my eyes. This wasn’t how the story was supposed to end. I looked over at April again, and this time she shifted her gaze to look at me. She said nothing for a moment, and then spoke so softly I had to lean forward to hear.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I replied. I thought about saying something else, but I realized I didn’t need to. Our story still had a long way to go.

*

We arrived in Vernazza after dark, and the next morning April was standing at the window when I woke up. The sun had already burned off the morning mist, and the sky and water were competing for the title of most brilliant blue.

“You didn’t tell me it was going to be this gorgeous, Alexi,” April said, not taking her eyes off the coastline. I joined her at the window, looking down into Vernazza’s small harbor. A few dinghies were pulled up onto the shore underneath the small stone church. On the concrete break wall across from the beach, a group of art students, facing in different directions, tried to capture the morning light. The town rose in a mass of pastel buildings around the cobblestone Via Roma. When I shifted my gaze further down the coast, I could make out the coves of Corniglia and Manarola.

“This is the most beautiful place in the world,” I said.

“I can believe it,” April responded. “You said there were hiking trails?”

“Lots of them. Want to go later this week?” If she wanted to get out, that had to be good, I thought. Interest in her surroundings was progress over yesterday, right?

“Definitely.”

“Perfect! Should we find some food? Crina’s been gone a few days, so there’s not much in the house, but there’s a great little bakery above the tracks. Want to come with me?”

“You’re going to walk down in your boxers?” A grin played around April’s mouth for the first time in thirty-six hours.

“Well, no, I’d get dressed first,” I said. “Carlo would have something to say if I walked into his bakery without proper clothes!”

“Go get dressed, then,” April replied, turning back to the window. I guessed that meant she was coming, so I went to find some clothes to throw on. A few minutes later we were picking our way down the steep trail into town.

“Do you spend a lot of time here?” April asked, one hand on the stone wall rising on our left.

“Not as much as I’d like,” I replied. “Mamă and I used to come each summer, but it’s harder to get away when the band is touring.” She was asking questions, that was a good sign, right?

“I didn’t realize your family was Italian,” April said. We had descended far enough for the houses to be pressing in on either side of the path, which, despite being no wider, now had a sign declaring it a street.

“They’re not,” I said, directing April to turn to the right. “Crina moved here after her husband died… I think it was fifteen years ago? Something like that.” I pushed open the door to the bakery, hesitating when I noticed everyone gathered around the small TV in the corner. Carlo looked up, and I waved.

“Perchè, se non è poco Alexi! E questo volta vi siete portato una ragazza?” I paused, teasing out the words of a language I hadn’t used in years before I replied.

“Sì, questo è Aprile, ma lei non parla italiano.”

“Well, we can’t have that!” Carlo’s laugh was infectious, and I felt, rather than saw, April relaxing next to me.

“So, what do you do all this time?” Carlo asked. “I thought you were too famous to spend time with us!”

“Never!” I protested.

“It’s okay, I see you had prettier things to look at than old Carlo!” I glanced over to see April blushing.

“What’s going on with the TV?” I asked. “You never have that thing on.” The joy on Carlo’s face disappeared.

“Oh, not good, Alexi, not good news. Explosions on three sottopassaggio and a bus in London. People dying, everyone scared, and the polizia don’t know what’s going on.”

“What?” I moved closer to the set.

“Alexi, what’s sottopassaggio?” April whispered from next to me.

“Subway.”

“Shit, explosions on the subway…” We stared at the news anchor speaking in rapid Italian while scenes of smoky tunnels and flashing emergency vehicles splashed across the screen. The attacks had happened within the past hour, so the same video showed over and over while the commentators discussed the scant detail available and recapped regularly for the benefit of viewers joining the programming. After the third such repeat, April pulled back.

“They’re speaking too fast.”

“We can go back to the house and watch BBC1.” We picked out a couple of pastries and, capitulating to Carlo’s insistence that this morning was on the house, headed back up the hill.

It was sobering and somewhat surreal to watch the details come in. As time went by the networks found witnesses with pictures, cell phone videos and CCTV footage. Survivors described the wreckage, fear, confusion, injuries and death they had witnessed. I lost track of time, staring in horror at the screen, but at some point I turned towards April and realized she was sitting pale and hunched on the couch beside me. Not good. I reached for the remote and turned off the TV.

“Don’t, I want to watch-”

“We’ve seen everything we can for now,” I said. “It’ll repeat. We’ll check it later.” April nodded, staring into the space in front of her. I slid over on the couch and put my arm around her, unsure whether her lack of reaction was good or bad.

“Hey, we’re all right,” I said, trying for some response. “Do you know anyone in the London area?”

“No one I could contact. I keep thinking of someone I sat next to on the plane who had a British accent.”

“At the beginning of the summer, you mean?”

“Yeah.” Her Adam’s apple bobbed as she swallowed. “I thought I was going crazy from dreaming about you, and somehow I ended up telling her the whole story. Maybe I thought I could trust her, or maybe it was just that I’d never see her again.”

“What did she say about it all?” I wasn’t about to take the advice of some random woman on a plane, but I was curious what the reaction of a stranger would have been.

“She told me to be flexible and not fight the dreams. Something about how I risked drowning if I tried to swim against the tide for too long.” April paused for a moment. “I hope she’s all right.”

“I’m sure she is.” It was a platitude and I knew it, but what else is one supposed to say in those situations?

“I don’t know if she even lives in London.” April brushed a strand of hair out of her face. “She could have had a layover, or she could live outside the city. It’s stupid of me, isn’t it? To worry about someone who probably isn’t even in the area?”

“It’s not stupid,” I said. “It just means she made an impact on you and you care whether she’s all right.” I paused, thinking. “Let’s get out of the house. There’s a beach access about twenty minute’s hike north.”

*~*

I felt superficial to be in such beautiful surroundings without soaking in every color, but while I followed Alexi down to the beach my own swirl of emotions took every scrap of attention not devoted to navigating the trail. I hated it all. War, terrorism, attacks on civilians. It made me feel afraid and vulnerable to the whims of some random, malicious force. I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of going about your daily routine and then, suddenly and violently, not existing. When we descended the trail and moved onto a small strip of sand, I tried to give voice to my emotions.

“I don’t understand how people can do that to one another.”

“I don’t either.” Alexi said, his voice sober. “I mean, I can understand people have different opinions about the world, but I don’t get how anyone can use those opinions to justify killing innocent people.”

“What right to they have?” I asked, my fear surging into anger. “What right do they have to decide who lives or dies? Just because of where you were born, or what you happen to have been taught? These people, they were trying to build their own lives. Now they’re dead because some random religious nut blames them for the actions of their government! When does the government ever listen to the people?”

“When it’s convenient, I suppose.”

“Exactly! The average person doesn’t change the direction of the government!” I knew I was ranting, but I didn’t care. I picked up a stick and sent it hurtling out into the water. “The average person goes off in their own direction, and the government does whatever the hell it wants. Now there’s death and destruction and I feel so helpless! I hate feeling helpless!” Alexi reached over and grabbed my hand, pulling me into a hug.

“It’s what that woman said about going with the tide, right?” His voice was soft in the face of the breeze drifting off the water. “Some things are too big for us to stand against.”

“I’ve gone with the damn tide for too long!” I pulled away and sent another stick flying out to sea. “I couldn’t do anything about my sister, about my family breaking up around me, about my friends backing away, about my grandfather dying, about my boyfriend disappearing into addiction. The only good thing the tide has ever brought me is you.” Once I started, I couldn’t do anything to control the flow of words, and I found I didn’t want to.

“Then something good has come of it all, right?” Alexi said.

“But the fucking tide is going to ruin it! It’s tossing me into memories I thought were gone and screwing with my mind.”

“What do you mean?”

“That wasn’t you I was with in Kefalonia, that was Keith. I was in his shitty little apartment with his hands yanking my hair and his rancid privates in my face. I know it’s not possible, but it happened!” I paused to gulp in air and froze, horrified at what I had said. Alexi was still standing next to me, but how long would that last? “Oh, fuck, now you’re going to think I’m completely round the twist and-”

“April, slow down! I’m not going to think anything.” Alexi grabbed my shoulders and looked me in the eye. “I’m not going to judge you, just sit down and start at the beginning. Who is Keith?” I sank onto the sand and took a shaky breath.

“My ex. The first boyfriend who stuck around for more than a month. We dated for over a year. We even talked about getting married someday.” I reached for a piece of driftwood and pushed it into the sand, leaving it standing like a denuded flagpole. I had been so happy after that conversation, so pleased my life was coming together, that I had left my past behind and had control over my future.

“What happened to him?” Alexi asked.

“He started smoking meth and dropped out of the university. We fought about it for a while, and one day he just left. Said I wasn’t what he thought I was.”

“He just left and never came back?” I closed my eyes and the memories bubbled back to the surface. Alexi’s hand curled around mine, his fingers rolling grains of sand over my skin.

“No. Someone robbed my apartment a week later. I told the police we had broken up, and they caught him the next day with a bracelet that had been my grandmother’s. I… I didn’t tell them he was doing meth.” I took a deep breath. “He posted bail and came back to my place that night, mad because I’d reported the theft…” I remembered how I hadn’t felt comfortable in my apartment after the robbery, and then I’d come home to find him in my bedroom, pressing a knife against my throat and warning that a single sound… Then later the bright lights of the hospital room, the bandage on my throat and the indifferent nurse conducting the exam. My mother had shown up, still in her pajamas, but even then, on the worst night of my life, I couldn’t have both parents because someone always had to stay with my sister.

My voice trailed between the past and present while Alexi held me. I felt his fingers wiping my cheeks and realized I was crying.

“Did he…?” I knew what he wanted to ask, but I couldn’t wrap my mouth around the answer. Instead I raised my fingers to rub away the patch of powder I used each morning to cover up the last vestiges of the scar.

“It’s not very distinct. The doctors were able to minimize it, but the knife was dull. I didn’t want to go through plastic surgery.”

“K? He carved his initial into your neck?” Alexi’s voice was disbelieving, and then angry. I nodded.

“He said I was his and I’d never get away from him, no matter who I told. He’d been snorting. When he came off the high he started throwing up, and I ran.”

“He’s in jail now, I hope?”

“Yeah. I testified against him. It was the only way… I had to know… he can’t hurt me as long as he’s there…” Alexi squeezed me tight, rocking me back and forth.

“When was all this?”

“January of my sophomore year. Right after Kaia went back to the Ukraine.”

“So this is what she doesn’t know about.” Alexi’s voice had the sound of someone for whom all the pieces are falling into place.

“I didn’t tell her,” I said. “How could I? ‘Oh, hi, how are you settling in back at home? Oh, by the way, I was brutally raped by my ex-boyfriend the other day. But other than that things are just fine and dandy.’ She doesn’t even know he used meth, just that he dropped out and we broke up. She thinks I drove him away by demanding he stay enrolled.” I laughed, a short bark that held no humor. “She knew about my childhood and family, and drew her conclusions from there.”

“And she was so sure she had the entire story and knew how to make it all better.” Alexi shook his head.

“She’s always been that way. I never thought she would turn it against me. We took on the world together when she was in the States.”

“And now she’s messed it up.” I nodded, trying to bite back another wave of tears. “You don’t need to keep your composure for me, April,” Alexi whispered. “You don’t need to carry this all by yourself. You’ve been so strong, keeping it all together and under control, but you can let me help now.” I shook my head. This is mine, I tried to say, my life and my mess to deal with. I couldn’t expect anyone else to do this for me. My words were lost in sobs, unintelligible even to me, and Alexi said nothing, just held me in his arms.

*

We spent most of the day talking, winding through both our pasts, presents and hopes for the future. Eventually we wandered into town to pick up more food and made a simple dinner back at the house. As the light faded into darkness, the last of my energy faded with it. I fell asleep twice on the couch with my book, and, upon waking the second time, padded into my bedroom and shrugged on my nightgown. I hesitated before closing the door. Alexi and I had slept in separate rooms the night before, and I kind of wanted the reassurance of him sleeping next to me. But I couldn’t think of a good way to ask, so I was the only warm body beneath the sheets when I turned out the light. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.

Some time later, I found myself walking down a dirt road, surrounded by supersaturated colors. The landscape was unfamiliar; the road wound down a hill, and I could see a fair-sized town at the bottom. My skin began to scorch in the heat, and the sunlight forced me to squint. Alexi walked next to me. We weren’t talking, and the silence hung thick between us. I glanced at him from time to time, my eyes darting away when he looked back.

We soon found ourselves in the midst of modern shops, though the main road was unpaved. The dust billowed in clouds around our feet and drifted higher to deposit in a thin layer over our clothes. I swallowed and felt the dry edges of my throat. We walked down the main street, he turned in to one store, and I continued to another.

The force of the explosion shook merchandise off the shelves of the aisle I stood in. The lights flickered and went out. I fought my way through the other shoppers, trying to avoid the panic rampaging like a bull through the crowd.

In the street, smoke billowed from the shell of the store Alexi had entered. Debris littered the area. Something squished under my feet, sickeningly like human flesh. I screamed. He had gone in there, and I had to get him out. I ran, dodging people and twisted lumps of metal as I fought my way towards the shattered hole that had swallowed the man I couldn’t live without.

Someone grabbed my arm and held me back. I screamed and struggled and kicked, trying to break the iron grip. I twisted to face my captor head on, and a hand cracked across my cheek. The scene faded into darkness.

*~*

I moved into April’s spot on the couch after she went to bed, as if by sitting where she had been I could better process everything she had told me. The magnitude of what she had endured was so far beyond my comprehension that I’d had a difficult time responding with anything other than horrified awe. I tried my best to stay calm and be supportive, but there had been times when I didn’t think she even knew I was there.

She was so strong, my dream girl. I’d dated girls who would have crumbled under the rape alone, and those were the ones with normal childhoods. April’s past made her boyfriend’s self-destruction all the more debilitating, but she had managed to complete her degree without anyone suspecting a problem. Indeed, if I understood her correctly, even she hadn’t thought anything was wrong until I came along.

I drifted off to sleep on the couch and woke with my heart pounding and a crick in my neck. I’d heard a noise. I jumped up and stood, listening. April! I ran into her room before I could think. She thrashed against her sheets on the bed. A nightmare? Were you supposed to wake people up in the middle of a nightmare?

I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to gently shake her awake. She pulled away, her eyes still closed, her lips parted in an indistinct wail. I took a firmer grip on her shoulders. She fought me, her arms and legs flailing. What was this? Hysteria? My uncles had an attack of hysteria once, and Mamă had slapped him. He’d frozen, and then snapped out of it. I didn’t want to hit April. I didn’t even know if it would be effective.

As I debated, April’s foot caught me hard in the stomach and her shoulders ripped from my grasp. I had to do something. I gritted my teeth, pulled back my hand and let loose. She froze. Her eyes opened wide, unrecognizing, and she blinked at me a few times before sinking back to the bed and burying her face in the pillow.

I stood over her, unsure of whether I’d helped or hurt. What should I do now? I didn’t want to leave her alone. I watched her breathe for a while and eventually lay down next to her, careful not to disturb what appeared to be peaceful sleep.

*

I woke the next morning to the sun’s rays filtering through the window and April’s body snuggled against mine. There had been six inches between us when I lay down in the night, but during the intervening hours she must have moved closer. I thought I ought to move, but having her pressed against me was so warm and comfortable.

April stirred while I delayed moving, stretching forward before nestling closer. I had imagined mornings like this. Sleeping in and waking up gradually, knowing the girl next to me was there because she loved me. I’d imagined watching her sleep, tracing the details of her face with my eyes before leaning over and landing a gentle kiss on each eyelid, so I was the first thing she saw when her eyes opened. I’d imagined her smile when she turned towards me, her hair mussed from sleep, leaning in to initiate a slow, sweet kiss.

I should get up, I thought. We weren’t there yet, and my imagining the sex that would come after our kiss had only served to create something that would soon be pressing into April’s back. I shifted, intending to slip out from under the blankets without waking her, but she rolled over as I moved.

“It’s cozy, don’t leave,” she murmured.

“I need to, uh…”

“Come back after?”

“Sure, but I’ll be a bit.”

“Why?” I tried to think of a naked professor or something, anything to deflate my erection. We were still too close. I tried to shift my hips backward. April looked at me, and I saw her smile slightly. Then she pressed tight against me, erection and all.

“April, are you sure?” I could barely think past the physical sensation. “I don’t want to-” April put a finger over my lips.

“I thought I had lost you last night,” she whispered. “I don’t ever want to feel that way again.”

“You won’t- I won’t- I want you to be ready,” I stammered.

“It’s just you and me this morning.” April reached down to cup my erection. I tried to process. Her previous boyfriend had been an enormous jerk. This was my chance to set the tone of our physical relationship, and I didn’t want her doing anything to remind her even slightly of him. I reached down and grabbed her wrist, pulling her hand up to rest on my shoulder.

“Not this time,” I whispered. “This one is all you.”

*~*

We never actually got around to getting dressed that day, and my memories stayed silent and in the past. By evening I was sore, tired, and completely and utterly happy. I stood in front of the pantry with Alexi behind me, assessing what might be made into a meal.

“We picked up veggies yesterday, right?” I asked, eyeing the boxes of pasta. “How about my standard – noodles and random vegetables?”

“Sounds good.” Alexi paused. “Will you be all right with the knife?”

“I’ll do the cutting,” I said, my face flushed with embarrassment.

“All right. Should I put on some water?” Alexi said.

“Yeah, that’d be good. And a frying pan with some olive oil. And would you mind peeling some garlic?”

“No problem.” We shared a moment of silence while I rinsed off a zucchini and two tomatoes and found a knife and cutting board. “So, you’re okay with knives when you’re the one holding them?” Alexi asked.

“I guess. I’ve actually never been in that situation,” I admitted. “I broke my lease and moved back into the dorms after, so I wasn’t around knives very often. At least, not knives in other people’s hands.”

“Is there anything else you react to?”

“Not that I know of.” I thought I had gotten all those reactions under control in the year after Keith’s attack. My junior roommate knew what had happened, but the girl during my senior year hadn’t. If I’d done anything odd she would have told me. The thought of having more undiscovered triggers was unsettling. I glanced over at Alexi. He stared at the bulb of garlic in his hand, scratching at the papery skins while he tried to peel them. “Crush it under a can, the skin will come off much easier,” I said.

“Really?” Alexi got up, pulled a can of chicken broth from the pantry and started whacking the cloves. “Cool, I didn’t know that!” He grinned over at me. “Now, what do I do with these?”

“Toss them here, I’ll mince them,” I said. Three pungent, misshapen orbs came flying towards me. “Hey, not literally!” I retrieved the cloves from the sink, rinsed them off and set about cutting them as small as I could.

“I am a literal creature,” Alexi said, laughing. He paused. “So, not to be nosy, but what are you going to do about the knife thing?”

I lifted the cutting board to scrape the first clove of garlic into the frying pan. This question had to come up at some point, I told myself. “I don’t know,” I answered. “I guess I’ll try to avoid being around when other people are using knives.”

“You can’t do that forever, April.” Alexi came to stand behind me and rubbed his hands over my shoulders. “Besides, I do want to cook for you someday.”

“But I have no idea what to do about it,” I said. “I don’t even understand how it happened.”

“Maybe there’s somebody you could see, once you’re back in the US?”

“And what could they do?” I said. “They’ll just hand me some anti-psychotic medication. Those side effects are supposed to be awful.”

“I don’t know, maybe they’ll have some suggestions for short-circuiting the reaction?” Alexi suggested. “Or talking you through it all?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. I knew I sounded petty, but I didn’t know how to avoid that. “Talking about it just makes me feel bad that I can’t control my own mind.”

“You don’t need to feel bad about anything,” Alexi said. “You went through way more than anyone ought to endure; you should be proud you got out this unscathed.” I stared down at the zucchini and shrugged. The weight of his hands moved up and down with my shoulders. “Look, maybe Crina and I can help you with the knife thing,” Alexi said. “Some sort of continued exposure to reprogram your response? I don’t know, sounds like it might work.”

“I’d rather your aunt not know I’m psycho,” I said, tossing out the protest reflexively. The idea itself had worked before, but the thought of going to so much effort for something I thought I’d conquered was repulsive. Sudden noises and movement had been a big issue right after the attack, and I had sat in the elevator lobby with my homework each night until I could stay calm when the doors opened and conversation spilled out.

“Oh, Crina won’t care,” Alexi said. “And I’m sure she’ll be happy to help. I just want you to be comfortable in any situation.” I pulled away from him to toss more veggies into the pan. The water in the pot was boiling, so I opened the box of spaghetti and tossed it in. “Please, April, will you try? Just the knife thing with Crina, and if it works, maybe consider seeing someone when you go home?”

“I don’t want to think about going home,” I said.

“I don’t either. It’s weeks away.” Alexi’s arms wrapped around me in a hug. “Will you try?”

“I…” It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, it was just all so confusing. Part of me wished I’d never taken this trip, even though I couldn’t give up Alexi if I tried. But if not Alexi, something else would have broken your routine, I thought. Your control was an illusion. I sighed.

“Just the knife thing, all right? I’ll be with you every step of the way,” Alexi whispered.

“All right,” I replied. “But you’re explaining this mess to your aunt.”

“Of course,” Alexi said, squeezing me tight.

*

We had two more days before Crina returned, and we spent them on the trails. Alexi said nothing more about my problems, and I enjoyed pretending they didn’t exist. I almost wished Crina would be delayed until after we left, except I didn’t want to leave. The prospect of meeting someone from Alexi’s family was a bit more nerve-inducing than I cared to let on. What if she thought I was too nuts for Alexi to date? Why did she have to be plunged straight into my neuroses? I assumed she would tell Alexi’s mother of her impressions of me, and I didn’t like the idea of his mother knowing about my past before I’d even met her. When I mentioned some of these thoughts to Alexi he dismissed them out of hand.

“They’ll love you. Honestly, they’ll probably be so thrilled I’m actually dating someone that it wouldn’t matter if you spent all your time talking to invisible friends.”

“Somehow I think they wouldn’t be thrilled if that were the case,” I said. “Look at the wind whipping up the spray down there.” I pointed out to the ocean. We had packed a lunch and hiked to the highest point in the park, and now we sat, enjoying the view and our last hours of solitude. Crina arrived that afternoon.

“It’s starting to spin,” Alexi observed. We watched while the wind formed a short-lived water funnel. “You’re right, they would have something to say if you were truly psychotic,” Alexi said, after the wind had died down. “But you’re not, and that’s one of the things I love about you.” He looked over at me and grinned.

“Just one?” I teased, swallowing the sudden lump in my throat.

“Of course! There’s also your mind, and how courageous you are, and how brave and beautiful, and smart. And all those places on your body that make you gasp when I touch them, and the noises you make when – “

“Now that’s just mean,” I said, still trying to tease. “Getting me all worked up when we can’t do anything out here in the open.”

“I like the thought of you all worked up.” Alexi leaned over and kissed me, long and slow. “I like the idea of you wanting me for the rest of the day.”

“You’re awful,” I said, slapping at him. “Just you wait until we go to bed tonight!”

“Well yes, that would be the point,” he quipped, ducking when I sent a slice of bread sailing towards him. “I take it you’re done eating, if you’re throwing your food at me?”

“Not at all,” I said, taking a bite out of a chunk of cheese.

“We’ve been up here for an hour,” he replied. “We ought to head back down.” I sighed. “Really, April, don’t worry about it,” Alexi reassured me.

“Easier said than done,” I said.

“I know, but trust me. She’ll love you.”

*

There was someone in the garden when we approached the house. I hung back, hesitant, while Alexi paused and then moved quickly amongst the plants.

“Crina!” he called out. “I thought you were taking the afternoon train.”

“My meeting ended early, and I couldn’t wait to get back.” The woman tossed back her large floppy hat and pulled Alexi into a hug without pausing to set down the handful of flowers she had been gathering from the garden. I tried to get a good look at her without staring. She barely came up to Alexi’s shoulder, and I could see the edges of her body around his chiseled form. Strands of fly-away hair peeked around his side. She and Alexi pulled back, and he turned to introduce me. But before he could speak, Crina held up a hand.

“I remember you.” I recognized her as soon as she spoke.

“You’re the woman from the plane.” She smiled and reached out to shake my hand.

“I’ve often wondered about you this summer,” she said. “If I’d known you were dreaming about my nephew, I would have given you his address! Crina Mitkova; I don’t think I introduced myself when we first met.”

“You know each other?” Alexi’s voice was incredulous.

“Apparently.” I laughed. “April Singer. I… oh my God, I don’t believe this!”

“The world is a mysterious place,” Crina said. “Much smaller than we think it is. So, I take it you found what you were looking for?”

“Found what I wasn’t looking for would probably be more accurate,” I said, “but yes, I did.”

“Excellent!” Crina glanced down at the bundle of flowers in her hand. “Well, I have enough to fill a vase here, so let’s go inside and you can tell me all about it.”

*

“So, what are your plans for the rest of the summer?” Crina asked later in the evening, while we cleared the remains of supper from the table. I looked over at Alexi; I hadn’t thought so far as to what the next weeks would hold now that Paul and Kaia weren’t with us.

“We haven’t talked about it,” Alexi said, glancing back at me. “We were hoping you might be able to help us with something, though.”

“And what would that be?”

“April has a … fear that she’s trying to conquer,” Alexi said. My cheeks began to burn.

“Oh? And what would that be?” Crina’s eyes sought out mine.

“Knives.” My voice squeaked and I thought for one horrible second that the word was unintelligible.

“Really? You did quite fine with the chopping before dinner,” Crina said. I took a deep breath.

“I’m all right when it’s in my hands,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “It’s when someone else has it that I start to have… problems.” Crina turned and picked up a paring knife from where I had left it on the chopping block. I stared at her. Nothing. Alexi and Crina stared at me. My face felt so hot that I was amazed my hair wasn’t catching on fire.

“You don’t seem-” Crina began, but Alexi stepped forward and took the knife from her. I bit my lip. A curl of nervousness snaked through my stomach. My hands found the back of a kitchen chair and I gripped the wood. I forced myself to breathe. The silence in the kitchen weighed on me while Alexi and Crina watched my every motion. Alexi moved very slowly towards the cutting board and picked up the half of the cucumber we hadn’t eaten with our salad. The crisp snap as the knife cut through the skin echoed through my head. I closed my eyes, but they popped open at the next cut. There were droplets of juice on the blade.

You’re all right, it’s okay, it’s just Alexi, he’s cutting cucumber, you’re fine, you’re safe, he’s not going to hurt you, he’s not going to hurt you. I started up a mantra and set it to run through my head on repeat. There was another snap, followed by the slight thud of the knife hitting the board.

“What are you thinking right now, April?” The voice was Crina’s. It seemed to be coming from a distance.

“You’re all right, it’s okay, it’s just Alexi, he’s cutting a cucumber, you’re fine, you’re safe, he’s not going to hurt you, he’s not going to hurt you.” I opened my mouth and let the contents of my brain spill out.

“Put the knife away, Alexi,” Crina said. “This is more than can be solved in one day.”

*~*

I could hear Crina moving around in the kitchen when I woke the next morning, and I managed to slip out of bed without disturbing April.

“добро утро,” Crina said softly after I closed the bedroom door behind me.

“Good morning,” I replied in Bulgarian, trying to make the linguistic switch on a brain that hadn’t fully woken up yet. I nodded my thanks when Crina poured me a cup of coffee. We moved out into the garden.

“What is behind this fear of knives?” Crina asked, sitting down in one of the chairs scattered throughout the plot of land.

“Rape,” I said. I didn’t want to tell the whole story. It was April’s after all, and she had the right to tell it.

“Ah.” Crina nodded, taking a sip from her own cup while she stared over the water. “She is very strong. I didn’t realize, when I told her to go with the tides, that she had managed to fight them so successfully.”

“A hazard of counseling strangers on airplanes, I’d say.” Crina laughed at my words.

“True, but I think you’re glad I did.”

“Would she have passed me by, you think?” I said. “She told me she almost didn’t come to the concert, or to dinner the next day.”

“The Lord only knows, Alexi,” Crina said. “One thing is sure though – you have a very strong girlfriend. You’d best take care never to get on her bad side.”

“I’ll do my best.” I glanced back towards the house, which was still silent. The morning air was cool, and the only sound was the water beneath us and the occasional bird. “Do you think she might get over the knife thing?” I asked.

“If she wants to, most likely she will,” Crina said. “Having only spent a day with her, I’m not well qualified to say. I’m happy to help while you stay here.”

“Thank you.”

“She will need more professional help, though, once your trip is over,” Crina added. “It is unlikely she escaped only with a fear of knives.”

“I know.” I took another sip of coffee. “We’ve talked about it, a little. I’m hoping some progress with the knife thing might prompt her to seek additional help.” I glanced back at the house again, and this time a light had turned on in the bathroom window.

“We will see what we can do,” Crina said, following my glance. “Shall you go tell her where we are?”

Mental Affairs

Chapter 10

I woke before Alexi the next morning and slipped out of the tent, walking down to the water’s edge. The early morning mist was burning off, and the point at which the fog and water became one slipped steadily backward. I needed to pick apart what had happened last night. I had been in the tent with Alexi and then, quite suddenly, somewhere else. It didn’t make any sense, and that scared me. If I didn’t understand what had happened, I had no way of ensuring it never happened again.

Why would I flash back to Keith now? I’d never done so before. Yes, he had been awful and I’d left more of myself than I wanted in escaping him, but I hadn’t seen him in over two years. I thought I’d put him behind me. I glanced back at the silent tents. Keith had been in my thoughts more than normal of late. That was to be expected when starting a new relationship, right? Alexi was the first guy to get close since Keith, so some mental comparison made sense. I’d tried to stay focused on the present. There was no reason I should be remembering the past so vividly when Alexi gave me every reason to stay here.

Maybe it was this spot, or the tension within the group. I stared at the water, biting my lip and trying to find the location where the waves originated. We had planned on staying here another night, but if Paul and Kaia slept together again, how could I stay with Alexi? He would want more than sleeping side by side, and while I did too, I had no way to know what would happen. I couldn’t ask Kaia to move back into my tent without an explanation, and I couldn’t come up with a convincing lie.

I bent down and picked up a small pebble from the shore and flung it out into the water. It sank with a satisfying plop. I scooped another and sent it flying, then another. I had no idea what to do.

The sound of the tent zipper cut through the stillness of the morning, and I turned to see Alexi emerging. He moved towards me, picking his way through the chairs we had left askew the night before. I tossed another stone into the water.

“Any good ones?” he asked when he drew close.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“You know, the ones you can throw and they don’t go down right away? I don’t know how to translate it.”

“Oh, skipping stones?” I glanced at the rock in my hand, which was somewhat flat. Crouching on the sand, I tried to skip it across the water. It bounced once and hit the six inches of an incoming wavelet, which swallowed it with barely a splash.

“It’s harder with the waves,” Alexi said, plucking his own stone off the beach. He watched the tempo of the water for a moment and then sent the disk off at a tight angle to the shore. I counted one, two, three, four before it sank below the surface. Figured. “You’re up early,” Alexi commented, brushing his hands off.

“Didn’t seem to be much point in staring at the bug under the rain fly of the tent,” I said.

“Not much for bugs?”

“No. I mean, I don’t mind them normally, but this one just kept moving and I was staring at it, and…” I realized there wasn’t a logical ending to the sentence, so I let it die bereft. Alexi looked at me, his brow furrowed.

“I see.” He turned to stare out at the water, where patches of brilliant blue were beginning to drift in and out of the more muted fog. “Listen, about last night-”

“I’m fine.” I said, cutting him off.

“What happened?”

“I told you, it’s just been a while and I messed up the timing.”

“You’re sure? Because if it was something I did, or if there’s something I can do to make it easier next time, I want to know.”

“You did fine, Alexi,” I said. “Better than fine. Before that you were amazing.” Alexi ducked his head and grinned.

“You’re beautiful like that, shaking and moaning,” he said. “I want to see you come for me again.” I bit the inside of my lip, torn between wanting what he described and wanting to avoid anything that might bring up more memories of Keith. I felt Alexi looking at me, but I didn’t want to meet his eyes. “Do you want to? Only if you want to,” he hastened to add.

“I do, but not here.” I grabbed at the first thing I could think of and shoved it into the air between us. “It’s not very comfortable, sex in a tent. And I’m getting tired of Greece. Let’s move on to Italy.”

“Well, we’re leaving tomorrow,” Alexi said, sounding confused.

“Why can’t we leave today?”

“Didn’t Kaia have some plan for today?”

“Oh, fuck Kaia’s plans!” My frustration and fear boiled over, even though the plans had likely been mine to start with. “Kaia has plans and opinions for everything, and I’m having a hard time caring.”

“Whoa, April, calm down!”

“Don’t tell me to calm down!”

“Okay, I’m not telling you anything. Just take a deep breath, all right?” I breathed in and put my face in my hand, ashamed that Alexi had been the target of my irrationality.

“God, I’m sorry, I’m just, I don’t even know,” I mumbled.

“It’s all right, don’t worry about it.” Alexi moved close behind me and set his hands to working some of the tension out of my shoulders. “Look, if you’d rather, we’ll talk with Paul and Kaia about leaving today. I’m sure we can get an earlier ferry to Brindisi.”

*~*

April appeared to have gotten herself back under control by the time Paul and Kaia emerged. I had to admit I was a bit jealous of Paul. I had hoped for a drastically different end to my evening. But my conversation with April had confirmed what I had suspected, even if she hadn’t been able to say anything outright. Something had happened, though God only knew what. I had no clue what to do, but the idea of moving on seemed good as any. Maybe in different surroundings, with another day to lessen the sting of the memory, she would be able to tell me what had gone wrong.

Kaia, predictably, did not like the idea. “There’s no reason to leave. Our ferry tickets are for tomorrow, and we’re supposed to hike the south side of the island today.”

“We can change the tickets easily enough,” I said. “I know the hike is supposed to be brilliant, but I think it would be better if we left today.”

“Why?”

“It’s just time, is all.” I was acutely aware I didn’t have a good reason for wanting to leave – or at least not one I was willing to vocalize.

“I haven’t slept well since before Athens,” April put in. “This campsite is too noisy. I want to go somewhere I can get a full night’s sleep.”

“You say everything is too noisy,” Kaia said, her voice irritated. “In Meteora, the birds were too loud.”

“That’s not true!”

“I think you made that one up, Kaia,” Paul said, speaking for the first time.

“Okay, fine, I did, but she may as well have said it,” Kaia snapped.

“Look, if April and Alexi want to skip ahead to Italy, I’m fine with that,” Paul said. I shot him a grateful glance and he met my eyes and nodded slightly. “I’m ready for some Italian cuisine,” he added.

“But we had plans for today; we can’t just throw them out the window!” Kaia protested.

“There’s no money involved,” Paul said. “I thought we agreed at beginning this trip would be flexible and not tied to an itinerary?” Kaia said nothing for a second, looking between each of us.

“All right, fine, let’s leave,” she said. “You may as well go ahead and start striking the tents.”

*

Despite the rough start to the day, the rest of the trip went smoothly. The ferry for the mainland was boarding as we walked up to the depot, and when we arrived in Patras we were able to switch our tickets without trouble. We even had time to wander around the city and get a bite to eat before settling into our berths on the ship. I stood on the deck of the ferry and let the wind blow against my face, and I thought somehow, in some way, everything was going to work out.

My feeling of peace managed to stand up to the next few days as April remained distant and Kaia began staring at her, her expression openly speculative. While I did enjoy the absence of active arguments between the two of them, I sensed it was only a matter of time before something exploded. I just hoped April would open up to me before that happened.

Kaia waited until we got to Pompeii, then waylaid me while I hung back to take a few photos of the wildflowers growing in the ruins.

“Interesting angle,” she commented when I rose from where I’d been squatting, using my knee as an impromptu tripod.

“Makes for an interesting picture,” I replied, pressing the review button on my camera and holding it out for her to see.

“Hmm, nice.” She barely glanced at the screen. “What’s going on between you and April?”

“We’re dating and on a trip together,” I said.

“You know what I mean.”

“I do. I also think it’s none of your business.”

“Oh, come on, you know what she’s like. We need to help her stay stable.” Kaia looked up at me, completely serious. I couldn’t quite believe what I had heard.

“I don’t remember anyone appointing us to be April’s managers,” I said, trying to think of a way to nip this in the bud. I didn’t want to micromanage my girlfriend, I wanted to date her. And I certainly didn’t want to collaborate with Kaia to manipulate April.

“Something’s wrong, Alexi, and if you tell me what you know I might be able to help.”

“Why are you so sure something is wrong?” I bit back a sigh.

“You spent the night with her and the next morning she irrationally insists we leave early.” Kaia tapped her finger as if she were going to continue with a list of reasons. “We’ve been in Italy several days, and she’s not interacting with anyone, not even you. You can’t think that’s normal.” I glanced up the path to where April and Paul appeared deep in conversation about a half-degraded fresco on the side of a wall. Kaia followed my gaze, but when I turned she showed no sign of backing away.

“April is fine. I don’t want you to poke into our relationship trying to cure things that aren’t there. It doesn’t help either of us.”

“You’re not going to help her by ignoring the obvious, Alexi. I’ve known her way longer than you have, and she had issues before you ever began dreaming of her. Those didn’t disappear because she finally managed to hook up with a decent guy.”

“And you’re not qualified to diagnose the issues you think she has, let alone treat them,” I said. “I’m sure it’s against some code of ethics for the supposed therapist to press the patient’s boyfriend for information.” I stared at her, watching while her eyes widened and then narrowed. “Rein in your impulse to meddle, Kaia, and let us work through our relationship on our own,” I said. Kaia seemed ready to reply, but before she could April’s voice drifted back towards us.

“Hey guys, come look at this fresco! The sign says the workers who excavated it were so embarrassed they covered it up again!”

*~*

A few days into Italy, I knew leaving Greece early had been the right choice. The memory of what had happened in Kefalonia was fading and I slipped back into the rhythm of touring. Alexi seemed to have accepted my timing explanation, and though we had taken a few steps back, I felt like we were moving forward again as we traveled up the peninsula. We spent a few days exploring the ruins around Pompeii and took a day trip out to the Amalfi coast. In Positano, Alexi and Paul went off in search of a sandal shop they had heard of while Kaia and I explored the boutiques.

“Maybe I’ll buy some of this and ship it back,” I mused, looking at the whimsical painted ceramics on display. “I bet my parents would love this design.”

“The elephants are a nice touch,” Kaia said, her attention on a delicately crafted wind chime. We continued browsing, and then Kaia spoke again. “So, are you and Alexi back on good terms? That was a long walk you went for last night.”

“We weren’t ever on bad terms,” I said, immediately defensive.

“You mean you’ve just been going through a fun phase lately?”

“What are you talking about?” I bristled.

“Insisting we leave Kefalonia early,” Kaia said. “Not talking to anyone when we first got to Italy. What happened, April?”

“Nothing worth dredging back up,” I said, turning away. “It’s done, and I don’t want to talk about it.” I felt, rather than heard, the footstep that brought Kaia behind me.

“How come you don’t tell me anything anymore?” Her voice was soft and held an element of sadness, or perhaps regret. “We used to keep no secrets. Is Alexi your new confidant?”

“I’ve kept plenty of secrets,” I said, refusing to turn around.

“Why?”

“Because you insist on giving them more importance than they deserve.”

“But it’s not healthy to bottle them up! You need to tell someone and get things out of your system and accept them.”

“It does no good!” I spun around, narrowly missing a small figurine on the shelf when my hand veered outward. “I tell you and you give me some simplistic advice. Then it ends up hurting worse than if I’d never brought it up in the first place. Better not to think about it at all.”

“You do yourself no good if you hide from your memories, April, and-”

“No.” I cut Kaia off. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“But-”

“Let’s go find the guys.” I walked out of the shop, not waiting to see if she would follow me.

It was true I’d been more open with Kaia in the past than the present, I thought, ignoring her while we walked along the steep roads that cris-crossed Positano. When she’d been in the States our conversations had been natural, but now she managed to tie everything I said to some problem she thought I had. I knew she must think she was trying to help me, but I didn’t need help. I just wanted my friend back. I sighed.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Kaia said, almost as if she had read my mind. Her next words dashed my quick burst of hope. “If you would tell me, I can help. I asked one of my professors and he said -”

“You told your professor about me?” I stopped short in the street and whirled to face her. She came within inches of bumping into me and took a hasty step back.

“Well, yes. Not by name, though. We were talking in class about abuse repression and-”

“In class?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What do you mean?”

“It was just a class discussion.”

“Just one? Or were there multiple discussions in multiple classes?” I knew my voice was rising, but I didn’t care about the glances being tossed our way.

“Just one class, that’s all, I promise!” The look on Kaia’s face assured me she was telling the truth, but even one class was too many.

“You took what I told you in confidence and laid it out for a group of strangers to poke at! How could you?”

“You’ll never see them, April. They live in the Ukraine, so what does it matter?”

“It matters because I trusted you,” I spat. “I can’t believe you would turn me into a… a specimen!” Kaia’s expression switched from regret to exasperation.

“Don’t be melodramatic,” she said, her voice tight. “My point was that they agreed with me-”

“I don’t give a damn what they agreed!” I was close to screaming now. “You sold me out for the sake of having an interesting story to tell your class about this crazy girl you met in the States! I thought you were my friend!”

“I am your friend!” Kaia protested.

“No.” My voice dropped. “You were my friend.”

I turned and dodged down one of the sets of stairs running between levels of the town. We were a few streets above where Alexi and Paul said they would be. When I reached the bottom, I glanced back to see Kaia picking her way after me. I ducked down an alley. Then I ran, dodging people and doorsteps, not sure where I would end up, but always going down.

*~*

The silence between April and Kaia seemed especially icy when we boarded a train to Campobasso that evening, but I stuck with my policy of not asking and instead let the few forced attempts at conversation lapse. Not pushing for answers had served me well so far. April and I had walked for more than an hour the night before, not talking about anything in particular and just enjoying each other’s company. I was confidant things would work themselves out.

We arrived late into the hostel in Campobasso, and the next morning Paul and I got up early to scout out breakfast.

“April and Kaia seemed upset about something last night,” Paul commented when we walked through the centro storico in search of a bakery.

“Yeah, don’t know what’s up with that.” I shrugged. “Did Kaia mention anything?”

“Some, but it doesn’t make much sense to me. Something about leaving Greece, and April refusing to help herself.”

“Is she still on about that? I told her to leave it a week ago!” I kept one eye on Paul and the other on the cobblestones to keep from turning an ankle while we walked up the street.

“Well, you know women, they hold on to that shit,” Paul said, nodding sagely. I refrained from rolling my eyes.

“April hasn’t been happy with Kaia since before Athens. Not being friendly, or something like that.”

“Not being friendly? I thought they’d known each other for years?”

“I guess things have changed?” I shrugged.

“I’ll say. I think it would kill them to be on the same side of a disagreement. Like when we left Greece… I bet if she’d thought you were behind the suggestion instead of April, there wouldn’t have been a problem.”

“You made it a hell of a lot easier when you said you wanted to leave,” I said.

“I know. I figured it was inevitable I’d be pulled in, so I chose the side that would end the argument the soonest.” Paul looked over at me, squinting in the morning sunlight. “Between you and me, I’m not so much for this camping thing, and it seemed important to you and April that we leave.”

“Thank you,” I said, after a slight pause.

“No problem. What happened, anyway? Did you push her too far?”

“No, she was as game as I was. Something weird happened, and I’m still not sure what.” It was a bit odd to be talking about this with Paul, but he had just admitted to helping us out, and I did want another opinion.

“Something weird?” Paul prompted.

“Yeah, we were playing around and I’d just gotten her off, and all of a sudden it was like she wasn’t quite there anymore. She didn’t respond to what I said. She was giving a phenomenal blowjob, but her eyes were blank. And then she choked and came back and brushed it all off.”

“Her eyes were blank?”

“Like, no emotion or anything. Almost how you would think of a statue brought to life.”

“That’s… really fucking freaky, Alexi,” Paul said.

“No shit.”

“Did she say anything afterwards?”

“Just that it had been a while and she messed up the timing. Repeated the same thing the next morning, and latched on to the idea of leaving.” I saw a shop ahead that looked like a bakery, but I kept quiet, wanting to hear Paul’s thoughts.

“I don’t know, man. None of the birds I’ve been with has ever done anything like that.”

“Deep insight there, Paul,” I said, suppressing a sigh. With his reaction in the open, I wasn’t sure why I had thought he would have helpful advice.

“Sounds like she got mentally abducted or something. It only happened once?”

“Just once. It’s taking her long enough to get over it, though. And Kaia’s not helping.”

“Yeah, their arguments aren’t helping any of us,” Paul said.

“Kaia thinks she can fix April.” We walked past the bakery. “If I had to guess, I’d say that’s the cause of most of their arguments.”

“Kaia thinks she can fix April?” Paul was quiet for a moment. “Does she know about this thing in Greece?”

“No. She asked, but I told her to mind her own business.”

“What does she think she can fix?”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. Kaia’s theories about April’s past hadn’t translated into clear problems with set solutions, at least not as I saw it.

“The only thing I can think of is she’s not moving fast enough for you, but I can’t see why Kaia would care,” Paul said. “Besides, you’re not the kind of guy with a new girl each week. You and April actually make a decent match.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?” I asked.

“Maybe an honest assessment.” Paul said. “It’s true, though, you’re after some meaningful relationship. I’m in it for the sex and entertainment.”

“Not one to marry and settle down?” I teased.

“Not yet!” Paul put on a look of mock horror. “I’ve got songs to write, crowds to perform to and an image to uphold! I can settle down later.”

“True enough,” I laughed. “So Kaia knows she’s a step in the road?”

“It’s a fling, man, she knows that. We go our separate ways at the end of the summer. You and April are the star-crossed couple. Assuming you actually manage to get all the way before she heads back to the US.”

“I’m working on it!” I protested. “It would be a hell of a lot easier if Kaia would leave off.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Paul said. “I can’t take much more tension between those two. It’s driving me nuts, not knowing when they’re on good terms.”

“Generally, if they’re talking, they are, and if they’re not talking, they aren’t,” I said. “But yeah, if you could get her to back off, that’d be cool.”

“I can’t take six more weeks of them fighting,” Paul said. “I’ll head back to Bucharest if they’re going to do that.”

“You’d leave me here with the two of them?”

“No, I could find an excuse for both of us to go back.”

“Good to know you wouldn’t leave me hanging,” I said. “Get Kaia to back off, because I’m not ready to go back to Bucharest.”

“All right, but you’d best hurry up with the seducing!” I laughed along with Paul, trying to ignore the part of me that agreed with him- I was running out of time.

*~*

We blew into Rome with energies running high. Paul and Kaia had taken to going off on their own during the day, so Alexi and I set out together to explore the city. I found I preferred it that way; getting along with Kaia was much easier when I only saw her in the mornings and evenings, and our days apart meant we had something other than my mental state to talk about. It also helped that I didn’t have to share a room with her – we had managed to snag another room for four in a hostel near the Piazza della Repubblica. We ate breakfast and dinner as a group, and struck out in our respective pairs to explore the city.

On our third day in Rome, Alexi and I ventured down to the Coliseum. After standing in line for a while, we climbed to the upper levels and stood looking down on the remains of the hallways under what had been the wooden floor.

“These things always amaze me,” Alexi commented while I snapped a few pictures.

“Yeah.” I stood, soaking the scene in. “I can’t get over how big it is.”

“You can see the structural similarities to the amphitheater we saw in Plovdiv, though,” Alexi said. “This is just scaled up.”

“Were they the same era?” I asked.

“I think they were both built by the Romans.” Alexi shrugged. “I didn’t keep track of the exact year. Those dates are all estimates anyway.” We turned and walked along the perimeter of the upper level.

“In some ways, I think I like the one in Plovdiv better,” I said as we stepped around an Italian woman who appeared to be admonishing her young child for not showing suitable appreciation for the history he was witnessing. “There were less people there.”

“Not one for crowds?” he asked.

“I haven’t made it obvious enough?” I replied. Alexi laughed.

“I wouldn’t mind if most of these people disappeared,” he said, dropping his voice and leaning close. “Then we could pick up where we were interrupted in Plovdiv.”

“Mmm, that would be nice,” I said, ignoring my nerves and moving closer to him. He’d given me plenty of space, but it had been over a week now and I needed to get over this already. Nothing horrid had happened the few times we had kissed, and I was sure I just needed to keep kissing him until that night in Kefalonia became a distant memory. “Are you sure we can’t find somewhere secluded here?”

“I think we’d be putting on a show,” Alexi said. Our heads were close together now, as we walked side by side, and I threw caution to the winds and tilted a bit farther over to steal a quick kiss. Alexi tightened his arm around my waist and turned slightly, extending the moment for longer than I had anticipated. I heard the beep of a digital camera behind us, and, an instant later, the high-pitched voice of the child we had sidestepped a moment before.

“Mamma, guarda!”

Alexi broke away from me with a sigh. “We’ll find somewhere better,” he said, so low I almost couldn’t hear him.

*

We did manage to find a few secluded places before we left Rome, and by the time we moved on to an apartment above the main square in Panicale, I felt confident enough to plan on taking a room with Alexi. The idea filled me with nervous excitement. We were to stay in Panicale for a week, with the plan of renting a car to explore Umbria and Tuscany. That was a week of sleeping next to Alexi and, hopefully, sleeping with him. It had been almost two years since my last disastrous one night stand after Keith. Part of me wondered if I’d forgotten how. But no, sex wasn’t something you forgot, and while our secluded places in Rome didn’t include a bed, there had been no further memories of Keith. I’d left him behind in Kefalonia, I told myself. I would be fine. And I wanted this, oh, did I want it. My impatience grew while we traveled north.

“You know,” Kaia commented from the front seat of the car, “this apartment is supposed to have a kitchen. We should do some cooking.”

“Why?” Paul was driving, and he kept his eyes on the road.

“For a change of pace, and we might be able to save some money,” Kaia replied.

“It’s been years since I cooked anything,” Paul protested. “If we’re short on money, Alexi and I can toss in more, right Alexi?”

“I don’t know, it might be sort of fun to cook,” Alexi said, glancing over from his seat next to me in the back. Paul opened his mouth to respond, but Kaia got there first.

“There’s nothing sexier than a guy in an apron, don’t you think, April?”

“Mmhmm.” I nodded. Paul’s face, reflected in the rearview mirror, held an expression of contemplation. I waited for his about-face, trying to keep my amusement hidden.

“I appear to have neglected to pack an apron,” Paul said. “Alexi didn’t tell me it was an essential backpacking item.”

“I think the food preparation is the important part,” Alexi said, grinning. I let my smile break through.

“Do you know how to cook?” Paul looked somewhat incredulous.

“I know a few recipes,” Alexi said. “I can tell you what to cut up, if you want to give it a try. We should get into Panicale with more than enough time to pick up what we need.”

“Well…” Paul hesitated.

“Oh, come on, it will be fun. Besides, there are definite benefits to cooking.” Alexi glanced over at me and winked, and I felt a flush rise in my cheeks.

“All right,” Paul agreed. “But no photos of the process or anything, okay?”

*

Later that evening I sat on the sofa in the apartment, pretending to read while listening to Alexi’s increasingly precise instructions to Paul drift out of the kitchen.

“Come on, you have to cut it smaller than that, no one will be able to fit it in their mouth!” I heard him say. I bit my lip and glanced at Kaia, who was smothering her laughter with her hand.

“I can fit it in my mouth just fine!” Paul protested. “See?”

“Stop eating the vegetables, otherwise we’ll have to buy more,” Alexi said. “And just because you have an abnormally large mouth doesn’t mean the rest of us do. Make them, like, two centimeters on each side.”

“Fine.” There was a pause. “So what are you doing while I’m over here chopping identical pieces of carrot?”

“Chopping identical pieces of tomato.”

“Why do they all have to be the same size? I thought variety was the key to a well-balanced life?”

“It looks better if it’s all the same size,” Alexi said. “And when it looks good, tastes good and was cooked by a guy, well, girls like it.” I muffled a laugh.

“They’d better like it,” Paul grumbled. “Actually, I don’t much see the point; Kaia likes me fine when I pay the bill at the restaurant. That’s a hell of a lot easier.” Kaia began to turn red, trying to hold in her amusement. Or perhaps annoyance, I thought, it could be either after Paul’s last comment.

“Is there a romantic bone in your body, Paul? Homemade food by candlelight with a glass of wine is way better than some random restaurant.”

“Hey, I pick fine restaurants!” Paul said.

“You’re hopeless!” Alexi’s footsteps approached the kitchen door. I dropped my eyes to my book so as to pretend I hadn’t been listening. “Kaia, your boyfriend is hopeless! Don’t you prefer when Paul cooks for you instead of paying the check at a restaurant?”

“I haven’t had the opportunity to compare,” Kaia said, but I barely heard her. I glanced up and froze at what was in Alexi’s hand. A knife. A guy with a knife. It’s just Alexi, part of my mind screamed, but my vision narrowed, zooming in on the blade until that last vestige of logic disappeared.

I jumped to my feet, thinking fast. My book was small, too small to use for protection. A couch cushion, that might work. I yanked one off the couch and held it in front of me. My eyes fell upon a small metal sculpture sitting on the coffee table. I snatched it up, holding it high and ready to swing. Voices swirled around me like pestering children. I couldn’t listen to them. I took a step forward.

“Drop it.” I made my voice low and threatening, with no hint of the pounding of my heart in my ears. The insistent noise rose to a higher volume. “Drop the knife, now.” It clattered to the floor. I watched it fall.

Something was tugging on my arm and I turned as Kaia managed to wrench the sculpture out of my hand.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Her voice was shrill. I looked at her, and then over to where Alexi stood, his face white. What was I doing? What was I doing? My horror threatened to drown me as the situation sank in. Kaia pushed me down onto the couch and pried the cushion from my hands.

“April, what happened? Are you all right?” Alexi loomed over me.

“I…” I didn’t know what to say. I lurched to my feet and brushed past Kaia and Alexi’s outstretched hands. “I need a moment.” I shut the bedroom door behind me.

*~*

The bedroom door swung shut behind April and I stared between Paul and Kaia. They both appeared as confused as I felt.

“Well,” Paul said. “That was … different.”

“Should I go get her?” I looked over at Kaia.

“No. I don’t think… no,” Kaia said. “Let her get herself together.”

“What the hell was that?” I asked.

“I’m not sure.” Kaia spoke slowly, as if she was organizing her thoughts as she talked. “She saw you with a knife and overreacted.”

“What wonderful detective skills you have,” Paul commented.

“She must have thought she needed to defend herself.” Kaia continued as if Paul hadn’t even spoken. “It almost makes me think PTSD, because you don’t react like that unless you have some traumatic experience. But PTSD doesn’t make any sense at all…”

“PTSD?” I asked, bewildered.

“Post traumatic stress disorder,” Kaia said. “I can’t think of what she could have gone through to cause it.”

“I thought you said she had some issues,” Paul said.

“Well, yeah, but not like that,” Kaia replied. “I saw her around knives a few times in the States, and she was fine. And she would have told me if she got attacked or something.” I wasn’t so sure that was true, but I didn’t want to say so. I glanced back into the kitchen, where my pot of water had begun to steam.

“So, what do we do now?” I asked. “I mean, we’ve got this stuff half cut up, and the water appears to be boiling.”

“Maybe we should wait until tomorrow for the dinner?” Kaia suggested. “It’ll keep, right?”

“Yeah.” We sure as hell weren’t going to be achieving the desired ambience for a romantic dinner tonight.

“Let’s just get a pizza from that place we passed on the square.”

*

April didn’t respond to our knocks on the door when Paul and Kaia returned with the pizza, so we sat at the table and ate on our own. I had moved to open the bedroom door, but Kaia had told me not to.

“Fewer people is usually better,” she said. “Paul and I will go for a walk after dinner.” We served ourselves and sat down.

“So.” Paul let the word hang in the air. “Now what?”

“I go to her after dinner, I suppose,” I said. And we step back another week, I added to myself.

“Yeah, just go and try to be understanding,” Kaia said. “If you can figure out what went through her head, that would be good.”

“She wouldn’t tell me last time,” I said. This had to be something similar to what had happened in Kefalonia. I hadn’t been close enough to see April’s eyes this time, but she hadn’t responded to any of our voices.

“Last time? She’s done this before?” Shit. I’d forgotten Kaia didn’t know. Vaguely, I realized this meant Paul hadn’t told. “Was this what happened on Kefalonia?” Kaia asked. I nodded. No point in denying the obvious now. I only hoped Kaia wouldn’t go into therapist mode.

“Hmm.” Kaia took a few bites of pizza. “I don’t know, Alexi. Something must have happened to her that I don’t know about, and I don’t feel comfortable doing anything. I don’t know enough.” I let out a sigh of relief.

“You’re saying she needs professional help?” Paul asked.

“Yeah,” Kaia replied. “I don’t know how we’ll manage it, though, since we can’t well drag her into a therapist’s office in Italy, and we’ll be in separate countries once the trip is over.”

“Can we get in touch with her parents?” I suggested.

“She’s moving to another state when she goes back, if I remember correctly,” Kaia said. “Besides, she doesn’t get on well with her parents. I doubt they would be very effective in getting her into therapy.”

“Friends?” I asked.

“Maybe.” Kaia took another bite of pizza. “That’s probably our best bet. I’ll try to remember who’s still around. She was supposed to share an apartment with someone, but I don’t remember who.”

“Maybe I can try to figure it out?” I suggested. Something was ringing, somewhere in another room.

“That would be good,” Kaia said. “Do you hear that?”

“Probably the phone down below,” Paul said. “So, what do we do until she gets into therapy?”

“Well, stay away from knives, for one,” I said.

“I told you cooking was a bad idea,” Paul said.

“So sorry I didn’t foresee this,” I replied, rolling my eyes. The door creaked. We all turned to see April emerging from the darkened bedroom with a phone in her hand. She held it out to Kaia.

“Who is it?” Kaia asked, looking confused.

“Someone asking for you.” April’s voice was flat and emotionless. Kaia took the phone.

“I don’t know the number,” she said. “It’s Ukranian, but… привіт?” She held the phone up to her ear and walked away. I stared at April. Her hair was rumpled and her eyes puffy. She stared back at me.

“Are… are you all right?” I asked. “There’s pizza, if you want something to eat.”

“I’m not hungry. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to overreact.” April spoke in a monotone, as if she were a sullen student reciting lines.

“It’s fine, no harm done,” I said, glancing over at Paul, who got up and took his plate into the kitchen. “What happened?”

“I overreacted,” April repeated.

“But why? I mean, you know me, you know I’m not a threat, right?”

“All I saw was the knife.” April closed her eyes for a moment, swaying slightly.

“You need to eat something, here, let me get-”

“No.” April cut me off. “I should leave.” She turned and walked back into the bedroom. I debated following her, then opted not to. Maybe she just needed more time.

“Well, this is going to make the rest of the trip interesting,” Paul commented when I walked into the kitchen.

“Understatement of the year,” I said. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

“Get her safely on a plane and get on with your life,” Paul said.

“What about the dreams? Why would we have dreamed of each other for so long if she can’t manage a relationship?” It made no sense to me.

“Man, you gave it your best shot, but you can’t be tied to some whack job because you happened to dream of her,” Paul said. “Crazy doesn’t fit into our lives. Let her go.”

“Maybe I’m supposed to be the one to help her through this,” I said, wishing I were having this conversation with Mamă instead of Paul. All he saw was how April would affect the band, not how she would affect me.

“How can you help her when she won’t even tell you what’s wrong?” Paul said. “She needs professional help, not your good intentions.”

“I don’t want to give up that easily,” I said.

“She could have hurt you today, Alexi,” Paul said, his voice frustrated. “You saw her, she didn’t respond to anything! Do you want to risk that happening again? Get her back home, and that’s the most anyone can reasonably expect of you.”

“It’s what I expect of myself that’s important to me,” I replied. There was a noise from the doorway. We turned to see Kaia standing there, staring at the phone in her hand as if it had sprouted limbs.

“Who called?” Paul asked.

“My mother.” Kaia’s voice had an element of disbelief. “From the hospital. My father… he’s had a stroke. I need to go home.”

“Oh no! Do they think he’ll be all right?” I asked.

“They don’t know. He’s not conscious right now.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I wondered if I should go give her a hug or something.

“I think Florence is the closest airport,” Paul said. “I’ll take care of getting you a ticket.” He pulled his cell from his pocket and moved away, punching numbers while he went.

“He’ll get something, don’t worry,” I said. “He’s organized shows for us in less than a day.” Kaia nodded, looking shell-shocked. “I’m sure he’ll be fine. Your father, I mean.” Kaia nodded again. “Do you want us to go back with you?”

“No, we don’t have the space,” Kaia said. “Besides, I wouldn’t expect you to spend days in the hospital for someone you don’t know.”

“But if you want the support or something…”

“Thanks, but I’ll be fine.” I nodded, and felt a stab of relief when I heard Paul’s footsteps return to the kitchen.

“I’m booking you a noon flight from Florence to Lliv, with a layover in Kiev,” he said, the phone still at his ear. “They won’t book train tickets over the phone, but they’re assuring me you can catch the last train with time to spare, and it’s apparently never full.”

“It’s not, I’ve taken it before,” Kaia said. “Thank you.”

“No problem,” Paul replied. “What? Yes, that’s correct.” He moved away from us again, giving instructions in rapid Romanian to the person on the other end of the line.

“So, if the flight is at noon, you need to be to the airport by ten and we need to leave here around seven thirty or eight,” I said, thinking through the timeline.

“All right. I’d better go get my stuff together.” Kaia turned and moved away in an apparent daze. I stayed where I was, eating my lukewarm pizza without much enthusiasm.

“Very good. Thank you very much.” Paul walked back in, snapping the phone shut. “Where is she?” he asked.

“Packing,” I replied.

“She can’t have unpacked much.”

“No, but I think she needed the time to process.”

“I’m going to travel with her tomorrow,” Paul said. “I’m sure she could manage on her own, but I don’t want to just drop her off at the airport.”

“That’s a good idea,” I said, refraining from commenting on the difference between this and what he had advised me to do moments before. “April and I can take a few days to get re-centered and pick you back up in Florence.”

“Actually, I’m just going to head back to Bucharest. Not that I don’t love your company and all, but there’s some things that need doing if we’re going to record in the fall.”

“Oh.”

“I can get you a ticket back, too,” Paul offered. “And get April’s moved up.”

“No thanks.” A plan was forming as I spoke. “If April agrees, I think we’ll go up to my aunt’s place.”

“Whatever. Just don’t get too sucked into this. She’s not something you can fix by yourself.”

“She’s not an object, Paul.” I was tired and didn’t feel like arguing.

“I know. That makes it even harder.” Paul looked at me for a moment, his expression holding something that might have been pity. “I’d better go make sure Kaia’s all right.”

I stared around the kitchen for a while after he left, taking in the old gas stove, the dark cabinets and the faded linoleum floor. We would probably have to forfeit our rent for the week, I thought. One of us needed to go tell the landlord we’d be leaving in the morning. I pushed off the counter I had been leaning against and headed for the door. And once I’d talked to the landlord, I needed to talk to April.

*~*

A shaft of light pierced the darkness of the bedroom. I didn’t move. It would be Kaia, or Alexi. Footsteps moved across the floor and the bed sagged when someone sat down.

“April? Are you awake?” Alexi’s voice. I debated whether to answer. “April, wake up, I need to tell you something.” He was leaving. That had to be it. There was no other response to how I had behaved. I felt a fresh stab of sadness, but all my tears had long since fallen. Alexi’s hand landed softly between my shoulder blades, and I heard him sigh as my muscles tensed involuntarily.

“April, wake up. Kaia and Paul are leaving tomorrow.” I rolled over and sat up. That wasn’t what I had expected to hear. Though I couldn’t blame them for not wanting to be around me. Next, Alexi would say he was leaving, too.

“Kaia’s mother called, and her father is in the hospital. Paul’s going to make sure she gets home and then go back to Bucharest. I was thinking we could go to my aunt’s a week or so early.”

“Why is her father in the hospital?” I asked the easy question.

“He had a stroke.”

“Is he recovering?”

“Still unconscious.” I chanced a look at Alexi’s face. His expression was sober. “Kaia and Paul need to be at the airport in Florence tomorrow morning, so we need to leave here by seven thirty. Then it will just be the two of us.”

No, it wouldn’t, I thought. I didn’t know how I could look at Alexi in daylight without melting from shame. If he wouldn’t leave on his own, I couldn’t keep him with me out of some twisted sense of obligation. He couldn’t possibly want me now. It would be easier for us both if I just left. Tonight, after he had fallen asleep.

“Do you want to keep to our schedule?” Alexi asked. “I told the landlord I didn’t know whether we’d stay or not.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“Well, we did just get here, and we haven’t seen any of Tuscany or Umbria. But, I don’t know, it would be weird to me to stay here when Paul and Kaia aren’t.”

“Yeah.” I didn’t want him to have to foot the bill for the week on his own. If he cancelled it before he realized I had left, then at least I wouldn’t have that bit of guilt to deal with. I would already be cursing myself for a good long while for letting my irrational brain kill my chances with Alexi.

“So, do you want to stop for a few days in Florence, or find another town around here to stay in, or go on to my aunt’s in Vernazza?”

“Whatever you want to do.” It didn’t matter.

“Let’s go on to Aunt Crina’s, then,” Alexi said. “It’s peaceful there, and we could both use that, I think.”

Mental Affairs

Chapter 9

My plan was not going well, I thought, sitting on a wall outside the monastery at Meteora and staring out over the iconic rock formations of the Pindos range. I had tried to seek out time with Alexi over the past few days, and he had been quiet and hesitant. He didn’t seem to have any objections when we did manage to slip away, but he appeared to be keeping himself on a tight leash. In a moment of extreme bravado I had moved his hand up and under my shirt to cup at my breast. He had paused, his eyes shining with what I thought was desire, to ask me if I was sure. Granted, he had shown every appearance of enjoying the experience, but it hadn’t been repeated in the days since.

Men were confusing. Keith had been close to feral when it came to our physical relationship, pushing – I cut off the thought. I wasn’t ready to go there. Not yet.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

I jumped. I hadn’t heard Alexi come up behind me. “It is.” I glanced over at him, wondering what I should do. There were lots of people around, so this didn’t seem like the best place to start kissing him again.

“Listen, April, I wanted to ask you something.” I tensed. This was it; he was going to say he didn’t like me and wanted me to leave him alone. “Is everything all right? You’ve been … different during the past few days. It’s not that I don’t enjoy it, but…” He trailed off, looking at me.

“But what?” I asked.

“But I’m worried you’re, I don’t know, not enjoying or – no, that’s not right.” He looked supremely uncomfortable. “I just – look, is everything all right?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. This wasn’t in the list of possible scenarios I had planned for over the past few days.

“Oh.” Alexi looked like he hadn’t expected my answer either. “You’re sure?”

“What do you want me to say?” I tried to force a laugh. This situation was comical in a way I couldn’t quite define.

“No, no, I’m glad everything’s fine, I like seeing this side of you. It’s just different, that’s all. Unexpected.”

“But you like this?” The question slipped out before I could help it and hung between us. My heart rate jumped and I watched Alexi’s face as he responded.

“Yes, of course!” He spoke without hesitation. I started breathing again. My mind raced. I’d changed my approach too suddenly and confused him, that was all. Maybe I should have eased into it. But he said he liked me this way, always pushing our boundaries. Good. I could keep pushing.

A loud beep pulled me out of my thoughts and I turned with Alexi to face an older, rotund man walking towards us with a large camera.

“Excusez-moi, êtes-vous tout bon avec des caméras?” he asked.

“Sorry, English, Romanian or Bulgarian,” Alexi replied.

“I have some English,” the man replied, his accent heavy. “You are good with cameras? This one, it does something I do not understand.” He lifted his camera and handed it to Alexi without waiting for a reply. “The screen, it gives these words, here.”

Alexi’s brow wrinkled while he examined the camera. “It looks like you’ve filled your memory card,” he said. “Do you have an extra?”

“Memory card? What is this?” The confusion on the man’s face was so dramatic that it was hard not to laugh.

“What you store your pictures on.” Alexi shot me a bemused glance. I watched comprehension dawn on the man’s features.

“Oh, yes, my son give me one of these, where is it…” He rummaged through an oversized camera bag hanging from his shoulder and triumphantly brandished a small plastic case.

“Well then, you just put the new one in, I’d guess over here… Yes, right here, and you’ll have space for more pictures.” Alexi’s fingers moved over the camera while he spoke, inserting the new card and handing the old one back to its owner. “Did you son give you the camera as well?”

“Yes, for this trip, he insist on joining me into the, how do you say, twentieth century?”

“I believe you’re looking for twenty-first century.” Alexi handed the camera back. “You should be good to go.”

“Oh, good, merci. You are very nice together, may I take picture?” Alexi and I glanced at each other and shrugged, allowing the man to position us against the backdrop of the mountain range and take a few shots with his camera and then with Alexi’s. There was something uncomfortable about this, though I couldn’t put a finger on what. I disregarded the thought as the man offered his thanks again and wandered up the path.

“That was one of the worst imitations of a French accent I’ve ever heard,” Alexi commented once the man had moved out of earshot.

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I suppose he could have been a clueless older guy with a generous child. Still, swapping out the memory card is pretty basic stuff.”

“Yeah.” Alexi shook his head. “Paul and Kaia were supposed to meet us here in a bit. They wanted to light candles in the sanctuary.”

“They did?”

“Probably more that Kaia wanted to and Paul is tagging along, but the effect is the same.” Alexi laughed.

“How long should we wait?”

“Why, do you want to leave them for something else?”

“I wouldn’t mind walking some of that trail over there.”

Alexi glanced over the trickle of people emerging from the sanctuary. “All right.”

*~*

There was something else which had been odd about the man with the camera, something I hadn’t mentioned to April. The language on his LCD screen was Romanian, not French. He wasn’t Sandu, though. Were we a big enough payday for Sandu to hire a team? It didn’t fit his style. He preferred to stalk our every step and take lots of compromising shots, not send in proxies for portrait style photos. I mentioned the incident to Paul when we retired later in the evening.

“Sounds like a crazy tourist,” he said. “There are some strange ones out there. Still, I’ll mention it to the publicist when I talk to him next.

“When will that be?” I asked.

“Sometime tomorrow,” he replied. “I’m hoping I’ll get a cell signal when we get closer to Athens.”

“Where was Sandu, last you heard?”

“Still around Rila, as of yesterday.”

I nodded and put the incident aside. If Paul wasn’t concerned, it didn’t make sense for me to be either. I had better things to do.

*~*

The next few days passed in a whirl of activity while we moved down the peninsula and immersed ourselves in Athens. The city pulsed day and night and our hostel, located right below the Agora, was in the heart of the action. I found it a bit too close, actually. We had managed to snag a room for four and didn’t have to worry about roommates, but the walls were paper-thin and the noise of our fellow travelers coming and going at all hours was beginning to get on my nerves. Kaia, on the other hand, loved the bustle and constant motion.

“We should go out tonight, April,” Kaia said, walking out of the adjacent bathroom with her hair wrapped in a towel. “I’ve been talking with some of the other travelers and I found out where the best clubs are.”

“You can go if you want,” I replied. “We’ll be heading out tomorrow, so you can nap on the train.”

“You should come too!” Kaia insisted. “Napping applies to you as much as me.” I took a deep breath. This conversation wasn’t new. Kaia knew I disliked the noise and crowds in clubs. I preferred to stay in with a book, or occasionally go to live music or dance shows.

Besides having had this particular conversation before, this was the third or fourth time in the past few days Kaia had gone out of her way to needle me about things she knew I disliked. Which, I reflected, was in and of itself a fifth thing, but that was beside the point. I’d had enough.

“Kaia, you know my thoughts on this.” I tried to keep my voice even. “I don’t know why you’re bringing it up again.”

“I swear, April, you’re the only person on earth who doesn’t like clubbing! If you’d just give it a chance you could really enjoy it! And what better time to try something new than on this trip?”

“I see no reason to do something I’ve already tried and hated!” I snapped, losing my grip on the moral high road.

“You’ll miss a lot of fun and meeting new people because you’re too stiff to bend a little and try!” Kaia snapped back. “It’s not much different from a rock concert, and you love those.”

“It’s entirely different from a rock concert! In a concert I get to choose the band, and I like the music. I’m not expected to dance with strangers, and I’m not encased in a giant, sweaty mob!”

“Uh, barrier?” Kaia looked at me as if she couldn’t believe I’d left such an obvious hole in my argument. “If that’s not a giant, sweaty mob, I don’t know what is.”

“It’s a giant, sweaty mob with a comfortable bubble cleared by the liberal use of elbows while dancing,” I replied, trying to regain some shred of dignity. From his perch in the upper bunk across the room, Alexi made a small, strangled noise.

“Come on, we can all go together and you won’t have to dance with strangers, April. I bet Alexi and Paul love clubbing, right?”

“Paul likes it. I’ve performed in too many clubs to want to go to them in my spare time,” Alexi said.

“There, see, I’m not the only one!” I pounced on Alexi’s words, grateful for the opportunity to further my argument. The door opened, and Paul walked in.

“Not the only what?” he asked.

“The only person who doesn’t like clubbing,” Kaia said.

“Another thing you have in common with Alexi,” Paul replied. He looked over at Kaia. “I take it you do?”

“Love it,” Kaia said.

“Want to go out tonight?” Paul asked.

“Sure! We can go on our own.” They moved around the room, making plans and preparations while Alexi and I hid in our respective bunks.

“Have fun!” Alexi called out as Kaia and Paul headed out the door several minutes later.

“Will do! See you in the morning,” Paul called back. I glanced over at Alexi after the door closed.

“You’re amusing when you’re mad,” he said. “I particularly liked the elbow dancing comment.”

“I’m kind of proud of that one.” I laughed in spite of my lingering annoyance. “I rarely manage to come up with good comebacks in the heat of the moment.”

“Yeah, I always think of the best thing to say after an argument is over.” Alexi paused. “I’m not trying to snoop or anything, but it seems like you and Kaia have been disagreeing more than you did at the start of the trip.”

“We are.” I sighed. “I think she’s been trying to annoy me. Maybe I’m overreacting.”

“How so?” Alexi’s voice was measured and cautious.

“I don’t know. She’s picking topics she knows I don’t want to talk about. Clubbing- we discussed it when she was in the US, and again while we were planning for this trip. She knows what I think. Why even bring it up?” The more I spoke, the more I warmed to the subject.

“I’m sure she just doesn’t want you to miss out on the experience,” Alexi said.

“But she never used to do that, and now it’s all the time! Last night she was pushing me to order seafood, and there was that conversation about siblings two days ago.” I started ticking each instance off on my fingers. “She mentioned religion at Meteora, and before that it was-”

“Wait.” Alexi put up a hand, and climbed down to sit on the bed next to me. “There’s that many things you don’t like talking about?”

“Everyone has subjects they don’t want to give regular monologues on,” I said. “Kaia doesn’t like dogs; she was attacked by one as a child. She changes the subject when dogs come up, therefore I find other things to talk about because I don’t want to make her uncomfortable.”

“So you’re saying everyone has traumatic memories connected to certain subjects they’d rather not see brought up.” Alexi paused for a moment, appearing to muse over my words. I felt a sudden need to fill the silence.

“Or things that are annoying or awkward,” I said. “You wouldn’t bring up embarrassing personal problems in casual conversation.”

“Fair enough.” Alexi paused for long enough that I assumed the conversation had ended. “I have to say, you have a very unusual list. Seafood and siblings?” I tensed. I had thrown myself into my argument without thinking it would lead to questions. “You don’t have to tell me, of course, but I will admit to being curious.”

I bit my lip and tried to decide how to respond. The things I had mentioned weren’t secrets, per se. Most of my friends knew about my dislike of seafood and my tumultuous relationship with religion. A few knew about my sister’s accident and my family. If Alexi and I were to go anywhere as a couple, he would know what I had just mentioned and more. For tonight, though, I would keep to what I had already blurted out. I nodded, more to myself than to him.

“It’s all simple,” I said. “With seafood, it’s a reaction to having people push me to try it.”

“Is it just that, or do you not like the taste?” Alexi asked.

“It’s sort of silly,” I said. “One of my aunts is allergic to shellfish, and avoids all fish. When I was small and we had family reunions at the beach, I saw she was the only person not eating seafood. I decided I wanted to be just like her, so I refused to eat it. Now, I’ve gone for so long that I genuinely hate the taste of anything fishy. I’ve tried in good faith, a few times. It never works.”

“It’s funny what our minds can do,” Alexi said. “I have a similar hatred for chives, because my mother grew them in her garden when I was younger. I ran through one day and tripped in the middle of the bed, and I cut my hands in the process. Since I crushed some of the stems when I fell, the juice got in my cuts and it hurt worse than anything else I’d ever felt. When Mamă told me it was the chives, I told her I would never eat anything that hurt so much!”

“Well, if I ever cook for you, I’ll remember never to use chives!” We both laughed.

“And I’ll do the same for seafood,” Alexi replied. “Any other culinary dangers I should avoid?”

“No, I’m not too picky. Unless you go for, like, insects or organs.”

“Not a liver and brains type person, are you?”

“Nope.” I grinned. “I’ll try everything within reason. As long as the reason is my own!”

“That’s one way to look at it,” Alexi said. “So what about siblings? Not eating them, I mean, but-”

“Yeah.” I took a deep breath and found a smudged spot on the far wall to stare at while reciting the words I had perfected back in high school. I hated the series of emotions which flickered across people’s faces when they heard my story and put together the parts I didn’t say outright. It was easier not to watch. “My sister and I were in a car accident when I was eight. Mom and I were fine, but my sister suffered severe brain injuries. She has mental and physical disabilities that require someone to be with her all the time. Since then, her care has been my parent’s priority.” I stopped, hoping it would be enough.

“Oh, wow.” Alexi leaned over to take my hand in his. “I’m sorry to hear that. Does her care require two people?”

“Not usually. My mother quit working to be her primary caregiver.” Alexi’s touch anchored me in the present.

“So your father took care of you?”

“Dad would help when he wasn’t working. My brother’s interests coincided with Dad’s much more than mine did. Dad coached a lot of his sports teams.” I shifted to stare at the blanket instead of the wall. I hated the creeping emptiness brought on by revisiting these memories. It was only after I had gone to college that I realized how different my childhood had been. I didn’t blame anyone; how could I? They were my family, and I couldn’t wish that either of my siblings take the loneliness in my place. I couldn’t change the situation; my choices were to be caught in it or move forward. I had chosen the latter, but that didn’t make this moment of telling, inevitable with anyone I got close to, any easier. Alexi slid nearer to me, putting his arm around my shoulder and pulling me tight.

“I’m sorry I’ve brought up unpleasant memories by asking,” he said. That was, I thought, the best response to my story I’d ever gotten. Alexi applied his sorrow to the present, where it could actually do some good. I leaned into his embrace, grateful to have him holding me.

*~*

Both Paul and Kaia’s bunks remained untouched the next morning- Kaia’s covered in clothing and Paul’s empty, save for his pack. April and I had returned from breakfast at the foornos down the street before they came sauntering in. Kaia looked exhausted but content, and Paul wore the expression of the proverbial cat in the cream. We passed a busy day traveling, but Paul barely waited until the door to our hotel room in Olympia had closed before he began gloating.

“So, did you score last night?”

“Excuse me?” It hadn’t taken much to guess Paul had gotten some action the night before, but we had never made a habit of discussing our sex lives.

“Don’t be dense.”

“I wasn’t expressing confusion.”

“Come on, man, we gave you the whole night and you didn’t get there? What happened, couldn’t get it up? April wants a good fucking, what with the way she’s been throwing herself at you lately. You should hurry up and give it to her, or she’ll pass you over for someone else.” I set my teeth. April was beginning to trust me, and I wasn’t about to jeopardize that by getting into a pissing match with Paul about who had a better sex life. Besides, I’d lose – at least at the moment.

“It’s none of your business what we did or didn’t do.”

“Whatever, let me give you some advice. A night out dancing and a few beers, followed by a room in the Grande Athena, and the ladies melt into your arms. Though maybe with April you might want to skip the dancing and go straight to alcohol.”

“You took her to the Grande Athena?” The question popped out before I could help it. We’d passed the imposing hotel on our first day in Athens, and it had been the subject of much longing on Kaia’s part. Paul smirked.

“Let me know if you’d like me to hook you up with a room in Pompeii or Rome.”

“I’ll manage on my own, thanks.”

*~*

“Are you going to ignore me all day, or do you want to hear about the night I had?” Kaia asked.

“You slept on the train, and we’ve been touring. I’m not ignoring you,” I said, sidestepping the question. After last night, I didn’t know what we had to say.

“So it’s a coincidence that we’ve been sitting here for the past half hour and you haven’t said a word?” Kaia said.

“Don’t let me keep you from talking.”

Conversations require two active participants; otherwise I believe the term is monologue. And as amazing as Paul’s cock is, I don’t think it quite deserves to have it’s virtues extolled on that level.” I looked up from my book, and Kaia smiled. “Ah, I thought that might get your attention.”

“So you sucked him off outside the restrooms in some club,” I said, bowing under a fresh wave of irritation. “Big deal.”

“Oh, no, April, think again. We spent the night at the hottest clubs in town, then relaxed into the sublime comfort of the Grande Athena.”

“What’s that?”

“Honestly, April, you’re hopeless sometimes! The five star hotel we passed on our first day? The one I told you I’d never see the inside of?”

“Oooh.” I was impressed, in spite of myself. Paul was smooth. I decided to oblige Kaia’s obvious desire for me to ask more detail.

“Well, we decided we didn’t want to stay out later than four, since we’d be traveling today, and when we left the last club I’d had quite a lot to drink, so Paul found a taxi and when we got in he told the driver to go to the Athena, not the hostel. And when I asked him what that was all about, he said he’d given them a call earlier and they happened to have a room available, and wouldn’t I like to spend a little time there, just the two of us? And let me tell you, April, he is absolutely amazing in bed! His tongue and fingers are beyond words!”

“Sounds like it,” I said. Kaia sat back in her chair, looking satisfied. “So, did you and Alexi get up to anything interesting while we were gone?”

“We talked for a while.” After the siblings conversation, if you could call it that, he had held me, not saying or doing anything, just acting as a steady anchor while the memories swirled through my head. He’d somehow sensed I needed the comfort, even when I couldn’t ask. That was something special, and I refused to let Kaia anywhere near.

“You talked?” Her voice dripped with disbelief. “That’s it?”

“That’s all I want to tell you about,” I said.

“Well, fine then,” she said. “See if I tell you about my experiences again!” She got up, grabbed a room key and stalked out of the room.

“Kaia, wait!” I called, but she responded by letting the door slam behind her.

*

The beach at Platiamos was a deserted strip of white sand tucked back into a cove surrounded by high cliffs. Perhaps the stairs turned people off, I thought, picking my way down what seemed like several hundred of them, though I had lost count. I jumped the last few steps onto the sand and set out to explore with Alexi at my side.

“Let’s head for that pile of driftwood,” he suggested, pointing about three hundred yards up the beach. “I’ve always thought it would be cool to find a walking stick.” We ambled along, pausing to take pictures and pick up small rocks and shells that caught our eyes. I found a piece of sea glass, deep red and polished smooth by the waves.

Alexi abandoned his shoes and charged into the surf, laughing as the water drenched his legs. I joined him in the shallows and we walked along, our hands linked, the tide rushing over our feet. When we drew closer to the driftwood pile it resolved into an intricate hut, with multiple rooms, driftwood furniture and shells and gull feathers adorning the walls.

“We could stay here tonight,” Alexi suggested as we explored the intimate little structure. “We wouldn’t even need a tent, just a couple of blankets.”

“I’m sure something this lovingly created has an owner,” I said.

“But we’d be using it with love, I’m sure they wouldn’t mind!” Alexi said. “Just think how romantic it would be, out under the stars with the waves in the background.”

“And all that nice, soft sand, getting all nitty gritty and rubbing away at your sensitive privates,” I joked. I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to puncture the romantic picture he had painted.

“Eee. Okay, I didn’t think about that.” Alexi sat with a plop in the sand, pulling me down beside him. “Listen, though, I don’t know what you want to do about, you know, but no matter what Paul and Kaia are doing I’m never going to pressure you into anything, okay? I’d love it if you wanted to do more, but I’m happy with what we’re doing now. Besides, I think it’s more important to know someone mentally before you know them physically, especially if you want the relationship to last.” Alexi looked at me, the light from the gaps in the driftwood roof cutting diagonal lines across his face. “Oh, and I was tested after my last relationship and I’m fine, so you don’t have to worry about catching anything from me.”

My head spun. He was clean. He wanted our relationship to last. How had we gone from exploring the beach to having the talk that all advice columnists recommended ‘well in advance of your first sexual contact’? I’d always found the idea amusing – how were you supposed to plan attraction? But here we were, having that conversation, and Alexi had initiated it. What had I done to deserve him?

“April?” I’d forgotten he was expecting a response.

“I’ve always thought it was sort of silly to plan these things out,” I said, smiling. “I mean, I don’t want to rush into anything, but I’m also not going to be like, ‘Three months from today we’ll be doing it daily.’”

“We’ll be in different countries then, so I think it’s safe to bet we won’t be sleeping together that often!” Alexi said, relief flooding his features. “We’ll talk a lot, right?”

“Of course we will!” I said. “And we still have more than half the summer. Let’s not talk about leaving. I was tested after my last time, too, so we can let things unfold. Not here, though. I was only half joking about the sand.”

“Are you sure?” Alexi reached toward me with a sand-covered hand, creating new sensations as he caressed my neck. I considered changing my position regarding sex on the beach when he pulled back.

“Shall we go find the others?” I reluctantly followed him out of the hut, blinking in the bright light. Shading my hand with my eyes, I spotted Paul and Kaia down the beach and pointed them out.

“Race you down there?” Alexi took off before I could agree, leaving me protesting as I ran down the shore behind him. The wind blew in my face, but I was able to make up some ground on the firmer sand near the water. As we drew closer to Paul and Kaia, I could hear snatches of their conversation, carried on the wind.

“We suffer… slow… not our place… own good…” My eyes narrowed. Then Alexi tripped a few feet in front of me and tumbled to the ground. Without time to stop or turn, I jumped, sailing over him and waving as my shadow passed over his face.

“Hey! Not on!” He rolled to his feet and lunged after me, catching my knee and sending us both down in a puff of sand. Somehow, by the time we skidded to a stop, he ended up on top.

“What was that for?” I asked, panting.

“I don’t know,” Alexi replied. “You’re beautiful when you’ve been running, you know that?” I grinned.

“Stop being a sap and get off me.”

“Why? I rather like the view.” Alexi leaned down and kissed me. I closed my eyes, letting the rest of my senses soak in the scene. The sound of the waves, the heat of the sun, the weight of his body and his lips against mine – maybe he was on to something here.

“My, that was a dramatic entrance.” Paul’s voice broke into my thoughts. “And here I was thinking you would never get the hang of the stage, Alexi.” We sat up, brushing sand off each other and grinning.

“It’s getting late,” Kaia said. “I hate to cut the scene short, but we need to find a campsite and get the tents pitched before it gets dark.”

It didn’t take long to find the campground, pitch our tents and run back into town for a quick meal. When we returned, however, things began to get a bit hairy. Out of habit, we had split the tents between the sexes, the same way we did whenever we ended up in a hotel. But when we got back to the campsite, after sitting, talking, and watching the moon rise over the water for a bit, Paul and Kaia disappeared into one of the tents. I glanced over at Alexi, who shrugged.

“I take it one night to themselves isn’t enough,” he said.

“They might have mentioned that before you put all your stuff in their tent,” I said, wondering if this had anything to do with the snatches of conversation I had heard earlier.

“Not the end of the world. Maybe they’re just planning a quickie.” A high-pitched moan drifted out of the tent. “Or maybe not. We’ll just have to wait and see. Come sit with me?” I moved to sit on his lap and he wrapped his arms around me, pulling me close. We sat for a bit, watching the moonlight sparkle off the water and listening to the noise emanating from the tent behind us. Paul and Kaia weren’t making much effort to muffle their activities. I wondered whether anyone else could hear them, and then wondered why I cared.

“I was so frustrated when they interrupted us earlier today.” Alexi’s lips brushed against my ear, making my breath catch. “I could have kissed you forever.” His lips moved down my cheekbone, barely touching, yet sending sparks of sensation through my skin. I shifted to straddle his lap, facing him. I felt caught in the moment, yet separated from it, running my hands along his torso and leaning forward to kiss him. He pulled me tight, his tongue dancing with mine. His hands slipped under my shirt to unhook my bra. I moaned when his fingers passed over my newly freed nipples. His erection began to rise, straining against the fabric of his pants into the newly wet spot between my legs.

“We could go to the other tent,” Alexi suggested, his hands now tracking down my sides and across my stomach, playing with the waistline of my shorts. I froze. The sounds of the night – the crickets and frogs, the waves on the sand, Kaia’s moans and Paul’s low voice – they all were smothered. And from across the years and thousands of miles, If you love me, you’ll do it. I gasped, and the world began to produce sound again.

“Tell me if you’re not comfortable and we won’t go all the way,” Alexi was continuing. “But please, we do need to move because you’re kind of in the way of something that needs a bit more space at the moment. April? April?”

“Oh, sorry!” I scrambled to my feet, shaken and embarrassed. My mind was playing tricks on me, that was all.

“Are you all right?” Alexi stood next to me, his face illuminated by moonlight.

“I’m fine.” I found a smile and looked up at him.

“Did I do something wrong?” He reached out, hesitantly.

“Not at all.” I moved closer to him. “Just thought I heard something. Where were we?”

“I was suggesting we retire to the other tent – no expectations. As a matter of fact, I have an idea and I don’t want you to do anything!”

“All right!” I made myself sound enthusiastic, despite my sudden apprehension. I thought I’d never hear that voice again. Having him reappear now, and from my own head, no less, to threaten this relationship… Alexi was a thousand times better than Keith could ever have been… no. I wouldn’t allow it.

I snapped back to the present as Alexi pulled my shirt over my head, laughing with him when the collar caught on my nose and rumpled my already windswept hair. My unhooked bra fell from my arms. Alexi sat for a moment, looking. I felt a creeping of nerves while his eyes passed over the stretch marks left from growing too quickly and my breasts, the left one bigger than the right.

“You’re gorgeous,” he said finally, reaching out to smooth his palms over my chest.

“You’re pretty easy on the eyes yourself,” I replied, leaning into his touch and melting with relief. “And you’re wearing too much clothing.” He smiled.

“Time enough for that later,” he said, and paused to position Kaia’s sleeping bag behind me. “Lay back.” His hands returned to my breasts and he leaned in to kiss me again. The tension in my body built while his lips moved down my neck, across my collarbone and further to encircle my nipple. I moaned and arched against the new sensation as his hands dropped lower, unzipping and then slipping off my shorts and panties.

“Alexi, what are you – oh!” Alexi laughed, keeping his finger circling that nerve rich area for a moment or two.

“Good spot, eh?” he said, gazing at me as I lay next to him, twitching. I’d played with my clit before, but I’d never had a reaction like that!

“It’ll be even better with my mouth, I bet,” Alexi said. “I’ll bet I can get you to come three or four times in a row! Just a sec, let me take care of this.” He moved up on his knees, angled away from me, and unzipped his fly. I tried to take a deep breath. I had never come so explosively before; none of my prior partners had ever given my pleasure much heed. And Alexi was going to do it again? I looked over at him. Why was he getting himself off? Keith had always insisted I do that. He’d said I was good at it – better than any of his prior girlfriends. Had Alexi asked and I’d been too out of it, post-orgasm, to respond? If he wanted me suck him off, I’d better do it. He deserved something in return, after all. I leaned forward and settled myself onto my knees, crouching low to get even with his cock and batting his hands away. His protest of “You don’t have to, April,” fell on deaf ears as I took him into my mouth. He smelled different than Keith – clean and fresh.

“April, Christ, you’re-” I focused on the motions – up, down, twist my tongue right there to make him tremble – and the tent fell away. I was back in Keith’s cluttered bedroom.

“Oh, oh, yeah, baby!” His fingers twisted in my hair as he thrust into my face, his balls slapping against my chin. I forced down my gag reflux, mentally repeating that he wanted this, he was enjoying it. Never mind the gas he passed when aroused was disgusting. Bury that thought. This is what a girlfriend is supposed to do, right?

“April, slow down, I’m going to-” Alexi came while I was between years, between continents, with his cock halfway in my mouth and not at all prepared to swallow. I choked, gasping for air while those few seconds stretched into eternity. And then I was on my hands and knees, my breath ragged as Alexi’s come dripped from my mouth and tears leaked from my eyes.

“Oh, fuck, are you all right? I tried to warn you but I guess not early enough or something and wait, you need – here.” His words ran together as my heart pounded. It had been so real, but it had already happened. Keith was years ago, not now. In the US, not here. Alexi put something in my hand, a towel, and I tried to wipe off my face.

“Here, sit back, God you’re shaking, where’s your water bottle, you should rinse out your mouth or something, I’m so sorry about this, I didn’t want you to have to do anything at all tonight and oh, here’s your bottle, or Kaia’s, it doesn’t matter-” I took the bottle and sat up, trying to control myself long enough to take a sip. I didn’t know whether I shivered from cold or from something else. “April? April, please say something.” Alexi stared at me, his face scared, his dick still hanging flaccid from the unzipped fly of his pants. The sight struck me as funny and I leaned back and closed my eyes to keep from laughing.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I just misjudged the timing; it’s been a while since I’ve done this. I’m sorry.”

“No, I should be apologizing,” Alexi said. “I should have pulled back and come on your chest or something since you hadn’t said I could come in your mouth.

“Don’t worry, we just miscommunicated. No harm done.” I felt suddenly exhausted. I leaned over to fish my underwear out of the tangle of clothes near our feet and dug through my pack for a nightshirt.

“Are you sure? I feel awful about this and-” I put a finger to Alexi’s lips. I didn’t want to deal with reassuring him right now. How could I convince him all was well when I didn’t understand what had happened myself?

“I’m sure,” I said. “Let’s go to sleep.”

*~*

I sat and watched April sleep for a long time that night, replaying every moment of the evening in my mind and trying to figure out where it had gone wrong. I don’t know how late it was when I figured it out, but the noises from the other campers had quieted and the only sounds were the insects and the ocean. Something had changed when she had positioned herself to give me a blowjob. She’d brushed aside my objections, which she’d never done before. When she began, she’d seemed to approach my penis like it was something separate from me. She hadn’t made a sound throughout the entire thing – hadn’t given any indication she heard anything I said, or even looked at me. Except for once, near the end, when I’d been trying to warn her I was coming, she’d glanced up and her eyes were blank. No emotion. Not even the guarded hiding of emotion I’d come to recognize over the few weeks we’d spent together. It was if she were absent from what she was doing. And then I’d come and she’d choked, and she was back – obviously confused and scared, shaking, but present and insisting everything was fine. What the hell had happened in that moment?

Mental Affairs

Chapter 8

Being on the road without the expectation of performing was wonderful. I got the sense we moved faster than April and Kaia might have liked, but compared to the tour our forward progress was leisurely. We stayed off the beaten path, and saw parts of Bulgaria that most travelers missed. When we got to the Valley of Roses we tossed a pencil at the map and ended up in Golyamo Dryanovo, a tiny village marked as much by a decreased density of roses as an increased density of humans. We asked permission to pitch our tents where the fields melted into town, and I first kissed April under a luminous moon perfumed by rose petals.

April seemed to be getting more comfortable around me as the days passed. Maybe it was time to push a bit, I thought. Slip a hand under her shirt or into her jeans. I smiled, contemplating the possibilities, and looked over to where she sat next to me in the train compartment. She was rubbing her nails lightly along her bandaged hand, as if she were trying to relieve an itch without scratching.

“Has your hand still not healed?” I asked.

“It’s mostly there,” she said. “It just itches like crazy now, and I think the old stitches need to come out.”

“We’ll find a clinic in Plovdiv and get them checked,” I said.

“Actually, I thought I’d take them out myself.” My surprise must have shown on my face because April hastened on. “I’ve done it plenty of times with dogs and cats. It’s not complicated.”

“Don’t you want something to numb your hand?” I asked. I didn’t want her to think I was weak, but removing stitches seemed like something best left to a professional.

“Nah, it won’t hurt that much.” April got up and rummaged through her pack. Paul and Kaia had gone to the snack car and were nowhere to be seen. It appeared I would be the only witness to April’s attempts to play doctor.

April pulled a first aid kit out of her bag and set a small pair of curved scissors, tweezers, anti-bacterial cream, a few alcohol pads and fresh bandages on the small food tray. She cut through the tape on her bandage and began unwinding it.

“I haven’t changed the gauze yet today,” she said. “But the skin looked good yesterday.” She lifted away the last piece of white to reveal her hand. Five black stitches, irregularly spaced, bisected the intense pink of new skin. She examined her hand for a moment and then ripped open one of the alcohol pads and began wiping down her scissors and tweezers.

I watched while she applied a fresh pad to her healed cut, picked up the scissors, and snipped through the first stitch. She caught her bottom lip in her teeth as she switched to the tweezers to pull the suture out. The process reminded me of a video I had seen of an adult guinea worm being removed from its human host. As soon as the thought surfaced, I wished it hadn’t. A couple of stitches later, April cursed softly. I looked over and saw blood welling around the second to last suture.

“Damn it, this one’s too tight. I nicked myself,” she said, pulling the thread out through a few droplets of blood. She grabbed one of the used alcohol pads to hold over the fresh wound and looked over at me, her lips pursed. “Can you help me with this last one?”

“What do you need me to do?” I asked, swallowing the, I told you so, that came bubbling to the forefront of my mind. Those words wouldn’t be helpful now.

“Use the tweezers to pull up on the last stitch. That way I don’t have to dig under the knot,” she said, tossing the cloth aside and holding out her hand. I took the tweezers and forced my hands to be steady. I had no idea how hard to pull up, so I made myself move slowly. The last thing I wanted to do was rip the stitch out of her skin. I held my breath while she inched the scissors forward, slipping them under the suture knot as it lifted away from her hand. The seconds until I heard the snick of the scissors lasted an eternity, and my hand jerked upward once time started again, pulling the thread out faster than I had intended.

“Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean-” I started, but April cut me off.

“No worries,” she said, grinning. “Thanks! It already itches less.” I took a deep breath as she set about cleaning up her palm and bandaging it all up again. When all of the first aid paraphernalia had been put away, April laughed.

“What’s funny?” I asked, wondering if she was laughing at me.

“My boyfriend helped me pull out my stitches,” she said, smiling. “Not a typical date, huh?”

“Not really, no,” I said, focusing instead on the fact that she had called me her boyfriend. Not for the last time, I hoped. I liked hearing it.

“I hope you didn’t mind,” she said. “I’m sorry. I should have asked first.”

“What? Oh, no, it’s fine, just a bit unexpected,” I hastened to reassure her.

“Good.” April was silent for a moment, a small smile still playing about her lips. “It’s funny how much has changed since we started traveling.”

“Changed for the better, right?” I asked.

“Of course!” My face split into a big grin at her response, and I moved to pull her close against me.

“There certainly have been a lot of surprises,” I said. “I never expected Paul would hit it off so well with Kaia.”

“It doesn’t surprise me too much,” she said, and paused to glance out into the hall. “Kaia’s always been casual about getting into relationships.”

“Paul surprises me a bit,” I said. “He’s always preferred one-night stands.”

“I guess it makes sense for them to latch on to each other,” April said.

“They meet in the middle,” I finished. April laughed, and then trailed off into silence. I wondered what she was thinking. I had opened my mouth to ask when I saw Paul and Kaia coming up the aisle.

“You guys were gone a while,” April commented. “Anything worth eating in the snack car?”

“The typical,” Paul replied, hoisting a cardboard carrier with cups of something that steamed. “May I interest you in some gourmet powdered soup and crackers?”

“I never thought I’d hear the words gourmet and powdered in the same sentence,” I said, raising an eyebrow as I looked into the cup Paul handed me.

“Hey, that was what the menu said,” Kaia replied. “Careful, it’s hot.”

“Maybe it will look more appetizing once it’s cooled,” April said, setting her cup aside.

“So, what does the magic schedule suggest we see in Plovdiv?” Paul asked. He rarely took interest in what we would do until we arrived at our destination, preferring instead to leave that level of detail to the research April and Kaia had done. Kaia pulled a page from her bag.

“The old town dates to the nineteenth century and is centered on the Marita River,” she read. “The Nebet Tepe fortress is just outside town and dates to the 12th century BC. There’s a Roman era amphitheater, as well as Ottoman era baths and mosques. The Tsar Simeon gardens are supposed to be worth a visit.”

“We were planning on a day and a half here, right?” April said.

“Yeah, and then we go on Maliovitsa on Thursday,” Kaia replied.

“What’s in Maliovitsa?” I asked.

“Hiking!” April said, her face lighting up. “It’s supposed to be gorgeous. I’ve marked out four or five hikes I want to go on.”

“Wow, that’s a lot,” Paul said.

“You up for it?” April teased.

“Of course. I’m just worried about weakling here,” Paul replied, leaning over to punch me on the arm.

“Says the man who’s never gone backpacking before,” I retorted, ducking away. “Are these hikes overnight?”

“Some of them are.” April leaned over to pluck the notes from Kaia. “There’s the hike up to Rila Monastery. That one’s six hours. From there we go on to the Seven Rila Lakes and Rilski Ezera, which are seven and eight hours, respectively. There are two shorter trails to the waterfall at Skakavitsa and Strashnoto Ezero.” She stumbled over the unfamiliar syllables and blushed a bit. “And then we can stop in Sandanski for a few days and relax in the mineral springs!”

“After your schedule, we’re going to need it,” Paul said.

“You up for it?” It was my turn to goad. “We can always get you a comfortable hotel room and leave you to entertain yourself while the fit ones among us climb the peaks.”

“I’ll have you know you’re looking at a man of iron over here,” Paul said, flexing his biceps. “I’m more than able to get up the mountain, and I can probably carry you along with me.”

“No thanks, I don’t want to land under you when you fall,” I retorted.

“I have no intention of -” Paul paused as the conductor passed our compartment and rattled out a stream of Bulgarian before moving on down the aisle.

“What did he say?” April asked.

“Plovdiv’s in ten minutes,” I said. “I asked him to let us know.”

“Guess we’d better get our stuff together, then,” Kaia said.

*~*

“Wouldn’t this be a great place for a concert?” Paul asked, staring up at the ancient columns rising behind the floor of Plovdiv’s deserted Roman-era amphitheater. “We should see if we can book it on our next tour.”

“You think we’ll be ready to go international?” Alexi replied.

“Maybe.” Paul jumped down from the stone bench he’d been standing on. “We were getting interest towards the end of our last tour, but the timing didn’t work.” He shrugged, and turned towards Kaia, who stood snapping pictures several rows above us. “Hey Kaia, come down!”

“Why?” Kaia called back. “It’s kind of fun taking pictures of you prancing around down there. A bit of editing and you’ll be a gladiator.”

“I don’t want to be a gladiator,” Paul said.

“Why not?” I asked. It seemed like the kind of thing that would appeal to him.

“Gladiators died,” Paul replied.

“Fair enough.” Kaia moved down the wide stone steps and across the amphitheater floor to join us. “What would you rather be instead?”

“Could I be the gallant winner of the joust, awaiting the token of my fair lady?” Paul asked. Alexi looked over at me, rolling his eyes.

“I believe that’s our cue to make ourselves busy elsewhere,” he said. “What do you say we find a play to reenact over by those pillars?”

“Which play would you suggest?” I asked. We moved under the shadow of the arches.

“Well, there’s always Romeo and Juliet, but they die at the end; we don’t want that.” He maneuvered me so my back brushed against the cool stone. “What about A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Would you be Hermia to my Lysander?” I struggled to remember the gist of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“Aren’t they the two that get put under a spell?”

“Among others, yes.” Alexi slipped his hands around my back and pulled me close against him. I moaned, my mouth opening to his and my hands roaming up his sides and over his back. His skin was warm and ever so slightly damp under his shirt.

“God, you’re so fucking gorgeous,” he whispered. “If we weren’t in public…” My heart rate jumped further.

“You want me?”

“I want you more than anything in the world right now.”

I leaned forward, intending to continue the kiss. I wanted his hands to be everywhere; I wanted him to take me there, with my back pressing into the rough stone. Alexi was moving his hands down my back, our lips a fraction of an inch from touching, when we saw movement where the light met the shadows beyond the arch. I turned in time to see Kaia dart out of sight. Alexi sighed.

“I would have expected them to be occupied for longer,” he said, his lips tickling the curve of my ear. “I suppose they want us to move on.” I nodded, and resigned myself to trying to recapture the moment at a later date. However, when we emerged, blinking, into the sunlight, Paul had disappeared and Kaia sat slumped against one of the columns.

“Where’s Paul?” Alexi asked as we drew closer.

“I don’t know.” Kaia didn’t look up from the patterns her fingers were making in the dust. She sounded on the verge of tears. I didn’t know what had happened, but I guessed it had something to do with Paul, and Kaia wasn’t likely to tell me with Alexi there. I met his eyes over Kaia’s head, hoping he would understand without me saying anything out loud. And somehow, miraculously, he did.

“I’ll just go find him, then,” he said, giving my hand a squeeze before moving away. I mouthed him a silent thank you.

“Kaia, what happened?” I sat down next to her I realized a few tears had already tracked down her face.

“I don’t know.” She added a few lines to her doodle in the gravel and wiped the whole thing out in a single, abrupt motion. “This is so ridiculous! I don’t know why I’m crying over some guy I met a week ago!”

“Because you like him and he’s done something stupid?” I ventured. This type of situation was so not my forte.

“I like him a lot, and I don’t think he likes me at all!”

“I think he does like you,” I said, baffled. “Alexi said-”

“You and Alexi are the long term show around here.” Kaia cut me off. “I’m just something to distract Paul while the two of you are off falling hopelessly in love.”

“If Paul wanted a distraction he would have stayed in Bucharest,” I reasoned.

“April, I was giving him a fucking hand job, all right? I had my hand on his prick when his goddamn cell phone rang and he told me to stop so he could answer it!” Kaia let out a shaky sob. “I’ve never had that happen, never! Either I’m losing my touch or he cares next to nothing about me.”

“You’re kidding!” I said, my mind whirling. What guy would stop a hand job to answer his cell phone? Was Paul human? I hadn’t thought Paul and Kaia had progressed so far. Did Alexi expect that of me? Just moments ago he had said that my running my hands under his shirt tested his control – was I being too chaste? I realized I had left my last spoken sentence hanging and dragged my thoughts back to Kaia.

“Alexi said Paul’s never stayed with anyone as long as he’s stayed with you,” I said. “He does one night stands, not actual relationships. Maybe he doesn’t know how to act. Why would he be here if he didn’t care for you?” I glanced up and saw Alexi and Paul advancing across the amphitheater towards us, Paul with a bouquet in his hands. “Look, he’s coming back right now to apologize.”

*~*

Paul must have said something to keep Kaia from following him, because I found him sitting on a low stone wall outside the amphitheater, talking on his cell phone. I approached him, annoyed that his behavior, whatever he had done, had interrupted what was promising to be a very pleasant time with April.

“All right, I’ll be in touch over the next few days,” Paul said, finishing his conversation while I drew near. He flipped the phone closed and turned to face me.

“What did you do to Kaia?” I didn’t want to waste words.

“What do you mean, what did I do to her?” he responded.

“She’s sitting back there trying to keep her composure, and she went from perfectly happy with you to crying in a matter of minutes.” I expected Paul to snap at me, but he let out a heavy sigh instead.

“That call was just really fucking bad timing,” he said.

“What the hell? What call could rank above making out with your girlfriend?” It didn’t take much to guess at what Paul had been doing, and he didn’t contradict me.

“Our publicist. I told him to call me if there was a problem back in Bucharest. Sandu is on our trail, and C Magazine paid for the exclusive.”

“Shit.” I sat down on the wall next to Paul. C Magazine was the most aggressive of all the gossip rags in Romania, and most of the time they didn’t care about getting the facts straight.

“Yeah, shit.” Paul massaged his forehead with his fingers. “I’m glad we’re disappearing into the mountains for a week. Maybe he’ll be thrown off our trail.”

“You need to explain that to Kaia,” I said, remembering why I had come out in the first place. “C Mag is bad, but she has no idea why you ran out on her.”

“She’ll be fine.” Paul moved to get up. “Run back in and get the girls, will you? We should move on.”

“No, she won’t just be fine,” I said, not quite believing he could be so dense. “She’s not one of your one night stands you’ll never see again. You can’t brush her off like that.” Paul hesitated.

“You really think so?”

“Look, right now I bet she would be happy never to see you again.” I was exaggerating, but the anger coming off of Kaia had been palpable, so I didn’t think I had stretched the truth too much.

“Oh.” Paul looked befuddled. “You’re good at this sort of thing – what do you think I should do?”

“I’m good at what? Apologizing?” What was that supposed to mean?

“No, you’re good at interacting with the birds when you’re not fucking them,” Paul clarified.

“You’re sleeping with Kaia?”

“Not yet, and not that it’s any of your business!” Paul said. This was, hands down, the most bizarre conversation and somewhat backward compliment I’d ever gotten from Paul.

“You want advice on what to say to her?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Go tell her you’re the biggest idiot who has ever walked the face of the planet. Complement her on something. Whatever happened right before the phone rang, tell her she’s amazing at it,” I said, enjoying my moment of knowing more than Paul. “Grovel, tell her she’s beautiful, tell her you’re unworthy, maybe buy some flowers from that stand over there to give to her when you apologize.”

“You can’t be serious.” Paul stared at me with an expression of amazement mixed with horror.

“Okay, maybe hold off on the groveling until you see how she reacts, but buying her flowers and saying you’re sorry and stupid is a good start.” Paul gave me a suspicious look.

“You’re not having me on?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

*

Paul’s apology, combined with an over-application of charm over the next twenty-four hours, mollified Kaia’s hurt feelings. By the time we reached Maliovitsa they were closer than ever. April and I found ourselves increasingly on our own as they slipped away from the trail during our hikes and away from our campsites after we had pitched the tents at the end of the day. I had no objections to this development, but I wasn’t so sure about April.

“I think they’re trying to break the record for kissing in the most places,” April commented. We stood at the edge of the shallow pool at the bottom of a waterfall and watched Paul and Kaia smooching on a flat rock out in the middle.

“He’s not being very circumspect,” I replied. “Some of the trails we’ve hiked were deserted, but there are people here.”

“You don’t still think we’ll be followed?” April asked. “We’re almost two weeks out of Bucharest.” I hadn’t mentioned Paul’s news to April, and I hesitated, trying to decide whether to tell her. She would be just as affected if Sandu caught us.

“We’re already being followed, according to our publicist,” I said. “Sandu hasn’t caught up, and Paul’s trying to make sure he doesn’t.”

“Oh.” April paused. “Is this the same guy you were worried about in Bucharest? Will Paul be able to keep him away?”

“Yeah, but Paul’s good at this stuff,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. “He managed our publicity back in the beginning, and the label didn’t give us a publicist until the start of this tour. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

“He must think he’s safe here, then,” April said.

“I suppose so,” I replied. “Plus, look what he’s getting.” I meant the comment casually, but I saw April grow tense in my peripheral vision.

“Is that what you want?” She stared down to where Paul was caressing Kaia’s skin under her spray-drenched shirt. I didn’t know what to say. Of course I wanted more – what straight guy wouldn’t, especially with a body like April’s? But I wanted her to want it too, and her current tone didn’t sound encouraging.

“I don’t want to do anything you’re not all right with,” I said. The words sounded inadequate after my initial silence. April refused to look at me, and bent to pick up a pebble.

“April? I’m not just saying that, okay?”

“It’s time we left.” She hurled the stone over the water to land squarely between Paul’s shoulder blades.

“What the-” he sputtered, sitting up.

“Come on, lovebirds!” April yelled, loud enough that the few other hikers spread around the base of the falls turned to see the cause of the fuss. “Let’s go!”

*~*

I said nothing to Paul and Kaia’s objections as they waded to shore, leaving Alexi to point out the presence of other people at the falls. Paul accepted the explanation, and when we headed down the trail I hung back, trying to sort out my thoughts. I had asked him and he hadn’t pushed for anything more, but he had been quiet for so long before he replied. Did he really mean it?

Alexi and Paul pulled ahead and Kaia fell back to walk beside me.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “You’re quiet.”

“Am I expected to talk all the time?” I knew I was being rude, but I didn’t particularly care. She’d started all this, with her botched hand job and public displays of affection.

“That’s not what I meant, April.” Kaia sounded reproachful. “You look like something’s bothering you.”

“I’m fine.” This wasn’t something I wanted to discuss.

“Are you sure? You can tell me, you know, if Alexi’s done something or-”

“I’m fine.”

“All right.” Kaia stepped out and caught up with Paul and Alexi, leaving me trailing along behind. I wanted some time to sort everything out, but with Alexi walking in front of me it was impossible to get any distance from my emotions. My mind moved in circles instead, coming back to the same unpalatable ideas over and over again. Alexi said he didn’t want anything I didn’t want. He’d been quiet for so long before he’d replied. He must not mean it; he must be saying what he thought I’d want to hear. There must have been conflicting desires that didn’t get out of his mouth. I did that all the time.

So, if he had conflicting thoughts, what were they? He must want us to get more serious. Or maybe he didn’t want me any more. That couldn’t be right. If he didn’t want to do anything with me, he would have found a way out of the trip by now. Right? Maybe he had decided I wasn’t what he wanted and was playing along until the end of the summer when he could move me along naturally. I felt a stab of fear at the thought. My perpetually single state seemed a bleak fate to return to. I suddenly thought I would do anything to maintain the status quo and keep the summer around forever.

He said he didn’t want anything I didn’t want. Either he wanted more, or he never wanted to see me again and was too polite to say so. I didn’t want to lose him. If he never wanted to see me again, what could I do to change his mind? I scoured the time we had spent together, trying to come up with reasons.

Alexi sometimes approached me carefully, almost like he thought I would break if he pushed too hard. Why? I didn’t think I’d given the impression of being fragile. There had been the day in Rusenski Lom, and maybe the stitches thing had freaked him out. A couple of nights I’d gone to bed early with a headache.

That had to be it. He wanted a robust girl, one who didn’t have to be handled with kid gloves and could jump forward in the heat of the moment and throw caution to the winds. He must think I wasn’t that girl, and I hadn’t disabused him of the notion. If I wanted to keep him, I had to become that girl. I had to change his mind.

I strode forward, covering the ground between us in seconds. The path was wide here, enough for us to walk four abreast. I pulled even with Alexi and realized, mortified, that I had no idea what to say. I couldn’t pull him off the trail and kiss him senseless in the bushes with Paul and Kaia waiting. Everyone had noticed my sudden appearance and they were watching me with quizzical expressions. My face burned.

“I didn’t realize I’d fallen so far behind,” I lied.

“No problem, we all need time alone now and then,” Alexi replied. “And with scenery this gorgeous, I can’t blame you at all for slowing down.” I barely heard him. Alone. He’d said everyone wanted to be alone. He’d been content on his own before I’d come barging into the picture. I took a deep breath. I’d come this far; I sure as hell wasn’t dropping back now. I’d take this one step at a time, one confident foot in front of the other. If he wanted more, I’d give it to him. If he didn’t, well, he would get it anyway.

*~*

Our conversation was sparse while we headed off the trail and back to the hotel. I didn’t think April had believed me, back at the waterfall, but I wasn’t sure how to say what I meant more clearly. I thought my actions spoke well for me – I’d followed Kaia’s advice and hadn’t pushed her for anything, and I had taken every opportunity to be with her. Surely she knew I wouldn’t force our relationship. I sighed. If she still didn’t believe me, than I would just have to keep saying and acting it until she finally did. She got to set the pace in this game. Not the most traditional thing, but in my mind tradition was a sword that could cut your friends as easily as your enemies. If April wasn’t comfortable with me leading, then I would stand back and let her direct.

Perhaps I’d been too forward that day at the amphitheater. In the instant before Kaia had interrupted, I’d thought April wanted to push forward as much as I did. Maybe I’d been mistaken. I’d have to tone it down and keep myself under control until April was ready to do more than steal kisses in corners. Hopefully that time would be soon.

Paul told me to shower first when we got back to the hotel, saying he needed to make a few calls. He was gone when I emerged from the bathroom. I pulled one of his magazines from the side table and was flipping the pages wondering if I should go find him or head over to the girls’ room, when there was a knock at the door. Kaia stood outside when I opened it.

“Hey, what’s up?” I said. “Paul’s not around, he stepped out to make a few calls.”

“That’s all right, I actually wanted to talk to you,” Kaia answered. “Can I come in?” She moved forward without waiting for me to answer.

“What’s going on?” I asked, thinking maybe she wanted some inside information on Paul.

“April’s upset about something, but she won’t tell me what,” Kaia said. “Did you say anything?”

“I…” Wait a minute. This wasn’t any of Kaia’s business.

“I might be able to pull her out of it, but I need to know what happened so I can break into her thought process,” Kaia continued, looking at me with an expression that indicated she thought I was responsible for this perceived problem. I felt a twinge of annoyance. This wasn’t my fault, and April didn’t deserve to be treated like a child by her own friends.

“Whatever I’ve said is between me and April,” I said, keeping my voice even.

“But you said something to upset her, and I warned you to be careful. What did you do?”

“Listen, April hasn’t told me anything about what you said to her at the amphitheater in Plovdiv,” I said, trying to be reasonable. “It’s not my business to ask what you were upset about. Likewise, April and I will work things out between us. I appreciate what you’ve told me about April, but I’d rather approach her on my own.” Kaia stood silent for a minute.

“How do you plan to fix this, then, if you won’t tell me what caused it?”

“Don’t be dramatic,” I said, frustrated. “You’re acting like a misunderstanding is the end of the world.”

“I don’t want it to blow up later on and be awkward for everyone,” Kaia replied. “We are traveling together, remember. Besides, if I can help with anything… April is my friend.”

“I plan to be calm, supportive and understanding, like you told me to,” I said. “I’m going to talk with her and be reasonable and all that.” Kaia looked at me, her face skeptical. “Give me some credit, Kaia, I’m not stupid and I don’t want to see her hurt any more than you do.” She sighed and glanced away.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to accuse you. I just get so frustrated when something is obviously wrong and I’m sure I could help, but she doesn’t even trust me enough to tell me what’s going on. She used to. I don’t know what happened.”

“I understand,” I said. “But I don’t think we can make April do anything. She has to come to terms with whatever is bothering her on her own.”

“That’s one theory, I suppose,” Kaia said, pushing off from where she was leaning against the wall and turning to the door. “All the same, intervention is a big business. There must be something to the theory of external catalyst for change.”

“That’s for suicide and addiction,” I pointed out. “April’s not a danger to herself.”

“True.” Kaia shrugged. “Time will tell which of us is right, I suppose.”

“Or if we’re both completely wrong,” I added.

“That could be an option too.” Kaia shook her head. “Anyway, I should get back before April wonders where I’ve disappeared to. See you at dinner.”

“See you.” I watched the door swing shut behind her. I felt like an accomplice somehow, even though I had stood up for April. I sighed, and moved over to my pack to pick up a book. Things were so much simpler in worlds made of words.

Mental Affairs

Chapter 7

We managed to leave the next morning without alerting anyone other than the hotel staff to our departure, and I breathed a sigh of relief once we had left Bucharest behind. Our drive south was uneventful. Kaia tried to read through Paul’s attempts at conversation, April spent her time looking out the window and listening to music, and I kept fiddling with the song I had started the day before. When we neared the border and ran into the typical traffic jam, April pulled off her headphones and tried her best to stretch in the cramped space.

“I wonder if there’s an accident up there,” she commented, pressing her head against the window to try to see ahead.

“No, just the border crossing,” I said.

“We’re at the border already?” April responded.

“Probably a few miles out.”

“Wow, that was fast,” April said. “Why the backup?”

“There’s only one bridge connecting Romania and Bulgaria,” I replied. “Traffic backs up.”

“Only one?” April asked. “I thought the border was, like, two hundred odd miles long.”

“No point in building bridges you don’t need,” I said. April looked at me, her expression perplexed. “There wasn’t as much traffic under communism, and Romania and Bulgaria didn’t have good relations until recently.”

“Why?” April asked.

“Didn’t you study this stuff in school?” I looked over at her, wondering at all the questions.

“Nope,” she replied. “I think my high school history course spent two weeks on the 20th century.”

“High school… is that separate from the university?” Paul asked.

“It’s the four years just before,” April said. Paul nodded.

“Still, two weeks,” I said. “I would think your class would have covered this region of Europe.”

“Only in the sense that you were behind the Iron Curtain and communism fell.”

We fell silent as the crawl of traffic brought us to the border guards, who demanded passports, fees and reasons for our travel.

“So why didn’t Romania and Bulgaria get along?” April asked when we pulled away from the checkpoint, moving quickly for the first time in an hour.

“I don’t really know; history was never my strong point,” I replied.

“It’s not history,” Paul pointed out. “I mean, we were alive for some of it.”

“That doesn’t mean I paid attention,” I said. “I think it had something to do with a falling out between Zhivkov and Ceausescu before they were overthrown.”

“It had a lot to do with unresolved cross-border complaints,” Paul said. “Pollution and differences over international policy. Zhivkov was closer to the Soviet Union than Ceausescu.”

“Zhivkov was the Bulgarian leader?” April asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “How do you remember this, Paul? You were what, ten when they executed Ceausescu?”

“I paid attention?” Paul said. “And just because I was young doesn’t mean I didn’t know something was happening. My family couldn’t get food during the overthrow; three days of hunger is memorable at any age.”

“Really?” I asked, surprised. “I thought your father owned a bunch of supermarkets.”

“He didn’t get into that until the sector was privatized,” Paul said. “Didn’t you notice something during the overthrow? You would have been what, seven? It should have made an impression.”

“My father had a government job, so we weren’t affected by the food shortages,” I shrugged. “There were a few days where my parents wouldn’t let me out to play, and they stayed up late talking.”

“That’s all you remember?” Paul sounded amazed and I found myself vaguely annoyed. I couldn’t help what I chose to remember from my childhood. Paul turned to Kaia, asking about her memories of the fall of communism in Ukraine.

I waited a moment before turning my attention back to the song in my lap. The lyrics were in Romanian, as were all our songs, which made it easier to work on with April in the car. A good thing, too, since she soon leaned over to see what I was doing.

“Just a new song,” I said, tilting the page toward her. Her fingers brushed against mine when she took it. She began humming, and it took me a moment to recognize my own melody. I stared at her, a question about where she had learned to sight read on the tip of my tongue. But she had read the melody perfectly and Paul was not feet from her. Only the noise of the road kept him from hearing the slight sound of her voice. What would he do if he knew she could sing like that? He would probably insist she record the song with us to use for a promotional tool, and I didn’t like that idea. Better to smile and nod when she handed the page back to me. There would be other songs, I thought.

We were heading for the Rusenski Chalet, where I had stayed with my parents years ago. I thought it nothing short of amazing that it was still operating and there had been rooms available when I called. James dropped us at the door, told us to have fun and drove off. It felt odd to walk into a rented room without the ridiculous amount of gear and stage clothes we had hauled around on tour. Paul and I dropped our packs and joined April and Kaia in their room.

“What do you guys want to do?” Kaia asked. “There’s still plenty of afternoon left.”

“We could walk up to the rock monastery,” I suggested. “It’s not far from here, and there’s some great views.”

“Rock monastery?” April asked.

“Built into the side of a cliff,” I answered. “I think it’s still in operation. It made an impression on me as an eight year old, which was pretty hard to do!”

“Sounds good to me,” Kaia said, and April nodded.

We stopped in at the office of the chalet to reconfirm my memory of the direction, and walked out into the sunlight. I took a deep breath. The air smelled of water and fresh growth and sun baked rock. We walked down a road that had once been paved, but had accumulated so many years and layers of dust that it looked more like a dirt track. I ran my fingers along the base of the cliff rising fifty meters on our right; on our left stretched a low plain, aggressively green and punctuated with groves of trees and additional rock formations.

“What kind of stone is this?” April asked, leaning down to pick up a flat pebble. “It looks like cream made solid.”

I consulted the brochure I had grabbed from the chalet. “I’m not sure how to translate,” I said. “It says here the mixture of rock is unique to this area because of the way the three rivers – the Beli, Malki and Cherni – come together.”

“Oh, look at the turtle!” Kaia exclaimed, pointing to a large bump sunning itself on a low rock at the bend in the road ahead.

“A tortoise, I think,” I said, but my words were lost to Kaia. She sprinted ahead as if she were afraid the animal would run away. Far from running, the tortoise instead looked at her with an expression of bewilderment as we approached, most likely wondering why this odd creature was cooing over it with a camera. I laughed.

“I didn’t realize you were such an animal lover,” Paul commented.

“Turtles are special,” Kaia replied, crouching on the ground to snap a shot of the animal from it’s own height.

“It’s not a turtle, Kaia,” April said, her expression amused. “Look, it has claws and scaly feet. It’s adapted to land.”

“Well, it has four feet and a shell, so that’s close enough,” Kaia retorted.

Kaia took her fill of tortoise pictures, and we continued walking until the monastery came into sight around a curve in the road. The afternoon sun made the entrance of the structure, located about forty feet up the cliff, appear as a dark hole. Further down, I could see shadows that I knew opened to additional rooms, bordered by rock paths with metal handrails. Vines and grasses climbed up the cliff face underneath the main entrance, which, when we got closer, resolved into an ornately carved pair of wooden doors set with stained glass windows.

“This rock looks like Swiss cheese,” Paul commented, poking his hand into one of the nooks that pockmarked the cliff rising on one side of the stairs.

Reaching the head of the stairs, we pushed donations into the box at the door and passed into the front room of the monastery. The temperature difference was immediate. I walked around the perimeter, examining the wooden carvings and paintings on the walls. The last time I was here, Tată had taken my hand and pulled me toward the religious icons to explain the story of St. Dimitar. I had been struck with a rare moment of silence as I stared in awe at the images; now I studied them with a new appreciation for their workmanship and the skill and time their creation must have taken. Even the existence of the monastery was amazing, when I thought about it. If I were a monk, my brothers and I would be bumping our heads on the too-short ceiling!

I moved slowly into the next room, laughing to myself as I ducked through the low door and left Paul and Kaia to examine the visitor’s book. April stood at the window – the sole source of light for the room. The opening had been hewn through at least a meter of stone and set with a wooden frame. April’s shadow stretched across the floor behind her and her face was pale in the light, which illuminated dust specks floating in the air. I paused for a minute, watching her, and then moved quietly across the room. She glanced back as I approached and smiled at me.

“This is beautiful,” she said, nodding out the window to where one of the rivers was just visible above the trees.

“I had forgotten how intricate it all is, both inside and out,” I replied.

“It’s…sad, somehow.”

“Sad?” Not the emotion I had expected.

“I mean… there’s a lot more to this, right?” she asked.

“To the monastery?” I replied. “Yeah, but most of it’s not open to visitors. I think there are just a few rooms and the trails to the top of the cliff. Why?”

“It must have taken centuries to build,” she said, putting the words together slowly. “All those people, year after year, taking tiny steps toward a goal they would never see accomplished.”

“That’s faith.” I spoke quietly, unsure of what April meant.

“You ever wonder what it would be like to have faith like that?” she asked, her eyes meeting mine for an instant before turning back out the window. “I don’t know, maybe you do. So many people have spent their energies here. Don’t you feel it?”

“I don’t have that kind faith,” I said, thinking I had realized her point. “But I know what you mean. Do you get the same feeling when you go into an empty church, or take a hike away from buildings and people?”

“Churches, yeah. You get it when you’re outside?” I nodded, another memory from my prior trip here jumping into my mind.

“I can show you tomorrow, if you’d like,” I said. “There’s a trail near the chalet we could take.”

“I’d like that,” April said, turning to face me. I reached for her hand, but the moment was broken when Kaia and Paul entered. Kaia walked around the perimeter, her fingers hovering above the gold inlays on the. Paul gave the walls a cursory glance and moved to join us at the window.

“Have you been in the next room?” he asked, indicating the door across from the one we had entered through. “It looks a lot brighter.”

“Not yet,” I said. “Somewhere there’s a room that exits to the trail up the cliff. Maybe that’s it.”

“There’s a trail to the top of the cliff?” Paul said. “Let’s go!” He moved to the door as Kaia joined us.

“I take it you like heights?” she asked, her voice amused.

“Yes,” he answered, moving out of the room. “I like looking down on everything.”

“That explains a lot,” I muttered. April glanced at me but said nothing.

We passed the statue in the corner of the next room and moved out into the sunshine, following Paul and Kaia up the path. Stones littered the trail, making for an uneven, if less than strenuous navigation. When we got close to the top, April pulled ahead and climbed up a flat spire of rock. She stood above me, arms outstretched and face turned toward the sun, so pretty as the breeze teased her hair away from her face. I stopped and stared. She looked like a painting come to life, the very image of Maxfield Parrish’s Ecstasy. When the breeze died and she dropped her arms I moved to join her on the outcropping.

“You- you’re beautiful.” The words sounded silly when I said them, cheesy and entirely inadequate for what I was trying to express. April turned to me, her expression open and a slight smile on her lips.

“No one’s ever told me that before.”

“Really?” I asked, moving closer. “I can’t understand why. You’re very beautiful.”

“Now you’re just flattering me,” April said, grinning.

“I am not!” I protested. April batted her hand across my chest, and then the breeze picked up again and she turned her face into it.

“I think I might understand what you mean,” she said, and I nodded before realizing she was referring to our conversation at the window in the rock room below. “The wind carries energy.” That wasn’t exactly what I had meant, but I chose to let it go and instead looked up the trail to where Paul had climbed to the highest point possible. He stood, his foot planted in the classic image of the explorer claiming ‘new’ land for his sovereign. Kaia stood on the path below him, taking pictures of the view.

“Shall we join them?” April had followed my gaze.

“I suppose.” I climbed off the rock and held out a hand for April to follow me down.

*~*

I felt my energy draining while we walked back from the monastery and cursed to myself as I subtracted the dates and realized my period was due. I’d forgotten it was coming. I guess that explains some of the past few days, I thought. I’d never been particularly emotional on my cycle, but it was a convenient explanation for my behavior.

There was nothing quite like the hell that was the first day of my period. My strength seemed to trickle out of me along with the menstrual blood, and basic activities such as walking or even standing became a challenge. I wouldn’t be hiking with Alexi tomorrow. Instead, I would have to come up with an excuse for why I wouldn’t be leaving the chalet. Perhaps I’d be lucky and have a light month, but I doubted it.

Sure enough, the next morning found me still in pajamas when Paul and Alexi knocked on our door. Kaia stepped into the hall, leaving me lying on my bed in the darkened room. I hated this. I hated being weak and having to accommodate my body. I hated the eyes that would flicker my way with unspoken questions and the cheery inquiries into my status that would come over the next few days. If only I could just ignore this- push through the pain and weakness and act as if nothing were wrong! But experience had taught me this was a bad idea. I had no desire to explain why my collapsing was not a reason for a hospital visit.

I didn’t move when the door opened. It would be Kaia, slipping back to get something she’d forgotten. But instead of the quick movement and optimistic ‘We’re off; feel better!’ I had expected, someone sat on the edge of my bed.

“Kaia says you aren’t feeling well.” The voice was Alexi’s. Why was he here? Kaia had seen me like this before, and she knew I wanted people to leave me alone, not pay more attention. She ought to have gotten everyone out the door and started with the day. Instead, I had to display my shortcomings in front of someone I barely knew and might be involved with. I rolled over and sat up.

“Not now, but I’ll be fine tomorrow. I’m sorry we can’t hike. You don’t need to miss your day.” I forced myself to look Alexi in the face. His eyes were soft in the dim light.

“We can hike tomorrow morning if you’re up to it,” he said. “I don’t want you to have to stay here alone today.”

“I’ll be fine.” I felt my cheeks starting to flush. “You don’t need to stay; I don’t want you to miss the caves.”

“I’ve seen them,” he replied. “Besides, I think Paul would like to spend some time with Kaia. He gave me quite a look when she said you weren’t coming.” I groaned silently. I didn’t have the energy to play the is-your-friend-interested-in-my-friend game.

“I’m not going to be very good company today,” I said, trying one last time to get him to leave. “Really, you’ll have more fun with Kaia and Paul.”

“It doesn’t matter to me what fun I could have, just whether I enjoy what I do,” Alexi said. “I’d love to have a day to relax. We never get them when we’re on tour.” He reached out and rubbed his hand over my shoulder. “Lay back down and I’ll go get us something to eat. You don’t need to be arguing with me when you can barely sit up.” I sighed and sank back against the pillow.

“Is it that obvious?” I asked.

“It wasn’t until I touched you – every muscle is tense.” He leaned over and brushed a kiss across my cheek. “Does it help to sleep?”

“Some,” I admitted, galled that he had seen through me so easily.

“Then sleep; I’ll be back in a bit with some food.”

*~*

When Kaia and Paul returned that evening, Kaia had the look of someone bursting to tell a secret. I waited, knowing I wouldn’t have to ask. It didn’t take her long to push Alexi and Paul from the room.

“He kissed me!”

“No kidding? Where?” I asked.

“In the back of the caves, there was a little nook off the path and no one there to see and we’d been talking the whole time and-”

“Wait, slow down! When?”

“Mid-afternoon. We hiked a trail near the caves first, and we’d been talking the entire day. We have a lot more in common than I would have thought. He’s studied a bit of psychology and he’d actually heard of the project I worked with. You know, the one trying to map the psyche of the young Ukrainian?” I made a non-committal noise, knowing from past experience it would be enough to keep her going. “So we’d been talking about that for a while, and we were walking through the caves and he stops and the rest of the tour group got in front of us and he kissed me.”

“Good kisser?”

“Yep.” Kaia’s expression was smug.

“Was he asking all the questions, or did you get some in yourself?”

“You know me, April, of course I did!”

“And?” I knew the question was a formality.

“He’s twenty six, born the third of six siblings in Bucharest and he studied law before venturing into music and founding Raze three years ago.”

“Did he tell you anything that’s not common knowledge, Kaia?” I smiled as I spoke, intending the question to be gently teasing, but Kaia responded irritably.

“Some, but he has to know he can trust me before he tells me anything too private,” she said. “We could mess things up for them if we went to the press.”

“I guess,” I said. Paul’s philosophy was, after all, not too dissimilar from how I ran my own life, but I would have preferred to know a bit more about our companions. “I take it he said something along those lines when your questions got a bit personal?”

“Kind of. It’s not too hard to get the idea,” Kaia said. “How was your day with Alexi?”

“It was fine,” I said. “We spent the day relaxing and reading and talking. You know how I am on my first day. I wasn’t the best company, but he didn’t seem to mind.” He really hadn’t, much to my surprise. I’d dozed through the morning, but after lunch we had commandeered two of the hammocks slung between the trees behind the guesthouse and read until the light failed us, occasionally offering tidbits from our respective books.

In each snippet of conversation I had been struck by the depth of his observations and how much he thought about the world he encountered. I had never stopped to consider the shape of words in the mouth, the scattering of veins across a leaf or the motivations of the evil character in a novel – all topics we had touched upon over the course of the afternoon. The idea of putting thought into something so insignificant was intriguing to me. I didn’t know quite what to think of it, or how to explain the concept to Kaia, so when she didn’t inquire further I left my description to dangle and went with her down to dinner.

*

Alexi knocked on our door early the next morning, when the world outside was still gray and the bird songs were sleepy.

“Are you still up for hiking?” he asked. “I’ve raided the kitchens and if we hurry, we can have breakfast at the top of the cliff and watch the sun come up.” I blinked at him, confused, before I remembered agreeing to this plan the night before. I hadn’t realized sunrise would come quite so soon. The cool air was waking me up, though, so I nodded my assent and mumbled, “Give me a sec,” before closing the door to stumble into some clothes and make an attempt at looking presentable.

“You look like you’re feeling much better this morning,” he said, smiling when I approached him a few minutes later on the front porch of the guesthouse. “I wasn’t sure whether to wake you up or not, but this is our last chance to go and I wanted to take you on this hike. The view is the best in the park.”

“I’m glad you did.” I smiled back and took the water bottle he handed to me. “I’m always restless after a day of forced inactivity.”

“I wouldn’t call it forced so much as needed,” he replied. “Girls are lucky in some ways, I think; your bodies force you to take a break at least once a month. Jan and I always have to remind Paul to schedule breaks into our tours. He’d be performing or doing promo every day if we were willing.” Alexi paused and surveyed the landscape for a few seconds. “I think the trail head is over behind these trees. It’s only a couple of kilometers to the top.” I hardly hard the last two sentences; the first had taken me by surprise. Lucky? A monthly day of weakness was lucky? He wouldn’t be saying so if he were the one bleeding! My thoughts must have shown on my face, because Alexi glanced over and laughed.

“I got the same reaction from my aunt, too. I must be missing something.”

“Only the cramps, backache, exhaustion, loss of appetite and bloating,” I said.

“Hmm.” I could see Alexi’s brow furrow in the pre-dawn light. “I can see how that would be a turn off. But the day got better, didn’t it, once you’d rested and eaten? Didn’t you enjoy the afternoon down time?”

“Well, I guess,” I said. The afternoon had been decent, true, but I could have done without having to explain my malady and sleeping the morning away. And I hadn’t had a perfect and pain free afternoon; the discomfort had simply improved to tolerable. “I would have preferred to feel good on my day off,” I said.

“I’ll grant you that one,” Alexi said. He climbed in silence for a while, and we spoke only to warn each other of rocks or holes in the trail. As I moved, I turned this new idea over in my mind. Down time was a bit of a foreign concept to me. I tended to fill my days from start to finish, and my occasional attempts to create a day without the ever present class work of my undergraduate career resulted in a day filled with the chores I had neglected in favor of studying. When we paused at a break in the trees I mentioned as much to Alexi.

“Why did you have so much class work?” he asked.

“Science major. Lots of lab time, lots of homework.” I looked out to where the horizon had begun to turn pink.

“Do they not trust you to learn the material on your own?” Alexi said.

“You learn best by using the material regularly,” I said, somewhat confused at the question. “Besides, if you don’t do the homework, you lose the easiest part of the grade!”

“Really? I never had a class like that.”

“You didn’t?” I paused to think this over. “What did you do instead of homework?”

“We were expected to learn either in lecture or on our own, and the score on the final was your score in the class.”

“The study abroad office told us about that. I figured it was something to scare underperforming students into staying at home,” I replied. We began climbing again. “That’s really how it is, then? Weird.”

Alexi shrugged. “It is what it is. If you don’t know any other way, it doesn’t seem bad at all. To me, an enforced schedule of grades sounds very strange. I’d rather set my own pace.” We climbed again in silence, and I contemplated yet another new idea. If you don’t know any other way, you get used to it. I wasn’t sure why I found the thought so uncomfortable. Before long, I had decided not to think about it anymore. I focused instead on the trail, on Alexi’s back in front of me, the shape of the rocks in the twilight before dawn and the way the impending arrival of the sun sent streaks of orange to illuminate the few clouds on the horizon.

We reached the top of the cliff just as the sun ambled over what appeared to be the edge of the world. The air pulsed with the songs of birds calling out their greetings to the day. The plain stretched out below us, the soft green of the grass dotted with darker green humps of trees grouped near the rivers and streams. Every shade of green was washed over with gentle yellow sunlight. I stood for a moment, soaking it all in.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Alexi said, quietly. I nodded, not wanting to take my eyes off the landscape in front of me. We stood there, side by side, watching. I felt as if we were the only people on earth to be treated to a show this magnificent. For now, in this moment, Alexi and I stood alone, watching while the day began.

*~*

Both Paul and Kaia were still asleep when we returned to the guesthouse. I thought we had shared something special, April and I, and it put me in a good mood as I shook Paul awake. We had to check out before ten in order to catch the bus out of the park and make our connection to Gabrovo.

Paul and I had decided to let Kaia and April venture into Gabrovo without us, and so we found ourselves in the hotel on our own the next day, trying to get the basics of my latest song into the computer. The early versions always sounded awful, but they served to capture the idea until we could polish it further, and the collaboration tended to introduce new twists.

“What if you set this in 3:4?” Paul asked, looking over my final notes.

“Why?”

“It would be something new and might catch people’s attention. We could record it right when we get back and use it as a promo single,” Paul said, scribbling notes on the page. “The lyrics lend themselves well to the adaptation with a bit of tweaking.” I mused over the thought while Paul tapped out a beat on the edge of the table.

“If we make it 3:4, it could be interesting to use some of the elements of classic waltz – maybe an electric string quartet? Not our normal sound, but…” I shrugged.

“Oh, I like that!” Paul said. “If we laid it to a simple drum track…” He bent over the computer, sorting through the pre-recorded tracks until he found something he liked, then picking out a few notes on the mini keyboard. The piece began to take form as we layered the tracks on top of each other.

“This last verse, we should have a big crescendo here,” Paul said, adding a tag to the measure. “Maybe we could add in some thunder or something, to go with your storm theme.”

“In the middle of the song? Wouldn’t that distract from the beat?”

“Probably, but adding it to the beginning or end has been done so many times.”

“I think there’s a reason for that,” I said.

“I’ll make a note and we can play with it once we get into the studio,” Paul replied. We worked for a while, slowly putting the pieces together.

“So, this song is about April?” Paul asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“It’s pretty. One of the better things you’ve written.” Paul stared at the screen of the laptop. “April’s not quite what I expected, though.”

“In what way?” I asked, not sure where this was going.

“I didn’t think she would be quite so skittish.”

“I like her as she is,” I replied, on my guard.

“As long as you like her, man. But I have to say, she wouldn’t be my first choice.”

“Good thing it’s not your choice, then,” I replied, annoyed at his judgment of my girl. She couldn’t help it, at least, not according to Kaia.

“Hey, don’t get all defensive – I was just making an observation!” Paul raised his hands in mock surrender. “If you’re that touchy about her I’ll wait to bring her up again until after you’ve gotten a few good shags in.” He let out a bark of laughter. “Listen, though, we need to talk about how to deal with her when we get back to Bucharest.”

“What do you mean, how to deal with her?”

“If you’re going to stay together, how we manage the publicity, that sort of shit.”

“God, Paul, we’re not even a week into the trip.” Kaia’s warning rang in my mind.

“So?”

“So we can figure it out later. Besides, she’s going back to the US.”

“I’m assuming you’ll want to go visit her.”

“You’re the publicity guru. What do you want me to do?”

“At least give it some thought. She should come back to Bucharest for a week or two. I think I’d like you to go on a talk show or two. This is a huge change to our image.”

“Whatever. We’ll figure it out when we get there.”

“But you do see the need, right?”

I sighed. I did, but I just didn’t want to think about it. “Yes, but it’s the beginning of the summer, all right? Let us be.”

Paul looked for a second like he might have continued on, then he folded. “I’ll deal with it, then. Let’s go find some food.”

We managed to leave the next morning without alerting anyone other than the hotel staff to our departure, and I breathed a sigh of relief once we had left Bucharest behind. Our drive south was uneventful. Kaia tried to read through Paul’s attempts at conversation, April spent her time looking out the window and listening to music, and I kept fiddling with the song I had started the day before. When we neared the border and ran into the typical traffic jam, April pulled off her headphones and tried her best to stretch in the cramped space.

“I wonder if there’s an accident up there,” she commented, pressing her head against the window to try to see ahead.

“No, just the border crossing,” I said.

“We’re at the border already?” April responded.

“Probably a few miles out.”

“Wow, that was fast,” April said. “Why the backup?”

“There’s only one bridge connecting Romania and Bulgaria,” I replied. “Traffic backs up.”

“Only one?” April asked. “I thought the border was, like, two hundred odd miles long.”

“No point in building bridges you don’t need,” I said. April looked at me, her expression perplexed. “There wasn’t as much traffic under communism, and Romania and Bulgaria didn’t have good relations until recently.”

“Why?” April asked.

“Didn’t you study this stuff in school?” I looked over at her, wondering at all the questions.

“Nope,” she replied. “I think my high school history course spent two weeks on the 20th century.”

“High school… is that separate from the university?” Paul asked.

“It’s the four years just before,” April said. Paul nodded.

“Still, two weeks,” I said. “I would think your class would have covered this region of Europe.”

“Only in the sense that you were behind the Iron Curtain and communism fell.”

We fell silent as the crawl of traffic brought us to the border guards, who demanded passports, fees and reasons for our travel.

“So why didn’t Romania and Bulgaria get along?” April asked when we pulled away from the checkpoint, moving quickly for the first time in an hour.

“I don’t really know; history was never my strong point,” I replied.

“It’s not history,” Paul pointed out. “I mean, we were alive for some of it.”

“That doesn’t mean I paid attention,” I said. “I think it had something to do with a falling out between Zhivkov and Ceausescu before they were overthrown.”

“It had a lot to do with unresolved cross-border complaints,” Paul said. “Pollution and differences over international policy. Zhivkov was closer to the Soviet Union than Ceausescu.”

“Zhivkov was the Bulgarian leader?” April asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “How do you remember this, Paul? You were what, ten when they executed Ceausescu?”

“I paid attention?” Paul said. “And just because I was young doesn’t mean I didn’t know something was happening. My family couldn’t get food during the overthrow; three days of hunger is memorable at any age.”

“Really?” I asked, surprised. “I thought your father owned a bunch of supermarkets.”

“He didn’t get into that until the sector was privatized,” Paul said. “Didn’t you notice something during the overthrow? You would have been what, seven? It should have made an impression.”

“My father had a government job, so we weren’t affected by the food shortages,” I shrugged. “There were a few days where my parents wouldn’t let me out to play, and they stayed up late talking.”

“That’s all you remember?” Paul sounded amazed and I found myself vaguely annoyed. I couldn’t help what I chose to remember from my childhood. Paul turned to Kaia, asking about her memories of the fall of communism in Ukraine.

I waited a moment before turning my attention back to the song in my lap. The lyrics were in Romanian, as were all our songs, which made it easier to work on with April in the car. A good thing, too, since she soon leaned over to see what I was doing.

“Just a new song,” I said, tilting the page toward her. Her fingers brushed against mine when she took it. She began humming, and it took me a moment to recognize my own melody. I stared at her, a question about where she had learned to sight read on the tip of my tongue. But she had read the melody perfectly and Paul was not feet from her. Only the noise of the road kept him from hearing the slight sound of her voice. What would he do if he knew she could sing like that? He would probably insist she record the song with us to use for a promotional tool, and I didn’t like that idea. Better to smile and nod when she handed the page back to me. There would be other songs, I thought.

We were heading for the Rusenski Chalet, where I had stayed with my parents years ago. I thought it nothing short of amazing that it was still operating and there had been rooms available when I called. James dropped us at the door, told us to have fun and drove off. It felt odd to walk into a rented room without the ridiculous amount of gear and stage clothes we had hauled around on tour. Paul and I dropped our packs and joined April and Kaia in their room.

“What do you guys want to do?” Kaia asked. “There’s still plenty of afternoon left.”

“We could walk up to the rock monastery,” I suggested. “It’s not far from here, and there’s some great views.”

“Rock monastery?” April asked.

“Built into the side of a cliff,” I answered. “I think it’s still in operation. It made an impression on me as an eight year old, which was pretty hard to do!”

“Sounds good to me,” Kaia said, and April nodded.

We stopped in at the office of the chalet to reconfirm my memory of the direction, and walked out into the sunlight. I took a deep breath. The air smelled of water and fresh growth and sun baked rock. We walked down a road that had once been paved, but had accumulated so many years and layers of dust that it looked more like a dirt track. I ran my fingers along the base of the cliff rising fifty meters on our right; on our left stretched a low plain, aggressively green and punctuated with groves of trees and additional rock formations.

“What kind of stone is this?” April asked, leaning down to pick up a flat pebble. “It looks like cream made solid.”

I consulted the brochure I had grabbed from the chalet. “I’m not sure how to translate,” I said. “It says here the mixture of rock is unique to this area because of the way the three rivers – the Beli, Malki and Cherni – come together.”

“Oh, look at the turtle!” Kaia exclaimed, pointing to a large bump sunning itself on a low rock at the bend in the road ahead.

“A tortoise, I think,” I said, but my words were lost to Kaia. She sprinted ahead as if she were afraid the animal would run away. Far from running, the tortoise instead looked at her with an expression of bewilderment as we approached, most likely wondering why this odd creature was cooing over it with a camera. I laughed.

“I didn’t realize you were such an animal lover,” Paul commented.

“Turtles are special,” Kaia replied, crouching on the ground to snap a shot of the animal from it’s own height.

“It’s not a turtle, Kaia,” April said, her expression amused. “Look, it has claws and scaly feet. It’s adapted to land.”

“Well, it has four feet and a shell, so that’s close enough,” Kaia retorted.

Kaia took her fill of tortoise pictures, and we continued walking until the monastery came into sight around a curve in the road. The afternoon sun made the entrance of the structure, located about forty feet up the cliff, appear as a dark hole. Further down, I could see shadows that I knew opened to additional rooms, bordered by rock paths with metal handrails. Vines and grasses climbed up the cliff face underneath the main entrance, which, when we got closer, resolved into an ornately carved pair of wooden doors set with stained glass windows.

“This rock looks like Swiss cheese,” Paul commented, poking his hand into one of the nooks that pockmarked the cliff rising on one side of the stairs.

Reaching the head of the stairs, we pushed donations into the box at the door and passed into the front room of the monastery. The temperature difference was immediate. I walked around the perimeter, examining the wooden carvings and paintings on the walls. The last time I was here, Tată had taken my hand and pulled me toward the religious icons to explain the story of St. Dimitar. I had been struck with a rare moment of silence as I stared in awe at the images; now I studied them with a new appreciation for their workmanship and the skill and time their creation must have taken. Even the existence of the monastery was amazing, when I thought about it. If I were a monk, my brothers and I would be bumping our heads on the too-short ceiling!

I moved slowly into the next room, laughing to myself as I ducked through the low door and left Paul and Kaia to examine the visitor’s book. April stood at the window – the sole source of light for the room. The opening had been hewn through at least a meter of stone and set with a wooden frame. April’s shadow stretched across the floor behind her and her face was pale in the light, which illuminated dust specks floating in the air. I paused for a minute, watching her, and then moved quietly across the room. She glanced back as I approached and smiled at me.

“This is beautiful,” she said, nodding out the window to where one of the rivers was just visible above the trees.

“I had forgotten how intricate it all is, both inside and out,” I replied.

“It’s…sad, somehow.”

“Sad?” Not the emotion I had expected.

“I mean… there’s a lot more to this, right?” she asked.

“To the monastery?” I replied. “Yeah, but most of it’s not open to visitors. I think there are just a few rooms and the trails to the top of the cliff. Why?”

“It must have taken centuries to build,” she said, putting the words together slowly. “All those people, year after year, taking tiny steps toward a goal they would never see accomplished.”

“That’s faith.” I spoke quietly, unsure of what April meant.

“You ever wonder what it would be like to have faith like that?” she asked, her eyes meeting mine for an instant before turning back out the window. “I don’t know, maybe you do. So many people have spent their energies here. Don’t you feel it?”

“I don’t have that kind faith,” I said, thinking I had realized her point. “But I know what you mean. Do you get the same feeling when you go into an empty church, or take a hike away from buildings and people?”

“Churches, yeah. You get it when you’re outside?” I nodded, another memory from my prior trip here jumping into my mind.

“I can show you tomorrow, if you’d like,” I said. “There’s a trail near the chalet we could take.”

“I’d like that,” April said, turning to face me. I reached for her hand, but the moment was broken when Kaia and Paul entered. Kaia walked around the perimeter, her fingers hovering above the gold inlays on the. Paul gave the walls a cursory glance and moved to join us at the window.

“Have you been in the next room?” he asked, indicating the door across from the one we had entered through. “It looks a lot brighter.”

“Not yet,” I said. “Somewhere there’s a room that exits to the trail up the cliff. Maybe that’s it.”

“There’s a trail to the top of the cliff?” Paul said. “Let’s go!” He moved to the door as Kaia joined us.

“I take it you like heights?” she asked, her voice amused.

“Yes,” he answered, moving out of the room. “I like looking down on everything.”

“That explains a lot,” I muttered. April glanced at me but said nothing.

We passed the statue in the corner of the next room and moved out into the sunshine, following Paul and Kaia up the path. Stones littered the trail, making for an uneven, if less than strenuous navigation. When we got close to the top, April pulled ahead and climbed up a flat spire of rock. She stood above me, arms outstretched and face turned toward the sun, so pretty as the breeze teased her hair away from her face. I stopped and stared. She looked like a painting come to life, the very image of Maxfield Parrish’s Ecstasy. When the breeze died and she dropped her arms I moved to join her on the outcropping.

“You- you’re beautiful.” The words sounded silly when I said them, cheesy and entirely inadequate for what I was trying to express. April turned to me, her expression open and a slight smile on her lips.

“No one’s ever told me that before.”

“Really?” I asked, moving closer. “I can’t understand why. You’re very beautiful.”

“Now you’re just flattering me,” April said, grinning.

“I am not!” I protested. April batted her hand across my chest, and then the breeze picked up again and she turned her face into it.

“I think I might understand what you mean,” she said, and I nodded before realizing she was referring to our conversation at the window in the rock room below. “The wind carries energy.” That wasn’t exactly what I had meant, but I chose to let it go and instead looked up the trail to where Paul had climbed to the highest point possible. He stood, his foot planted in the classic image of the explorer claiming ‘new’ land for his sovereign. Kaia stood on the path below him, taking pictures of the view.

“Shall we join them?” April had followed my gaze.

“I suppose.” I climbed off the rock and held out a hand for April to follow me down.

*~*

I felt my energy draining while we walked back from the monastery and cursed to myself as I subtracted the dates and realized my period was due. I’d forgotten it was coming. I guess that explains some of the past few days, I thought. I’d never been particularly emotional on my cycle, but it was a convenient explanation for my behavior.

There was nothing quite like the hell that was the first day of my period. My strength seemed to trickle out of me along with the menstrual blood, and basic activities such as walking or even standing became a challenge. I wouldn’t be hiking with Alexi tomorrow. Instead, I would have to come up with an excuse for why I wouldn’t be leaving the chalet. Perhaps I’d be lucky and have a light month, but I doubted it.

Sure enough, the next morning found me still in pajamas when Paul and Alexi knocked on our door. Kaia stepped into the hall, leaving me lying on my bed in the darkened room. I hated this. I hated being weak and having to accommodate my body. I hated the eyes that would flicker my way with unspoken questions and the cheery inquiries into my status that would come over the next few days. If only I could just ignore this- push through the pain and weakness and act as if nothing were wrong! But experience had taught me this was a bad idea. I had no desire to explain why my collapsing was not a reason for a hospital visit.

I didn’t move when the door opened. It would be Kaia, slipping back to get something she’d forgotten. But instead of the quick movement and optimistic ‘We’re off; feel better!’ I had expected, someone sat on the edge of my bed.

“Kaia says you aren’t feeling well.” The voice was Alexi’s. Why was he here? Kaia had seen me like this before, and she knew I wanted people to leave me alone, not pay more attention. She ought to have gotten everyone out the door and started with the day. Instead, I had to display my shortcomings in front of someone I barely knew and might be involved with. I rolled over and sat up.

“Not now, but I’ll be fine tomorrow. I’m sorry we can’t hike. You don’t need to miss your day.” I forced myself to look Alexi in the face. His eyes were soft in the dim light.

“We can hike tomorrow morning if you’re up to it,” he said. “I don’t want you to have to stay here alone today.”

“I’ll be fine.” I felt my cheeks starting to flush. “You don’t need to stay; I don’t want you to miss the caves.”

“I’ve seen them,” he replied. “Besides, I think Paul would like to spend some time with Kaia. He gave me quite a look when she said you weren’t coming.” I groaned silently. I didn’t have the energy to play the is-your-friend-interested-in-my-friend game.

“I’m not going to be very good company today,” I said, trying one last time to get him to leave. “Really, you’ll have more fun with Kaia and Paul.”

“It doesn’t matter to me what fun I could have, just whether I enjoy what I do,” Alexi said. “I’d love to have a day to relax. We never get them when we’re on tour.” He reached out and rubbed his hand over my shoulder. “Lay back down and I’ll go get us something to eat. You don’t need to be arguing with me when you can barely sit up.” I sighed and sank back against the pillow.

“Is it that obvious?” I asked.

“It wasn’t until I touched you – every muscle is tense.” He leaned over and brushed a kiss across my cheek. “Does it help to sleep?”

“Some,” I admitted, galled that he had seen through me so easily.

“Then sleep; I’ll be back in a bit with some food.”

*~*

When Kaia and Paul returned that evening, Kaia had the look of someone bursting to tell a secret. I waited, knowing I wouldn’t have to ask. It didn’t take her long to push Alexi and Paul from the room.

“He kissed me!”

“No kidding? Where?” I asked.

“In the back of the caves, there was a little nook off the path and no one there to see and we’d been talking the whole time and-”

“Wait, slow down! When?”

“Mid-afternoon. We hiked a trail near the caves first, and we’d been talking the entire day. We have a lot more in common than I would have thought. He’s studied a bit of psychology and he’d actually heard of the project I worked with. You know, the one trying to map the psyche of the young Ukrainian?” I made a non-committal noise, knowing from past experience it would be enough to keep her going. “So we’d been talking about that for a while, and we were walking through the caves and he stops and the rest of the tour group got in front of us and he kissed me.”

“Good kisser?”

“Yep.” Kaia’s expression was smug.

“Was he asking all the questions, or did you get some in yourself?”

“You know me, April, of course I did!”

“And?” I knew the question was a formality.

“He’s twenty six, born the third of six siblings in Bucharest and he studied law before venturing into music and founding Raze three years ago.”

“Did he tell you anything that’s not common knowledge, Kaia?” I smiled as I spoke, intending the question to be gently teasing, but Kaia responded irritably.

“Some, but he has to know he can trust me before he tells me anything too private,” she said. “We could mess things up for them if we went to the press.”

“I guess,” I said. Paul’s philosophy was, after all, not too dissimilar from how I ran my own life, but I would have preferred to know a bit more about our companions. “I take it he said something along those lines when your questions got a bit personal?”

“Kind of. It’s not too hard to get the idea,” Kaia said. “How was your day with Alexi?”

“It was fine,” I said. “We spent the day relaxing and reading and talking. You know how I am on my first day. I wasn’t the best company, but he didn’t seem to mind.” He really hadn’t, much to my surprise. I’d dozed through the morning, but after lunch we had commandeered two of the hammocks slung between the trees behind the guesthouse and read until the light failed us, occasionally offering tidbits from our respective books.

In each snippet of conversation I had been struck by the depth of his observations and how much he thought about the world he encountered. I had never stopped to consider the shape of words in the mouth, the scattering of veins across a leaf or the motivations of the evil character in a novel – all topics we had touched upon over the course of the afternoon. The idea of putting thought into something so insignificant was intriguing to me. I didn’t know quite what to think of it, or how to explain the concept to Kaia, so when she didn’t inquire further I left my description to dangle and went with her down to dinner.

*

Alexi knocked on our door early the next morning, when the world outside was still gray and the bird songs were sleepy.

“Are you still up for hiking?” he asked. “I’ve raided the kitchens and if we hurry, we can have breakfast at the top of the cliff and watch the sun come up.” I blinked at him, confused, before I remembered agreeing to this plan the night before. I hadn’t realized sunrise would come quite so soon. The cool air was waking me up, though, so I nodded my assent and mumbled, “Give me a sec,” before closing the door to stumble into some clothes and make an attempt at looking presentable.

“You look like you’re feeling much better this morning,” he said, smiling when I approached him a few minutes later on the front porch of the guesthouse. “I wasn’t sure whether to wake you up or not, but this is our last chance to go and I wanted to take you on this hike. The view is the best in the park.”

“I’m glad you did.” I smiled back and took the water bottle he handed to me. “I’m always restless after a day of forced inactivity.”

“I wouldn’t call it forced so much as needed,” he replied. “Girls are lucky in some ways, I think; your bodies force you to take a break at least once a month. Jan and I always have to remind Paul to schedule breaks into our tours. He’d be performing or doing promo every day if we were willing.” Alexi paused and surveyed the landscape for a few seconds. “I think the trail head is over behind these trees. It’s only a couple of kilometers to the top.” I hardly hard the last two sentences; the first had taken me by surprise. Lucky? A monthly day of weakness was lucky? He wouldn’t be saying so if he were the one bleeding! My thoughts must have shown on my face, because Alexi glanced over and laughed.

“I got the same reaction from my aunt, too. I must be missing something.”

“Only the cramps, backache, exhaustion, loss of appetite and bloating,” I said.

“Hmm.” I could see Alexi’s brow furrow in the pre-dawn light. “I can see how that would be a turn off. But the day got better, didn’t it, once you’d rested and eaten? Didn’t you enjoy the afternoon down time?”

“Well, I guess,” I said. The afternoon had been decent, true, but I could have done without having to explain my malady and sleeping the morning away. And I hadn’t had a perfect and pain free afternoon; the discomfort had simply improved to tolerable. “I would have preferred to feel good on my day off,” I said.

“I’ll grant you that one,” Alexi said. He climbed in silence for a while, and we spoke only to warn each other of rocks or holes in the trail. As I moved, I turned this new idea over in my mind. Down time was a bit of a foreign concept to me. I tended to fill my days from start to finish, and my occasional attempts to create a day without the ever present class work of my undergraduate career resulted in a day filled with the chores I had neglected in favor of studying. When we paused at a break in the trees I mentioned as much to Alexi.

“Why did you have so much class work?” he asked.

“Science major. Lots of lab time, lots of homework.” I looked out to where the horizon had begun to turn pink.

“Do they not trust you to learn the material on your own?” Alexi said.

“You learn best by using the material regularly,” I said, somewhat confused at the question. “Besides, if you don’t do the homework, you lose the easiest part of the grade!”

“Really? I never had a class like that.”

“You didn’t?” I paused to think this over. “What did you do instead of homework?”

“We were expected to learn either in lecture or on our own, and the score on the final was your score in the class.”

“The study abroad office told us about that. I figured it was something to scare underperforming students into staying at home,” I replied. We began climbing again. “That’s really how it is, then? Weird.”

Alexi shrugged. “It is what it is. If you don’t know any other way, it doesn’t seem bad at all. To me, an enforced schedule of grades sounds very strange. I’d rather set my own pace.” We climbed again in silence, and I contemplated yet another new idea. If you don’t know any other way, you get used to it. I wasn’t sure why I found the thought so uncomfortable. Before long, I had decided not to think about it anymore. I focused instead on the trail, on Alexi’s back in front of me, the shape of the rocks in the twilight before dawn and the way the impending arrival of the sun sent streaks of orange to illuminate the few clouds on the horizon.

We reached the top of the cliff just as the sun ambled over what appeared to be the edge of the world. The air pulsed with the songs of birds calling out their greetings to the day. The plain stretched out below us, the soft green of the grass dotted with darker green humps of trees grouped near the rivers and streams. Every shade of green was washed over with gentle yellow sunlight. I stood for a moment, soaking it all in.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Alexi said, quietly. I nodded, not wanting to take my eyes off the landscape in front of me. We stood there, side by side, watching. I felt as if we were the only people on earth to be treated to a show this magnificent. For now, in this moment, Alexi and I stood alone, watching while the day began.

*~*

Both Paul and Kaia were still asleep when we returned to the guesthouse. I thought we had shared something special, April and I, and it put me in a good mood as I shook Paul awake. We had to check out before ten in order to catch the bus out of the park and make our connection to Gabrovo.

Paul and I had decided to let Kaia and April venture into Gabrovo without us, and so we found ourselves in the hotel on our own the next day, trying to get the basics of my latest song into the computer. The early versions always sounded awful, but they served to capture the idea until we could polish it further, and the collaboration tended to introduce new twists.

“What if you set this in 3:4?” Paul asked, looking over my final notes.

“Why?”

“It would be something new and might catch people’s attention. We could record it right when we get back and use it as a promo single,” Paul said, scribbling notes on the page. “The lyrics lend themselves well to the adaptation with a bit of tweaking.” I mused over the thought while Paul tapped out a beat on the edge of the table.

“If we make it 3:4, it could be interesting to use some of the elements of classic waltz – maybe an electric string quartet? Not our normal sound, but…” I shrugged.

“Oh, I like that!” Paul said. “If we laid it to a simple drum track…” He bent over the computer, sorting through the pre-recorded tracks until he found something he liked, then picking out a few notes on the mini keyboard. The piece began to take form as we layered the tracks on top of each other.

“This last verse, we should have a big crescendo here,” Paul said, adding a tag to the measure. “Maybe we could add in some thunder or something, to go with your storm theme.”

“In the middle of the song? Wouldn’t that distract from the beat?”

“Probably, but adding it to the beginning or end has been done so many times.”

“I think there’s a reason for that,” I said.

“I’ll make a note and we can play with it once we get into the studio,” Paul replied. We worked for a while, slowly putting the pieces together.

“So, this song is about April?” Paul asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“It’s pretty. One of the better things you’ve written.” Paul stared at the screen of the laptop. “April’s not quite what I expected, though.”

“In what way?” I asked, not sure where this was going.

“I didn’t think she would be quite so skittish.”

“I like her as she is,” I replied, on my guard.

“As long as you like her, man. But I have to say, she wouldn’t be my first choice.”

“Good thing it’s not your choice, then,” I replied, annoyed at his judgment of my girl. She couldn’t help it, at least, not according to Kaia.

“Hey, don’t get all defensive – I was just making an observation!” Paul raised his hands in mock surrender. “If you’re that touchy about her I’ll wait to bring her up again until after you’ve gotten a few good shags in.” He let out a bark of laughter. “Listen, though, we need to talk about how to deal with her when we get back to Bucharest.”

“What do you mean, how to deal with her?”

“If you’re going to stay together, how we manage the publicity, that sort of shit.”

“God, Paul, we’re not even a week into the trip.” Kaia’s warning rang in my mind.

“So?”

“So we can figure it out later. Besides, she’s going back to the US.”

“I’m assuming you’ll want to go visit her.”

“You’re the publicity guru. What do you want me to do?”

“At least give it some thought. She should come back to Bucharest for a week or two. I think I’d like you to go on a talk show or two. This is a huge change to our image.”

“Whatever. We’ll figure it out when we get there.”

“But you do see the need, right?”

I sighed. I did, but I just didn’t want to think about it. “Yes, but it’s the beginning of the summer, all right? Let us be.”

Paul looked for a second like he might have continued on, then he folded. “I’ll deal with it, then. Let’s go find some food.”

Mental Affairs

Chapter 6

“Where were you last night, Paul?” Kaia asked, her voice sugared. I fought the urge to roll my eyes as we walked through the hotel lobby and into the attached restaurant for breakfast.

“I had some unexpected business to attend to,” Paul replied. “Nothing for you to worry about.”

“Does this unexpected business have anything to do with Alexi trying to tell us not to go out today?” I asked.

Paul’s eyes darted around the café and then focused on me, probing for a moment. “I’ve taken care of that. You should be fine today as long as you don’t draw attention to yourselves,” he said, the words measured evenly as if he’d read off a script. I opened my mouth to ask for details, but at that moment something glanced over my shoulder. I spun, hands up, only to see Alexi take a hasty step back. My cheeks burned.

“Sorry,” I hastened to say. “I’m still jumpy.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize.”

“Be careful, Alexi, she might take up where the mob left off!” Paul said.

There was an awkward silence, and then Alexi muttered something in Romanian that I couldn’t catch. Then he turned to me again. “I was going to offer to translate the signs at the breakfast buffet,” he said. “They’re all in Romanian.”

“That would be nice, thank you.” I tried to set aside my discomfort and smile.

“All right…” Alexi set a course for the buffet table and I followed behind him. “There are scrambled eggs, omelets plain, with tomatoes and cheese, bacon and sausage and onions and peppers here, and a sort of cornmeal cereal called mamaliga.” He indicated each covered dish as he spoke.

I stared at the dishes. Alexi’s translation had been too fast for me to feel confident knowing what was what, but I didn’t want to ask him to say it again. Balancing my plate in my left hand, I picked a dish at random and tried to lift the lid off. It crashed to the floor with a metal on tile death rattle that had every patron in the café looking in our direction. “Goddamnit,” I muttered.

Alexi swooped down and lifted the lid, waving off the waiters who were now hovering around us. “Here, let me,” he said, scooping an omelet onto my plate.

“Thank you.”

“What else would you like?” I looked down the buffet table.

“Maybe some fruit and bread?”

Back at our table I picked up a fork in my left hand and tried to eat, waiting for someone to comment on my lack of coordination. But I was bracing myself for words that never came, and after a few minutes I began to relax and let myself enjoy the food.

“So, how many countries have you guys been to?” Kaia asked, breaking the silence. “Will this trip revisit any places you’ve been already?”

“It will all be new to me,” Paul said.

“You’ve never traveled out of Romania?” Kaia said, her voice incredulous.

“Not really. We did a few shows in Moldova last year, but Moldova is hardly different from Romania.”

“Your English is so good, I assumed you must have spent time in an English speaking country,” Kaia said. I had made the same assumption, though now that I thought of it, Alexi’s accent was completely different from Paul’s and Jan’s. I wondered how I had missed that before.

“I had a private instructor,” Paul explained. “But Alexi learned his native, I think the term is.”

“You’ve lived in an English speaking country?” I turned to Alexi.

“My father was the Romanian ambassador to the UK until I was seven,” he replied. I listened, and yes, now that I knew I could pick out the undertones of a British accent. “I’ve been to most of the countries in your itinerary, to answer your initial question. My mother had family in Bulgaria, and I have an aunt in Italy.”

“Is your family still there?” My first thought had been that we might get a few nights of free lodging if they were, but then I thought that I didn’t really want to be introduced to Alexi’s family as his girlfriend. Not yet. If that was even what we were going to be.

“Not in Bulgaria anymore,” Alexi said. “Mother only has one sibling, and my grandparents passed on when I was quite small. My aunt Crina lives in Italy, though, on the coast about an hour from Pisa. We should stay with her for a few nights.”

“Maybe. We can see where we are when we get to Italy,” I said, hoping to shut down this line of conversation, but Kaia jumped in with a question.

“What’s in the area?”

“It’s a national park, actually, so there’s a lot of hiking and traditional little hillside towns. Cinque Terre. Great food and the views are gorgeous.”

“Oooh, that sounds like it would be a good fit, don’t you think, April?”

“We’ll see when we get closer, but yeah.” I looked down at my plate with its half-finished omelet sitting like an abandoned child. I was still hungry, but it didn’t seem worth the effort to eat the rest of it. “Should we head out?” I suggested.

“I guess,” Kaia said.

Alexi pulled out his cell phone and checked the time. “I should be going as well. It’s a three hour drive to Hirsova.” He looked over at Kaia and me. “Will you two be all right getting around today?”

“I’m sure we’ll manage,” Kaia said.

“All right.” He smiled at me, wearing a subtle expression that I couldn’t quite parse out. “We’ll see you tonight!”

~*~

I waited inside the lobby until April and Kaia had left, and then stepped out into the driveway in front of the hotel. It was probably overly cautious, but there was no point in taking chances. Once outside, I flipped open my cell phone to call James and tell him I was ready to leave. While I waited for him to bring the car around, I leaned up against one of the pillars holding up the awning over the lobby door. This would be another beautiful day, I thought, scanning the dribbles of people crossing the driveway on the sidewalk below. Perhaps Mamă and I could take a picnic lunch out in the field behind the house. It would be just like old times.

On the sidewalk below me two girls had stopped to point. One of them had fumbled a camera out of her bag and was waiting for it to turn on, her impatience clear from a hundred feet away. I put on a big smile and waved. A car paused to turn into the drive, honking at the girls, and I laughed as they scampered along. When James pulled up in front of me, I hopped in the back seat.

“Your mother’s place, right?” James asked when I pulled the door shut behind me.

“Yeah, I’m picking up some of my old backpacking supplies.” I settled into the seat. James knew all the shortcuts, and within a half hour the city buildings were replaced by expanses of pastureland and forest, broken by the occasional cluster of houses or a woodlot. While the countryside passed outside my window, I fell to contemplation of the past few days.

She was a puzzle, my beautiful dream girl. At least now I could be certain she wouldn’t dissolve under my fingertips, though I wasn’t so certain she wouldn’t choose to leave of her own accord. She certainly didn’t act like she’d been dreaming of me. My fingers moved up to touch my nose, but I caught myself in time.

She’d seemed genuinely sorry, but this morning… for an instant I’d thought she was ready to hit me again. It was almost like a reflex, except I’d never met anyone who hit anyone who touched them. Maybe it was just me. I thought back through our interactions, but I couldn’t remember seeing anyone else touch her. Strange. I’d keep my hands to myself for a while, I thought, just until I managed a better understanding of that aspect of April. I didn’t consider myself vain, but I did want to keep my face intact.

Strange reflexes aside, she was fun to talk to, if a little bit reserved in her interactions with me. It wasn’t what I’d expected, but we’d hardly had a smooth start, right? We just needed some time when we weren’t drugged with painkillers or being attacked by mobs of fans. After a little bit of time together, she would feel comfortable around me and we could start to explore what exactly our dreams had meant. I nodded, thinking it through.

I leaned forward and rummaged under the seat in front of me for one of the pads of staff paper we stashed everywhere we went. Since I always wrote lyrics first, I flipped to the back of the first page and started writing in the unlined space.

You came out of an insubstantial dream

To stand before me

Beautiful and real

I was flying; I thought I’d found heaven

To have you, my dream-girl, beside me

But my dreams never match reality

And you don’t know me

You’re watching me like

A bird, like you don’t know if I will

Throw crumbs, pebbles or something sinister

Ugh, that sounded ridiculous. I put a strike through the second section and kept scribbling.

My dream-girl, my siren, my shapeshifter

We were tempest tossed

Caught in a storm

Of human fantasy

I played with the syllables and timing, trying to come up with lyrics, a chord structure and a melody I liked. The page evolved into a tangle of words crossed out, hand drawn staves with snippets of melody and circles and arrows connecting the lyrics. I scanned the page, then ripped it off and began translating it into something the rest of the band would understand. Songwriting had never come easy to me, but I had gotten better over the years. I couldn’t match the sheer volume of Paul’s work, but I liked to think my songs were more complex.

When the car pulled up in front of the house, I tucked the unfinished song into the seat pocket and waved James away after I hopped out. The first time he had driven me on a personal trip I told him he was free to go where he wanted while I was otherwise occupied. It made visiting less awkward to have him elsewhere rather than hanging around outside.

The driveway was empty, so I pulled the spare key from its hiding place behind a loose piece of siding and let myself into the house. My steps echoed in the hall, and I felt slightly apprehensive.

I went through the kitchen and down the stairs into the basement, flicking the light switch. One of the two bulbs buzzed and went out, leaving the room bathed in dusty light. The musty smell of well-loved items past their prime brought back memories of playing hide and seek and building forts out of old chairs and spare bed sheets. My parents had kept this house during my father’s overseas posting, and returning to it at the age of seven had been an opportunity to explore a place full of treasures I couldn’t remember.

A broken recliner cast a long shadow over my path, and I almost stumbled over a small pile of old kitchen appliances as I made my way back to the corner where I’d tossed my backpacking gear a few years prior. I rummaged through the pile to find what I would need for this trip. My pack, the two-person tent, a sleep sack, a large water bottle, carabineers… there was more here than I had remembered. The clouds of dust billowing from the equipment were impressive, but everything still appeared serviceable. I gathered up an armload and ducked into the laundry room on my way back upstairs to grab a rag. Moving back through the kitchen, I opened the back door and deposited my load in a chair on the deck. Mamă didn’t let the deck furniture get this dirty, I thought, moving back into the kitchen to run some water on my rag. On further thought, I pulled out a large bowl and ran water into that instead.

I wiped down the table first, figuring it made no sense to clean the equipment and set it on a dirty surface. The gear felt familiar in my hands, like old friends I hadn’t seen in far too long. I remembered buying the tent the year before Tată had died. He said if I were going to be serious about backpacking, I needed something light and sturdy. And then he had overridden my original choice of a singleton tent, saying someday I’d wish I had room for one more. I grinned, wondering if he had foreseen this summer.

My pack was newer, from when I had done some city packing during my final year in school. I had purchased it with hiking in mind though, and it had space for a tent and a sleeping bag. I slung it over my back and adjusted the straps to account for the muscle I’d gained since I’d last used it. Before long the bag fit me like I’d never set it down.

I worked methodically through the pile of supplies, enjoying the warmth of the sun and the memories that came with each piece. My stomach grumbled by the time I finished and stuffed my supplies into the pack. Moving inside, I set the pack in the front hall and dropped the rag down in the laundry room. Back in the kitchen, I rummaged through the cupboards looking for something to eat.

There isn’t much here, I thought. Where was Mamă, anyway? Shouldn’t she always hang around the house, just in case her son might decide to stop by unannounced? I smiled at the absurdity of the thought. I hadn’t lived here in four years now, maybe five? Of course Mamă had come up with other ways of filling her days.

The cupboards contained three pieces of bread, some dry pasta, a bag of nuts and a box of energy bars. The fridge was empty save for a jar of tomato sauce, a wilted cucumber, a few slices of turkey and a small piece of cheese. I improvised a sandwich and grabbed an energy bar, wishing I had taken my song with me so I could work on it while I ate.

I had finished my meal and put my plate away by the time I heard a car in the driveway. Mamă was coming up the walk when I opened the front door.

“Alexi, this is a surprise!” she exclaimed, coming inside and giving me a hug. “I have groceries in the car; will you help me bring them in?”

“Sure,” I replied, moving outside with her. “How have you been?”

“Fine, fine,” she answered, a little too quickly. “But you have exciting news, I think? Either that or you’re looking for some of my bruise balm for your face.”

“Maybe I just came home for your healing touch,” I said, laughing. “What makes you think I have news?”

“One, your backpacking supplies are cleaned and sitting by the door and two, you’re my son and I can tell. Besides, I’m sure you have perfectly adequate medical care in Bucharest.” She handed over several grocery bags and looked up at me, her eyes dancing.

“Well, I can’t argue with your intuition,” I joked, taking the bags she tried to carry herself and walking loaded back to the house with her by my side. “I’m sure you remember what I told you a couple weeks ago?”

“Oh, you mean when you came running home like you were being chased by a demon?” she teased. “How could I forget?” Her voice dropped a bit. “Have you found her?”

“I have.” I intentionally left the sentence dangling, inviting her to ask more.

“And?”

“Her name’s April and she’s gorgeous and smart and she was dreaming of me too, so I’m not insane.”

“I never said you were.”

“No, but I think Jan and Paul were wondering.” I set the bags on the counter and started putting the groceries away.

“And what does that matter?”

“It made for some uncomfortable moments.”

“I suppose. So how did you get those bruises?”

“Well… The short version is that April accidentally hit me.”

“Accidentally… Alexi, listen, I don’t care how many dreams she appeared in, if-”

“No, Mamă, it was truly an accident. We got caught in a mob and April fell down. I went back to get her and grabbed her arm and she wasn’t expecting it.”

“Sounds like an overreaction to me.” Mamă pursed her lips and looked at me.

“Trust me, it wasn’t. Just before I grabbed her someone pushed her over and stomped on her hand.”

“Hmph.”

“We had to go to the emergency room because we thought she might have broken bones.”

“Doesn’t sound like you’ve gotten off to a very good start.”

“Not particularly.” I sighed and reached for the last bag of groceries.

“Not there; I’ve moved things around a bit.” Mamă moved next to me and picked up the cans I had been about to put in the cupboard next to the refrigerator. I was struck by how pale she was. “I keep cans on this side now; that way they’re closer to the counter space.” She looked up at me. “Let’s go outside; just let me wipe down a couple of chairs.”

“I did it earlier,” I said, opening the door to the deck and holding it for her. She stood for a second, looking at me.

“Thank you. How long have you been here?” she asked, moving to the other side of the kitchen and pulling down two glasses.

“A couple of hours,” I answered.

“Ah, you must have arrived soon after I left,” she said, nodding to herself. “Would you like something to drink? I’m going to have some rakyia.”

“When did you start drinking at lunchtime?” I asked.

“When I didn’t have to set a good example for you,” she responded, laughing. “Will you be traumatized for life by seeing me drink after lunch?”

“I will,” I answered, keeping my voice serious. “I’ll have to start drinking just to purge myself of the memory.” Mamă smiled and prepared the two drinks, handing one to me while we moved onto the deck.

“So, what do you do now?” she asked, settling into her chair.

“Well, we get out of Bucharest tomorrow, to start with.”

“What do you mean?”

I sighed. “The mob scene was caught on film and we had paparazzi on the roof last night. They’re out touring Bucharest today, even though Paul didn’t want them to and-”

“Who’s them?” Mamă interrupted.

“April and her friend.”

“April has a friend? Does this friend have a name?”

“Kaia.”

“Pretty name,” Mamă commented. “We were going to name you Kaia if you had been a girl.”

“Oh,” I said, not quite sure what to make of that bit of information.

“Not that I would trade you for a girl, Alexandru.”

“It’s Alexi, Mamă,” I said automatically.

“It does you no harm to be reminded of your given name now and again, scumpete,” Mamă said, smiling at me. “So, April and Kaia refused your request that they stay in their hotel room?”

“Quite adamantly.”

“Good for them.” Mamă said softly. I looked at her, unsure of how to respond. She stared at her glass for a moment, her fingers idly drawing designs in the condensation on the sides. “So you’re leaving Bucharest. Where are you going? And with who?”

“April and Kaia are on a backpacking trip.”

“Ah, that must be why you cleaned up your gear.”

“Yeah, Paul and I will be accompanying them through Bulgaria, Greece and Italy.”

“Paul, backpack?” she asked, incredulous.

“He’s interested in Kaia,” I said.

“I should have guessed.” Mamă’s face had the expression of one who’d swallowed a lemon. I laughed.

“He’s not that bad, Mamă. It’ll be easier to travel as two couples than as a group of three.”

“Assuming you get to the couple stage,” Mamă said. “I imagine your chances will be better away from Bucharest and all your raving fans. Still, don’t push anything, Alexi. Put yourself in April’s position.”

“I understand,” I said. “It’s just… why would we dream of each other if there wasn’t meant to be something?”

“You were expecting happily ever after?”

“The stage seemed to be set.”

“Happily ever after only works when you ignore those pesky little details, scumpete. Besides, it’s boring. Not that I’m saying the injuries you’ve sustained are preferable, but perhaps you’ll find they will bring you and April closer with time.”

We moved on to lighter topics and continued talking until the sun had passed over the house and thrown our seats into shadow.

“Can you stay for dinner?” Mamă asked, rinsing out our glasses and putting them in the dishwasher.

“If we eat early,” I responded. “I have to drive back to Bucharest.”

“Lovely. How about pasta?” She pulled a pot out of the cupboard without waiting for my response and rinsed it in the sink before filling it with water. “I bought fresh tomatoes and there should be some basil in the window box; we can make your Aunt Crina’s favorite Italian dish.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

“So, where are you going first?” Mamă put a pot on the stove and pulled out a chopping board. A hissing filled the kitchen as the water on the outside of the metal evaporated on contact with the burner.

“Well, Paul’s afraid we’ll be recognized in Bulgaria so he wants to skip through it.” I moved to the board and began cutting the tomatoes.

“The whole country?” Mamă said.

“I’m hoping to convince him to stop in some of the parks. And I’d love to show April the Festival of Roses.” I grinned, contemplating the possibilities while Mamă laughed.

“I’m glad you never made a habit of hiding your emotions,” she said. “No matter what Paul would have liked. Speaking of, what does he think of all this?”

“We fought over them going out today,” I said. “There wasn’t much he could do about it, though.”

Mamă nodded, inhaling the steam when she tossed the tomatoes and basil into a pan with some garlic and olive oil. “That won’t be the end of it, you watch.”

“I’m sure it will be fine, Mamă.”

Mamă wore a look that clearly said she didn’t believe me, but was choosing not to comment further. “So, what happens at the end of the summer?”

“April goes back to the US,” I said.

“And you?”

“I’ve hardly met her, Mamă!” I protested.

“True, but you’d be lying if you told me you hadn’t thought of the long term.”

“I’ll stay here, I guess,” I said, draining the pasta. “I’d be a fool to leave the band, and there’s still a lot that could happen this summer.” Much to my relief, Mamă turned her attention to tossing the pasta and didn’t push the subject further. We sat down to full plates and conversation about happenings in town.

I called James while we cleaned up, and moved toward the front door when I heard him pull into the driveway about ten minutes later.

“Wait a moment, I have something for you,” Mamă said when I settled my pack on my shoulders and turned to say goodbye. She disappeared up the stairs and I could hear her rummaging around in one of the closets. It wasn’t long before she returned with a small plastic bag bursting with paper.

“Brochures from Bulgaria,” she said, smiling. “They’re several years old, but I think you’re going to need some help planning.”

“You’re probably right,” I said, grinning back at her.

“Drop me a line from time to time,” she said. “I don’t think I need to worry that you won’t have fun.”

“I’ve got that part covered,” I laughed, then struck a more serious tone. “Take care of yourself, all right? You’re looking really pale.”

“Don’t worry about me; you have better things to focus on right now. I’ll be fine.” Her voice sounded a tad strained, or maybe it was just my imagination. That must be it, I thought. I moved forward to give her a hug, trying to brush off my concerns, and at the same time treating her more tentatively than I ever had in my life.

“Oh, stop Alexi, I won’t break,” she said, squeezing me hard and shattering my hesitancy. I tightened my grip and we were both laughing as we broke apart.

“I’ll see you at the end of the summer,” I said, leaning down to kiss her cheek before turning toward the door.

“Bring April by,” she instructed, moving out on to the porch to watch me walk out to the car.

“I will,” I promised.

~*~

I sat on a bench next to Kaia in Herăstrău Park, waiting for her to finish tucking her shopping bags into her backpack and watching the people. “Are you going to carry souvenirs the entire trip?” I asked, putting voice to a question I’d been thinking since Kaia had bought her first trinket in Mera the week before.

“I’ll ship it home when my bag gets too heavy.” Kaia glanced up at me and laughed.

“I guess that works.” I sat back and closed my eyes, listening to snatches of Romanian mixed with the steady pulse of the fountain.

“There.” Kaia’s bag scraped the pavement and she settled next to me. “Are you doing all right?”

I nodded, leaving my eyes closed. The sun filtered through the newly emerged leaves on the tree behind us to spread a patchwork of warmth on my face. Even though we’d planned a museum stop for the afternoon, I found myself reluctant to move.

“You’re not getting tired, are you?” Kaia asked. “We could go back to the hotel for a break.”

“No, I’d rather not. This is the last day that will be just us.” I opened my eyes when Kaia didn’t respond. She stared across the plaza to where an older jogger had stopped to tie her shoe.

“I guess it is,” Kaia said. “I hadn’t really thought of it that way.”

“No?”

“You say it like there’s something to be sorry about.”

I glanced down at my shirt and noticed a hair clinging to the fabric. “Well… isn’t there?”

“You’re sorry about having two cute, friendly guys join us on our trip?”

I tried to flick the hair away. It clung stubbornly on my breast. “I don’t know. I … I’m not entirely comfortable, is all.”

“Is that what this morning was about? You looked like you were about to hit Alexi, and all he did was tap you on the shoulder.”

“I didn’t hit him!”

“I know, but you looked like you were going to.”

“He just surprised me.”

“Really? I didn’t realize you were that jumpy.”

“You would be jumpy if you’d gotten caught in a fucking mob,” I snapped.

“But that’s over, April.”

“Thank you for stating the obvious, Sherlock.” Kaia looked at me for a moment, her face blank. “Sherlock Holmes?” I prompted. No response. I sighed. “Never mind.”

“Why aren’t you comfortable?” Kaia asked.

“I don’t know. It’s like they expect us to be their girlfriends by default or something. I don’t like that.” I stared at my wrist. It throbbed, as if sensing my sudden attention.

“Would you rather they not come? We don’t have to let them.”

“No…” I let the word draw out. “I just would rather the situation were different. It’s all happening so fast. I’m still trying to wrap my head around Bob being real, and suddenly we’re caught in a mob and hiding from photographers and rushing out of the city to avoid being followed.”

Kaia glanced around us, checking to see if anyone was in earshot. Neither of us said anything while a young mother pushed a stroller past. Then Kaia spoke, her voice hushed.

“I see what you mean. I don’t know how else it could have happened, though.”

“I know. And Alexi did, well… rescue me. I ought to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

Kaia paused and her lips moved as she whispered to herself. “Benefit of the doubt… you don’t trust him?”

“I guess I do. Trust him, I mean. This would be so much easier if we could have met without the dreams, or at least without me being hurt.”

“We have what we have, April. And you have to admit, he’s got a lot of potential.”

“Yeah, that’s just what I need.” I laughed uneasily.

“No, really April.” Kaia turned and sat cross-legged on the bench. “Think about it. We’re going to be traveling with two guys who know the region, are fun to be around and appear to like us. We’ll be safer, they can tell us about places we might not have found otherwise, and we might get something extra!”

“I like to know a bit more about my boyfriends first.”

“It’s a summer fling, April. Relax and have fun with it! If it doesn’t work out, we give them the slip and keep traveling on our own. All we have to worry about is having enough condoms.” My cheeks burned. “Right?” Kaia prompted.

“I guess,” I said. “That wasn’t exactly on my packing list.”

“We should go find some then!”

“Right now?”

“Why not? Wasn’t there a department store near the park entrance?”

“Maybe? We can go find out.” I stood up, slung my day bag over my shoulder with my left hand and followed Kaia out of the park.

*~*

“Hi, Alexi,” Kaia said, stepping back from the door to let me in. “Did you have a good trip?”

“I did,” I replied, and held up the bag in my hand. “Mamă gave me some brochures for places in Bulgaria. I thought that now would be a logical time to figure out where we’re going tomorrow.” I walked into the room and tossed my stuff on the table.

“Good idea. April’s in the shower,” Kaia replied. “I don’t know where Paul is.”

“He was on the phone when I stopped by his room. Said he’d be down in ten minutes.”

“All right.” Kaia climbed up on her bed and sat looking at me for a moment. I moved to look out the window and then sat down in one of the chairs. The silence dragged. “Listen, Alexi?” Kaia ventured.

“Yeah?”

“This really isn’t any of my business, but you should know that April’s uncomfortable with this whole thing.”

“What whole thing?” I asked, though I suspected I knew the answer.

“Well… you. And having you go on the trip.”

“I’d hoped it was just an awkward start,” I said.

“That’s probably a big part of it.”

“But not all?”

“No.” Kaia sighed. “Look, just don’t push her, all right? This is more than her hurting her wrist.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Can I just ask you to trust me on this?”

“You could. But I’ll probably do something stupid if I don’t know what’s going on.”

Kaia stared at the bedspread under her hands, her fingers tracing the floral pattern on the top blanket. “Look, I told you I had a psychology degree, right?”

I vaguely remembered hearing this, so I nodded.

“April was emotionally neglected as a child,” Kaia continued. “She doesn’t trust easily, and she didn’t think you were real when she was dreaming about you. So she’s really conflicted right now, because to her you showed up almost out of nowhere, got her caught in a mob, rescued her and now you’re traveling with her and expecting her to be your girlfriend.”

“Well, that is what the dreams would seem to be indicating,” I said, opting to begin by objecting to the last statement.

“Yes, but she’s not paying attention to the dreams,” Kaia said. “She’s approaching you like you met at the concert three days ago.”

“Has she told you this?”

“Not directly, but I know her well enough to read between the lines.” The water shut off in the bathroom as Kaia spoke, and she let her voice drop.

“So what do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Just go slow. Let her take the lead,” Kaia said. “Otherwise she might decide that you’re too much and she doesn’t want to deal with you.”

~*~

Kaia knocked on the bathroom door as I dried myself off. “Alexi’s here, April.”

“All right, I’ll be out in a minute.” I rushed through my routine and walked out of the bathroom a few minutes later to find both Alexi and Paul hanging out in the room. Paul waved from a chair over by the window. Alexi moved toward me and paused, standing awkwardly by the dresser.

“We need to figure out where we’re going tomorrow,” he said.

“Oh!” I couldn’t believe that hadn’t occurred to me. I laughed at myself. “Yeah, that would be good to know.” I grabbed a guidebook out of my bag and sat down on my bed. Alexi moved to sit down next to me. Kaia sat cross-legged on the other bed with the pages of our itinerary in front of her. It had originally been typed, but we had already crossed out and written so much in the margins that it was difficult to pick out the typeface from a distance.

“So you have a basic plan, if I understand correctly,” Paul began, looking between Kaia and me. “Remind me what it is?”

“The plan is very skeletal because we didn’t want to be tied to an itinerary,” Kaia said. “There’s info about places we want to see, and campgrounds and hostels near those places. We’re planning to move south through Bulgaria and cut to the southwest to get into Greece.” She squinted at the itinerary. “We’d like to stop in Gabrovo, Plovdiv and Rila, Pirin and the Rhodope mountains. Past that, we’ll check out anything interesting that we run across.”

“There’s Kazanlak and the towns around the Valley of Roses,” Alexi put in, rummaging through the bag he had brought. “The Festival of Roses is coming up soon.” He pulled a brochure from his bag, and I looked over his shoulder at pictures of roses and women in traditional dress, liberally scattered amongst a language I couldn’t read. “According to this, the festival in Kazanlak is held over the first weekend in June.”

“Too public,” Paul said. “And too close to Romania. We’d be spotted in no time, and blow our cover not two weeks into the trip.”

“There are small towns in the Valley that hold their own festivals,” Alexi argued. “We don’t have to skip the event for fear of being seen; we just need to be prudent about how we go about it.”

“The prudent thing would be not to go,” Paul said.

“Yes, the most prudent course of action would be to lock ourselves away on an estate with gates and guards, but that’s not particularly practical.” Alexi said.

“I don’t understand,” Kaia said. “I thought you’d handled that reporter, or whatever he was.”

“I couldn’t keep him locked up past noon today.” The look on Paul’s face indicated that he would very much have liked to.

“You had him arrested?” Kaia sounded shocked.

“Trespass,” Paul said. “It was a temporary solution.”

“Would he really follow you out of the country?” Kaia persisted. “I mean, it’s hard to find information about you even in the Ukraine. I almost missed out on concert tickets because your website didn’t have a Ukrainian translation.”

“It doesn’t? We should remedy that,” Alexi commented.

“Why don’t we go to one of the small towns in the Valley of Roses?” I asked, trying to pull the conversation back to the subject of where we were going in the morning. “We can stay for a day, see the area in bloom and move on. We don’t have to see the actual festival if it’s that risky.” Alexi shifted to put his arm around my shoulder, and I was suddenly hyper aware of his body next to me.

“Well, that would increase the chances we could slip through unnoticed.” Paul spoke slowly, giving the idea thought. “I’d feel better if we went straight to Greece, honestly, but I see that’s not a popular opinion. At least you seem to have picked out a set of activities that reduce the chances of us meeting anyone who could recognize us. I’m not sure about Gabrovo and Plovdiv, though.”

“We can figure it out when we get closer, right?” I asked, running my fingers across the cover of the guidebook in my lap. “We don’t have to plan everything tonight; we just need to know where we’re getting off the train tomorrow.”

“Gabrovo is north of the Valley, so we do need to tackle that question,” Alexi said. “We could start off at one of the Natural parks and work our way south from there.”

“What parks are in the northern part of the country?” Paul asked. I flipped through my guidebook as Alexi began answering.

“There’s Vraschanski Balkan, but that would be out of our way,” Alexi said.

“What about Rusenski Lom?” I asked, pointing to a spot on the map of Bulgaria. “It looks like it’s right along our route if we go due south.”

“Oh, I forgot about that one,” Alexi said. “I haven’t been there since I was eight or nine.”

“Is it a popular place?”

“I don’t remember it being crowded,” Alexi replied. “I think there’s a cave and a monastery. And rivers. It’s pretty.” We all looked over at Paul, who appeared to be thinking the idea through.

“What do you think?” he asked, gesturing at Kaia and me.

“I think Alexi knows more about this than I do,” I said, shrugging. “It sounds like a good place.”

“Same here,” Kaia said. “It sounds like the kind of place we would have stopped to explore.”

“All right. We head to Rusenski Lom tomorrow and spend a few days there before dropping by Gabrovo on the way to the Valley of Roses,” Alexi said, sounding satisfied.

“Enough of a plan to be going on,” Kaia said, smiling.

“One more thing,” Paul jumped in. “What time are we leaving tomorrow?”

“Oh. That would be good to know.” Kaia’s smiled turned into a giggle that spread throughout the room like a contagion. She set aside the itinerary and pulled the train schedules out of my planning folder. “What’s the closest town to Rusenski Lom?”

“Ruse, I think,” Alexi said. I double checked my guidebook map and nodded.

“There’s an 11:30 from Bucharest to Ruse,” Kaia said. “It gets in mid-afternoon.”

“I’d like to leave earlier,” Paul objected.

“There’s an overnight train-“ Kaia stopped, having been cut off by Alexi.

“I do not want to get into Ruse at three in the morning,” he said. “Paul, why don’t we ask James to drive us down? He can drop us across the border and we won’t have to worry about the trains at all.”

“That works, actually,” Paul said slowly. “I told him to stay in town for a few days so it might look as if we were still around, so we’ve paid for his time. If he takes us, we can get out of the country with no one knowing.”

“You’re not worried that someone will follow us out of the hotel?” I said.

“No, this hotel is good about not allowing press stakeouts,” Paul said. “There’s nowhere to park and wait for our car to come out.”

“Okay then, what time should we leave?” Kaia asked.

“Nine?” Alexi suggested. “We can sleep in a bit.”

“Sure,” I said. As Paul and Kaia chimed in their agreements, I smiled and looked over at Alexi. This was going to be fun!

What’s so fascinating about watching a building come down? Why do people record the twisted carnage of brick and steel, watching the demise on YouTube or live from an office window?

I lean against the windowsill, my head spinning from hours on the computer. Behind me, two contractors are joking.

“I used to work in that building, but I can’t even see my floor no more!”

Outside the wrecker probes the remains of the building. Floors slant into nothingness, the occasional abandoned office chair tilting precariously into a six story drop. The claw probes along what was the top floor, seeking out the weaknesses which will bring the building lower. It grabs on like a bulldog and tugs, and the exterior walls wobble.

“Oh, it’s going!” someone says, and people emerge from cubicles as if summoned to daily prayer.

The claw is sniffing now, sliding along the wreckage. It brushes fragments of brick and floor away from one of the structural pillars and latches on, bracing for a pull that rocks the cabin of the machine. How easy it is to forget that there’s a man inside, that the destruction is all according to plan rather than being the result of some rampaging beast.

The top floor caves in, and the roof disappears in a sudden dust storm. I catch a glimpse of red and white and wonder, for an instant, what it was. Then I realize that what looks like a dollhouse pattern is actually the exterior brick.

“There goes the snack bar, y’all!” There’s a rumble of laughter from the audience, overlaid by the drone of the purchasing contractor in his cube. “Now in my day we called those plain old circuit caps, but they’ve got some other name for them now… and what’s the difference between the 23S and the 23HD? Describe it to me so I can get it right in my database.”

His words break the spell, and I turn back to my computer along with everyone else. Behind me a scoop bulldozer dumps a half ton of grey brick and plaster into a dump truck, tapping it down with the care that a baker might show in leveling a cup of flour.

I wonder how many hours were spent in that building. All the time and effort, the excitement and mind-numbing boredom, did it make any difference to that 60′s era box?

Mental Affairs

Chapter 5

We stumbled into the hotel in the early hours of the morning, Kaia and Paul walking under their own power but Jan and I supporting a heavily sedated April. Neither of us had broken bones, but the heel to her hand had snapped some old stitches, and she had sprained her wrist. The doctors in the emergency clinic had given us both scripts for painkillers and instructions to take it easy for a few days.

Paul had called ahead to the hotel and secured a room for April and Kaia. After seeing that they were both settled in, I went back to my own room, dropped my clothes on the floor and was asleep almost before I had finished crawling under the covers.

I woke around eleven the next morning and took a quick shower, then stood and stared for a while at the blue blotch that was my nose. April had quite a swing. Not that I blamed her, given the situation, but… damn. I sighed and popped some ibuprofen, then pulled on some clothes and headed down to the hotel restaurant. It was nearly deserted, but Paul sat at a table in the corner, nursing a coffee and examining the newspapers spread all over the table.

“They pick up the story?” I asked, sitting down across from him.

“Yeah,” he said, shoving a few pages over to me. “Wasn’t much chance that they wouldn’t.”

“How bad is it?” I glanced down at the front page, where a tightly cropped picture of me with blood dripping from my nose had been placed next to what looked like a shot of the crowd.

“Not as bad as it could be. Apparently some artist had gotten a people together for a giant group shot with cell phones in the dark. A statement on technology in society, or something abstract like that. We just happened to walk into the aftermath. That shot of you is the only one I’ve seen; at the moment we’re just a sidebar.”

“Well, that’s not too bad then,” I said. “If they didn’t pick up on April and Kaia.”

“Look at the copyright on that shot.” I took a closer look at the caption under my photo and groaned. Sandu Ionescu.

“It’s only a matter of time until he asks why we were there in the first place, and who we were there with. He almost certainly has April’s image, maybe Kaia’s, and it’s only a matter of time before he sells them.”

“Fuck.” I rested my palm on my forehead and stared at the photo. “Can we buy him out?” I asked.

“I’ll be damned if I give that bastard a lei.” Paul sighed and flipped open another paper. “All we’d accomplish is to confirm to him that we have something to hide, and figuring out what that is will net him more than anything we could offer. I’m wondering if we should strike preemptively and release our plans.”

“What do you mean?”

“Introduce April and Kaia at a press conference or something. Announce that we’re traveling with them, and ask for privacy.”

“When has that ever worked?” I didn’t like the idea of publicly associating April with the band this soon. One of the waiters finally realized that there was another tardy diner in the restaurant, and came over with a cup of coffee. I took a grateful sip.

“Never, but at least it deprives him of the income. And I don’t have a better idea.” Paul must really be tired, I thought, for him to admit that.

“Why don’t we stick to our original plan and just disappear?” I asked. “We can have our manager state that we’re taking some time off to recover from the tour and the mob. Anything we need to buy for the trip can be brought to the hotel this afternoon. I can make a run down to my mother’s place tomorrow, and we can leave the day after.” Paul rested his chin on his hand and let his eyelids sag.

“That might work,” he said, keeping his eyes closed. “As long as April and Kaia are willing to stay in tomorrow.”

“Why?” I asked.

“They might be recognized.”

“You don’t think Sandu would put the pieces together quickly enough to shadow them?”

“I don’t want to risk it.”

“We picked this hotel because it was difficult to track from. He’d have to cross paths with them after they leave.” Paul hesitated, and I pushed my advantage. “It’s not that big a risk, and I know they want to see the city. We’d already be cutting their time here if we leave early.” Paul opened his mouth to argue again, but I spoke again. “I doubt they’re going anywhere today, not as late as we got in last night. And you clearly need more sleep. Go back to bed, we’ll figure it out later.”

I watched him shuffle out of the restaurant, then waved the waiter over and asked for a pastry. Tipping my chair back on two legs, I tried to collect my thoughts. If we’d been looking to make a good first impression, we’d sure fucked that up. It didn’t get much worse than being attacked by a mob while on your first date with someone.

Maybe Paul was right about April and Kaia going out tomorrow, I thought, staring into the space in front of me and playing with the food the waiter had brought. It was a very tiny risk, but after last night, why take any risk at all? I sighed. After last night, I ought to be making sure they still wanted to travel with us. It wasn’t our fault, but we’d still landed them in the emergency room for most of the night.

~*~

Something was poking my side. I mumbled and swiped at whatever it was, and was jolted into immediate consciousness when my hand made contact. I sat up in bed and cradled my arm.

“Are you all right?” Kaia asked.

“Yeah, I just forgot.” I looked down at the fresh bandages swaddling my hand. Edges of bruising crept out from beneath the white gauze. “Where are we, again?”

“Same hotel as the band, remember?” Kaia added another layer of worry to her gaze. “We agreed at dinner last night.”

“Yeah, but what’s it called? Where are we in the city?”

“Oh.” Kaia looked relieved. “I’m not sure, actually. They didn’t say, and it was really late when we got here last night, so I wasn’t really paying attention.”

“What time did we get in?” I asked.

“Sometime after four. How much do you remember?” Kaia moved round the bed and peeked through the curtains, jerking them closed again when a bright shaft of light cut into the dim room.

“Not much after we got to the hospital. Whatever they gave me was pretty potent.”

“They had to sedate you to get the old bandage out of your hand. Whoever stepped on you broke some of the stitches, and by the time they’d finished x-rays it had, what’s the word, hardened?”

“I think I get the idea,” I said. “Anything else I ought to know?”

“Just a sprain. You have a stylish new brace to wear during the day. I think the doctor said to leave the rest of your stitches until the new injury healed.”

“And Alexi?” The memory of slamming my elbow into his face rose vivid in my mind.

“Nothing broken, though he does have a nasty bruise. I don’t understand why anyone would do that.”

“It was crazy in that crowd,” I said, trying to swallow the lump that had just appeared in my throat. “You don’t have time to think, you know?”

“I guess.” Kaia got up again and wandered toward the bathroom. “It’s almost noon. You feel up to finding the guys?”

“Theoretically,” I said. I maneuvered into a sitting position, my muscles protesting the movement. Somewhere in my pack was a bottle of ibuprofen, but the effort of finding it was a bit more than I wanted to tackle. A knock echoed through the room and I groaned. So much for working up to more movement.

I hauled myself over to the door and fumbled it open with my left hand.

“Hey, you’re up!” Alexi said. “How are you feeling?” I leaned against the doorjamb and took in the variations of blue and purple decorating his face.

“You look awful,” I replied, rather than answer his question. I wasn’t sure how to approach someone who had chosen to take on a mob to save me. When I thought over the expressions on the faces that had surrounded me, I had little doubt that I would have sustained more damage had Alexi not shown up.

“Nothing that won’t heal,” he said.

“I’m really sorry about that.” I wanted to drop my eyes, but the mottling around his nose held my gaze.

“It wasn’t intentional,” he said. “At least, I hope it wasn’t.”

“No, I feel horrible about it. Why didn’t you tell everyone what happened?”

Alexi glanced over his shoulder. “It was easier not to, trust me. Can I come in? How’s your hand?”

“Hurts like hell whenever I touch anything, but other than that it’s fine.” I stepped aside to let him in. He held a bunch of newspapers under his arm, and they brushed against me as he moved by. “Um… thank you for pulling me out.”

“Don’t mention it.” Alexi smiled and moved toward me, hand extended at shoulder level. I couldn’t help it; my muscles tensed and I became visibly stiffer. Alexi saw my reaction.

“Oh, I’m sorry, you’re probably sore,” he said.

“Yeah.” I dropped my eyes to the carpet.

“Did Kaia fill you in on what the damage is?” Alexi moved into the room. He tossed the papers on a small table beside the closed curtains and tried to sit with his legs hanging. The table gave a threatening wobble and he moved to a chair.

“Sprain, busted stitches, etcetera?” I sat back gingerly on the bed.

“Yeah, pretty much. The doctor commented on how the original wound didn’t look like it had healed cleanly.”

“It got infected a few days after I left the states.”

“Well, he gave you a script for an antibiotic cream. We’ll get it filled this afternoon.”

“Okay. That’s probably all I’ll be up for doing today.”

“That’s what I thought,” Alexi said. “Paul and I were talking about how this might change our plans.”

“My hand? It shouldn’t change anything,” I said. “I might need a bit of help for a few days, but I’m not staying here until I heal.”

“That’s good, but we were more concerned with the consequences from the mob.”

“What consequences?” I leaned forward, eyes narrowed.

“Well…” Alexi hesitated and glanced around the room. “Is Kaia in the bathroom? It’ll probably be easier to talk through this with both of you.”

“Yeah, she’s in the bathroom, but what do you mean?” Was he trying to say that they wouldn’t come? I was surprised at how much relief the thought brought.

“Have you two eaten yet?”

“No.”

“Why don’t I have room service bring something up?”

“Sure. But what’s going on?” I stared at Alexi.

“It’s not that big a deal, it’s just that after last night we need to take a few more precautions.” He picked up a room service menu from the table and handed it to me. “What kind of sandwich would you like?” I glanced over the page, but was distracted by a long squeak as Kaia opened the bathroom door.

“Oh, hi Alexi,” she said, clutching her towel tighter around herself. “I didn’t realize you were here.”

“Sorry.” He brushed the curtains open a bit and looked out the window. “We’re ordering sandwiches, you want one?”

“Yeah, just pick something for me, April.” Kaia stooped gingerly over her pack and grabbed a handful of clothing. “I’ll be out in a minute.” She disappeared back into the bathroom.

“I need to get cleaned up, too.” I was still wearing my clothes from the night before.

“Plenty of time for that,” he replied. “What do you want; I’ll call down.”

I looked back at the menu and chose without giving it much thought. “We’ll both have turkey and cheese.”

“All right.” Alexi picked up the phone and let loose a stream of Romanian. I tried to follow along for a moment, but gave up. When he hung up the phone, I stared at him without saying anything. “They’ll be up in about 20 minutes,” he said.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. The door creaked again and Kaia emerged.

“What do you mean, what’s wrong?” Kaia asked. Alexi sighed.

“Apparently that crowd last night was part of a community art project.” He spread his hand flat on the table and stared at it. “There were a few hundred people and several photographers, and we walked right into the middle of it.”

“I don’t see how that gives them leave to attack us, but go on,” Kaia said.

“It doesn’t, but it does mean that it wasn’t just amateur cameras taking pictures of the mess. One photographer in particular has been trailing us for several months, and of course he was there last night.”

“So?” I asked.

“He has pictures of us, and he’s already sold some of them. It’s only a matter of time until he asks why we were there. We need to get out of town before that happens.”

“Now hold on just a second,” I said. “You’re telling me we need to leave the city just because some photographer happened to catch our faces on film?”

“You have to understand, this guy has been stalking us for months. He’s making a lot of money off the photos he’s taking, and if he thinks we’re hiding something he won’t hesitate to follow us out of the country.”

“Can’t you just have him arrested?” I asked. “That’s a violation of privacy.”

“It’s only a privacy violation if he trespasses,” Kaia said. “If we’re out in public, we’re fair game.”

“But would he really follow us on our trip? That’s ridiculous!”

“He spent a night out on the roof next to one of our hotels about a month or so back,” Alexi said. Someone knocked on the door and I considered a response as Alexi got up to answer it. This was more than I’d bargained for. I sighed. Maybe Kaia would make a suggestion so I didn’t have to deal with it.

Alexi dug the sandwiches out of a bag and handed one to each of us. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know this isn’t what you were expecting when you met us.”

I looked over at Kaia. She stared back at me. I tried to think. What were our options here? We could go along with Alexi and leave early. We could refuse to change the schedule and bet on Alexi being wrong. We could go back to our original plan and leave Alexi and Paul behind.

“Is there really no way to get rid of this guy?” I asked.

“Our best bet is to give him the slip,” Alexi said. “He’d have a hard time tracking us internationally.”

“What’s your plan, then?” I asked. Alexi started to speak and I added, “I’m not agreeing to it yet.”

“No, I understand,” he said. “Paul’s current thought is for us to leave in two days. We’ll have any equipment we need brought in this afternoon. Tomorrow, I’ll go get my backpacking stuff out of storage, and we’ll leave the day after.”

“So we’ll still get one more day to explore in the city,” Kaia said.

“It… it might be better if you stayed in.” I paused, my hand halfway to my mouth with a sandwich. “It’s just, you’ll probably need a day of down time to heal, and that way there’s no risk of Sandu Ionescu finding you.” Alexi’s cheeks were burning red around the edges of his bruise.

“One day of forced inactivity is more than enough,” I said.

“Well, it’s just that if he does find you, we’ll have a mess on our hands.”

“What are the chances of that?” Kaia asked. “It’s a big city.”

Alexi sighed. “It would be a lot easier if you would-”

“Well, we won’t,” I said. “It’s pretty fishy if you ask me, getting us injured in a mob and then trying to keep us from leaving.” I watched Alexi raise a hand to his mouth as if to bite the nail and then catch himself.

“I know,” he said. “We don’t have any right to ask you to stay in. But you deserve to know about the potential for problems. If you do go, please watch for anyone following you and taking pictures.”

~*~

“Alexi, you idiot!”

“We have no right to keep them from leaving.” I glanced at the clock on my bedside table. We had ten minutes before the sales reps from the outdoor store arrived with packs for Paul to try on, and I was too tired to deal with the scene that would ensue if Paul was in a temper when they arrived.

“Whether we have the right is beside the point. You should have convinced them it was in their best interest to stay in, and then there wouldn’t be any problem.”

“There’s not a problem now. And I’m 99.99 percent sure there won’t be a problem at all.”

“But if they are noticed-” Paul paused and his cheek twitched. “Why did you have to bring it up in the first place? You know you’re not a good negotiator.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, it’s not a negotiation,” I snapped. “You don’t hold contract talks with your dates about where to go on a given day.”

“This is totally different,” Paul said. He opened his mouth to continue and then stood up, staring at the window.

“What?”

“There’s someone on the roof next door.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I wish I was.” Paul pulled his cell from his pocket and punched in a number.

“Who?”

“I can’t tell, but I can guess. Yes, there’s an individual with a camera on the roof next door to our hotel room.” Paul made several phone calls in quick succession – our manager, our private security people, the Bucharest police and the hotel front desk. By the time the outdoor supply reps arrived a net was closing on our paparazzo.

“Maybe it isn’t Sandu,” I commented, watching the figure realize he was surrounded. “He’s not usually stupid enough to picket on a private building.”

“We’ll find out soon enough.” Paul raised his arms for the shop representative to adjust the straps on his pack. “Whoever it is, I want the trespassing charges to stick.”

“Pity we can’t keep him locked up until we’ve left.” I rummaged through the selection of clothing the sales rep had brought, pulling out some socks and a pair of pants to supplement what I had in my suitcase.

“He’ll be locked up until I can get down to the station,” Paul said. “Josep will see to that.”

*

Later that evening I opened the door to my hotel room, turned on the lights and let myself fall back on the bed. Paul was probably still at the station, and I had just gotten back from giving April and Kaia an impromptu driving tour of Bucharest. Despite her arm, she had declared herself bored at the hotel and rejected the notion of simply having her antibiotic cream delivered.  Nothing had happened – this was why we had an SUV with tinted windows and a driver, after all – but I knew Paul would not be pleased if he found out.

I sighed. I just hoped we could get out without any trouble. April was proving to be a remarkably determined person, and if she went head to head with Paul… well, I’d have a hard time deciding who to bet on. April’s wrist was clearly hurting her, yet she’d insisted on going out, driving around the city and eating dinner in the hotel restaurant.

She’d also kept her distance. I caught her staring at me from time to time, and sometimes she looked away as soon as I noticed. Her words were sparse and cautious, in contrast to Kaia, who had spent the two hours chattering.

They’d both gone back to their room after dinner, and now, in the silence of my own room, I was questioning my original intention to stay awake until Paul got back.

I woke to someone pounding at the door. Paul tumbled into the room as soon as I opened it, and then paused.

“Did I wake you up?”

“Yeah, but no worries. What happened?”

“It was our favorite local photographer.”

I sat back on the bed and propped my head in my hands. “Why was he stupid enough to stake out a private building?”

“I didn’t ask, but it’s our gain,” Paul said. “His equipment’s been confiscated and I tipped the bailiff a bit extra not to let him out until noon tomorrow.”

“So he can’t follow April and Kaia?”

“He’d have to have someone else tracking them. I doubt he does; based on the questions he asked me, he doesn’t know who they are yet.” Paul leaned against the dresser across from me.

“What was he asking?”

“Why we were there in the first place, that sort of thing. I told him we’d decided to get gelato from that place around the corner.”

“I guess that works.” I yawned.

“Yep. Anyway, thought I’d fill you in. Are we meeting the girls for breakfast tomorrow?”

“8am, hotel restaurant.”

“Sounds good. See you then.”

Mental Affairs

Chapter 4

“That’s the price we pay?” Jan asked. I stared at him. “Whatever, never mind. Let’s go get something to eat.”

“Did we really go to a concert last night and find out that Bob is a guy named Alexi, who sings in one of the most popular bands in Romania?” I asked.

“We did.” An enormous grin split Kaia’s face. “Bob is a member of Raze, and he’s been dreaming of you the way you were of him, unbelievable as it sounds. And we’re meeting them for dinner to talk about Alexi and Paul joining us on our backpacking trip.”

“I still can’t believe it,” I said, shaking my head and keeping my voice low so as not to disturb the one remaining person sleeping in the surrounding bunk beds. “I can’t wrap my head around going from a trip for two to a trip for four. Are you sure this is a good idea?”

“Why not?” Kaia said. “I mean, come on, you can’t pass up at least trying a relationship with the guy you’ve been dreaming about.” She pushed back her blankets and moved to the locker at the foot of her bed.

“I know. It just … too far, too fast. You know what I mean?” I sat up and crossed my arms over my chest.

“Don’t worry about it, April,” Kaia said.

“But we met them last night!” I said, trying to put into words the worry that had been growing in my mind ever since I walked out of the dressing room. “I mean, I’ve apparently been dreaming of Alexi for however many months, but I know nothing about him! And you didn’t even know Paul existed before last night. Now we’re inviting both of them on the trip?”

“We have no way of getting to know them without asking them along.” Kaia shrugged. “We’re only staying in town for three days, right? And come on, are you really going to turn down a cute guy who wants to join you on a summer trip?”

“Well, no. I just don’t want to make any rash decisions, is all,” I said. “I didn’t think you were looking for a relationship.”

“I’m not, but I’m not averse to having some fun, particularly with someone as hot as Paul is!” Kaia smiled and raised an eyebrow. “Look, April, if it doesn’t work out we put them back on a plane to Bucharest, or give them the slip and go on by ourselves. Relax and have fun, ok?” She didn’t wait for an answer and changed the subject. “What do you want to do today?”

“I think we had the Gradina Cismigiu planned,” I said, not wanting to push the question of Alexi and Paul any further. It wasn’t that I didn’t want them to come; I just would have preferred to know them for a few months before taking them on as travel buddies. I ducked out of the lower level of my bunk, taking care not to hit my head.

“That sounds good; it’ll be nice to wander around in the gardens for a while,” Kaia said. “We should go shopping, too. I doubt our t-shirts and jeans will be appropriate for the restaurant they’re taking us to.”

I nodded. A ‘nice private restaurant’ didn’t sound like the sandwich shops we had been frequenting, and we’d brought along one nice set of clothes each. Since we’d worn them to the show, we couldn’t wear them again tonight. As I gathered my things and moved down the hall to the bathroom, I saw Kaia with the shirt she had worn, sniffing it and grimacing.

*~*

I slept soundly that night, and woke refreshed for the first time in several weeks. I lay back in bed and mulled over the details of the night before, fixing every aspect of her into my mind. April. She had a name now.

It’s amazing, the difference between this morning and yesterday, I thought. Today the room was light and airy. Yesterday it had felt like a prison. But I had come through, she did exist, and I would see her again tonight.

A knock on the door pulled me out of my thoughts, and I got up to find Paul and Jan in the hall.

“Take a look at some of these, Alexi, they’re amazing!” Paul pushed into the room before I’d even had a chance to say hello. He dumped a pile of newspapers on my bed and separated out the sections he wanted me to see. My image appeared front and center. Jan laughed at the look on my face while I scanned the reviews.

“What, did you think no one would notice?” he asked.

“Man, if you keep doing that, we’re going to explode!” Paul raved. “Jan and I will have to up our performance, so the voices stay balanced.” I swallowed, grating the raw edges of my throat. I wasn’t sure I would be able to talk today, let alone give such a performance again.

“I don’t think I’ll be repeating it,” I croaked. “I killed my voice.” Paul looked somewhat concerned.

“Temporarily stunned, more like,” Jan said. “I doubt you’re a mute now.”

“But that intensity level won’t work if you can’t sustain it,” Paul said. “Maybe you’ll find a balance as things settle down. Better than before, but not quite at last night’s level. Our publicist would appreciate that; your performance is giving him quite the headache, what with everyone wanting to know where the hell it came from. Of course, he doesn’t know, so he can’t tell.” Paul smirked. He had an intuitive sense of what made people tick, and often did exactly the opposite. I could tell he was enjoying keeping our management in the dark. Knowing Paul, he had sent his standard one-sentence text within minutes of leaving the stage: “We will accept no interview requests and have no comment to make.” Information about us reached the public when Paul chose, for the most part, and he crafted every release to create largest possible frenzy of attention.

“How do you plan to explain us disappearing on a backpacking trip?” I asked, skimming through the story leads. “I thought you would want to stay here and keep on top of things. Not that I have a problem with you coming, it just doesn’t seem like something you’d be interested in.”

“I’d like some time away from everything, same as you,” Paul said. “See some new places, get some new material for songs. And I think having us all disappear for a while could be really good for us. Everyone will have your performance to think about for a couple of months, and our absence might increase the interest in the story when we get back. We may have to fan a few flames, but the coals should still be there.”

“There’s more to it than that,” Jan said, grinning. “You should have seen him talking to Kaia last night. I thought he would make a move right there!”

“Well, yes, there is the matter of April’s very attractive friend, who would feel left out if you were the only one to join them,” Paul admitted, moving to sit on the low dresser across from the bed.

“She didn’t fall over herself to be with you, in my opinion,” Jan said. “She seemed a bit on her guard.”

“Just discomfort at being plucked from the crowd by a security guard and brought backstage,” Paul said, flicking his hand as if to wave away an annoying fly.

“I thought you were more of a one-night stand kind of guy,” I said. “I don’t think you’ve ever let anyone hang around for more than a week. You do know this is the entire summer, right?”

“Of course I do!” Paul said, sounding vaguely annoyed. “If she flakes, I hop a plane back here and leave you and April to your bliss.”

“How long are you going to give her to fall into bed with you?” I asked.

“You make me sound like I’m only going to sleep with her!” Paul protested.

“Well…” I let the word hang in the air, trying to keep a straight face. I loved when Jan and I found something we could tease Paul about, and he never handed us material this good.

“Look, it would be a nice perk, but that’s not my sole reason for going. She might be a reason to stay more than a few weeks, but I’d like to shake things up and travel without the expectation of performing.”

“Shake things up?” I snorted and tossed the papers aside.

“Oh, stop being juvenile,” Paul said irritably, before pausing and laughing briefly himself. “Okay, maybe shake wasn’t the best choice of words. But you know what I’m trying to say, so stop twisting it. Besides, that’s what you’re planning for April.”

“So? April and I have only been dreaming of each other for a year, whereas you didn’t know Kaia existed before last night. You don’t know if she’s interested, or even straight.”

“So she might be a challenge. Fine with me.” Paul shrugged. “Besides, if we admit that you and Jan are both in relationships, I ought to be with someone too.”

“Why?”

“It doesn’t work for continuity. We built our image around being single sex symbols – and our appearance will still be a bit part of our appeal – but if I stay single with you two committed, people will start wondering about me, you know?”

“Oh, and no one can wonder about you!” Jan’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “I’ve been hiding my marriage for a year and a half now so no one wonders!”

“I don’t know, Jan, Paul probably just thinks Kaia’s hot, and is sick of hiding his one-night stands,” I said, trying to keep the joke going.

“Think what you like,” Paul snapped. “I don’t have to lay out my motivations for you.” He turned towards the door. “I need to make a few calls.”

I stared at Jan. Paul’s footsteps faded down the hallway. “You think he’s serious, or does he just want the image?” I asked.

“Who knows?” The bitterness in Jan’s voice startled me. “Anika and I weren’t happy when he asked us to keep quiet, but we agreed because his analysis was dead on. We knew we wouldn’t have a normal marriage while the band toured. But for him to change his mind just because he thinks your relationship will be harder to cover up? It’s like he doesn’t realize what he wanted us to do for the past eighteen months!”

“Aren’t you glad you can stop hiding?” I said. I couldn’t imagine doing what Jan had done, stealing days with his wife here and there throughout the tour. We’d been on the road for over a year.

“Well, yeah. But that doesn’t mean I’m not mad,” Jan said.

“I didn’t say you weren’t,” I said. “I don’t know, we’ve grown a lot – maybe he thinks we’re strong enough now to add in an extra dimension to our image.”

“Maybe you’re right.” Jan sighed, picked up one of the papers and glanced at the page before tossing it back down. “We’ve grown, but sometimes I don’t like what we’ve grown into.”

“I guess,” I said, not sure what he was getting at. “It seems to be working, though.”

“Right. The person I’m talking to at the police station says we’ll need to make statements. I’ll tell her to send someone to meet us there. And our manager ought to be there too.”

I got up and rummaged through one of my bags to find some reasonably clean clothes to pull on over my boxers. Jan occupied himself with moving the newspapers into a pile bordering on neat. I stood in front of the mirror and ran my fingers through my hair.

“Come on, we’re just going to the hotel restaurant,” Jan said. “The staff won’t care.” I nodded and grabbed my key, and we headed out the door.

*~*

“What do you think?” I ignored the shopkeeper gesturing enthusiastically beside me and turned to Kaia. The sleeves of my shirt, cut with a dramatic flare at the wrist, fluttered behind me as I spun in a slow circle.

“I love the shirt; the color suits you,” Kaia said. “I’m not sure about the necklace and the earrings, though.”

“What doesn’t work about them?” I raised my hand to the large pendant around my neck. Once the shopkeeper had caught on that we were shopping for a special date, he’d insisted he had the perfect jewelry. The necklace and earrings matched the sea green of my shirt.

“I think you should pick one or the other,” Kaia said. “Together they’re a bit much. Go for the earrings, dangly earrings are sexy. What do you think of mine?” She had matched a pair of capris with a halter top printed with tiny red flowers.

“Nice! You need a necklace, though,” I said. “Here, try mine.”

“Red and blue-green?” Kaia asked.

“They’re across from each other on the color wheel.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean they look-” Kaia paused, looking at herself critically in the mirror. “Actually… not bad. I don’t want my necklace to match your earrings, though.” She handed the necklace back and went off to browse the remainder of the shop’s jewelry selection.

It was another half hour before we left the store, clutching our bags and trying to follow the shopkeeper’s directions to the nearest shoe store. If we were going to dress up, we might as well go all out.

*~*

My nerves, dormant since the night before, returned with a vengeance as we piled into the car for the short ride to pick up April and Kaia. What if they weren’t there, or we had the time wrong, or the wrong address for the hostel? Why hadn’t I had the sense to give them a cell phone, so we could find them? What if April didn’t want to see me again? I didn’t know if I’d want to see me again, I reasoned. Seeing a dream in the flesh had to be unnerving. I mean, I had been unnerved, along with ten million other things.

“Alexi, stop it.” Paul reached over and forced my knee to remain still. I had been unconsciously bouncing off my nervous energy. I tried to be a statue.

“Where are we taking them?” Jan asked. The question was one of few things he’d said to Paul since that morning.

“The Casei Gradina,” Paul said. “They had a cancellation and were able to fit us in. I figured the terrace would be a nice change after the past few weeks.” His voice held no blame, but they still triggered my defenses.

“I did my best,” I said. It had all worked out in the end, so why were we going through this again?

“You managed,” Paul said. “We couldn’t have made the situation stress free.” I stared down at my hands, balled into fists in my lap. “Look, I’m just glad it’s over, all right?” Paul spoke with a sigh of frustration hiding behind his words. “I want you to get past this so we can record in the fall without your dreams hanging over our heads.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but the sight of April and Kaia standing on the curb cut me off. Paul glanced up and down the street and then jumped out when the car drew to a stop.

“Hello, hello, hop in!” I heard him say. “Alexi’s in the middle seat, April, and Kaia, there’s two empty seats we can take in the back.” April moved to get in, her uncertainty obvious across the decreasing distance.

“You look beautiful,” I said quietly, as she settled herself in the seat next to me. “I was afraid you wouldn’t be here.”

“I didn’t know whether to show up,” she said. “It still seems too surreal.”

“I’m glad you did,” I said.

“Kaia made me,” April responded, one side of her mouth quirked into a grin.

“Thanks, Kaia,” I called over to the back seat. Kaia looked up from her conversation with Paul.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “What am I being thanked for?”

“Making April show up,” I replied.

“Any time. I think she might have come on her own, though. She’s not one to shop for clothes she won’t use.”

“Before you start talking about me, please remember I am still here,” April interrupted, her voice amused. I smiled and took her hand in mine, running my fingers across her palm. A moment later, I realized she wore a small ring on her ring finger, and that I held her left hand. My heart rate jumped. I hadn’t asked; I had just assumed she was single… Damn, if I’d been dreaming about a woman who was already dating another guy, some deity would be hearing from me. April saw the look on my face and laughed.

“There isn’t any significance,” she said. “I took a dance class once and found it in the locker room. I wear it to keep the guys away in bars. I even created an imaginary muscular boyfriend to go with it once.”

“Just once?” I asked, trying to hide a sense of relief so large I was sure it had to be filling the car.

“Yeah.” A muscle twitched on the side of April’s face. “Then I found myself a real muscular boyfriend and he was an ass. I had better things to do than go to bars after we broke up.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what to say to that, so instead I sandwiched her hand between mine, vaguely aware of Paul talking to Kaia behind us. I ought to be saying something soothing and reassuring right about now, I thought. “The ring… it doesn’t like, remind you of him or anything, does it?” April looked down at her hand while I traced the ring’s small heart with two tiny leaves embedded into the side.

“I wore this way before he came into my life,” she said.

*~*

The ring, which I tried never to give much thought to, had become a five pound weight on my finger. I couldn’t believe Alexi had noticed. No one I’d met before ever had. It wasn’t flashy like a diamond; while I hadn’t exactly lied about how I used it, I usually had to wave it in men’s faces to get them to back off. And Keith had taken months before- no. I wouldn’t go there. Not on a date with a guy who had the potential to be so much more than that scumbag had ever been.

We were quiet while we climbed out of the car and approached a small, discreet building. It looked too small to be a restaurant, I thought. We walked through the door and Alexi smiled when I gasped. The building was a front for entry into a series of beautiful gardens, with tables tucked into nooks and crannies surrounded by plants. The setting sun streamed through the landscape, illuminating waiters in white who floated across the grass, lighting candles and delivering food. We were soon seated on a terrace surrounded on three sides by climbing rosebushes.

“So, you dance?” Alexi asked me once we had settled in. The question took me by surprise until I realized he was referring to my mention of a dance class during our conversation in the car.

“Not anymore,” I said. “I stopped in high school.”

“Why?” Paul said.

“The classes were expensive and I kept hurting myself,” I answered. “And my parents thought I should be spending my time on schoolwork. I still work out choreography on occasion, but…” I trailed off and shrugged, letting my eyes wander over the gardens. Every so often the hostess would escort another group of patrons to their table, which was always tucked out of sight. If I hadn’t seen other people come in, I would have thought we were the only ones here.

“What styles do you work with?” Jan asked. “And what sort of music?”

“I trained modern, but I tend to mix in bits of whatever catches my fancy,” I said. “It’s not like I ever teach it to anyone. And the music I use depends…” I paused. I’d been planning on finishing with “on what speaks to me”, but that sounded odd, and I didn’t want them thinking I interacted with sounds.

“Depends on what?” Alexi prompted.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” I said. “Like if I’m listening to a song and I can close my eyes and see movement, I try to catch that. I know it doesn’t make much sense, but-”

“No, that makes perfect sense,” Paul broke in. “Writing a song is a very similar experience. You’re trying to catch an idea.”

“You’re with a group of artists, April,” Jan said, playing with the wrapper from his straw. “We write and perform music for a living, and Alexi painted the back cover of our first album. We know exactly what you’re talking about.”

“You paint?” I asked Alexi. He nodded.

“Not much when we’re on tour,” he said. “You do, too. I saw your canvases in some of my dreams.” I wondered what else Alexi had seen during the dreams – there had been times where clothes were strewn about the room, and my roommate’s dishes were piled high on top of her desk. I decided I didn’t want to know.

“I started drawing and painting after I stopped dancing,” I said instead. “I’m not very good. I haven’t had much time to practice.”

“Did you bring a sketchbook on the trip?” Alexi asked.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t think it was worth the weight.”

“Oh,” Alexi said. “You should get one. I’d love to see some of your work. I feel like I know you, but know nothing about you. What did you study?”

“Biology,” I said. “I’ll be starting vet school in the fall.”

“Where?” Alexi asked.

“North Carolina,” I said.

“Vet school- that’s taking care of animals, right?” Paul said.

“Yeah,” I answered, wondering why all these questions were aimed at me.

“Why did you choose to travel through Romania?” Jan asked.

“Kaia and I have been planning this trip for a couple of years. Enough quizzing me; why don’t you answer some of the questions my mother always stumps me with?” Alexi and Kaia laughed, and the dynamic shifted.

“All right, “ Paul said. “I’m twenty-six. I have a law degree that I’m not really making use of by being part of this group.”

“You focused on entertainment and copyright laws, and that has helped us out a number of times,” Alexi said. “As for me, I’d completed eight months at the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies when Paul recruited me for Raze.”

“Economics to pop music? Quite a change,” I commented.

“I hated the Academy, to be honest,” Alexi said. “I met Jan at a show near the National University, and he mentioned me to Paul when they needed a third member for Raze.”

“And how did you know Paul?” I asked, looking over at Jan.

“We’d collaborated on a few pieces, I think. I don’t remember exactly. That was around the time I met Anika, so my attention was elsewhere.”

“Who’s Anika?” Kaia asked.

“My wife.” Jan smiled, watching for Kaia’s reaction. She didn’t bother to hide her surprise.

“You’re married?”

“Yes. We’ve kept it quiet.” Jan’s voice was so devoid of emotion that I wondered if there was something more to the matter. “We’re considering a release, but don’t spill it before we do.” Kaia shook her head.

“Are you two still planning on leaving tomorrow?” Paul asked. I opened my mouth to ask what he meant and then realized he wasn’t talking to me.

“Yeah, Anika will drive up in the morning,” Jan said. “I’ve got lunch reservations at her favorite restaurant, and we’ll be heading for her parents after that.”

“You’ll watch out for Sandu, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Who is Sandu?” I asked.

“A paparazzi who’s decided that photos of us make for a decent paycheck,” Alexi said.

A waiter approached us with a tray of food, and we were enveloped in a comfortable silence broken only by the slight clink of silverware on china. The aromas from the various dishes mixed with the flowers behind us while the light faded to dusk. My mouth watered and I fumbled with my fork, trying to find a grip that would work with my gauze-covered hand. Despite my best attempts, the cut had become infected the day after I’d arrived in Ukraine and was only now beginning to heal. Alexi noticed my trouble and shot me a concerned look, but Paul spoke before he could say anything.

“Let’s see if we can get an idea of what’s happening over the next month or so.” Paul gestured at us with his wine glass. “Kaia, April, what are your plans?”

“April’s the schedule person,” Kaia said, tossing the question to me.

“We’re planning on staying in Bucharest for the next few days,” I said. “The general idea was to travel south through Romania, Bulgaria and Greece, hop over to Italy and move up the peninsula. We need to end in Austria by the first week of August.”

“All right,” Paul nodded. “Well, assuming you lovely ladies don’t mind if Alexi and I join you…” He paused for Kaia and I to nod. “I have only one small change to request with regards to the itinerary.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I’d like us to get out of Bucharest – out of Romania, really – as soon as possible.”

“Why?” Kaia said.

“We are very popular within Romania, but relatively unknown in the rest of Europe. Unless we want to have the Romanian paparazzi following us, we need to slip across the border without anyone knowing where we’ve gone. Once we’re south of Sofia, we’re unlikely to be recognized.”

“You think that’s a concern?” I asked. It sounded so extreme.

“Yes.” Paul didn’t elaborate.

“Well, April and I are spending most of our time on national parks and hiking trails,” Kaia said. “Won’t that reduce the chance of you being recognized? Anyone following us would stand out.”

“That will make it easier to get far enough south,” Alexi said. “And I don’t mind camping.”

“How often are you camping?” Paul asked.

“A few nights a week, and the rest in hostels,” Kaia said. “You fine with that?”

“I’ll toss in the money for a hotel on occasion,” Paul said. “I’m okay with some uncomfortable sleeping arrangements, but I’m fond of a good night’s sleep and hot showers. You’re not cooking on the trail, are you?”

“No, we carry food in,” I said.

“Good,” Paul said. He took a sip of his wine and leaned back in his chair. “I’ll need to buy some gear for this trip. What about you, Alexi?”

“I’ll need a few things, but I’ve still got a pack and a tent at my mom’s house,” Alexi said. “They ought to still be there. She never throws anything out.”

“All right, let’s plan on a couple more days in Bucharest so Alexi and I can gather what we need and you two can spend some more time exploring,” Paul said. “Now, would you be interested in staying at our hotel? It would be nice to spend some time together in the evenings and get to know each other before we head off on this adventure.” Alexi grabbed my hand under the table. I looked over and he grinned at me.

“We’ll pay, of course,” Paul continued.

“Paul doesn’t want anyone to find out about this until you all get back,” Jan said. “I’m sure he has it all planned out, how to work the story to the best advantage of the group.” I detected a definite hint of bitterness in his voice this time.

“Well, yes, there is the publicity. I haven’t decided how to deal with that yet,” Paul said, sounding slightly annoyed. “It will be much easier if we can get out of here without anyone knowing about the two of you. Besides, worrying about being followed in public is a pain. I’m sure we’ll want to see a lot of you over the next couple of days; if you’re in the hotel it will be more convenient.”

I looked over at Kaia, who shrugged.

“I don’t have any objections if you don’t, April,” she said. “Provided we’re not splitting the rooms into couples or anything.”

“Why Kaia, why would you even suggest such a thing?” Paul said, exaggerating his offense. “We expect nothing in return for this; it’s just for convenience.”

“I’m fine, then,” I said. With everyone else agreeing this was a good idea, I could hardly be the lone voice of dissent.

“Good!” Paul said. “We can pick up your bags on the way back to the hotel. Does anybody want dessert?”

*

If I had thought Paul was too concerned about being recognized in public, our stop by the hostel dispelled the notion. I assumed they would wait in the car while we got our bags, but they hopped out when we pulled up at the curb.

“Aren’t you worried about being recognized?” Kaia asked.

“We should be fine,” Jan added. “No one’s expecting us, and we won’t be here very long.”

“If you say so,” I said. Clearly I had misunderstood something about this issue.

The doors of the hostel were propped open to catch the evening breeze. We walked through the small entry and into the lounge that served as the social center of the building. A few staff members and travelers were hanging out when we walked in. The staff obviously knew who we were with, and a couple travelers appeared to have an idea as well. If they didn’t, they were looking surprised along with everyone else.

“Diana?” Kaia addressed the girl who had checked us in the night before. She was our age, and she goggled at us in response. “We’re here to get our stuff, and we’ll need to check out. We’ve met up with some … friends, and we’re going to stay with them.” Silence. “We can pay for tonight; I know the notice is short…” She tossed the words out like a lifeline, trying to get some response from the speechless people sitting on the couches in front of us.

“Oh, that won’t be necessary.” The words came from an older woman who I thought might be Diana’s mother. “We usually get people who drop by later, asking for beds. Forgive us, it’s not every day our backpackers walk in with members of my daughter’s favorite band.” She paused, looking at us each in turn. “Are you sure about this? How long have you known them? I didn’t think you’d spent time in Romania.”

“Don’t worry, it’s not like that at all, doamnă,” Paul said, before Kaia or I could reply. “We’ve known them for a while, or at least Alexi has. We couldn’t meet up last night because of the concert.” His voice was smooth and reassuring. All the same, I was acutely aware of everyone’s eyes on us, Diana’s mother in particular. She focused on my hand, nestled inside Alexi’s. I pulled away.

“We’ll run upstairs and grab our stuff,” I said, glancing at Kaia. “It shouldn’t be too long. We haven’t been here long enough to spread out.”

“We’ll come too,” Jan said, and he, Paul and Alexi followed us. I fought to keep from running from the stares boring into our backs. When we reached the top, I glanced back to see Diana rise and follow us up the stairs. The group below broke into excited whispers.

“I’m still not used to that,” Jan said softly as we entered our room.

“Not yet, we’re going to have company,” Paul said. I saw a meaningful glance shoot between them before Diana tumbled into the room. She appeared to have recovered her voice on the way up the stairs, and even though she spoke in rapid Romanian, I had no trouble catching the gist of what she was saying. Her voice was high and breathless and I caught the names of a few Raze songs while Kaia and I rushed to pack our bags.

It was interesting to watch how Paul, Jan and Alexi played off each other to encourage and rebuff Diana. Paul’s voice had gone from resigned to low and seductive, and Jan and Alexi moved around him seamlessly, drawing her away from us and towards the door. They signed her shirt in permanent marker. Alexi and Jan penned their names across her back and shoulder but Paul wrote directly across her chest, letting his hand linger on her breast an instant longer than needed for his signature. She leaned into him, looking disappointed when he pulled away, but she let Jan and Alexi shepherd her towards the stairs. Paul dropped the act once she had gone.

“Mind if I wash my hands? I got marker on them.” Kaia pointed to the sink in the corner of the room and busied herself with zipping the last few items into her bag. We hoisted our packs onto our shoulders as Jan and Alexi returned to the room.

“There are people outside, Paul,” Jan said, his annoyance clear.

“Damn it! We haven’t even been here ten minutes!” Paul grabbed a towel from one of the beds to dry his hands. “How many?”

“Twenty-five or thirty,” Alexi said. “And they all have their cell phones out, so it’s only going to get bigger. We need to get out of here now.”

Paul let lose a stream of Romanian, and then turned toward Kaia and me. “Do you have any experience with getting through a crowd?”

“Not when we’re the focus of them.” I bit my lip.

“All right, the car is at the curb; all we have to do is get there,” Paul said. “Look straight ahead and don’t say anything. Don’t make eye contact. Jan and Alexi, you know the drill. I’ll say … I’ll say April and Kaia are old friends.” I snuck a glance at Kaia, whose face matched my apprehension. Alexi and Jan nodded: they had heard this before.

“Don’t worry,” Alexi said. “Just smile and look towards the car and we should be able to get through in under a minute. Ready?” Paul nodded, and we moved out the door.

Out in the hall, I could hear the muffled voices of what sounded like far more than thirty people. I craned my neck to see around the corner and gasped. The lounge was filled to capacity. A crowd of mostly girls had packed into every conceivable space, and I could see more outside. The heat from that many bodies invaded the space at the top of the stairs, just out of view of the people below. I heard Alexi swear under his breath, and then all of a sudden the three of them were smiling and animated, waving while we walked down the stairs and blowing kisses. The crowd surged forward. Paul yelled something at Alexi and Jan, and they took the points of a triangle to push into the mass of humanity.

Kaia and I struggled to stay in the small space they managed to clear, but as soon as we had passed people closed behind us, trying to force around us in an attempt to reach one of the band. I slapped someone’s hand off my shoulder and slammed my heel into a leg stretched across my path. The leg was replaced by an arm, then a shoulder, then an entire person, a large black haired girl blocking my way with a malicious grin. She said something which was immediately lost in the din. I tried to push past her, but she forced herself in every direction I tried to dodge, and the rest of the group was slipping further and further ahead. Now the single girl had multiplied into a whole wall of hostile intentions, and they were closing in.

I reached to my belt for my knife and remembered it was back in the US. Fuck. The door was only a few feet away, and I could see the rest of the group fighting their way across the sidewalk to the waiting car. I slipped my pack onto one shoulder, took a deep breath and swung it toward the heads of the girls closest to me. The screams took on a new pitch.

My adversaries fell back, clutching their faces, and I pushed forward. Now the hands were trying to hold me back. Someone grabbed my hair and yanked. I whirled with my pack, not thinking about my actions anymore, operating on sheer panic and instinct. Something slammed into my side, pushing me off balance. My bandaged hand slipped from my pack and slammed into the ground to break my fall. Pain shot through my palm and up my arm. I scrabbled for a grip on the cobblestones, but before I could get back up a high heel planted itself firmly on my hand. I screamed and I kicked out, connecting with something solid and not caring that it wasn’t the person who had just stepped on me. Someone grabbed my arm and I swung around, knocking my elbow into the person’s face.

“Ow! Fuck, April!” Alexi leaned over me, holding his nose. It dawned on me that I had just hit him. A trickle of blood slipped under his hand. He stared at me for a split second while the behavior of the crowd around us disintegrated. Someone screamed in my ear, and all of a sudden I was surrounded by a thundercloud of pointed fingers.

“Come on, hurry!” Alexi took another grip on my elbow, hauled me to my feet, raised his arm to protect his head and charged into the crowd, dragging me along behind him. The SUV appeared in front of us like a mirage, slipping in and out of focus as people attempted to block Alexi’s path and were bowled over. The door opened when we got close and we jumped, crashing into the seats and scrabbling for a hold as Paul slammed the door shut. I dragged myself upright as the driver laid on the horn and began revving the engine, inching the front bumper against the legs of the idiots in the street to encourage them out of the way.

“Vai, Alexi, your nose!” Jan dug under one of the seats and emerged with a box of tissues. Someone began thumping on one of the back windows.

“Did you see who it was?” Paul asked. “We’ll press assault charges, this is entirely ridiculous.”

“No, it was too crazy,” Alexi replied, touching his nose gingerly. “Ugh, I think this might be broken.” I stared at him.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to-”

“Not your fault,” Alexi interrupted. “None of us expected this.”

“But I-”

“Blame the bitches out there, April.” I sat back and shut my mouth. If he wanted to hide the fact that I’d hit him, fine, my arm throbbed too much to argue.

“I still want someone arrested,” Paul said, pulling out his cell phone and punching in numbers as the car finally began moving more than a few inches at a time. “And we’ll need a doctor when we get back to the hotel. Unless you think you need to go to the hospital, Alexi?”

“I don’t want to go out in public ever again,” Alexi said, his voice muffled behind the tissue he was holding under his nose.

“We’ll get someone to the hotel, then,” Paul said. “If he says your nose needs to be reset, though, you’re going to the hospital. We can’t risk your face.”

“It’s not that bad,” Alexi protested, but Paul ignored him and began speaking into his phone. Kaia leaned forward from her spot in the back seat.

“Are you all right, April?” she asked. “Your arm…” I stared down at my hand, shoots of pain running races up and down my arm. I tried to curl my fingers and sucked in a breath, the sudden wave of new pain making me lightheaded.

“Something isn’t right.” I choked on the words, blinking back tears.

“What do you mean?” Jan asked. Alexi turned to look at me as well.

“Someone pushed me and I landed on my arm, and then someone stepped on my hand,” I said, biting my lip to keep from crying.

“And that hand was hurt before this,” Alexi said. “You should make sure it’s not broken. Paul! We need to go to the hospital.”

“What, you decided your nose was broken after all?” Paul asked, covering up the speaker of his phone.

“No, but April might have broken her arm.”

I slapped the alarm and lay back. The only music in my dreams had been live concert replays. No Bob/Alexi looming over me. Kaia stretched in the bed next to mine, and I rolled over to face her.

Mental Affairs

Chapter 3

I moved through the remaining two weeks of our tour with a sense of excitement and anticipation that belied the dwindling amount of sleep I got each night. She was moving, and coming closer. I recognized the scenery once; a trail in the Bucegi Mountains I had hiked a few years before. Jan and Paul had a hard time convincing me not to leave to look for her.

“Normal, Alexi,” Paul had said. “You need to act normal. Normal does not include trips to the Bucegi Mountains to search for someone you saw in a dream on the day of a concert!”

“But if go maybe the dreams will stop.”

“What, are you planning to take naps to keep up with her progress?” Jan snapped. “She’ll be gone by the time you get there, and we’ll have to cancel the show and come up with some explanation for everyone. You don’t even know if she’s real. Come on, get it together!”

I kept seeing glimpses of her during the day, too, which was massively not welcomed. I would see her face in a crowd, but when I looked back she would be someone else. We had given an interview early in the week, before a live audience, and I had frozen when her face appeared in multiple areas of the audience in quick succession. The question was about the stress of performing, thank God, and my reaction had been taken as a joke. Jan and Paul jumped in, agreeing that yes, we were all tired of being on the road, and we were glad the tour was coming to an end so we could take a break. The host threw me a sideways glance and went on with the show.

Afterwards, Jan and Paul looked grim when I told them what had happened.

“How will I know if she’s real if she does show up?” I asked. “If I’m seeing her this way now, how will I know she isn’t another apparition? Maybe I am going crazy.”

“Ask us if we can see her,” Jan said. “Last I checked, I wasn’t having visions of girls; what about you, Paul?”

“Nope,” Paul replied. “I don’t like this, Alexi. It’s freaky, and today you came too fucking close to outing the whole mess.”

“Sorry, not much I can do about seeing this shit.”

“You can do a better job of not reacting,” Paul said. I took a deep breath, trying to keep from saying something else sarcastic. Did he think it was easy to keep calm when her face was flashing everywhere I looked?

“When you see her in crowds, is it quick or does she linger?” Jan asked.

“It’s just for a split second,” I said. “Usually when I scan the crowd.”

“Try not to react,” Paul said. “If she stays for more than a minute, let us know and we’ll tell you if we see her too.”

We had left it at that, but I knew the strain was starting to wear. Our public interactions were becoming more forced, more scripted. We were straining to hold our image together until the last concert. Just four more days – now three, two, and one.

*~*

We arrived in Bucharest on the day of the concert – a few days behind schedule, though Kaia had made me promise to use the schedule as a guideline instead of a gospel. We were following the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, weaving in and out between the tiny little towns and the three gorgeous national parks on the eastern side of the country. Our nights were split between hostels and our tent, and we spent most of our days outdoors.

The close quarters meant I learned to wake myself up when I dreamed of Bob. If I didn’t allow the scene to unfold to the point of having an emotional impact, I could wake silently and Kaia never knew Bob had visited again. We’d constructed an elaborate story for him – something along the lines of him falling in love with a beautiful sorceress, who spurned his affections and doomed him to forever wander the dreams of unattached fair maidens. During the day I found it all quite amusing, but it was easier to keep Bob’s appearances private when I had to force myself awake. In some ways, giving him a name and a story had made the whole thing more difficult because I knew, in those dark morning hours, that our explanation was nothing close to the truth. Unfortunately, knowing I was wrong brought me no closer to the correct answer. I had no idea what could be causing all this, and the mental energy it took to short-circuit each dream meant I traveled through a haze of exhaustion.

The music seemed to be the clue in all of this; the dreams had returned to the pattern of him visiting me in darkness, so I still had only a vague idea of what he looked like. But every dream opened with a Raze song, and even though the whole thing baffled me, I kept returning to the music as if by thinking it through one more time I could somehow come to a different conclusion.

On the morning of the concert we found ourselves buying tickets for Peles Castle.

“Do you want to take one of these trails after we see the castle?” I asked Kaia. We stood outside, trying to get our bearings.

“I don’t think we’ll have time,” she replied.

“You think? It shouldn’t take more than an hour or so to tour the castle.” I glanced up at the elaborate façade towering above us. “If we catch the bus at three we’ll get to Bucharest in time.”

“You really think we’ll go through 160 rooms in an hour?” Kaia said. “Besides, we paid too much for those tickets to miss the concert. You don’t want to disappoint Bob!”

“Oh, right, how could I have forgotten?” I asked, hiding a sigh and trying to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

“Anyway, I think we need to catch the one o’clock, and once we tour the castle we’ll just have time to grab lunch and get on the bus,” Kaia said. “We want to have time to check into the hostel and get ready for the concert, too.”

“Yeah, makes sense,” I said. “Let’s get going.”

I tried to focus on the art and architecture while we moved through the castle. In the back of my head, though, there was a little voice listing with increasing certainty all the things I’d rather do before going to this concert tonight. If only I could skip the show, I mused, maybe then this mess would all go away. Or maybe tonight is a culmination and I can leave Bob with some other unfortunate girl in the crowd. I laughed at myself – I must really be losing sleep to even entertain thoughts that Bob was a physical object I could hand over.

*

I fingered my necklace, staring at the map of the Bucharest metro and continuously re-assuring myself that yes, we were on the right line and our stop was still coming. The sharp edges of the pendant, a silver sun with amber in the center, bit into my fingers. Amber was supposed to bring good luck, I thought. How ironic, as I felt anything but lucky.

“April, calm down!” Kaia said. I looked over to find her staring at me with a mixture of concern and distaste on her face. “You’re going to wear through the chain if you keep moving it back and forth on the chain like that.”

“Sorry.” I forced my hand down to my lap and tried to take a deep breath in the stuffy car.

“What’s up?” Kaia asked. “You’ve been all unsettled today, and that’s not like you.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just… I feel like this concert is important. I don’t understand why.”

“It’s just a concert, April. We’ll go, we’ll enjoy it and we’ll continue our trip.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s not a big deal. Come on, this is our stop.” We got up and joined the flow of people out the doors and up the road towards the concert pavilion.

*~*

Silence reigned backstage, a contrast to our normal modus operandi. There was no banter with the stage hands tonight, or conversations about planned variations to the show. We were so close, but one wrong move in the next two hours could send everything crashing down. I had to keep myself together and, in doing so, keep the group together. I heard muffled cheers when the opener finished their act, and the background music started up again while the tech crew swapped the equipment. All too soon the management was beckoning us on. A chant of ‘We want Raze! We want Raze!’ moved through the building with increasing momentum. Paul held out his fist, and Jan and I piled ours on top of his.

“All right guys, we can do this. Fifteen songs and it’ll be over,” he said. We nodded and ran out on stage.

*~*

Once again, I scanned the ever-changing mass of people around me. Our seats were far back, but we had abandoned them in favor of standing in the throng in front of the stage. We moved with the crowd while it undulated with the beat blasting from the speakers. People dressed in black moved things around on stage. I bounced slightly to the music. The opener had been all right, nothing spectacular. No one had spoken to us since we had arrived, much to my relief. The hum of voices swelled to a cheer when Raze ran onstage and began to sing. My heart rate jumped to match the beat and I let out a whoop. I jumped high to scan the crowd again, but as the music washed around me the action seemed increasingly silly. It wasn’t like Bob was real, after all.

*~*

It’s working, I thought, pumping my fist in the air alongside Jan and Paul in one of our signature moves. She wasn’t showing up everywhere I looked, and we were almost half way through our set. I moved through the dance steps without thinking, and they took me to the head of our triangle formation to sing lead for the next verse. I jumped into it, adrenaline coursing through my blood and bringing the wonderful high that came with whipping the crowd into a frenzy with my music. I scanned the audience, farther and farther back, almost to the point where individual faces began to blur into a single mass.

Her presence hit me like a punch to the face. I had been flying and now she carried me higher, but the words and movements of my performance were left behind. I noticed on some level that my voice had faltered, but I was lost in the fact that she was there, she hadn’t disappeared. I blinked. She was still there!

It didn’t take Paul long to realize what had happened, and he and Jan were next to me within seconds. They grabbed my arms and pulled me back into reality enough to start moving again, and pick up a little of the background vocals Jan had abandoned to take on my part. The world seemed to be moving without me while I focused on her existence out there in the crowd. Thirty seconds – still there. Forty, fifty. A minute, a minute and a half. And then the song swung to an end and Paul was working the crowd, calling out to a pretty girl in the front and telling people to enjoy the intermission, we would be back in a bit. They hustled me offstage.

“You’re not supposed to take an intermission!” someone protested, but Paul held up a hand.

“Alexi, what the hell happened?”

“I saw her, she’s not disappearing, can you see her?” I babbled, breathless. “Look, right out there, in purple, next to the girl in pink and the guy with the green spiked hair. See, hair guy is moving now, do you see her?” We peered out from around the edge of the stage, trying to remain concealed yet be able to see out at the same time. The crowd swirled aimlessly, confused by our sudden departure, but she and her companion stayed still. Time was surreal while I waited for Jan and Paul to say they saw her too.

“I see her,” Paul said, after an eternity. Jan nodded. They both turned to stare at me.

“How can I get to her without being mobbed?” I asked. “I can’t just let her leave when the concert is done!” Paul turned and called to one of the security guards.

“Look here, do you see that girl out in the audience, four or five rows back?” He pointed her out.

“Next to the one with the ponytail?” The guard nodded.

“Yes. Alexi needs to talk to her,” Paul said. “After the show. I want you to go take a position in the crowd near her and stay close for the rest of the night. When people start to leave, go tell her and her companion that we’d like to see them. Keep it quiet, or make it seem like a normal security issue; we don’t want the whole world wondering why they’re coming backstage. Then take the girl in purple to Alexi in the dressing room and the girl in pink to Jan and me in the green room. Got it?” The guard nodded and double-checked a few details.

“Good. And I don’t want this showing up on all the gossip shows tomorrow, understand?” Paul pulled a bill out of his pocket and slipped it into the guard’s hand.

We watched the guard work his way back out into the crowd, pausing to speak briefly with another security worker on the perimeter before taking a position on close to where she stood.

“All right, then.” Paul looked back at us after assuring the guard was positioned to his satisfaction. “Alexi, there’s still half the show to go. I want you to sing to her.”

“What?”

“Sing to her,” Paul repeated. “The second half is slower; there are more love songs. Apparently she’s real. So sing to her. You can turn this whole thing around by injecting so much emotion into your voice that everyone will sit up and take notice. Put every bit of those dreams into those songs.”

I took a deep breath. The idea was different, but this situation was so ridiculously far from reality that singing to her just might work. Paul and Jan looked away while I scrambled to find a straight face and rolled my shoulders a few times.

“Ready?” Jan asked.

“Ready,” I said. We piled our hands on top of each other once again, but this time there was hope and enthusiasm in the action.

“Let’s go!”

*~*

“Is Bob enjoying the concert?” Kaia asked after Raze had run offstage for intermission.

“There’s not been a peep from him!” I laughed. “No dreams, no visions, nothing!”

“Hey, there’s still half the show left; maybe he’ll find himself a body and show up in the crowd!” Kaia joked.

“How freaky would that be?” I said. “The dude from my random repeating dream showing up in the flesh?”

“Really freaky, that’s what it would be. He’d have some ‘splainin to do!”

“Seriously!” I laughed again, and took a quick sidestep as a guy with green hair and several facial piercings staggered drunkenly toward me. “And then he’d have to promise to stay the hell out of my head!”

“Seems reasonable,” Kaia said. “He’s been in there for what, four months now? High time for him to move on.”

‘I think it might be five,” I said. “I didn’t exactly write it down on a calendar, you know. ‘February 1^st, had disturbing dream, must have eaten something off at dinner.’”

“I’d be concerned if you had!” Kaia laughed. “I know you’re mature, April, but you’ve got several decades before you need to start behaving like my grandmother.”

“Oh, Christ, no!” I faked sounding horrified. “I only keep track of the stuff that’s coming, not the stuff that’s already happened!”

“I thought you used to keep a journal?” Kaia asked.

“Yeah, but I fell out of the habit after you left. Campus was just too desolate without you,” I joked.

“Aww, April, I didn’t realize you cared!” Kaia said. “Oh, look, Raze is coming back on!”

*~*

The music coursed through my body, pulling me higher than I had been even before seeing her in the audience. I imagined pouring my heart into the words, so much so that I barely registered what I was singing. Little snippets of lyrics made their way through to my brain, meshing with the image of her dancing in the crowd. I fought to stay on stage and not to jump down and run to her.

Can you tell me why,

As the day rushes by,

The world is frozen,

In the night of your eyes?

How could she stay there, dancing as if she had no idea? Couldn’t she feel my agony up here on the stage? She had to know – how could she not? What if she had never dreamed of me the way I had dreamed of her? What if this was all some cruel joke played by a malevolent god? I didn’t think I could stand it if she didn’t know.

We’ll stay through the night,

To taste the morning,

To ask with tenderness,

To answer with love,

And when we wake up,

We both will know,

That for me there

Is only you.

Pour these thoughts into the music, the music, the music. I forced emotion into every fiber of the words, pushing the crescendos and decrescendos until my voice felt ready to crack from the strain. Jan and Paul sang on either side of me, and I pulled back for Paul’s spoken verse that always made every girl in the crowd swoon. I watched while she laughed and met the eyes of her companion, as if they had shared some inside joke without speaking. I wanted to know her inside jokes. We started singing again, sweeping in with soft notes that hung in the air like smoke.

Where are you?

Where are you?

I call and you don’t answer.

I knock and you’re not there.

But in my dreams you watch me,

Where are you?

Finally our last song drew to a close and the crowd exploded. It was the loudest cheer we had gotten on the whole tour, and yet I hardly noticed. I stared at her, reaching with my eyes, willing her to look at me, to show some sign of recognition. She continued talking with the girl next to her, probably the only two girls in the pavilion without their eyes glued to the stage, I thought bitterly. Look at me!

And then she did.

She moved to brush her hair away from her face, and froze with her hand next to her head. Her eyes met mine from across the distance and it was a lifeline thrown to a drowning man. I felt Paul’s hand on my arm, pulling me to respond to the crowd, to finish the last part of the act we put on. Her friend put a hand on her shoulder, concerned about her sudden silence. I saw her shake her head and her eyes dropped. I continued to toss glances her way while I helped Jan and Paul play the crowd, and I noticed when the security guard started to weave his way towards her. And then we were waving our last goodbyes and running offstage.

“Alexi, that was phenomenal!” Paul raved. “I can’t wait to see our reviews!” I barely heard him.

“He’s somewhere else,” Jan said. “Go on, Alexi, you have an appointment to keep.”

*~*

Raze gives a great performance, I thought. Especially that blond one on the right, he’s pouring himself into it. He has Bob’s profile, I mused, and scoffed at myself. Bob wasn’t real, and even if he was, he couldn’t be the famous singer on stage!

My muscles were starting to protest from almost two hours of dancing. This had to be their last song, or at least close. Kaia had been playing this song the first time I had gone by her room to study. I hadn’t known her very well at the time, but we had spent close to an hour talking about the beats and chord structures of the CD. To our detriment on the exam the next day, if I remembered correctly. That song had brought us to this spot, on this trip. I glanced over at Kaia and smiled when she met my eye.

“Remember this one?” I asked, leaning in close so she could hear me over the cheering crowd as the music drew to a close.

“It’s the one that started it all,” she said. “I still think it’s their best, no matter what the rest of the world says. Looks like their last, too.”

I nodded, letting my eyes drift back towards the stage and trying to tease my hair away from my face and back into my hair clips. I paused. Was I imagining things, or was the blond guy on stage looking at me? I stared back at him. He did have the exact same profile from my dream… No. He could be looking anywhere in this area; I couldn’t tell from this far away. He couldn’t be looking at me. I felt Kaia’s hand on my shoulder and I shifted my gaze to the floor.

“You okay, April?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

Up on stage the band members were flirting with a group of girls at the barrier, though the blond one seemed to be doing it a bit halfheartedly. He kept looking back towards us and focusing again on the front row. Maybe… No. Not possible. Raze sprinted offstage and the people around us surged towards the doors. We stayed put, preferring not to get caught in the rush to leave. I chatted with Kaia and scanned the crowd, not paying much attention to what I said until one of my sentences garbled completely. Kaia was laughing at me when a security guard approached us.

“I need you to come with me,” he said. That shut Kaia up pretty quick.

“Why?” she asked, her voice suspicious.

“Your presence has been requested,” he replied, and wouldn’t say anything more.

*~*

I left Paul and Jan backstage and ran to our dressing room. It was a comfortable enough, with bright lights and walls covered with posters from the groups who had passed through. I sank onto one of the stuffed armchairs in the corner, then changed my mind and moved to the loveseat closer to the door. Just a few minutes and I’d see her! I got up and started pacing, checking the clock above the mirror with each circuit around the room. Ten seconds per lap, and I checked two, three, four times. I sat down again, only to resume pacing less than a minute later. She spoke English; I’d have to remember to speak to her in English. Had I told Jan and Paul? I couldn’t remember. They’d figure it out soon enough.

It would take time for the guard to get to them and pull them away without attracting attention. Four minutes, five minutes. Where was she? Maybe the guard had lost her; maybe she had slipped out with the rest of the crowd. What would I do then? The thought of knowing she existed and had been so close…

I sank into the armchair again, with my face in my hands. She was gone- I knew it. The clock ticked off the seconds without mercy. And then someone knocked on the door.

My head whipped up so fast that my neck screamed in protest.

“Come in.” My voice was hoarse. I had pushed way too far during the performance.

The doorknob turned and there seemed to be an eternity until the door opened. She stepped hesitantly into the room and I caught a glimpse of the guard pulling the door shut behind her. I stared, struck by the overpowering reality of her existence. She stood, unsure, a step inside the door.

“Oh my god, it’s you,” I breathed, standing up and moving toward her. She remained solid as I approached. In fact, she didn’t move – didn’t react at all to my words.

“Tell me you’ve had the dreams, too. You have to have had them!” My stomach twisted.

“I can’t believe this,” she whispered, shaking her head slightly. “It must be another dream. He’s not real. He’s not really coming towards me.”

“It is real; I’m real,” I said. “Look at me, touch me, I exist!”

“He says he’s real,” she murmured, so low I almost missed the words. “It would be nice if he were.” Her voice caught in her throat. I reached for her, wanting to pull her into my arms and prove my reality.

“No, don’t!” Her voice rose. “Don’t touch me!”

“What?”

“You’re not supposed to touch me. You’re supposed to disappear now, just like you’ve done all the other times.” Her voice wavered and she stared at the floor, sneaking glances at me as she spoke. “But before you go, stop showing up in my dreams. It hasn’t been nice seeing you, goodbye.”

I stood, rock still, paused inches from her with my hand extended, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do next.

“I’m not a dream,” I said. “Not this time.” I reached forward and brushed my fingers across her bare shoulder. She gasped. “A vision couldn’t do that,” I said. I ran my fingers down her arm and slipped her hand into mine. Her eyes followed my every move.

“You’re touching me,” she said. “I can feel you touching me. I’m not that crazy.” She looked up at my face. “Why did you pull me out of the crowd? Where’s Kaia?”

“I’ve been dreaming about you for more than a year!” I said, disappointment replacing panic in the pit of my stomach. This wasn’t the reaction I had expected. “I couldn’t just let you leave after I saw you. And your friend is with my band mates.”

“Oh.” She seemed to be thinking this over. “You’ve been dreaming of me? Why?”

“I wish I knew,” I said. “Trust me, it would have been easier if I hadn’t. But I did, and now you’re here. Would you like to sit down?” I gestured to the loveseat behind me.

“Okay…” She perched on one corner. I sat down next to her, towards the middle, still holding her hand. “So. I’ve been dreaming of you, you’ve been dreaming of me, and we’re both real.”

“So it would appear,” I said, staring at her. She looked bewildered, but even more gorgeous in person than in my dreams, with her hair pinned back and her cheeks flushed from dancing.

“Do you have a name?” she asked.

“I’m Alexi Kostov. And you?”

“April Singer.”

“April.” I let the name roll around my mouth and become familiar. “Beautiful.” She laughed tightly, as if she were not quite comfortable with my words. “Why didn’t you know who I was?” I asked.

“I don’t speak Romanian. And I never saw your face in the dreams, just your profile. It was always dark.”

“But the day you were listening to music, with all the boxes-”

“Would you be looking at details if a strange guy somehow appeared in a locked room?”

“Well, no, I don’t suppose I would,” I said, considering. “Did I scare you?”

“Sort of, yeah,” she admitted. “It’s a good thing I moved out later that day. Staying there with a ghost or whatever you were would have been… unsettling.”

“You thought I was a ghost?”

“I didn’t know what you were. Maybe a symptom of way too much stress. What did you think I was?”

“I thought you were real.” I shrugged. “I saw you often enough that there weren’t many other conclusions I could make. The whole thing drove us all nuts.”

“Why?”

“I was dreaming of you each night, sometimes more, and for the past few weeks I’ve been seeing your face in crowds. I couldn’t always hide my reaction, and Jan and Paul had to run interference to keep anyone from finding out.”

“Why would it matter if anyone found out?” she asked. I paused before answering. I didn’t want to explain the complexities of our image and scare her away in our first hour together.

“It matters,” I said. “The publicity would have been awful.”

“Oh,” she said. “So Jan and Paul are the other members of Raze? Where are they?”

“They’re backstage with your friend Kaia,” I said, glad she had changed the subject. “Should we go find them?”

*~*

Good lord, this was like something out of a movie. Random guys weren’t supposed to show up in your dreams for months on end, turn out to be real and have been dreaming of you too. Oh, and random guy just happened to be amazingly hot, intelligent, and famous. I couldn’t wrap my head around what was happening to me. I kept running through the evening as if by analyzing it one more time I could figure out when reality had disappeared and this fairy story had taken over. I had even kept my composure when he touched me. It felt nice.

“So what are you and Kaia doing in Bucharest?” Alexi was saying while we navigated the narrow halls between the dressing room and the stage. “Where are you from, anyway? My dreams didn’t come conveniently labeled with ‘April Singer, 2:43 AM, Somewhere.’” I laughed. Damn, he was funny, too.

“I’m from the US – outside of Washington, DC, to be exact.”

“Then what are you doing in Romania? I saw you and Kaia traveling in my dreams.”

“We both graduated a couple weeks back. We’re taking a summer backpacking trip before we go for more education,” I said.

“Oh, so you must be close to my age.” He reached out to grab my hand. “What are you, twenty-three?”

“Twenty-two.”

“I was close,” he said. “How long are you staying in Bucharest? Where are you staying, for that matter?”

“We checked into one of the hostels in the city center this afternoon,” I said. “I think we’ll be here another few days.”

“Let me show you around,” he said. “I spent a summer here a few years ago; I know all the good places to go.”

“I’d like that,” I said, smiling at him. He smiled back, and proceeded to walk straight into a vertical pipe inexplicably placed in the middle of the narrow hallway.

“Are you okay?”

“Ow! Yes.” He rubbed the side of his head, looking rueful.

“Don’t go injuring yourself just to get out of showing us around tomorrow!” I joked.

“Hey, now that’s not fair,” he protested. “I don’t take things back within seconds of offering.”

“Take what back?” A new voice rang down the hall. We turned and saw Kaia and the two other band members standing next to an open door.

“Jan, Paul, come over here, there’s someone I want you to meet!” Alexi called. They moved towards us.

“So, this is the mystery girl?” The shorter of the two guys stepped in front. He had olive skin and brown hair streaked blond and plastered back over his forehead with sweat. His large glasses emphasized his angular face, and a tight shirt with suspenders created a look that somehow managed to be geeky and extremely sexy.

“Yes! April, this is Jan, in front, and Paul.” Alexi gestured at the second band member, a taller man with dark eyes and black spiked hair. Paul moved forward and bowed, sweeping my hand up to his lips and releasing it gently. I noticed he had moved first toward my still bandaged right hand and switched sides without the slightest hesitation.

“You have no idea what a relief it is to have you appear at last,” Paul said, his voice quiet and formal. “Alexi has been almost unbearable the past few weeks.” His eyes traveled up and down my body, lingering at my chest. Heat rose in my cheeks. Alexi noticed too, and put his arm around my shoulder. I tensed for a split second before forcing myself to relax.

“Well, we certainly had an interesting time with Alexi showing up in April’s dreams,” Kaia said, her voice a welcome diversion. “We called him Bob.”

“Really? Bob?” Paul turned towards Kaia, his expression interested.

“Yes, Bob the amazing dream alter-ego who offended a goddess and was doomed to wander the dreams of fair maidens.” Kaia laughed.

“April, you didn’t tell me that part,” Alexi said. “I’m glad it’s not true.”

“Definitely,” Jan said. “Having a band member doomed to wander in dreams would be problematic come time to record our next album.”

“Yes,” Paul said, glancing between Kaia and me. “So, what should we do now? The venue would like us to leave, and we’ll have to sign autographs on the way back out to the bus. Why don’t you two lovely ladies tell us where you’re staying and we can arrange to meet up tomorrow?”

“I was thinking about showing April and Kaia around Bucharest tomorrow,” Alexi said, tightening his arm around my shoulder.

“You won’t get very far, not after the performance you gave tonight,” Paul said. “Besides, do you want everyone to find out about this yet?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The whole experience, with the dreams and you meeting each other,” Paul said. I thought I felt Alexi tense next to me, but the movement was so slight I wasn’t sure. “Everyone’s going to be talking about your performance, Alexi. I heard someone describe it as ‘grippingly beautiful.’ If we toss in the fact that you’ve met someone at the show and oh, by the way, she’s the same girl you’ve been dreaming of for the past year, it will be a madhouse. Let’s let the story leak in a month or so, when things have had time to settle down.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Alexi said, nodding. “You know how to play the press.”

“Let’s meet for dinner tomorrow night,” Paul said. “We’re going to have lots to work out. Kaia said the two of you are backpacking, correct?” I nodded, beginning to grasp the meaning of his words. I didn’t know if I liked where this was going.

“My guess is Alexi will want to come with you. And I wouldn’t mind coming either, if you’ll have me.” Paul glanced toward Kaia, who flushed pink. “But let’s work that out tomorrow. There’s a nice private restaurant near the city center. May we pick you up at your hostel around six?”