Free The Lovers by Vendela Vida

assertively—a strange panic was growing like a vine up her legs. Lawrence opened the door, his shirt off, and Yvonne forgot to adjust her plan. She let her robe open and drop to the floor behind her. And then she saw Lawrence was not alone. She should have known by Lawrence’s face—he was not happy to see her. But behind him she saw a man pullinga robe around his naked body. The same hotel robe—the Florentine flower stitched in gold on the pocket over the heart—that Yvonne had just let drop from her shoulders. A sound escaped her throat, passing through her lips before she could stop it. She ran back to her room, where she splashed her face with water and sat on the balcony for an hour, repeatedly counting the bridges of the Arno River, until the knocking at the door had finally stopped.
    In the morning she saw him at breakfast.
    “I’m sorry you found us,” he said.
    “You’re sorry I found you, but not sorry about what you did.”
    “We could have had a great trip.”
    She did not tell him her parents expected that the European trip, for which his family was paying, meant they would return engaged. Yvonne and her sisters had shared the same room growing up, and when they had reunited in Albuquerque the previous Christmas, they’d spent the night in their old beds, in their old room, with their photos of prom nights and roller coaster rides, and invitations to high-school graduation parties still thumbtacked to the large, porous corkboard on their wall. It was there in that room, among these photos, that her sisters had planned her wedding for her—the ice with the mint leaf frozen within each cube, the dahlias, the million tiny silver stars that would be thrown instead of rice. She was surprised by how eagerly she greeted their conviction that she and Lawrence would marry.
    She checked his face for signs of regret, and she saw it there in his eyes and his cheeks, which had slackened into jowls overnight. He had plenty of regret, but all of it for himself. He regretted bringing her. Some other girl would have accepted the bargain, and gratefully.
    “How I pity you,” she said, and only a moment later, when he began to cry, did she realize this was true.
    They spent the rest of the day in their separate rooms, writing notes to each other on hotel stationery. She would write three pages of a letter, fold it into quadrants, and slip it under the thick door to his room. Then she would pace around her bed, run the bathtub and fill it with bubbles (as though she could actually sit in a bathtub when waiting for his response) until his reply slid beneath her door. His letters were unfolded single sheets.
    At the end of the day a decision had been reached. He would continue on the trip without her and she would remain in Florence until her scheduled flight home, in three weeks’ time. She didn’t want to return early because she didn’t yet know what explanation she would give to her family. Nor did she have any interest in continuing on their planned itinerary, as he suggested. He could see Switzerland and its mountains and Austria and its white horses with out her.
    The next morning when he came to her door to say good-bye he looked like a person who had been relieved of a lie. Staring at him, Yvonne thought of an amateur painting she had once seen in which the seated figure cast no shadow, bore no relationship to the ground beneath him.
    “I’ll write to you,” he said.
    “I’m not going to keep staying here,” she said, gesturing to the rug of the hotel room behind her, as though the small rug was where she spent her time.
    “Then I’ll write to you care of poste restante. ”
    “Okay,” she said, as though she knew what this meant.
    “It’s a box they keep at every main post office, anywhere you go. Since you don’t know where you’re staying…”
    “Okay,” she said again.
    They parted without touching. He left her a purple purse with a gold clasp, a farewell present. She was not surprised