Free Just One Night by Gayle Forman Page A

live. About him living anywhere. When she’d met him, he’d lived out of a backpack.
    In the kitchen, Willem tries to collect himself as he makes drinks. (He watches the kettle; the adage is true, it refuses to boil.) He digs through the cabinets for the tea that he recalls his uncle Daniel saying he kept for Fabiola, his soon-to-be wife, the soon-to-be mother of his child, whom he is now with in Brazil. Willem makes himself a coffee—using the instant because it is faster and it has already taken too long for the water to boil.
    He puts it all on a tray and returns to the lounge. Allyson is sitting on the sofa, her sandals off, neatly placed under the coffee table. (The sight of her bare feet. What this is doing to Willem’s blood pressure. She might as well have taken off all her clothes.)
    He puts the tray down on the coffee table and sits on the couch, but on the opposite side from Allyson. “I hope chamomile is okay,” he says. “It’s all my uncle has.”
    “It’s fine,” Allyson says. Then, “Your uncle?”
    “Daniel. This is his flat. I’m staying here while he’s in Brazil.”
    Allyson almost tells him she thought he lived in Utrecht, that was where she’d tracked him down before the trail went cold. Or she’d thought it went cold. Until she’d accidentally heard about
As You Like It
being performed in Vondelpark last night and she somehow
knew
that Willem would be in it.
    Accidents. All about the accidents. She wants to tell Willem this, is working out how to start without sounding like a complete lunatic, when he says: “Daniel used to share this flat with my father, Bram. When they were young. And then my father met a girl while he was traveling. They spent a day together. Not even a day, a few hours, and a year later, she showed up here. She knocked on the door.”
    Like you just did
, Willem thinks, but he doesn’t say that. He doesn’t want to sound like a complete lunatic.
    “Your mother,” Allyson says.
    “Yes. My mother. She’s in India right now.” He thinks of her. He cannot wait to tell her this. He takes a small moment to savor that, being eager to tell his mother something. Then he goes back to savoring Allyson, and her bare feet, which are
right here
. He never thought he had a thing for feet, but he is beginning to reconsider.
    Allyson remembers Willem talking about his mother and father. It was during their conversation—argument? debate?—about love when Willem had smeared the Nutella on her wrist and licked it off. Allyson had challenged Willem to name one couple who hadn’t just fallen in love but had remained in love, had stayed stained.
Yael and Bram
, he had said.
    “Yael and Bram,” Allyson says now, not even having to reach for the names.
    She remembers Willem’s sadness last summer. And immediately she knows, maybe she knew then, that there is no more Bram. Which isn’t to say there is no more stain.
    Yael and Bram.
Something in Willem’s chest catches. He’d been right. He is known to this person. Has been from the very start.
    He looks at her. She looks at him. “I told you I would remember,” Allyson says.
    Before he’d kissed her that night in the art squat, she had told him that she’d remember everything about their day in Paris. That she would remember
him
.
    Willem had made no such promises. But he can taste, touch, hear, and smell every last detail of that day together. “I remember, too,” he says.
    There is so much to say. It is like shoving all the sand of the world into an hourglass. Or trying to get it out.
    But Willem’s phone keeps ringing. He keeps ignoring it, until he remembers he promised he’d call Linus back right before he opened the door to her.
    “Oh, shit. Linus.” He goes to fetch his mobile. Five missed calls.
    Allyson looks curious. He tells her, “I have to make a call.”
    She thinks he will go into the other room to do it, but he doesn’t. He sits down next to her.
    The conversation is in Dutch so Allyson doesn’t