Free Stray Love by Kyo Maclear

walk for hours. Sometimes she walked so far that at nightfall she would have to borrow a telephone and call Stasha to pick her up.
    I was travelling on the bus with Oliver. It was Sunday afternoon and it had rained recently and the streets had a damp metal sheen. The bus had just turned the corner onto Bayswater Road, past the cash and carry when Oliver slapped the window and said, “Christ. That’s Pippa.”
    He leapt up, called to the driver to stop, and pulled me off the bus. I wanted to yell out to her, but Oliver held my arm and said, “Shh.”
    She was walking towards the entrance to Kensington Gardens. He nodded in her direction and said, “Look, Marcel, we’re going to play spy for bit.”
    I thought it was a fun game at first. We tailed after her at a distance to avoid being seen, listening for the gentle clopping ofher shoes on the paved path as she slowed down. She was lost in her own thoughts and didn’t appear to notice us. I saw, as we got closer, that her hair was wet.
    After a short while, I started to feel nervous. What were we really doing? I looked over at Oliver, my hands waving, gesturing,
Why are we hiding?
He raised a finger to his lips.
    There was a tree up ahead along the path, with dark, glossy leaves and sooty branches that intertwined to form a canopy. She stopped under it. Oliver stepped back between two shrubs and pulled me with him. We waited to see what she would do.
    The ground was littered with faded petals and swollen buds that had fallen off the branches. Pippa bent over to inspect these. I watched as she tried to pry several buds open, manually bloom them, kneading, coaxing, slowly peeling, in one case revealing a frill of perfect satiny pink, which seemed to glow in the grey air. More buds fell from the tree, as if shaken.
    Two women strolling by noticed the shedding tree and hurried past, holding their hands over their faces to protect their powdered noses from any scattering of moisture.
    Pippa looked up, staring at the canopy of leaves. She lifted her arms as high as she could reach, and then opened her hands. The buds she had been holding fell with tiny splashes around her feet, with the weight of small tired birds. The ground was strewn with soft, beaten flowers. I felt a sudden chill.
    Pippa pushed her wet hair back from her face and crouched down, carefully making her selections—squeezing each bud between her thumb and fingers like a woman choosing the best oranges at a market—and putting them in her coat pockets. What criteria determined her choices? When she was finished, she stood, hiked up her sagging skirt and gave her bulging pockets two satisfied pats. She then turned her attention backto the shiny pavement and resumed walking, her soles lined with trampled petals.
    I reached out a hand, but something held me back from calling to her. I watched as she floated off—gone.
    When I looked at Oliver he was squeezing his eyes closed. I was beginning to understand that there were feelings he had that had nothing to do with me. But it still shocked me. I had never seen him cry before.
    I decided he had been crying over her beauty, in the way grown-ups sometimes cried over beautiful things that made them happy. I couldn’t understand, then, when he started to accuse Pippa of being overly concerned with her appearance.
    Why nail polish, satin nightgowns, new shoes? Why such high heels?
    Pippa stamped his forehead with kisses and said, “Relax, Oliver, I love you, I love you.”
    But he continued: Why were her socks damp? Where had she been walking? Why was she so cheerful? He even wanted to know when she had started drinking coffee instead of tea.
    “You have a lot of anger, Oliver,” she said.
    “Of course I do. What do you expect?”
    “But what have I done?”
    “You still think about him,” he said. “It’s obvious that he’s always on your mind.”
    “Of course he is, Oliver. But I’m here with you now, aren’t I?”
    I touched her arm. “Who’s always