Saudade
Saudade (Portuguese) — a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one cares for and/or loves.
Rest came as unsteadily as it usually did for Therese, her gaze ploughing into the near-darkness of her room and searching for an escape in anything familiar, anything at all. Even through the caliginosity of it, she could still see the peeling wallpaper in the corner, drawn by water damage and age away from the wall since she had arrived. At some point, she’d have to fix that. That would, of course, require actually caring enough about the appearance of her room to fix it in the first place — it would be a while.
She turned again, her leg now sticking just out of the edge of the duvet, the coolness of the winter air taking her thoughts momentarily away from the only thing she could seem to think about. Carol. Even now, five hours on from their goodbye, she could still feel the warmth of Carol’s palms pressed against her back, the comfort of Carol’s chin resting on the crown of her head. She shivered, putting her uneasiness decidedly down to the temperature. The warmth that emanated from her core spoke differently of exactly why she was shivering, and Therese ignored that too. It was too late for this.
And yet.
Heaving a slightly frustrated sigh, Therese gathered the blanket up from the rest of her body and pushed it onto the mattress beside her, steadying herself as she sat up. Sleep wasn’t going to come — at least, not for another few hours — and when it did, Therese knew all too well the name she would call out and follow into consciousness, sweat pooling in the hollow of her neck as she dreamt. Carol. Carol, over and over again until it was a foreign word that stumbled from her mouth, just as uninvited as the fantasies themselves. She willed herself away from them now, away from the bed that would hold her as she writhed; light feet padding across the hardwood. God, it was cold this time of year.
She’d been meaning to invest in slippers since November, but the reminder had always eluded her right when she needed it, and bare her feet remained. The latch on her door was painfully loud as she tugged it back, echoing through the house like a misfire. She shut her eyes, briefly, listening for any sign of life from Dannie. Nothing. The light in here was better, seeping in from under the front door and gaps in the blinds, and Therese could easily see enough to make her way over to fridge. Empty, apart from three cans of beer, a bottle of milk, and some minced beef she’d been meaning to do something with. I bet Carol’s fridge is full to the brim. Wine and caviar and tapenade and all that fancy shit. She stepped back, noting that the milk’s expiry date had long passed — wasn’t that the milk I put in Carol’s tea? — picking up the throw that was supposed to be on the couch and draping it over her shoulders like one of those sad Victorian children she’d read about in A Christmas Carol.
Carol.
She really couldn’t escape that damned name.
“Therese?”
Dannie waved a cautious hand in front of her face in an attempt to draw her attention back to him, the steam from the cafetière rising up, a shield between them.
“Yeah?”
“You’re miles away.”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry."
Therese looked down at her coffee.
"S'fine."
"The blonde?”
Therese looked back down at her coffee, her smile sheepish and restrained. Dannie leaned across the table, nudging her, an equally unrestrained grin painted on his face.
“The hot one?”
Therese’s eyebrows drew up with her gaze.
“She’s not just a hot blonde!”
The glint in Dannie’s eyes became apparent, his mouth hanging open accusatorially. Jackpot.
“Therese Belivet, you flirt.”
With a mock scowl on her face, she reached across the table, punching her makeshift interrogator softly on the arm.
“She’s barely even a friend. We met last Tuesday in the bookshop I like and she’s really nice.”
Dannie guffawed, coffee spilling unceremoniously from the side of his mouth.
“Friend as in, with benefits?”
In a bid to distract from the pinkish hue rising steadily up her cheeks, Therese flicked a piece of her toast at Dannie. She was moments too late, though, and he bounded up, his chair scraping across the floor behind him.
“You’re blushing!”
Therese tilted her head back to stare past the ceiling, praying to any god that existed that this line of questioning would end. Soon.
“And you're an idiot, Daniel."
Dannie shook his head, abjectly refusing to drop the subject despite Therese’s hopeless quips. He finished his coffee with a flourish, mopping up the dribble that had escaped with his incredulous laughter.
“The real question here, though, does she…”
He wiggled his eyebrows conspiratorially, miming the action of hitting a baseball as Therese watched on.
“Does she bat for the same team?”
Therese groaned into her mug.
“It’s not a forbidden question, Dannie. You’re allowed to ask without doing… that.”
He shrugged.
"Look, I haven't asked her and it'd be weird if I did.”
Dannie made a move to speak before he looked down at his watch, eyes widening.
“Shit. Can you clean up breakfast? I’ll do dinner tonight if you want.”
There was barely time to nod as Dannie grabbed his suit jacket from the chair, sprinkling crumbs of toast as he went. He paused by the front door, just out of sight.
“Therese?”
She leaned backwards, catching his eye.
“Just… be careful, okay? With the blonde. She sounds great, I’m not denying that, but…”
He trailed off, a remorseful shrug tearing down the façade that his smile had been so dutifully holding up.
“You know what happened with Gen.”
The words stung, even though Therese knew how delicately Dannie had tried to release them. They both knew what had happened with Gen, the event which had rendered her unable to speak for days, completely inconsolable for weeks. Even now, two months after the fallout, the thought still hurt her stomach — a gut punch where once, there were butterflies. She nodded, locking eyes with Dannie again. I know, she mouthed, unsure why her words had made no noise. Perhaps she would have tried to sound out some other sentence to reassure them both, but as soon as the thought crossed her mind, Dannie was gone.
As the physical door shut behind him, another opened up somewhere deep in the archives of Therese’s mind, and it was all that she could do to hold back the tears that clawed at the back of her eyelids. How she longed for someone to hold her as she sobbed, and sobbed, and sobbed. There was no-one, however, and Therese sat in the kitchen for quite a few more minutes after that, pleading with herself over and over not to break down.
The day passed almost as uneventfully as most other days usually did, save for a pigeon crashing into the living room window and scaring Therese absolutely shitless. Unperturbed, it had fluttered off, having caused enough of a distraction to enlighten Therese as to how lacklustre her book was. Gently, she placed it back onto the L pile, holding it as it teetered before stepping back and praying that the domino effect didn’t decide to demonstrate itself in the meek confines of her apartment. Boredom tended to creep in on days like this, in moments like these, and here it unabashedly was, slinking in under the cracks of doors like smoke from a fire.
She looked around, her eyes finally settling on the collection of books that rested on the mantel. The Book Thief sat, an ever-present taunt, on the edge of the row. The cavities where her nails had pressed still lay emboldened on the front cover and as she made her way over, her fingers down brushing against the paper. I suppose you’ll have to buy this now. Carol’s words flooded back into her ears and she sighed, letting the memory run from her nape to the small of her back.
She wondered, as she so often found herself wondering nowadays, whether the older woman would have been repulsed had Therese simply closed the gap between them and taken Carol’s lips in her own, nimble hands reaching up to cup the implausibly sharp line of her jaw. The thought was a maze and Therese was blissfully lost in it, clutching the novel to her nose and praying that the faint whiff of Carol’s perfume wasn’t simply a figment of her imagination. The battle was waged now, and Therese was tracing her steps back through that maze, fighting to find her way back to that intoxicating scent of everything that could possibly matter at this point.
The older woman hadn’t been perfumed by some generic mix of citrus or rose or lavender or, god forbid, coconut — it was instead the sheer regality that gave way to her presence, the illustrious sort that came with fur coats and ballrooms and hotel suites. Therese wanted to bathe in it, to have it be the only thing she ever came into contact with from then on, and yet the looming fear that she had of Carol becoming someone familiar quashed those thoughts like a toddler might a ball of play-dough. Familiarity and Carol Aird did not belong in the same sentence, no matter how hopelessly Therese wished that the words could one day fit together, somehow. She slipped the book back onto the mantel and rested her head delicately on the wall beside it. Something told her that no matter how well she got to know Carol, she would always carry that delicate air of mystery around with her like no person that Therese had had the fortune of meeting before.
A sigh found its beginnings in her chest and she ignored it, willing herself not to be completely devoured by the role of wistful young admirer. With the urge that came soon after to pick up the phone and call Carol, though, came the realisation. She had been that wistful young admirer ever since their eyes had first locked. As her fingers padded in the Aird household number that Therese had already memorised, the certainty grew — she could only hope that this story was not such a tragedy as the last romance she had played a part in. Across the state, a phone started to ring.
You’ve reached the Aird residence. I can’t come to the phone right now — you know what to do.
The beep of the answer machine had startled Therese out of the reverie that Carol’s voice seemed to induce and immediately, her brain fumbled with all of the words she wanted to say.
“Um. Hi. It’s me — Therese.”
Suddenly, those words were being dropped with startling frequency, shattering on the ground and draining Therese of any cogent thought that she could possibly have come up with. The voice in her head tried desperately to piece together the fragments of her sentences, and for a few moments Therese went along with it, blurting out occasional non-verbal noises as if that were any better than silence. She cursed herself for the bumbling idiot that she never seemed to be able to stop making herself out to be, quietude finally circling back to drown out her random grabs at speech. Fifteen seconds passed with just her hurried breaths echoing down the line, before she tried out a sentence again.
“I really enjoyed our dinner.”
Of course, she had, but it was with a silent prayer that she begged herself not to say something closer to the subject of what she really couldn’t stop thinking about, about how perfectly they slipped into each other’s arms, of how the whisper of Carol’s breath still haunted the top of her head. Once again, she waited to collect herself, another drawn out sentence.
“I can’t wait to see you again.”
A shorter pause.
“If you want to see me, I mean. You don’t have to… want to. See me. I don’t—"
She sighed. Dear god, was this going wrong.
“Call me back, if you can.”
She held the phone to her ear for a few seconds more with the desperate hope that Carol’s voice might miraculously come flooding through the speaker. Silence awaited her, and she hung the phone up with a slightly shaking hand.
Carol shut her eyes as Therese hung up. She had heard every single word.
How desperately she wanted to call her back.
How terrified she was of the way Therese made her feel.