Brussels, One May Evening
A Look
When Sonia felt the gaze, she was listening to a woman tell her about her renovated kitchen.
She didn’t turn around. She didn’t need to. At forty, you’ve learned to pick up on these things — an attention that lands on you like a slight shift in temperature. She kept nodding at the right moments. Open-plan kitchen, blue stone countertop, the contractor who’d run three weeks behind schedule.
The man was standing near the entrance. Dark-haired, lean, fiftyish, holding a glass of wine he wasn’t really drinking. She catalogued him quickly: alone, ill at ease, looking at women with that mixture of melancholy and hope they so often mistake for depth.
When Thomas came up behind her and slipped his hand onto her hip, she made an almost imperceptible movement away.
And yet it had been their signal for a long time. Since a night in Lisbon, twelve years earlier, in a bar where they knew no one and he had made that gesture for the first time with a quiet certainty that had disarmed her.
I want you. Now. Here.
She had finished her drink slowly, without looking at him, and they had left together ten minutes later.
Now it was more complicated.
Now it meant several things at once. Sometimes I’m here. Sometimes we can leave whenever you want. Sometimes nothing at all — just a body’s habit reaching for a fixed point in a dull evening.
Tonight, she didn’t know which.
She ran her hand across his back. That back she knew by heart, with its slight tension in the shoulder when he was tired. Tonight, it was there.
The woman with the kitchen kept going. The tiling, now.
Sonia took a sip of champagne and thought about last week. Thomas coming home late with no particular explanation. The absence of details, which he usually offered unprompted. She hadn’t asked. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know, and she wasn’t sure either what it said about her, not wanting to know.
The man was still looking.
She saw him clearly this time. He was watching Thomas’s hand with an expression she recognised immediately: longing for what he thought he saw. The longing for a simple, obvious desire that had survived the years. She smiled.
If only it were that simple.
“Do you want to leave?”
His voice was low, neutral. Nothing like Lisbon.
“A little longer,”
He nodded. Then, a few minutes later, he came back.
“I’m exhausted. I’m heading home. Are you staying?”
There was neither reproach nor permission in his voice. Just tiredness. They kissed on the cheek. She watched him cross the room, vaguely greet two people, then disappear.
She was left alone with her almost empty glass.
Sonia
The man hadn’t moved.
Sonia finished her glass and crossed the room without quite knowing why. Maybe just to do something. She stopped near him, beside him, as though she were looking at the same thing he was.
“He left,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Are you staying?”
“I don’t know.”
A silence. He let it settle.
“My name is Gian Piero.”
“Sonia.”
He looked at her directly.
“I’d like to take you for a drink somewhere else. Not here. Somewhere quieter.”
She felt the precision of the sentence. Direct. Clean.
“Straight to the point.”
“From the moment I saw you.”
Sonia looked at him. There was nothing to decode in his face. He was waiting.
It was so much simpler than everything else about the evening.
“I don’t know you.”
“No.”
She thought about Thomas. About the tense shoulder. About the hand that perhaps no longer meant anything. She also thought that she could just as easily go home alone, run a bath, spend another week not knowing what she wanted.
“Give me your number,”
she said, holding out her phone.
He entered it directly, without ceremony.
“Tonight?”
he asked, handing the phone back.
Something in his gaze unsettled her — she felt seen, fully, for the first time in a long while. Desired. As though new. A shiver moved through her.
“I don’t know yet.”
“All right.”
He looked out at the garden.
Sonia stayed beside him for another minute without saying anything.
Then she picked up her coat, said goodnight to no one, and walked out.
Outside, the May air was mild and she stopped on the pavement. In her hand, her phone. In her head, nothing very clear — just that physical sensation, sharp and distinct, of a door standing open.
She could go home.
She could call.
Both were true at the same time.
She started walking.
The sound of her heels rang clearly in the warm night. She could still feel on her coat the heat of the room, the mingled scent of champagne and Thomas’s cologne.
Her phone was heavy in her pocket.
After five minutes she stopped under a streetlamp, took out the phone and read back the number Gian had entered himself. Just digits.
She pressed
She pressed Call before she could think too much.
Two rings.
“Hello?”
His voice was exactly the same as before: calm, low, unsurprised.
“It’s Sonia.”
“I recognised you,”
he said, and she heard a smile in his voice.
A short silence, almost intimate.
“I’m not sure I feel like going home.”
She heard a slight movement on the other end. Maybe he was getting up.
“Would you like me to come and find you somewhere?”
“No,”
she said.
“I can come to you.”
The silence was a little longer. The realisation that the door had truly opened.
“Rue Darwin, 47. Code 34B12. I’ll be waiting.”
He hung up.
She walked. She wanted to feel the air, feel her body moving, feel that she was doing something irreversible and utterly simple.
Rue Darwin
When she reached the building, the door opened before she even touched the keypad. Gian was at the bottom of the stairs, in his shirt, no jacket. He must have come down while waiting for her.
They didn’t speak at first. He watched her climb the three steps of the entrance. Then his hand found the way Thomas had forgotten.
He nodded and led her inside.
The apartment was spare, dimly lit. Books everywhere, a large bay window open onto the night, a few objects brought back from elsewhere, placed without display. A bottle of wine already open on the coffee table. He didn’t offer her anything to drink.
He closed the door and drew her toward him. His mouth moved down her neck, then along her collarbone. She felt his stubble, his weight against her.
She slid her hands under his shirt. His skin was warm, his stomach firm beneath her palms.
He raised his head and looked at her in the half-dark.
“You can still change your mind.”
For an answer, she pressed herself against him and found his lips.
He placed his hands on her shoulders and the dress slipped to the floor, caught for a moment by the fullness of her chest.
Sonia stood in her bra and lace underwear. A sturdy bra, honest, built to hold. The underwear contrasted with an almost weightless delicacy.
He put his hands on her hips and looked at her. In the half-dark, the light from the street fell across her body.
He drew her close. Her breasts pressed against his chest, the firm underwire between them. He found the clasps at her back by touch, undid them with a sure gesture. A small sharp snap. He held the bra for a moment, then let it slide slowly down. The nipples appeared first, then the full shape of her breasts, heavy in their own weight. He took them in his hands, held them, moved from one to the other — the nipples hardening in turn under his tongue. She slipped a hand to the back of his neck and drew him gently closer. Her whole body resonated.
He drew her underwear down over her hips, then her buttocks, and she lifted her feet to help. The dark, soft, curling hair appeared. Entirely a woman.
She took a few steps toward the bed and lay down on her back. Her gaze challenged him. She slowly took hold of her own ankles, parted her knees, offered her stomach and her sex to his eyes.
Time stopped for a moment.
When he joined her and lay down on her, when he entered her slowly, she was warm, wet, ready. Their bodies adjusted.
She stretched her arms toward the headboard, her hands searching for something to hold onto. He took hold of them, kept them there. Her underarms were exposed, smooth, lightly damp. He moved close and his tongue made contact with that tender skin — a faint scent of warm body, of mild perspiration, something natural and intimate that moved him directly.
She shivered at first, then surrendered, accepted it, let him. Her hips came toward him, sought him.
They moved for a long time. She dug her nails into his back at one point. He quickened. She followed.
Afterward, they lay still, skin against skin, damp.
He passed a hand across her stomach, gently. He said nothing and she was grateful for it.
After a while:
“Do you want to stay the night?”
Sonia didn’t answer straight away. She was thinking about Thomas — what he would do if she wasn’t there in the morning, what she would say, what he would believe or pretend to believe. It had happened with him, she was almost certain. Not entirely certain. She had never wanted to know. And her — no, never, not until tonight.
“I don’t know yet,”
she said.
He nodded in the dark.
She closed her eyes. She still didn’t know what this night would change between them. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything. Perhaps it wasn’t something you decided in the dark at a stranger’s place but later, in the ordinary light of a familiar morning.
Gian looked at the ceiling. He felt the warmth of her body against his, her breathing lengthening. An image was with him, light, persistent. He lay with his eyes open in the dark.
Outside, Brussels kept up its usual noise.
Thomas
Thomas realised a hundred metres on — his scarf, left on the back of a chair near the entrance. He turned back.
He slipped in quietly, found the scarf. And it was as he turned around that he saw her.
Sonia was standing near the bay window, beside the dark-haired man he had vaguely noticed earlier. They weren’t touching. But there was something in the way they stood together — that way of being side by side without distance — that stopped him cold.
He left without her seeing him.
He waited on the pavement. He wasn’t quite sure why he didn’t go back in, didn’t call her, didn’t do anything. The awkwardness, perhaps — of having come back without telling her, of having seen what he’d seen, of finding himself now standing there like someone keeping watch.
When she came out ten minutes later, he stepped into the shadow of the building across the street. She paused for a moment on the steps, then started walking — in the right direction, toward home. He felt something loosen in his chest.
Then she stopped under a streetlamp. Took out her phone. Put it to her ear.
He went still.
The call was short. She set off again — but in the other direction.
He followed her at a distance, uneasy, unable to stop himself. Avenue du Général de Gaulle, then toward the Bois de la Cambre. He walked along the edge of the pavement to muffle the sound of his footsteps, which struck him as absurd — absurd and shameful — but he kept going anyway.
Rue Darwin. An old building, handsome facade. She stopped in front of the door, reached toward the keypad — and the door opened before she touched it.
Someone was waiting for her.
Thomas stayed on the pavement. The door closed.
He stood there without moving, eyes on the door. She would come back out. In two minutes, five minutes — she would come back out, there was a simple explanation for all of this, a friend who lived there, someone she’d wanted to say hello to, anything. He waited.
The door didn’t open.
There was a bench a little further along, under a linden tree. He sat down.
The night was mild. Brussels in May, that blend of damp and warmth that belongs to no other city. Every now and then a car passed. He looked at the window on the top floor — a faint light. He waited for it to go out, still hoping for something he couldn’t have named.
The light went out.
After an hour he took out his phone and called. One ring, two, then straight to voicemail. He hung up. Called again. Voicemail immediately this time — the phone was off. He sat with the phone in his hand and did nothing.
He dozed on the bench, his head against the wooden backrest, the scarf rolled up under his neck. A shallow, restless sleep, full of images without narrative.
He woke to the cold. Half past five. The sky above the rooftops had that grey-pink tint of spring mornings. He got up, walked a little to warm himself, came back.
He positioned himself in front of the door.
At a quarter to seven it opened.
Sonia stopped dead when she saw him. A suspended moment — her, him, the still-empty pavement, the cold morning light.
“Thomas.”
He didn’t speak straight away. He looked at her. He had spent the night on a bench ten metres away and he no longer knew quite what he wanted to say — to accuse her, to hear her out, to disappear. He felt only the tiredness and something sharp in his chest.
“I came back for my scarf,”
he said at last.
She understood immediately that he knew everything.
They stood there for a moment on the pavement, in the cold of the morning, not yet knowing what this night had shifted between them.
Gian Piero
On the top floor of the Rue Darwin, Gian heard the door close downstairs.
He lay still for a moment, then got up. The apartment still held something in the air — a recent presence, a faint scent. He opened the bay window in the sitting room. The city was growing pale above the rooftops.
He went down to the kitchen.
Soo-ah was there, standing at the coffee maker, in a vest top and shorts. Her long black hair was tied up in a high ponytail, smooth and tight, brushing against her back.
She held out a cup which he declined with a tilt of his head and a slow blink. He sat at the counter.
They stayed for a while without speaking. It was a quality of silence they had built together — full, without obligation.
She turned, leaned on her elbows across from him, and looked at him with that calm, direct gaze he knew well.
“She left early.”
“Yes.”
A beat.
“Is she the one?”
He looked at her, thoughtful.
“I don’t think so.”
She nodded. She had been witness to all of this for years — sometimes far more intense encounters, extraordinary women, situations far more complex than this one. She judged nothing.
“When do you leave?”
she asked.
“Tomorrow evening. Moscow first.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“No. I’ll be in touch in two days.”
She nodded. Moscow, Warsaw, Bucharest — the destinations changed, the rhythm stayed the same. She knew this work from the inside, in ways few people outside suspected.
A silence. Then:
“Oppa.”
He smiled slightly at the word. She noticed.
“Why are you smiling?”
“You’ve been calling me that for eight years. I never get used to it.”
She set down her cup, turned back toward him, arms folded, composed.
“You are my Oppa. I belong to you — since I made that vow, eight years ago.”
He looked at her for a moment without speaking.
“You know I don’t want to bind you.”
“I am free. This is my life. This is my path, as I chose it when you set me free. It isn’t hard. And it never will be.”
A silence.
“Oppa… do you want me to sleep in your room tonight?”
“Yes.”
“With you, or on the futon?”
“We’ll see.”
“Do you want me to ask Frida to come, or someone else?”
He set down his cup.
“Not tonight.”
She looked at him with her dark eyes. She was small, barely five foot three, but she held the space with an economy of movement that was entirely her own. A fine-featured face, very clear skin, her black hair pinned up that morning in a quick loose knot. Neat hands with long painted nails that contrasted with the simplicity of her vest top. Beneath the fabric, a well-formed body suggested itself — round hips for such a slender frame, light pear-shaped breasts that existed without insisting. She was beautiful — with that quiet beauty that doesn’t try to convince.
“You enjoyed watching us together last week. You might enjoy it again tonight…”
He smiled.
“You’re adorable. I’ll let you know.”
She unplugged her phone from the windowsill where it had been charging, slipped it into her pocket.
“I’m taking the Saab to do the shopping.”
Gian got up.
He was thinking about Sonia — about her gaze that had challenged him in the half-dark, about the intensity of the night. He didn’t yet know what he would make of it. He was giving himself time.
He thought about his search — still without a face, still without a name. He would recognise her. He had been certain of it for years, with that quiet and faintly absurd certainty that withstands everything.
“I’m going up,”
he said.
She didn’t answer. She knew he didn’t need one.
He took the stairs. Thomas and Sonia were facing the wreckage of their marriage somewhere in the cold morning city.
He crossed the upstairs corridor and entered the large spare room — two rugs on the floor, a wide bay window looking out over the rooftops. He lay down on his back, closed his eyes, let his breathing slow down.
He let the images drift.
A silhouette. A voice. A light laugh heard somewhere, as though in a dream. A scent. And then, a woman’s feet in heels — bare heels, ankles above which curved shapely legs. Familiar images, that came back sometimes.
He waited, with that long patience that had become his way of being in the world.
Somewhere, she existed.
CONTACT