The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (best romance novels of all time TXT) 📗

me, she wanted to tell him. You used to mean something and then you used it all up without even giving it three seconds of your time. And I want to walk out and leave you with nothing, just like that, in this beautiful apartment with your wonderful, expensive things.

Amelia looked aside.

‘Let’s go to sleep. I’m tired,’ she muttered, moving from the couch to his bedroom, as though she lived there.

She was exhausted. This was true. But it was also true that she could have called a car and stumbled home. Sure, she assured herself it was a safety matter, that she might collapse outside her building or pass out in the car. And yet, she could have called someone, perhaps Pili, to pick her up.

She didn’t want to leave. She wanted to act the part of a fool. As simple and as complicated as that.

*

He wanted to make it up to her, he said, although he did not specify exactly what he was making up for: his callous ghosting or his most recent omissions. He proposed lunch, then he’d take her shopping. He wanted to buy her a dress so they could go dancing on New Year’s Eve.

Amelia looked at her text messages. There were five from her sister. She was not worried because Amelia had never come home the previous night. Instead, the messages were castigating her because Amelia needed to take the girls to school and cook lunch.

Amelia deleted the messages. She grabbed his arm and they went out.

She’d never taken advantage of Elías’s social position when they were dating. A dinner here and there but no expensive presents. Of course, back then, he’d been playing at bohemian living. The nice car was his one wealth marker. He kept it tucked in a garage and they took it for a spin once in a while. Once in a while, there had also been an extravagance: the sudden trip to Monterrey where they partied for a weekend, the ability to sail into a popular nightclub while losers waited outside for the bouncer to approve of their looks, but these were random, few events. He wanted to be an artist, after all, an artist with a capital A, long-suffering, starving for his creative pursuits.

Now he had shredded those pretenses and now she did not bother telling herself things such as money did not matter. In the high-tech dressing room with interactive mirrors, she made the outfits she wanted to try on bounce across the slick, glass surface. She could take a selfie with this mirror. She wondered if anyone ever did. She assumed some people must, people who did not look at the fabric on display and wished to wreck half a dozen dresses, leaving a man with an immense bill to cover as they slipped out the back of the store.

The so-elegant employee packed her dress in pale pink tissue paper and handed her a bag. She was on Mr. Bertoliat’s account now. And though Amelia supposed ‘Mr. Bertoliat’ meant well, she hated him when he smiled at her as they stood by the counter.

But by the time they sat down at the sushi restaurant, with its patio and its pond full of koi fish and its impeccable white plastic furniture made to resemble bamboo, she wanted to do anything but fight. Whether the blood siphoned from her veins had also drained another part of her, or she simply had latched on to a new type of debilitating obsession, she did not know.

‘I heard, soon, there will be nothing but jellyfish in the seas,’ she said, looking at the pond. ‘All the fish will be gone.’

‘I find that unlikely,’ he said.

There was a restaurant in the city, run by a Parisian chef who charged $800 for a three-course meal cooked with ‘Indigenous’ ingredients, plated on large stones. He had thought to take her there, but reservations were required.

When your credit card could afford such meals, she supposed many things were ‘unlikely’. She supposed, with the hefty allowance he received, he could ask that a polar bear be dragged to rest on his plate after being stuffed with a dolphin. And not a cloned bear. The real damned thing too.

‘I guess it won’t matter when it happens,’ she told him with a shrug. ‘Not to you.’

‘Are you interested in zoology now?’ he asked. ‘Fisheries?’

‘I’m hardly interested in anything. I spend about three hours every day drawing things that don’t matter and another three fiddling with my cell phone.’

‘That sounds the same as me. Sometimes, I take photos. But not too often.’

‘You had a good eye,’ she admitted and he smiled at that.

Elías looked rather fine that day, very polished. She’d always loved looking at him. She knew it was bad to enjoy somebody’s looks so much. After all, the flesh faded. But when she’d been nineteen, she had not been thinking about what sixty-nine-year-old Elías would look like and now it seemed equally preposterous to self-flagellate because he was still handsome.

If she was shallow, that seemed the least of her issues.

‘I should mention this right now. I have to go to Monterrey for Christmas. I can’t get out of it. I’m not going to disappear, I swear. But it’s Christmas and my father wants to see me. I’m his only kid. I’ll be back for New Year’s.

‘And I’ll break it off with my fiancée while I’m there,’ Elías added.

‘Don’t start making promises,’ she muttered.

‘I want to do it. For you.’

In the pond, the koi swam and she wondered if they were authentic koi, or if they had been modified. They could be mechanical. They could even be holograms. She’d seen things like that before.

Elías held out a plastic card. ‘Here. This is a spare key to my apartment. You can hang out there while I’m gone. Ask the concierge to get you anything you want: food, drinks. OK?’

She toyed with the card, thinking she could lose it in the subway, toss it into the sewer. But when he