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

‘Well, if that’s how you see it. But let me tell you something. He’s going back to Monterrey this summer. His father is demanding it and Anastasia is pressing for it too. So, whatever you’ve got going, it’s not going to last.’

‘Nothing does,’ Amelia said. She grabbed the butter knife again and slowly, deliberately buttered her bread, much to the chagrin of the other woman. When she left the restaurant, she knew she would never be having lunch with Fernanda again.

*

She went back to the blood clinic. She was certain Elías wouldn’t appreciate the fresh mark on her arm, but fuck him. She sat there and they siphoned out the blood, and she recalled how years before he’d abandoned her, how he had not returned her calls. So she’d gone to his apartment, trying to figure out what was wrong with him. She pictured him run over by a car, dying of a fever. A million different, dramatic scenarios. Instead, she walked into an empty apartment. The only traces of him that remained were the stars on the bedroom’s ceiling and the leaks slowly dripping across the floor.

It was that emptiness that she attempted to escape as the machinery whirred and the tourniquet tightened, the centrifuge spinning and separating plasma and blood.

It was that helplessness which she must combat.

She could not depend on him because Elías was not dependable. She knew that even before Fernanda had spilled poison in her ears, even before she walked down Reforma with her eyes downcast.

When he texted her and she showed up at his place, and when he noticed the mark, she told him to mind his own business, to mind Anastasia and his own fucking life because she had hers.

How he stared at her.

‘You should tell me if you need help,’ he said.

‘And you should have told me it was her,’ she replied.

He ran a hand down his face. Then he had the gall to try and reach out for her. Amelia slapped his hand away.

‘What does it matter?’ he asked, stubbornly trying to grab hold of her again. ‘What does it matter if it’s Anastasia?’

‘I don’t like not knowing. I wish you would fucking tell me something.’

‘You don’t tell me anything either! Look at that!’ he yelled, touching her arm, the mark there. ‘You just go off to sell fucking plasma, like a junkie.’

‘Everyone sells it, Elías! Everyone has to!’

She shoved him away and he reached out a third time to catch her.

‘I’ll tell you all if you want, fine, but there’s not much to tell. I’m supposed to head back in the summer. And the rest… you must know it already. I care about you and I care nothing about them,’ he said brokenly.

It was not enough. It wasn’t, but then, she lived on scraps and bits of nothing. She let him hold her, after all.

‘Don’t go to that stupid clinic anymore,’ he said. ‘Ask for the money if you need it, all right?’

Because she was a coward, because it was always easier in the moment to lie, she nodded.

*

But she did not stop going to the blood clinic. She had amassed almost a complete new wardrobe, courtesy of Elías, which she kept at his place, but she did not ask for money. It baffled him, even irritated him. Instead, she continued to meet the occasional client on Friendrr, or helped Pili with the odd gig since Pili was a purveyor of constant and strange gigs. And the blood, there was the blood when she needed the cash.

Her life had not changed, not really. She still spent a great deal of time in coffee shops – connected to their Wi-Fi, drawing nonsense – but she also ventured to see Elías. He had many of her same habits. He did not work. He did not seem to do anything at all, although once in a while, he’d take photographs with a custom-made Polaroid camera. This wasn’t but a faint echo of his previous passion and, inevitably, he shrugged and tossed the camera back into a drawer.

One evening, Amelia opened the drawer and emptied it on the floor of his neat, sparse office, holding up the pictures and looking at them. He walked in, looked at her.

‘I wish you would…’ he said. She didn’t understand the last word he muttered before he sat down next to her and pulled Amelia into his arms.

There were moments like that when it was easy to forget that he wasn’t hers and she wasn’t his. There were moments when the phone didn’t ring, and it wasn’t his father or that fiancée on the line, and there were moments when she pretended this was New Panyu because she had never seen it, so it could be. It could be that the homes of the wealthy there looked like this: manicured and perfect.

Then came May and the rain was early, soaking her to the bone one afternoon, so that her clothes were a soggy mess as she hurried up the stairs of her apartment and the phone rang.

‘Hello,’ she said. It was Miguel.

‘Hey, Amelia. You don’t need to go to Lucía’s home today. She’s passed away.’ As usual, he spoke in a sunny tone. So sunny that Amelia stopped and held on to the banister, pressing the phone harder against her ear and asking him to repeat what he had told her. She couldn’t believe he had said what he’d said. But he repeated the same thing, adding that there was a lawyer who wanted to speak to her. The old lady had left something for her.

‘A poster,’ the lawyer said,’ Miguel told her. ‘You should phone him.’

*

It was indeed a poster in a cardboard tube. Sealed with Scotch tape. Amelia placed it on the empty chair next to her. Lucía had died in her sleep, an easy death, so she did not understand when the lawyer asked her to sit down. There was more.

‘The house, her