Sukienka Bez Granic

The needle on the fuel gauge was kissing the red line when Karolina said, “Pull over here.”

I didn’t argue. I never argued with her. Not about the little things. The big things were already too complicated for arguing.

She was already reaching for the door handle before the engine coughed its last. The station was one of those old places with a single pump and a bell that dinged when you drove over the hose. Nobody had dinged it in a while. The place looked like it had been waiting for us, or maybe just waiting to die.

I killed the ignition. The silence rushed in like a held breath finally released.

“I’ll get it,” she said, and I watched her slide out of the passenger seat. The skirt of her dress caught the breeze from the open door and lifted just enough to show the pale curve of her thigh. She didn't bother to push it down. That was Karolina. She knew exactly what she was doing, or she didn’t care, or maybe those two things were the same for her.

The pump clicked and hummed. She leaned against the car, one hand on the nozzle, the other pushing her hair back from her face. The sun was low, that golden hour when everything looks like it might break if you touched it. Her dress was the color of cream, thin cotton that caught the light and let me see the shape of her underneath. She wasn’t wearing a bra. I noticed that. I noticed everything about her, which was the problem.

“You’re staring,” she said, not looking at me.

“I’m admiring.”

“Same thing, different word.”

She had a way of saying things that made them true just by the way she said them. Her voice was low, a little rough around the edges, like she’d been smoking since she was fourteen. She hadn’t. She just sounded like she’d already lived through things that other people only read about.

The pump clicked off. She hung the nozzle back and walked around to my window. I rolled it down.

“We should go,” I said. “Before someone sees us.”

“Who’s going to see us? There’s nobody here.”

“That’s not the point.”

She put her elbows on the window frame and leaned in. Her face was close enough that I could smell her. Something floral, something clean, something that made me want to press my mouth to her throat and stay there until I forgot my own name.

“What is the point, Mateusz?”

She used my name like a weapon. Like a key. Like she knew exactly which lock it fit.

“You know what the point is.”

“I want to hear you say it.”

I didn’t say it. I couldn’t. The words were too heavy, too real, too much like confession. So I did what I always did. I looked away.

She laughed. Not a mean laugh, but not a kind one either. It was the laugh of someone who had already won and was just waiting for me to admit it.

“Get in,” I said.

She didn’t get in. She walked around the car, opened the passenger door, and slid in beside me. The dress rode up her thighs as she settled into the seat. She didn’t adjust it. She just sat there, looking at me, waiting.

I started the engine. The radio came on, some pop song I didn’t recognize, and I turned it off. The silence was better. The silence was honest.

“Where to?” I said.

“Does it matter?”

“It always matters.”

“Drive toward the lake.”

The lake was twenty minutes away. Twenty minutes of road that wound through trees and past fields that had gone fallow. Twenty minutes of being alone with her in a car that was too small and too hot and too full of everything we weren’t saying.

I drove.

She put her bare feet on the dashboard. Her toenails were painted a color that was almost red but not quite. She watched the trees blur past, her head tilted back, her throat exposed. I wanted to bite it. I wanted to put my hand on her knee and feel the warmth of her skin. I wanted to stop the car and pull her into the back seat and ruin everything I had spent the last three years building.

I did none of those things.

“You’re tense,” she said.

“I’m always tense when I’m with you.”

“That’s not my fault.”

“Whose fault is it?”

She turned her head and looked at me. Her eyes were dark, almost black in the fading light. “You could say no.”

“I can’t.”

“You won’t. There’s a difference.”

She was right. There was a difference. And the difference was the shape of my life, the shape of my marriage, the shape of the lie I told myself every morning when I woke up next to a woman who wasn’t her.

The road curved and I took it too fast. The tires grabbed the asphalt and held. Karolina didn’t flinch. She never flinched. She trusted me in ways that scared me, ways that made me want to be worthy of it even though I knew I wasn’t.

“I don’t have a condom,” I said.

The words came out before I could stop them. They hung in the air between us, ugly and honest and stupid.

She didn’t react the way I expected. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t get angry. She just looked at me, her expression unreadable, and said, “I know.”

“You knew?”

“I saw your wallet on the nightstand. Empty. I figured.”

I wanted to ask why she hadn’t brought one herself. I wanted to ask what she expected me to do about it. I wanted to ask a hundred questions that I was too afraid to hear the answers to.

Instead, I kept driving.

The lake appeared between the trees, gray-blue and still. There was a dirt track that led down to a small beach, a place we’d been before. I pulled off the road and followed the track until the car was hidden from view by a wall of pines.

I killed the engine.

The silence was different now. Thicker. Heavier. It pressed against my ears like water.

Karolina turned in her seat. Her dress rustled. The sound was soft, intimate, like sheets moving in the dark.

“We don’t have to,” she said.

“That’s not what you want.”

“No. But I’m giving you the choice.”

I looked at her. Really looked. The curve of her jaw. The way her hair fell across her shoulder. The small mole above her lip, the one I had kissed a hundred times and would kiss a hundred more if I had the chance.

“There’s no choice,” I said. “There never was.”

She smiled. It was a sad smile, the kind that knows the end of the story before the first page is turned.

“Then stop talking,” she said.

And I did.