Love Between Worlds

Seven Days

There are moments when you understand that a single fracture has split your life forever into a before and an after. From this instant on there is no going back; the bridges have collapsed silently behind you.

Clara's breath came shallow and far too fast. Her thoughts raced—wide awake—through the heavy silence of this strange bedroom. Every muscle in her body was strung taut to the point of snapping, a mute, throbbing alarm in her veins that refused to quiet. Everything around her breathed the unfamiliar. The sharp, heavy smell of the room, the coarse weave of the sheets against her bare skin. Deep beneath the floorboards, soft but steady, the dull bass of the jukebox vibrated, creeping up from the bar directly below them. The almost frightening calm of the woman lying close behind her, breathing evenly. The pillow under Clara's head was cold and clammy, soaked through by her own tangled hair, which clung to her neck and forehead like physical proof of her total loss of control.

She had taken Evelyn.

That bare realization hung in the room. But what in the first few seconds had felt like a mistake, like a monstrous breaking of taboo, was now turning into something else. Now, as her pulse settled and the adrenaline ebbed away, a nearly heretical truth dawned on her: those seven days of deprivation, the filth, the hunger, the mortal fear—all of it was nothing compared to what she had lived through in this one night. It had been no mere trade-off, no simple exchange.

She would have been willing to sacrifice far more.

If someone had told Clara beforehand that this fall was the price of feeling even a single second of this freedom, she would have paid it blindly. More than that: if someone had told her it wasn't enough, she would have given everything. She would have walked willingly to the edge of what a human being can still endure. Seven days. Fourteen days. Twenty-one days. She would have crossed hell to the point of self-erasure just to taste this forbidden cup once and feel what it meant to be truly alive.

The road into this bed hadn't begun with a kiss, but with a week of naked fear. The rebellious mind that had once decided to break out of her family's Southern bubble had collided, over those seven days, with a reality that broke it.

Her naive dream of freedom had shattered head-on against reality the moment she stepped off the train and a police patrol stopped her. Her parents had reported her missing the instant she left. Only sheer bureaucracy—the fact that she was of legal age—had kept them from sending her back in handcuffs. But that freedom had crumbled at once. The address for the job that was supposed to save her was a fake. Her deposit, gone. Her suitcase, stolen.

The short week that followed blurred into a single gray horror trip in which hunger took command. The trained pride, the Southern manners—all of it stopped mattering the moment the first tearing cramp seized her stomach. She had turned into a ghost rooting through the city's garbage for scraps. The constant panic of being robbed in her sleep on a hard park bench, of being beaten, or of being done worse still in the dark corners of Los Angeles, had blasted everything civilized out of her.

And still she had never gone to the police. The physical misery of the gutter was extreme, but the panic of being shoved back into the moral straitjacket of her old life was far greater. They would have held an invisible mirror up to her, and out of it not only the officers but, above all, her father would have mocked her: Well, you little nothing. Did you really think you'd survive out there? She would have been dragged back to the judge's massive wooden desk, made to fall to her knees, beg forgiveness, and function again like a flawless machine. Anything is better than going back had been her daily mantra, even that morning, when a shopkeeper had driven her off onto the rough asphalt with rough jabs of his broom.

Until this strange woman simply stopped, took in the bloody wretchedness paired with the remnants of her old dignity, and brought her into this dim bar.

There stood Evelyn. A woman who wasn't looking for protection but radiated power. A woman who staged herself, with her tattoos and glittering piercings, like a custom-designed piece of jewelry—untouchable and self-possessed. Her knowing, almost dangerous smile, the one with which she sized up Clara's misery, was the moment everything tipped.

In the apartment over the bar, Clara had wolfed down something real for the first time in seven days, wild and greedy as a cornered animal. Under the hot water of the shower she had tried to wash away the caked filth and the raw terror of death. In that streaming warmth her deepest unconscious had understood: The turning point is here. You survived.

When she came out of the bathroom, only a far-too-short towel wrapped tight around her bare, trembling body, Evelyn was standing in front of her. And in that dim light, everything had suddenly turned on its head.

You'd have expected the experienced Evelyn to be the wolf, the one who took the vulnerable flesh for herself. But it was the supposed sacrificial lamb in whom a wild, utterly foreign drive suddenly woke. Clara had looked at this strong woman and felt, out of nowhere, a naked, raw craving—a deeply animal urge to cling to life itself. To draw energy.

Clara had let the towel fall.

For a fraction of a second Evelyn stood there caught off guard, before Clara simply pulled her close and pressed her lips to that soft mouth, which tasted of smoke and secrets. It was an impulse born of pure desperation and greed.

Other women might have panicked in a moment like this, because the unwritten rules between men and women suddenly led nowhere. Clara, by contrast, had no script. Not even one she would have had to unlearn. She had no map for desire, only this raw drive.

Her trembling hands slid over Evelyn's shoulders, and there she met something completely unexpected, almost uncanny: a mirror effect. She touched curves and soft skin, and her fingers seemed to understand blindly what might feel good, because they shared the same anatomy. It was an absurd paradox, because Clara had never explored her own body. Under the weight of prayers and strict prohibitions, her own skin had always remained a sinful mystery to her. In this frenzy she was getting to know herself by touching a stranger.

And that was exactly when the blackout came.

The instant the first surge of survival instinct burned off, Clara's courage collapsed in on itself. The split in her mind tore open. The trained morality cried out in horror at this broken taboo, but there was something else, too, something more mundane: the fear of being found out. What if Evelyn realized at once that she didn't have the faintest idea what she was doing? Clara's knees went weak, her hands began to shake, she froze in her inexperience.

But Evelyn felt it immediately. With the instincts of someone who knows exactly how broken people are when they're running from themselves, she seized her chance. In one fluid motion her hands closed around Clara's hips, firm and possessive. The original balance of power was back at once; the wolf took the lead.

For a young woman who had spent her entire life compulsively functioning and controlling herself, this supposed defeat was a liberation. The moment Evelyn took the decision out of her hands, relief flooded through Clara. At last she didn't have to know how it was done. She didn't have to meet any expectations. She could surrender control. Evelyn knew these torn, lost girls. She set the pace, self-assured and, in a rough way, caring, until Clara gave herself over completely to the unfamiliar terrain.

And now?

Hours had passed. The muffled clink of glasses and the tangle of voices from the bar below them had long since died away. The night outside the window had gone still. Clara lay motionless, her legs slightly drawn up, curled into a protective crescent beside the strange woman, whose skin still warmed her own.

She stared into the darkness, the damp pillow at the back of her neck. The intoxication had long since faded, yet the remorse she'd expected, the guilty conscience she'd been promised her whole life as punishment for sin, never came. She searched her splintered mind for some way to make sense of it. For a signpost. For an answer to the question of who she actually was and what was supposed to become of her starting tomorrow.

But there was no answer. Only Evelyn's quiet, even breathing. And the knowledge that for this one moment she would have sacrificed everything.

Sometime in the early hours of the morning, Clara had fallen asleep. A sleep like a fall, dreamless and bottomless, the sleep of a body that had fought against itself for too long. Even the few rays of sun that made it through the heavy, dark curtains by late afternoon, slanting across the rumpled bed, couldn't wake her.

When she finally opened her eyes, the first thing she felt was the stillness in her head. It was no gentle waking; it was a sudden stepping out of a dark tunnel. She lay there motionless, her heart beating slow and steady, and for a moment the world was far away. Then came the memory: the smell of Evelyn, the clamminess of the sheets, the bitter certainty of her fall.

Clara took her time. She had no thought of leaving this bed right away. Instead she wrapped the heavy blanket around her slender body like a protective cocoon before padding barefoot over to the little table by the window. The food Evelyn had set out for her was classic bar fare. A massive burger, a generous helping of fries, some wilted salad, and a few sad alibi pickles and tomatoes that were probably on the plate only for appearance's sake. Yesterday she wouldn't have cared. Clara thought hard, trying to patch the blackout in her head, but for the life of her she could no longer remember what exactly she had devoured in her blind greed the night before. It had simply been bulk, raw fuel for an empty tank.

Today was different. She ate slowly and deliberately. She took in only just enough to make the painful, hollow ache in the pit of her stomach disappear and the hunger fall silent.

While she chewed quietly, her gaze wandered searchingly through the room. It was furnished sparsely, a mismatched collection of pieces that probably all had stories of their own, but it gave off an unexpected, rough coziness. Here and there pictures hung on the walls, postcards and little keepsakes—scraps of a life that was still strange to Clara.