The City Route

Edvard had planned a restaurant with a discreet entrance. Talia chose the place beside the tram stop where a woman in a flour-covered apron argued with the oven as though it were a stubborn cousin. He accepted the correction and held the door for her without asking whether the room was safe for him.

They ate dumplings so hot they had to wait between bites. The proprietor recognized Edvard, looked at Talia, and said only, “The plum sauce costs extra.” Edvard paid for two bowls. Talia paid for the sauce. It was a ridiculous division of a modest bill, and it made both of them laugh.

At the next table two dockworkers argued about whether a card game permitted a second bid. Neither noticed the prince. The proprietor did, and somehow protected them by refusing to make a ceremony of his presence. She brought the extra sauce in a chipped blue dish and returned to scolding the oven.

Talia tasted the dumpling and closed her eyes. Edvard waited for her verdict with more suspense than he’d shown at the committee table.

“You were going to take me to a hotel dining room, weren’t you?” she asked.

“There was an arrangement.”

“Of course there was.”

“I canceled it.”

“Did the people making the arrangement survive?”

“Runa was delighted. My assistant may never forgive me.”

She dipped a second dumpling into the sauce. “I do not require every evening to prove that you’re ordinary. You aren’t. But I want to see what you choose when no one hands you a schedule.”

He looked around the room, considering the paper lantern over their table and the noise from the kitchen. “I choose this,” he said. “And I would have chosen it if you had said no to the walk yesterday.”

“You didn’t know the restaurant.”

“No. I knew I wanted to ask you about the food you like.”

“Dangerously personal.”

“I’m trying to find the right speed.”

She told him about Sundays with Marta before the illness, when the two of them cooked from an old book with missing pages and improvised the absent steps. He told her about being taught formal toasts before he learned to fry an egg. The more they said, the easier it became to ask the next unimportant question. None of it was unimportant to her.

“What would you have ordered?” she asked.

“Something with an English description no one could dispute.”

“You missed the best part.”

“I’m learning.”

They took the long route through the market. Edvard knew which shops opened before dawn and which gate led back to the palace; Talia knew how to ask a vendor whether the late fruit would be sweet tomorrow. He listened to her exchange in the vendor’s language, not to check her fluency but because he liked the sound of her voice when she was not working.

They stopped at a stall selling old postcards. One showed the blue map’s village as an actual village: brick church, narrow bridge, three roofs under a line of poplars. Talia held it beside Edvard’s face and announced that it was the only reliable royal portrait she had seen that week. He bought the card, then gave it to her only after asking whether she wanted it.

“I might frame it above my desk,” she said.

“The village or the fact I asked?”

“Both.”

His fingers found hers beneath the paper. The market’s voices moved around them. She could still choose to step away. The thought made the closeness richer, not less urgent. She drew him beside a stall of late flowers and kissed him first, a brief, bright answer to his careful waiting.

“That,” she said when he looked at her, “was not a payment for the postcard.”

“Good. The postcard was cheap.”

She laughed against his shoulder. A passerby recognized Edvard and kept walking. They separated to make room for the flower seller, not to hide. Edvard asked if she wanted to leave; she said she wanted a pear. The question had been his to ask and the answer hers to give.

“Tell me what you said,” he asked.

“I asked if the pears were honest.”

“And?”

“He said the small ones were.”

Edvard bought two small pears. She bit into hers on the bridge and found juice running down her wrist. He offered a handkerchief. She wiped the juice off her fingers, then took his hand instead. They stood together while the river carried the last market lights away.

“People will see us,” he said.

“They already can.”

“I don’t want the seeing to become your job.”

“Then don’t ask me to perform happiness for them. I’ll decide when I speak.”

He turned her hand in his. “Agreed.”

At his apartment, separate from the palace’s formal rooms, he asked whether she wanted to come in for tea. Talia understood both the invitation and the room it left for an ordinary answer. “Yes,” she said. “For tea. After that, we’ll see.”

The apartment was unexpectedly untidy: books in unfinished stacks, a pair of shoes abandoned by a chair, a blue folder full of maps on the floor. No staff had arranged it for guests. He seemed embarrassed by the shoes. She found their existence almost unbearably intimate.

He made tea badly, putting the leaves in before the water had warmed. She corrected him, then saw his expression and stopped. “Do you want a lesson?”

“I want you to stay while I learn.”

The kettle clicked. She moved around him to open the cupboard, and their bodies nearly met in the narrow kitchen. Neither pretended it was accidental. He kept his hands at his sides until she placed his palm against her waist. The heat of him came through her dress; her own desire surprised her with its steadiness. She had expected an overwhelming rush. This was something she could remain inside and choose again.

“I don’t have to stay,” she reminded him.

“I know.”

“I want to stay a little.”

He kissed the corner of her mouth, leaving her room to turn into the kiss. She did. The water boiled, forgotten, and they separated laughing when the kettle shrieked. She made the tea while he stood close enough to watch her hands, too far away to touch without asking. She liked that he wanted to learn the ordinary method as much as the answer to what came after.

While the kettle warmed, she touched the edge of a map. “Your ancestors drew a lot of borders.”

“I inherited the habit of keeping the paper.”

“Have you ever drawn one that was true?”

He set two cups on the table. “I’m trying.”

He approached slowly enough for her to turn away. She did not. She put her hand against his chest and felt his careful breath become less careful. “Kiss me again,” she said. He did, with the kind of concentration he had given the disputed page and none of its distance. Her back met the bookcase; his hand steadied the books before they fell. She laughed into his mouth. He laughed too, then waited when she caught her breath.

“That shelf is going to collapse,” she said.

“It has threatened me for five years.”

“Why haven’t you fixed it?”

“Every time I ask, someone orders a new one.”

“You could hold a screwdriver yourself.”

“I could.” He looked at the leaning wood. “I have avoided finding out whether I’m good at being useful in an apartment I call mine.”

The confession was too precise to laugh away. Talia moved a book onto the floor so the shelf stopped bowing. “You don’t have to pass an exam tonight.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

He sat on the rug with her. The blue folder slid off the sofa and spilled three maps across their knees. One was the official port chart, beautiful and incomplete; another was Lukas’s hand drawing, copied with his permission. Edvard had marked a route on the official page in blue, trying to make the distance between the documents visible.

“I used to think my job was to have the right paper when somebody asked,” he said. “I didn’t understand how often the paper was drawn from the wrong place.”

“You understood when you let Lukas put his drawing beside it.”

“You made it hard for me not to.”

“I didn’t make you listen.”

“No. You didn’t.” He held the second map by its corners, as though the fragile hand-drawn route deserved the same care as the old painted one. “I could have gone on being praised for a sentence that had never belonged to me.”

Talia rested her shoulder against his. She wanted to tell him that the most attractive thing he had done all week was give credit away in a room where people were trained to hand it to him. The thought felt too much like a verdict. She said what she knew instead.

“When you asked what I ate,” she said, “I called Marta. I told her about the apricot cakes. She said I should have stopped at two.”

“She was right.”

“She has been right about many things this week.”

He folded Lukas’s drawing along its original creases. “Do you want her to know about me?”

“She does. She knows your title too. She asked whether I could disagree with you.”

“A good question.”

“I told her yes.”

“You have ample evidence.”

“She will want more.”

He turned to her with a seriousness that made the little untidy room feel suddenly quiet. “So will I.”

He meant not proof she would stay, but more chances to be known with no interpreter between them. She answered by taking his hand and placing it against her cheek. His palm warmed there. When she kissed it, he closed his eyes. It was a different intimacy from the hurried one against the bookcase. She wanted both, and she could tell him so without fearing she had promised anything beyond this evening.

“I can stay a little longer,” she said. “I don’t know about the night yet.”

“A little longer is enough.”

They drank their tea after it had gone lukewarm, her feet under his thigh on the sofa, talking about the first maps they remembered. Later she chose to leave. He walked her to the door and made no plea for more. In the cab she knew exactly why she wanted to return: he had let her have an evening that did not become a bargain.

At the hotel she found the postcard of the village in her coat pocket. On the back Edvard had written nothing. She liked that he had left the space to her. She put the card against the mirror and changed out of the clothes that still held the warmth of his apartment. Desire followed her into the ordinary room, vivid enough that she considered calling a car back. She wanted him; she had told him so. There was no reason to treat the wanting as a hazard to be contained.

There was also no reason to hurry past the pleasure of choosing the next step. She sent him a message: I got home. The pears were honest.

He replied after a minute: The tea was not. I hope you’ll let me try again.

She could imagine his face as he typed, the little crease of concentration beside his mouth. She wrote, I would like that. I would also like to know how the shelf keeps standing.

His answer came with a photograph: a screwdriver beside the leaning books, no one in the picture but the evidence of his own hands. Tomorrow I find out what holds it up. Friday I report back.

She laughed in an empty room, then put the phone face down. It mattered that they could make a joke without making tomorrow a test of whether the night had been enough. She slept with the postcard on the bedside table, the village still where it belonged.