She slid the phone back and said, “Read them to me.”
“Saudade” was at the top because it was the last one I’d entered. After I told her what it meant, she said, “That’s breathtaking.”
I didn’t tell her it came from a passage that was part of the numinous impetus for why I was sitting in her house. That was a good story, but it was a story for another time. And that night I believed another time would someday come.
The next word was “Koi No Yokan.” I felt shy reading its definition aloud. “It’s Japanese. Loosely translated, it’s the sense one can have upon first meeting a person that you’re going to fall in love with each other.”
“Koi No Yokan,” she whispered, looking down at the table and, with her index finger, making an invisible drawing on my napkin. “I know that feeling.”
The third word was “adamantine.” “It just means “unbreakable.” No biggie. But I like the way it falls off the tongue like a melody.”
I scrolled to the next word. She saw it and said, “‘Cafuné.’ I know that one.”
I pulled the phone toward my chest so she couldn’t read the definition. “What does it mean, smarty pants?”
Another Portuguese term I’d come across in the same book, it was the word for tenderly running your hand through your lover’s hair. But October didn’t say what it meant. She reached up and acted it out, and goosebumps sprang up all over my arms.
“This last one’s my favorite.” I showed her the word because I didn’t know how to pronounce it: mamihlapinatapai.
She laughed. “That’s not a word, it’s an alphabet.”
“It’s real, I swear. Indigenous to South America.”
“What does it mean?”
“It’s the shared look between two people who want the same thing but are reluctant to initiate it.”
She looked right at me and didn’t blink when she said, “I wonder if there’s a word for when one person is less reluctant than the other.”
I wasn’t sure if she was referring to me or to herself in that instance, but the space between us was getting smaller, thicker, and as lush as the forest grass that grew in big patches behind the house.
October took my hand and held it between both of hers, the way she had the day we met. Then she nodded and said, “I can feel it.”
Something relaxed inside of me then. I put my free hand on her face and moved in to kiss her, but she pulled back, got up, and stepped away. Pointing at my phone, she said, “If you really mean what you’re saying, we need to call Chris right now and tell him what’s going on. Otherwise you can’t be here.”
It would be morning in Amsterdam. I imagined calling Cal and waking him to tell him—what? That I was in love with his girlfriend? That she was in love with me? Was she? I tried to picture his face when he heard me say the words, the various possible reactions he might have, all of them catastrophic.
I’m not letting her go without a fight, he’d said.
I stood up and walked into the living room, and October followed.
I paced, rubbing my face. “Fuck.”
“Not an ideal situation. I get it,” October said. “But we have to tell him.”
“I know. But fuck,” I said again. “Can I just think this through for a minute?”
She sat on the couch while I continued to amble back and forth, trying to figure out how we could tell Cal the truth and cause him the least amount of pain. October’s eyes followed me like I was a metronome she was using to keep time.
I sat down beside her and let my head fall into my hands. “He’s going to hate me.”
“Maybe not forever.” I felt her eyes on the side of my face. “Trust me, Chris knows that what he and I are doing isn’t working. He has to be able to see the inevitable end in sight. With or without you thrown into the mix.”
But I doubted Cal knew that. It wasn’t how his mind worked. When he wanted something, he went after it, and he got it; and if something was broken, he fixed it. Failure was not a conceivable outcome for him.
A memory came back to me then. The first time I brought Cal over to Bob’s houseboat. We had only known each other for a few weeks, but we were already blood brothers. It was a Friday night, Bob had gone out, and Cal started snooping around the house, looking for a way we could entertain ourselves in the absence of guitars. He found a couple of fishing poles in a storage closet. I have no idea why Bob had them, because I’d never known him to fish or express even a vague interest in fishing. At any rate, Cal got it in his head that fishing was simple and that it would be fun for us to catch our dinner off the side of the boat, never mind that neither of us had ever fished, nor did we know the first thing about what to do with a fish if we managed to catch one.
Cal asked me what I thought we should use as bait. I looked in the refrigerator and decided hotdogs were our best option. We both stabbed big chunks through our hooks and went out to the deck.
Cal said, “It’s all in the wrist, Harp,” like he knew what he was talking about, even though he’d only heard that on TV.
I flicked my rod backward with the intention of casting it out into the water, but the hotdog-heavy hook went left and caught Cal somewhere near his right eye.
With a howl, he dropped his rod, leaned over, and clutched the side of his face. A moment later he started making this aahhh noise that sounded like what precedes the choo in a sneeze. I couldn’t see the damage I’d done, but a little blood dripped down his fingers, and
