“You know what I mean.”
“Like dates or whatever?”
“Yeah.”
“No, not really. Nothing serious.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means nothing serious,” she says, prizing the last slivers of flesh from the soft skeleton of the fish in front of her.
He’s hardly touched his.
He lights a cigarette and says, “You never answered my question, the other day.”
“What question?”
“If you bring people back to your parents’ place.”
“Oh, that.”
“Well?”
“No,” she says. “Well, I did sometimes.” She says she hasn’t slept with anyone for a few months though.
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Months?”
“Yeah.”
“Why not?”
She shrugs.
“Don’t you like miss it or whatever?” he asks.
“Miss it?”
“You know.”
“Sex?”
“Yeah.”
“There are other ways,” she says, not looking at him.
“Other ways? You mean…?”
“I mean masturbation,” she says.
For a moment he looks so embarrassed that she laughs.
“I’m sure you know a bit about that yourself,” she says, wiping her fingers on a paper napkin.
“Yeah, a bit,” he admits.
A few minutes later they’re talking about porn.
She says she mostly looks at lesbian stuff because she finds the men in the films so off-putting.
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“They just seem to be such assholes,” she says.
“The men?”
“Yeah.” For a moment she imitates one of them—“Take that, bitch, suck that, bitch.”
He laughs at the accuracy of her imitation.
“It’s awful,” she says.
“Yeah,” he agrees.
“That that actually appeals to men. I mean, do you like that sort of thing?”
“Not particularly,” he says, tapping the ash off the end of his cigarette. “And you find the lesbian stuff turns you on?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Okay. Have you ever actually done that?”
“What, had sex with a woman?”
“Yeah.”
“No,” she says.
“Do you want to?”
“Not really.” She laughs herself at the hint of ambivalence.
“Not really?”
“No. I don’t think so.” Seeming slightly embarrassed now, she turns it back on him. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Well, as I understand it you’ve actually had sex with another man.”
He told her once, when they were drunk, about what happened in the institution that one time.
He sort of wishes he hadn’t now.
He says, “That was nothing.”
“That’s not how you made it sound.”
“We were desperate,” he says.
“You sure that’s all it was?”
He thinks she’s just teasing him and laughs. “Yeah. Another one?” he asks, indicating her can of Soproni.
“We can’t both have another one,” she points out.
“No?”
“One of us has to drive back,” she says.
“Well, not necessarily. We could stay the night,” he suggests, and he’s pleased how natural and spontaneous it sounds.
“Where?” she asks, not dismissing the idea out of hand anyway.
He shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“I’m not sleeping in the car,” she says, laughing.
“I know.”
“I’m not sleeping under a bush.”
“I know,” he says. “I was thinking a hotel.”
She takes a moment to absorb that idea. “You’ve got money, have you?” she asks.
“Sure,” he says.
“What money?”
“Money.”
It’s some money from his mother for his birthday. He doesn’t tell her that.
“I don’t know,” she says.
“Why not?”
She seems to think about it again, looking at him while she does. Finally she says that if they’re going to do that they should sort out the hotel now, while they’re still more or less sober, in case they can’t find anywhere later.
“Sure,” he says, trying not to show how excited he feels, and anyway the feeling wavers when it turns out that most of the hotels near the lake are in fact full, and he starts to worry that maybe they won’t be able to stay the night after all.
It’s already early evening. Shadows stretch across the road as they approach the last hotel on that part of the shore, which is a brownish rough-looking concrete thing. The lobby is humid and dimly lit. “Yes, we have a few,” the man says in answer to István’s nervous question about rooms.
When the man tells him the price he takes Noémi aside and says, “I don’t have enough for two.”
“Rooms?”
“Yeah.”
“So?” she says.
“Up to you,” he says.
They take one room, a twin.
It’s a concrete box with brown carpet and bobbly orange covers on the low beds.
Taking turns in the bathroom, they hang up their damp swimming things and then go back out and have another drink on a terrace next to the water.
They’re not talking as much as they did before.
The sun is setting.
They sit there in the soft horizontal light.
“What?” she says.
He’s looking at her.
“What?” she says again.
“Is it okay if I kiss you?” he says.
The moment he thinks of saying it, he says it.
He knows how it is. If he hesitates he won’t do it.
So he doesn’t hesitate.
He just says it.
And then, even though some foreign tourists are singing noisily at a nearby table, there seems to be total silence until she says, “Yeah it’s okay.”
Moths are attacking the lamps. The foreign tourists at the nearby table are still singing.
They stop kissing and just sit there looking at the other people.
They don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say now, it seems.
“Another?” he asks. He means a drink. He’s holding her hand, which is hot and damp, sort of kneading it with his fingers. There’s something wonderful about the fact that he’s allowed to do that now.
“No I don’t think so,” she says.
“Should we go back?”
She nods.
It’s only a few minutes’ walk to the hotel. They walk back through the warm darkness. It seems obvious to him that they’re going to sleep together now, and he’s in a heady state of nervousness and excitement as they mount the stairs. They arrive at their floor and make their way along the silent, brown-carpeted corridor. His trembling hands take a moment to insert the key. As soon as they’re inside the room he tries to kiss her again.
“No,” she says quietly. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Nothing’s going to happen tonight,” she tells him, sort of holding him at arm’s length.
“Why not?” he asks again.
“Just like that,” she says.
“Okay,” he says, after quite a few seconds.
“All right?” she says, making sure he understands.
“Yeah.”
She lowers her arms.
“Which bed do you want?” she asks.
“Whichever,” he says, still not sure whether this is a definitive development, or whether there might be some way around it.
“I’ll take this one,” she says.
“Okay.”
“I’m just going in there.” She points to the dark brown door of the bathroom.
“All right,” he says.
He lies on the bed that seems to be his and lights a cigarette. His hands are still shaking.
From the bathroom, a minute later, he hears the splattering of the shower.
She’s having a shower in there.
The urge he has to open the door and look is almost too strong for him to resist.
He resists it, though.
He still hopes that what she said about nothing happening tonight will turn out not to be the final word on the matter. When he thinks about how she kissed him, about how they made out on that terrace in a way that may not have been entirely appropriate in a public place, he can hardly believe that she doesn’t want anything more herself.
He’s on his second cigarette when she emerges from the bathroom.