The following days passed slowly, in a tense and silent routine. Their lives seemed to run on parallel tracks, only occasionally crossing for brief moments. Every morning, Mario and Lara greeted each other with a strange smile, exchanging brief phrases about work or the weather, as if they were casual acquaintances, not two people who had shared years of life and a bed. It was strange, and they themselves didn't know quite how to behave. They knew that letting themselves go too much would jeopardize their attempt, but they couldn't exaggerate being cold and distant either, as it would clash with their shared history. They talked about this and that, trying to defuse the situation they found themselves in, organized grocery shopping, laughed about something funny that happened at the office. But they both realized that everything was in a very precarious balance.
Every time Mario saw Lara go to the gym, he thought about the times she had told him how Abbas would try everything despite knowing she was taken, or how Valeriu would follow her to ask for advice or give some, trying to touch or graze her hips or arms, or Selam who always seemed to talk badly about others calling them pigs but who also tried to make a move. What if Lara had decided to give them more attention with this "break"? Had she told them they were on a break? Would their approaches become more insistent? And every time he would be stunned watching her leave with leggings so tight they wrapped around her ass and made her curves evident, finding himself imagining every possible scenario. He saw her doing exercises, sweat pearling on her forehead and slowly running down her chest wrapped in a sports bra, exposed skin prey to the gazes of men eager to try something. He imagined hands touching her, ambiguous comments, flirtatious looks and ambiguous smiles. Whispers he couldn't hear. In those moments, blood pulsed in his temples and a mix of anger and twisted excitement blended, confusing him. And every time, somehow, he tried to wait for her return to catch something, to try to discover what scared him and terribly excited him.
Every day, as soon as Lara left in the morning, Mario found a way to enter her room. His heart beat strongly while checking the recorder hidden under the bed: he adjusted the position to ensure she wouldn't discover it, checked the battery, retrieved the SD card and copied the content to his PC. In the evening, when Lara wasn't there or had gone to sleep, sitting in the study, with lights off and headphones on, he listened carefully. Always the same indistinct sounds: footsteps, rustling of sheets, closing doors. No compromising voice, no secret revealed. No message. No unusual vibration. No confession to friends. Nothing.
A sense of relief enveloped him, but at the same time, a visceral dissatisfaction strangely grew, as if he was disappointed at not being able to discover secrets, at not finding an evolution of what had happened that night. A small fragment of him, the most instinctive, unconscious, deep part, was almost disappointed that Lara didn't have another story.
One evening Mario was in the living room, trying to distract himself, attempting to think about something else while watching a film that was nothing more than a buzz in Mario's head. Images scrolled across the screen, but he couldn't follow the plot. He was now accustomed to that constant distraction, a silent anxiety that dug inside him, a question without an answer that kept him always on the edge of the precipice.
He heard the front door open and close with a sharp click. His heart immediately accelerated. Lara was returning from the gym: sweaty, hair pulled back, the elastic slightly pulling her blonde strands, her breath still slightly panting from all the energy spent. She took off her gym shoes and let her gym bag fall beside the entrance.
"Hey," she said entering the living room, her voice softer than usual.
Mario turned. Lara's hair was still damp, her face slightly flushed from the workout. Her green eyes seemed veiled, lost in a distant thought. God, how fucking beautiful she was. And how much he wanted her at that moment. He loved holding her when she returned from the gym, feeling her still warm body, her smell even stronger hitting him in the head.
"Hey, how was it?" Mario asked, trying to maintain a neutral tone for fear of asking too much. Every time he asked, he felt like a tightrope walker walking on a thin wire, always ready to fall.
