Summer night

On a summer night, in a land that speared into the blue sea, beneath an endless stretch of purple twilight, a particular woman sat with her (unironically) hazelnut-imbued Americano in a ceramic cup. She rested her chin seductively in her hand, eyes locked on the obviously charmed Rhinesian across the table. Whether it was something deeper or merely entrenchment, was Schrödinger’s job to decide.

The Rhinesian, whose tie had long surrendered to the humid breeze, traced the rim of his untouched drink with a finger. Not nervously, but as if coaxing an answer from the surface. His gaze held hers with the trained stillness of a man used to negotiations, though this was not a boardroom, and the stakes were, inconveniently human. Somewhere between the echo of laughter from the terrace and the jazz too proud to stay in the background, something passed between them. Too specific to be random, too spontaneous to be strategy.

She sipped from the steaming cup, the mist briefly forming a soft halo just above her cupid’s bow, peach fuzz like that of a Scandinavian woman in winter light. Her blonde hair, slightly untamed by the sea breeze, kept tethering forward, and each time she tucked it back with unconscious grace. Her gaze never wavered, locked still on the man across from her, as she adjusted the already-clouded rectangular frames perched on her nose. The man with his large build, knowing there were no more moves left to make, no further chess pieces to slide forward, stood, finally. He gathered his late work with slow precision, performing the gesture every woman adore a man would do for such obvious hint.

And yet she hadn’t expected him to actually ask. Not like that. Not with the low timbre and the slight tilt of his head, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to cut through the haze with a simple, “What is it?” And for a moment, just a flicker, she blanked. The entirety of witty lines, the imagined retorts, the romantic quips, all gone. Her mind, so carefully rehearsed in the theatre of flirtation, stood in the wings with stage fright. All she felt was a flick of panic, then rolled the curtain of excitement. Like the part in a roller coaster where it tips forward, and it’s too late to get off. Her lips parted, but no words arrived. Only the softest exhalation, a titter, as if her body had chosen to answer for her.

The part where the roller coaster make the loop de loop, the one where every gossip clique admonished. He chuckled, yeah he chuckled. It feels freeing, gyrating on her heart, her attempt worked. But there is still more coal to fuel this train. So she did what would be her inner counsel of ‘Plan failed at first contact.’ An absolute statue.

“What’s your name?”

“Bertrand, you can call me Bertl,” the man answered.

The woman feels ecstatic, just like certain Marshal who wear toque surmounted with great plume had said, “My friends [no my love!], I want to live another quarter of an hour to make a handsome charge with you!”

“So why are you looking at me?” The man in turn asked.

The woman visibly blinked as she had been taken back. Without a word, she gestured for him to sit

He eased into the chair, one arm draped over the backrest, the other casually circling his coffee. “You looked like you were composing something,” he said, watching her with a lopsided smile. “A line. Or a verdict.”

She tilted her head, her fingers absently curling around the lip of her cup. “Would it make a difference which?”

“Only to your defense attorney.”

She smirked, almost involuntarily. “What if I’m the prosecutor?”

“Then I surrender, obviously.” He lifted his hands slightly, palms out. “But I’d like to see the evidence first.”

She leaned forward, resting her elbow on the table, chin on hand. Back to that same pose, but softer now. “The evidence,” she said slowly, “is circumstantial. You walked in like you were halfway through an apology. And then you didn’t look away when I stared at you. That’s suspicious behavior, Bertl.”

He raised an eyebrow, sipping at his drink like it was a pause button. “And yet you stared first.”

“I never denied being guilty,” she said. Then, quieter: “I just wasn’t sure of the charge.”

For a beat, silence stretched between them. Not tense, but charged, the kind that asks a question with no one brave enough to answer it right away.

Finally, he said, “I didn’t come here looking for anything.”

She nodded. “Neither did I.”

He met her eyes. “But now that I found it, what do we do?”

She looked down at her coffee, then back at him. “We interrogate it.”

He laughed. “Together or separately?”

A pause. Then she offered the faintest smile. “I’d prefer to cross-examine.”

“As if certain,” he quipped, eyes narrowing with the ease of someone who’d danced around worse fires.

“Let’s be straight,” she said, sitting back slightly. “I wouldn’t have perused.”

“Yet you did.”

He raised an eyebrow, not in accusatory accent, but in general disbelief. And somehow, that was enough to send a flutter through her chest. As if he’d snapped something inside her open without touching a thing.

He leaned forward, voice low but crisp.

“So… what’s your name?”

She hesitated, not for secrecy, but for dramatic timing.

“Fiorella.”

He tasted the name silently, letting it settle in the space between them like a dropped glove. Then, with maddening ease, he said,

“Fiorella… like the blossom of a daisy, aren’t you?”

That was it.

His first real hit. Not a flirt, not a tease, but something that landed smack-dab into her stomach. Too poetic to be casual, too tender to be rehearsed. It stirred something under her ambivalence. He wasn’t just playing any more, he knew, recognized the pattern, the colour among the green vegetation.

The moment her breath caught. Not enough to show, but enough to feel. She reached for her cup again, not out of thirst, but for cover. Still it doesn’t cover her wide grin.

He smiled back, just slightly. Enough to let her know he’d seen it. That he knew, and walked through it. Then for a second he tensed, his body like the rim-rod of iron railing, his arm braced on the armrest. His vision occupied by half of his upper body as he shook her head a bit, letting out a hardly breath of air.

And by milieu of her comeuppance, the story starts so abruptly and end to which one would assume. And uh I don’t know where to end this.