Luxembourg

The night air was cold against my skin. I stopped for a moment to light a cigarette and consider my way back home. The night was humid, but fog conferred a spectral beauty to the city and I just could not see myself taking the public transport. So I walked. I hadn't even bothered to check if Léa had followed me because I had the feeling that she was still up there, staring at the cemetery. 

I walked slowly, lost in thought, but alert to everything that happened. I had always been extremely careful when I walked up alone at night, monitoring the shadows that I cast and changing my pace if someone walked near me at a similar one. Sometimes I stopped for longer at the traffic lights only to cross just before it changed colors again. That night was no different. Yet, part of my brain was thinking about Léa's proposition. I wanted to do it. I didn't know why, but I wanted it. I had had enough of men doing whatever they wanted. It was dangerous, yes, but it was who I had become. Or maybe it was who I had been all the time, but I had never accepted it. 

I walked around the Luxembourg gardens on my way home, feeling the cleaner air that they produced. There was something else, I knew. Léa could be able to give an answer to a question that had haunted me for years. However, I could not base my decision on only that. I had to decide whether on its own it was worth doing it. 

I was almost home when it started raining heavily, in true newbie fashion I had forgotten my umbrella and I arrived home completely soaked. I opened the door of my apartment with my shoes in one hand and I undressed in the hall, leaving the wet dress and tights on a pile in the floor, my coat, and purse in the hanger. Dressed only in my underwear, I went to the bathroom and prepared myself a bath to get the cold off my bones. As I slipped into the bathtub, I could not stop thinking about the choice I had in front of me.