Here's part three of Peter. I suggest you read part I and II first! Hope you like it!
I stopped outside of the conservatory and lit a cigarette. The first snow of the year had fallen during the night, and it was bitter cold. At the moment it was starting to snow again in big but light white flocks.
“Hey Peter,” said a voice behind me.
I turned around, and there she was standing before me, wearing a navy blue trench coat and a white basque. We looked at each other silently for a while.
“Your hair,” I said. “It’s gone.”
Her reddish brown hair, which had been long when I met her, now only reached down shortly beneath her chin. I felt a strange kind of pain when I realized how much it suited her.
“Yeah.” She smiled. “I was feeling sort of radical.”
“Looks good,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said.
A frosty wind was starting to blow, whirling the flocks in our faces.
“Peter,” she said, “I am really sorry about…what happened back last month.”
“That’s OK,” I said. I started drawing patterns in the thin layer of snow with the tip of my shoe. “I just didn’t understand it.”
“Neither did I,” she said.
We started walking across the square in front of the conservatory.
“Where are you going?” she asked. “Have you got the car?”
“Naw,” I said, “it’s broken down.”
My old car had let me down right in the middle of a tunnel. Not that I hadn’t expected it to give up the ghost sooner or later, but the timing had been most inconvenient.
“I’m taking the train.”
“Me too,” she said.
We crossed the street and went on towards the main station.
She sighed and said, “About what happened that evening, you know, I’ve tried to look at it from a, well, detached point of view. And I guess I was just confused by what you said and did because I could not for the life of me imagine somebody falling in love with me. You know, somebody wanting me and thinking of me and caring for me. Me.”
“But now you can?”
“No.” She said it firmly, in a matter-of-fact way. “But wait, let me finish. When I look at it objectively, like I am doing it now, I can say, well, why not, there are worse folks than me who’ve got someone who loves them. I can tell myself, now don’t fuss about your nose or your legs or some stupid thing you just said or whatever, that’s not what counts. I can say stuff like that, and I know it’s true. But when I’m in some sort of a situation, well –“ She shrugged. “I just can’t help it. Maybe that’s just the way it is with women, maybe it’s in our nature to have a certain amount of self-doubt.”
I thought about that for a while.
“You know what?” I said finally. “It fascinates me how you do that.”
“What?”
“How you can talk about your own psyche just as if you were giving a girlfriend advice about her problems or something.”
She laughed. “Well, maybe that’s why I don’t have a lot of problems. Of course I go through my phases of questioning myself and everything, but they don’t affect me like other people. Usually I know pretty much where I am.”
We reached the public park that was situated halfway between the conservatory and the main station.
Suddenly she said, “I’ve never smoked a cigarette in all my life. Never even taken a puff.”
“Wanna try?”
I offered her my almost burnt-down cigarette. She looked at it and her eyes shone with the excitement of novelty appeal.
“Ooo, I bet I’ll get a coughing fit,” she said.
She took the cigarette and brought it to her lips.
“No!” I laughed. “How are you gonna get a coughing fit if you don’t inhale?”
She giggled. “Oh, I’m nervous,” she joked and had another try.
“Hats off!” I said when she slowly exhaled. “You look like the most experienced smoker.”
“Wow,” she said, handing me back the cigarette, “wow. I don’t like it.”
And I said, on the spur of the moment, “You have no idea how endearing you are!”
It just slipped out before I could think it over.
The smile on her face became sad. She turned away. “See,” she said. “It’s happening again. I can’t believe you. I can’t get it into my head.”
I stopped.
“Katie.”
We were standing beside the water basin where the ducks used to be in summer. Suddenly I thought of a book I’d just read, The Catcher in the Rye. Where did the ducks go in winter? The water was dirty, but now even this stinking pond looked nice, frozen over as it was.
She looked at me forlornly and timidly.
“Katie, may I kiss you?”
I could see the glint of tears in her eyes.
“I would be sure to spoil it,” she said quietly. “I would get the jitters again and back out.”
“I will not let that happen,” I said, taking her by both her hands. “You’ll see.”
“But – I can’t –“ she stammered, a tear rolling down her cheek. “I’ve never done this before…”
I leaned towards her and very, very carefully kissed the tear away.
“It’s alright,” I whispered, gently pulling her into my arms.
And she let me kiss her.
It happened just as she had foreseen it: suddenly she pulled back and tried to wriggle out of my arms, but I held her with gentle force until she relaxed. She buried her face against my chest, now shaking with quiet sobs.
We must have remained like that for several minutes. Then she raised her head.
“Well,” I said. “We’re making progress.”
