Klara sits down on the sofa and looks at him. He’s so much softer, she thinks. It’s done him good to let go of his slick persona. He looks nice. His eyes used to seem so impatient and restless, but now she thinks they look mostly worried and a little nervous. It seems like his attention-seeking, childish self-confidence was only a mask, and he’s let go of it. Not completely, but enough to see what’s behind.

He settles down beside her on the sofa, so close that she catches a whiff of his cologne: citrus and wood. It smells expensive.

‘Damn,’ he says, rising halfway. ‘We should eat. I can go out and grab something. Don’t really have much at home. Cooking’s not my thing.’

Klara nods and leans back. She gently grabs his arm and pulls him back down. She feels so safe here, in his company. All of the stress of Brussels is flowing out of her on George’s sofa, in George’s company. It’s confusing – she barely knows him, after all. But she didn’t imagine it. Maybe there’s always been something there, something that she has tried to ignore?

‘Can’t you wait a minute?’ she says. ‘Can’t we just sit here for a while?’

Without really knowing how it happens, she’s leaning against his shoulder, and he’s hesitantly putting an arm around her.

She turns her face cautiously up towards George’s throat and lets her lips run along the skin just above his collar. She feels his skin tense under her lips, and he changes his position on the sofa, twisting towards her. Suddenly, his hand is beneath her chin and their faces are just millimetres apart. She raises her hands and runs her fingers through his thick hair. She gently takes hold of it and pulls him close.

His lips taste like beer and tobacco and peppermint chewing gum, and at first it feels almost too surreal to even register what’s happening. She’s kissing George Lööw! It would have made her laugh out loud if it didn’t feel so natural, if it didn’t feel like letting go of something she’d held in check far too hard, for far too long.

He runs a hand over her hair now, grabs the back of her neck and pulls her even closer, going from careful to hesitant to intentional. She pushes him back so that he’s half lying on the couch, but she doesn’t stop kissing him, she just straddles him. Now he moans into her mouth, and she can feel his hands on her back, running down towards her butt. She fumbles with the buttons of his shirt, without letting her lips leave his, without letting anything come between them. It feels if she were to pull back for even a second the magic would be broken, and reality would flood over them again.