Chapter One: Stroopwafel
It started with a stroopwafel.
Which is, I know, a ridiculous thing to say. But it did. Sofie was doing that thing where she balances one on top of her mug so the steam softens the caramel, and I was watching her and thinking, I have to tell her tonight or I never will.
It was a Thursday. Late November. One of those Amsterdam evenings where the rain is just everywhere at once. I’d had most of a bottle of wine. Not all of it. Most of it.
Sofie had had one glass.
We were on the sofa. The small one. The one we always end up on together even though the other sofa is bigger and nobody has ever explained why we don’t use it. She was reading and I was holding my wine glass with both hands and staring at the window.
“You’re doing the thing,” Sofie said, without looking up.
“What thing.”
“Where you hold your wine like it’s going to escape.”
I looked down at my hands. She wasn’t wrong.
“I’m fine,” I said.
She turned a page. “Okay.”
I put my wine down. Picked it back up. Put it down again.
“Sofie.”
“Mm.”
“I need to tell you something.”
She looked up. Book lowering a few centimetres. “Okay.”
And then I didn’t say anything for quite a long time.
“Mara.”
“I’m getting there.”
“Sure.”
“I’m just.” I picked up my wine. Put it down. “Okay. So. You know how sometimes you find out something about yourself and it kind of explains a lot of things? Like when I found out I was lactose intolerant and suddenly the last twenty years made sense?”
Sofie put her book face down on the cushion. “Go on.”
“I think I want to be told what to do,” I said. To my own hands. Not her face, my hands, because I genuinely could not. “Like. By someone. In a specific context. A sexual context.”
Silence.
The radiator made a clunking noise.
“I mean,” I said, still to my hands. “Not in normal life. I just mean. The kind of situation where someone is. In charge. Of me. I’ve been thinking about it for a while and I haven’t told anyone and I think the reason I’m telling you is because.” I looked up. “You’re you. And I trust you. And I’m slightly drunk.”
Sofie looked at me for a moment.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay?”
“Yeah.” She tilted her head. “How long have you been thinking about it?”
“Like six months? Maybe longer.”
She nodded. Just nodded, like I’d said something completely reasonable.
“Why are you nodding like that?”
“I’m just thinking,” she said.
“About what?”
“About Saturday.” She picked up her mug. Took a sip. “I’m free. You’re free.”
I stared at her. “That’s. You’re not even going to ask me anything else?”
“Do you want me to?”
“I don’t know, I just told you something quite significant and you’ve jumped straight to scheduling.”
“Would you prefer I made it weird?”
“No,” I said. “Obviously not.”
“Saturday then,” she said, like it was already decided.
And I suppose it was.
She picked her book back up. We sat there for another hour, the rain against the window, the radiator clunking. She ate the stroopwafel off her mug in two neat bites and didn’t say anything else about it.
Around eleven she said she was going to bed. She stood up, bent down, kissed me on the cheek exactly like she did every other Thursday. Her lips were warm.
“Goodnight, Mara,” she said.
“Night,” I managed.
I listened to her move through the flat. Bathroom, bedroom. The click of her door.
And then I just sat there in the dark with the rain and the radiator and the empty wine glass and thought, what on earth have I just agreed to?
I lay awake for a very long time.
I could not stop smiling.
