Page 2 of Meet Me in Berlin

Casey stopped and faced me. ‘No way! That’s near me.’

A little thrill shot through me that this beautiful stranger and I had some kind of link, albeit a tenuous one. But I didn’t want to come across as too keen. ‘Cool,’ I said and continued walking.

A beat of awkward silence followed, then Casey asked, ‘Why are you in Berlin? It’s a long way from home.’

‘Student exchange with Berlin Tech for a semester.’

‘Same, but at Berlin Arts. What degree?’

‘Creative Arts.’ I held up my small camera bag. ‘Photography’s my favourite, though.’ We entered the next gallery, and I took a step closer to her. ‘But I’m taking German art this semester, so here I am.’

Casey’s arm brushed mine and my skin prickled. ‘I can help with that, if you like.’

Two weeks later, we found a patch of grass under a tree in Monbijoupark. It was early evening, but the late summer sun hadn’t yet started its descent.

Casey laid her jacket on the grass and patted it. ‘I’ve made you a bed.’

I held my camera at eye level and twisted the focus ring to sharpen the image, keen to capture the dappled light that shone through the leaves and fell across her face. ‘You’re sweet,’ I said, shifting a few steps to the left so that she was off-centre.

She stretched out and propped up her head with her palm, warm brown eyes gazing into the lens. ‘Romantic is the word you’re after.’

The shutter whirred as I held my finger down for a few seconds. I checked the images on the monitor, tucked the camera into my bag and flopped on the grass beside her. ‘You are romantic.’

She pressed her mouth to mine, forcing me to sigh, the way I always did when she kissed me. When we broke apart, Casey said, ‘You know, people always think Paris is the most romantic European city, but I think it’s Berlin. It has this understated romantic coolness, yeah?’

‘Uh-huh.’ I brushed my nose against her neck and inhaled her scent – fresh and earthy from the cedarwood shower gel she used. ‘You believe in love and romance, then?’

‘Totally.’

My heart swelled with affection for her. We hadn’t talked about the intensity of what had passed between us since we met, but the way Casey pressed her ear to my chest and told me that our hearts beat to the same rhythm had to mean she felt the same. Still, I wanted to hear her voice it. ‘What happens next?’ I asked.

She slid her hand across my waist, her fingertips grazing the bare skin between my T-shirt and jeans. ‘We go to your room.’

‘I don’t mean now. I mean after semester finishes. You go back to London. I go back to Melbourne…’

‘Fuck, Holly,’ Casey said with a laugh. ‘We only met a couple of weeks ago.’

The sting in my chest was hard to ignore. ‘And it’s been the most incredible two weeks I’ve ever experienced.’ Not that I’d experienced many relationships in my twenty years – sex a few times with a male classmate in year eleven, a brief relationship with a woman in my first year at university, and a healthy amount of pashing and fumbling here and there over the years. ‘I can’t be imagining this between us,’ I said, slipping my hand up the back of her shirt and running my palm over her soft skin. ‘It’s too real, like the women in the painting.’

Casey considered me for a long moment, then said, ‘You’re not imagining it.’

Relief coursed through me. ‘Maybe I could go to London after the semester finishes? I have a British passport and family in London. They’re in Wanstead, too. You said that’s near you.’

She sat up, a flash of irritation sparking in her eyes. ‘Whoa, Holly. And drop out of university?’

‘I can apply to a London uni – get credit for what I’ve already done.’

‘And pay stupidly high international fees?’

‘I’ll pay domestic fees with my citizenship. I don’t care about that – I’ll get a student loan or something.’

‘You can’t leave Australia and get yourself into debt for me. That’s huge. And what about your family? Your friends?’

I shrugged. ‘I’ll miss them. But we’ll have each other.’

Casey shook her head. ‘I can’t make promises about the future like that.’

I fell silent, blinking to hold back tears.

---