A new, double life began. It had a rhythm more intoxicating than any drug.
By day, I was Lea, the bookseller. I opened Zvona i Knjige at ten. I dusted shelves, ordered stock, recommended Proust to wistful retirees and crime thrillers to bored tourists. I chatted with Mrs. Petrović about her arthritis and listened to old Mr. Barišić's theories about European politics. The shop was my anchor, my public face—a portrait of serene, bookish solitude. My green eyes were calm, my smile easy. No one saw the secret script running just beneath the surface of my skin.
By night, I became something else. His muse. His co-conspirator. His living manuscript.
It started with a simple, typed note slipped under my shop door two days after the arsenal: The lavender is at peak bloom. The scent, under a crescent moon, is hallucinogenic. Midnight. - K
I didn't hesitate. At 11:45, wearing a simple black dress and carrying a shawl, I locked my apartment and walked. The night was warm and still, the bura resting. The climb up the cliff road was steep, the silence broken only by crickets and the distant wash of the sea. His gate was unlocked. I followed a path of rough stone steps through the terraced lavender fields that fell away from the Vidakovic house. The plants were a sea of silvery-green under the starlight, the blooms a profound, velvety purple that seemed to absorb the night. The air was thick, almost viscous, with their perfume—sweet, herbal, soporific.
He was waiting on a wide, flat stone at the edge of the highest terrace, a dark wool blanket spread beneath him, a bottle of wine and two glasses beside him. He didn't rise as I approached. He just watched me, his face in shadow.
"You came," he said, as if there had ever been a doubt.
"You write compelling invitations." I stood before him, the vista of the moon-silvered sea and the darker humps of the islands spread out behind me.
"Sit." He patted the blanket. "The scene is simple. Two people. A universe of stars. The intoxicating smell of a billion flowers. And a question."
I sat, folding my legs beneath me. He poured the wine, a deep, local Plavac, and handed me a glass. "What's the question?"
"How does one make love in a field without destroying it?" He took a sip, his eyes gleaming over the rim of his glass. "It's a problem of physics. And ethics. And aesthetics."
I laughed softly. "Is that what you're writing? A treatise on floral preservation?"
"A chapter," he corrected. "Where the lovers are so consumed by each other they believe, for a moment, they are the center of the cosmos. That the stars are their nerve endings, the earth their bed. The lavender is merely an audience." He set his glass down. "But first, research."
He reached for me then, and we didn't speak for a long time. His kisses were different here—slower, deeper, infused with the night and the heavy perfume. We sank onto the blanket, the dry earth firm beneath the wool. His hands were unhurried, exploring the geography of my body through the thin cotton of my dress as if for the first time. There was no desk, no conquest, only a slow, mutual unraveling.
When he entered me, it was with a sigh that matched my own. We moved together in a rhythm as old and patient as the tides below, the lavender stalks bending and releasing around us, their scent crushed and released with every shift of our bodies. The stars wheeled overhead. It was tender, profound, and utterly devastating. Afterward, sticky with sweat and dust and lavender pollen, we lay intertwined, listening to the night.
"The text will call it 'idyllic'," he murmured into my hair. "But that's a lie. It was elemental. There's a violence in such peace. A consumption."
He drove me home just before dawn, the world hushed and blue. I slept for two hours, then opened the shop, lavender buds clinging to the hem of my dress, the scent rising from my skin every time I moved.
The next delivery was not a note, but a small, heavy package. Inside, a single, polished river stone, cool and grey. Wrapped around it, a page.
The hearth. Cold marble. The contrast of heat and permanence. 9 PM. Bring the stone.
His house was not what I expected. From the outside, it was the grim, stone vikendica. Inside, it was a monastery of words. Books lined every wall, stacked on floors, spilling over tables. It was sparsely furnished, but a massive, ancient fireplace dominated the main room. A fire crackled within, but it hadn't yet taken the deep chill from the stone flags.
Karlo stood by the fire, dressed in dark trousers and an unbuttoned white shirt. He held a leather-bound notebook. "The character," he began without preamble, as if our conversation were continuous, "needs to understand the duality of passion. It can be a warming fire. Or it can be a sacrificial altar. The setting informs the act."
He gestured to the hearth. The marble surround was wide, smooth, and pale as a winter moon. "Cold," he said. "Unforgiving. A stage."
He took the river stone from my hand, his fingers brushing mine. "And this is the talisman. A piece of the outside world, smoothed by relentless force. A reminder of endurance." He placed it on the mantelpiece.
"What's my role?" I asked, my voice small in the cavernous room.
"Your role is to feel," he said, closing the distance. He began to undress me, not with the fevered haste of the arsenal, but with a ritualistic slowness. Each article of clothing was folded and placed on a chair. When I stood bare before him and the fire, the chill from the floor and the marble seeping into my feet, he didn't immediately touch me. He just looked, his writer's eyes missing nothing—the goosebumps on my skin, the way the firelight gilded my curves, the apprehension and excitement warring in my eyes.
"Now," he whispered, leading me to the hearth. "Kneel."
The marble was shockingly, brutally cold against my knees. I gasped. He knelt behind me, his clothed legs bracketing my bare ones, his chest a warm wall against my back.
"The contrast," he murmured, his lips at my ear, his hands sliding around to cup my breasts. "The searing heat of the fire on your front. The bitter cold of the stone beneath you. And me… the variable. The source of another kind of heat."
He made love to me there, on the unforgiving stone. It was an act of exquisite torment. The cold bit into my knees and shins, a sharp, grounding pain, while the fire baked my face and torso. His movements were slow, deep, purposeful, each thrust a deliberate stroke against the internal heat he was stoking. The sensations collided—pain, warmth, fullness, the hard marble, the soft give of his lips on my shoulder. I was a nexus of opposing forces. When I came, shuddering, it was with a cry that was equal parts agony and ecstasy, my fingers splayed against the cold marble as if trying to absorb its stability.
After, he lifted me, chafing warmth back into my limbs with the rough blanket from his sofa, holding me by the fire until the shaking stopped. "Authenticity," he said, kissing my forehead. "You can't write that cold unless you've felt it steal your breath. You can't describe the surrender unless you've embraced the discomfort."
The invitations varied. A page torn from a nautical logbook, with coordinates scribbled in the margin. It led me to a derelict fishing boat, The Marija, beached in a hidden cove a mile down the coast. I found him on the prow, silhouetted against a blood-orange sunset.
"This chapter is about impermanence," he called out as I picked my way over the rocks. "The ghost of industry. The scent of rust and rotting wood. Sex here is a act of defiance. A life force in a place of decay."
The boat's deck was rough, splintered. We made love against the rusted winch, the metal groaning in sympathy, the salty, rotten smell of the sea filling our noses. It was fierce, quick, and hungry, our clothes barely pushed aside. As the last of the sun dipped below the horizon, he looked at me, paint smudged on his cheek from the corroded hull. "We are the only living things here," he said. "Remember that feeling. The victory of the temporary over the eternal."
He began leaving manuscript pages for me at the shop, not just invitations. The prose was breathtaking, transforming our encounters into mythic, psychological landscapes. Reading them was a form of reverse-engineering: seeing the beautiful, terrifying creature our passion became in the labyrinth of his mind. I was no longer just a muse; I was a critic. I'd leave notes in the margins.
The lavender scent wasn't 'hallucinogenic,' it was 'oppressive.' It weighed down the air.
The marble wasn't 'cold,' it was 'accusatory.'
You've missed the sound the winch made—a metallic shriek, like a ghost.
He'd receive the annotated pages, his eyes lighting up with a ferocious joy. "Yes! Accusatory. Perfect. You see? This is collaboration."
Our dialogue wasn't just physical; it was a constant, thrilling intellectual duel. He'd challenge me over glasses of rakija in his cliffside kitchen.
"You think love is a shelter, Lea," he'd say, pointing a bread knife at me for emphasis. "I think it's the storm that reveals the shelter's weaknesses. It shows you the rotten beam, the leaking roof."
"That's cynicism dressed up as insight," I'd fire back, emboldened by the alcohol and his total attention. "Love is the repair. It's the willingness to see the leak and patch it."
"Semantics," he'd shrug, a smile playing on his lips. "The patch is just a slower form of decay. The bura will find it eventually and rip it off."
We'd argue about books, about the nature of fear, about the ethics of using real people in fiction. The banter was a form of foreplay, sharp, witty, and charged. He'd corner me between bookshelves in my own shop, his body caging mine, and whisper a devastatingly accurate analysis of my deepest insecurity, then kiss me until I couldn't remember what we were arguing about.
The secrecy was part of the fuel. No one in town knew. We were careful. He never came to the shop during open hours. I'd arrive at his house after dark, leave before first light. In public, we were strangers. I'd see him sometimes, buying coffee at the kava bar on the Riva, reading a newspaper, utterly remote and unapproachable. Our eyes would meet across the square—a flash of green and a fathomless black—and the world would tilt on its axis for a second before righting itself. It was a secret shared in a glance, a universe contained in a heartbeat.
My days in the shop took on a dreamlike quality. I'd be ringing up a sale, and my mind would flash to the feel of cold marble, or the taste of salt on his skin. I'd catch my reflection in the window and see a woman glowing with a secret life, her eyes brighter, her movements more fluid. The mundane became beautiful because it was the counterpoint to the nocturnal intensity. Sorting invoices was a meditation. Arranging a window display was a composition. I was living in two worlds, and both were more vivid for the contrast.
One night, after a particularly slow, exploratory encounter in his vast, book-lined bedroom—an chapter he was calling "The Cartography of Yearning"— I lay with my head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat.
"People will start to talk soon," I murmured. "A woman is seen climbing the cliff road at night. The reclusive writer's light burns late. They'll connect the dots."
His hand stroked my hair. "Let them. Gossip is just the village's way of writing its own bad fiction. Our story is ours."
"Is it a story?" I asked, lifting my head to look at him. "Or is it just a series of… experiments?"
He met my gaze, his expression unreadable. "What does your marginalia say?"
I thought of the pages, of the narrative he was weaving. It wasn't just about sex. It was about a man haunted by the bura's voice, a woman drawn into his orbit, and a creeping horror that the line between his fiction and their reality was dissolving. Our enacted passions were the bright, beating heart of a much darker tale.
"It says we're in the second act," I said quietly. "The part where the characters are happy, before the shadow reaches them."
He smiled, a shadow crossing his own face. "You're learning the architecture. The second act is always the most dangerous. It's where the characters are most truly themselves, and therefore, most vulnerable."
He rolled over, reaching for his notebook on the bedside table. He scribbled something, tore out the page, and handed it to me.
It wasn't a love note. It was a line of dialogue, attributed to the fictional writer in his novel: "I don't invent the monsters, my dear. I just provide them with a mirror, and the courage to look."
I looked from the page to his face. "Is that you? Speaking through him?"
He took the page back, folded it, and tucked it under his pillow. "It's a character, Lea. Remember the boundaries."
But the boundaries were the very thing that felt increasingly fluid. Were we collaborators, or was I merely the most engaging specimen in his collection? Was this a grand, romantic obsession, or was I being meticulously researched for a role in a horror novel?
The doubt would creep in, cold and quiet, in the daylight hours. Then, a new note would arrive—a feather, a shell, a page smelling of ozone and typed with a fresh, provocative scene—and the doubt would be burned away by the sheer, addictive thrill of it. By the promise of another night as his living text, another chance to feel the world sharpen to a single, brilliant point of sensation and emotion.
I was his secret collaborator. By day, my bookshop. By night, his muse. And I had never felt more alive, or more perilously close to the edge of a page that might, at any moment, turn into an abyss.