It was too steep to take my bike up to the fortress with me, so I left it locked at the café and set out on foot. The street that led to the back entrance of the Old Town veered right, onto the path that would bring me outside the walls. There, I found the stone steps that wound up the mountain to the still-watchful ruins of Saint John’s Fortress. It brooded above us like some crumbling, stolid sentry, built by the Illyrians and reinforced in the sixth century by Emperor Justinian to keep guard over the Old Town below.
My thighs burned by the time I reached the first level of the ruins. The secluded little bit of rampart that Luka and I had claimed years ago was several levels farther up, though below the castle tower itself. I was almost out of breath as I reached the last bit of trail I’d have to take, so hair-raisingly narrow that tourists never thought it led to anything, and locals had more sense than to attempt. I’d flattened my back against the cliff wall and edged there so many times over the years that the sheer drop beneath me barely even registered in the pit of my stomach.
Luka was already there as I inched my way into the little aerie of crumbling stone we’d discovered together, lounging on the rampart. “Lithe” wasn’t a word I’d ever thought to use for any other boy, especially one as tall as he was, but it fit him, the way he draped himself over things as if they were his just because he was touching them.
I barely had time to set my backpack down before he swung himself off the wall and folded me into a bone-grinding hug. “Miss Iris,” he murmured into my hair. He smelled different than I remembered, amber and pine resin, a warm and spicy soap I might have liked if it hadn’t been so foreign. “So good to see you. They don’t provide cliffside service like this in the Belgrade restaurants, let me tell you. And the Serbs say we’re the peasants.”
“Oof,” I squeaked. “Let go, or you’re going to crush me and there won’t be any such service in your childhood home, either.”
“Good point.” I could hear him smile. “Can’t kill the fair maidens of my childhood home. Otherwise, why would I come back?”
He gave me another squeeze before letting go, and we unpacked the food I’d snuck into my backpack for a makeshift picnic. I was beginning to think he’d forgotten when he carefully plucked a little package wrapped in tinfoil from his back pocket and offered it to me, one lean cheek creasing as he smiled. He always brought me a new flower when we met. Jade vine, ghost orchids, sprigs of fuzzy bottlebrush, and once even something called a chocolate cosmos. Rare, exotic flowers that couldn’t possibly grow in the region, that I had no idea where he found.
He didn’t know what they meant to me—I hadn’t shared the gleam even with him, as much as I’d sometimes yearned to have him see the best of me—but he knew I loved them, and it was enough.
I unwrapped it carefully, peeling back the layers until I found a perfect, still-living blossom inside, its petals moist with the water trapped beneath the foil. It was some kind of lily, creamy yellow that deepened into red as if dipped on the ends, and tiger-speckled along the inside with red flecks. As soon as my gaze softened it fractured into a starburst, a miniature firework of yellow upon yellow, a whirlpool of crimson flecks swirling around the minuscule black hole that was the flower’s deepest inner point.
“What is it?” I breathed, like anything over a whisper might disturb the churning bloom. “Where did you find it?”
“It’s an Italia Asiatic lily, and like I’d ever tell. I love when you see a new one for the first time,” he added softly. “It’s like a baby looking at something it’s never seen before. I don’t think you ever look at anything else like that.”
“I’m glad you choose to find it endearing,” I murmured back, still caught up with the contained, gorgeous explosion on my palm. “As opposed to strange and unnerving. That’s the consensus around these parts.”
“Nah. They just think that about your face.”
I set the flower gently back into its foil cradle, then reached out and smacked him on the back of the head.
“Don’t beat me, woman.” He caught my hand and twisted it until I yelped. “At least not until after the food.”
I sat back against the dusty stone, watching him as he ate in his fastidious, starving way, both of us cross-legged on the sun-warmed floor of the aerie. He was wearing city clothes, fitted jeans and a Lacoste shirt with something that actually looked like an alligator emblazoned above the breast pocket, instead of a black-market knockoff like everyone around here wore. His dark hair was much shorter than it had been the previous summer, before he left for college, and his face more angular than I remembered.
He’d been lean-faced and handsome even as a little boy, with those same watchful eyes, a startling light hazel beneath black lashes and the thick, dark eagle wings of his brows. He was eleven and I was nine when we met, the day he punched our most notorious mouth breather in the face for calling Luka’s mother a child-stealing Roma. Later, I crept up to Luka and wiped the scrapes on his knuckles with a corner of my T-shirt while he watched me with solemn eyes.
After that, Lina and I had become inseparable from Luka and his sister, Nikoleta, who was a grade below us. We formed our own little group of half castes, an island of bright color. When we got older, the girls who’d once whispered about his Romany mother began to notice very actively how handsome Luka was.
But even if there wasn’t so much as a kiss between us—and there never was—I was still the girl who’d touched him first.
“Hey,” he said, startling me out of my thoughts. “Why you being so quiet, Missy? And you’re not eating anything.”
“Even the culinary treatings of Jasmina the Peerless get old, believe it or not,” I said, shrugging a shoulder. “Unlike her spectacular bitchery. She likes to keep that fresh for me.”
He snorted in sympathy. “She hasn’t eased up, huh?”
“I don’t think she knows how. It was even worse than usual today, there was this . . .” The white flame of Dunja’s hair blazed through my thoughts, followed by my mother’s devastation and her fear. It felt so out of place here in the sunshine, and with pragmatic Luka right in front of me, like a swarm of moths where there should have been only butterflies. I could tell him about it later, once the strangeness had the time to fade. “But anyway, old news. Tell me about Belgrade.”
He whistled low. “I didn’t think I was going to like it, you know? So much space, so many variables, too easy to get lost in. But it’s amazing, Iris, all these sleek modern buildings.” He gave a light laugh. “Even their older ones are fancier than ours—the biggest theater has this glass covering over the neoclassical facade, like a museum exhibit. It’s gorgeous, you’d love it. And they have stands where you can get a hot dog the size of your forearm, and you eat it with kefir.”