Fall in love in a weekwe get by - стр. 8
Well, nothing special. A man is like a man. About thirty years old, probably. Too pale to be a hot brunette – maybe he doesn’t stick his nose out at all? Clean shaven, neat – and I already imagined a classic “mad genius”, always disheveled and unkempt. He suddenly looked up from the newspaper and looked up at me. Dark, even scary.
– If you need something, tell me quickly. Don't loom.
Zar-r-raza!
– I wanted to remind you that the first couple… – “Charlotte! Who is our first couple? Fast!" “Healers, first course,” she prompted. I picked up: “Healers, first year.” If you have something important…
– When I fall into insanity, you will be the first to know about it. In the meantime, please get down to business.
"Hopelessly!" – I said with feeling, almost shying away from his table. Contrary to my expectations, Charlotte remained silent.
Until the end of the working day – and this, by the way, is four couples, plus a long lunch break, and several hours of consultations after! – I heard exactly three more phrases from him. “Send this by express mail.” “No, and stop distracting me already!” – in response to the offered coffee. And “Don’t forget to close the door,” to my “Goodbye, Professor Norwood.”
“What was that all about? – I asked Charlotte, going out into the street and exposing my face to the cold evening wind. – Something like “Get out of my sight”? Or a hint that without direct instructions I’m not even able to close the door?”
– He doesn't like open doors. And that Charlotte didn’t like closed ones. Well… – she seemed to think, – sometimes it’s better to have at least some kind of reaction than total indifference. That's what it seemed to me.
“I'm sorry, friend. About indifference. Familiar." “I tried to let my hair down, but the hairstyle, held together by magic, did not budge.
“Don’t think,” prompted Charlotte, “Just believe that it will work out.”
I wanted to say that it’s not so easy to believe if you never… but while I was looking for words, suddenly it really happened. As if by itself.
The wind caught the freed strands and tangled them. Fine! How tired your head is from pulled hair! And why was it necessary to collect them in a bundle if throughout the whole day I didn’t even see a single potion that I could hypothetically ruin?
– You'll see again. You have not yet been to his personal academic laboratory, nor to the general student laboratory.
I've never been anywhere before! The first day of seven passed – it was like falling into an abyss. Into the abyss. I sat with my nose in the mail, again running through the mail and the schedule. At lunch, when the professor had gone somewhere, I secretly looked at the magazine he had left on the table. The same one from Munich. A bunch of chemical formulas, half a page each. I very hesitantly identified the simplest of them as “some kind of horror from organic chemistry,” but mostly there was “some kind of basically unknowable horror.”
“A couple of dozen people in the world will fully understand this,” said Charlotte. – Not more. Higher magic applied to elixirs.
A day to nowhere. A day in which there was not even time to think about the almost hopeless quest “mutual love in a week.” And it’s good that it wasn’t found. Because now I understand very clearly that I want to live. I want it unbearably. Much stronger than I thought before. After all, what really matters is not that the only thing waiting at home is the neighbor’s cat! But this wind, which Charlotte probably no longer feels. Distant Sydney, which seems to remain an unfulfilled dream. A million everyday unnoticed little things that turn out to be significant when you lose them. A life where you can dream about the future, plan or just wait, knowing for sure that you have it. A present, long and preferably happy future, not a measly six days and one evening!