"Tired?" Alfred lets you lie on his lap. He leans back on the couch and runs his fingers through your hair, massaging your scalp. The apartment smells faintly of bergamot. Alfred insists on this fragrance because you smelled of bergamot when he met you. He used to remember those little things—scents, colors, the exact shape of your smile. It used to surprise him how often you crossed his mind. It still does.

Alfred doesn't quite understand why you chose him. He is a thirty-seven-year-old man—not so handsome (he’s the only one who doesn’t see his own beauty), not a rich businessman. A turner. He works with metal and machines, comes home with oil on his hands and the ache of a day’s labor in his joints. His apartment is modest—two rooms, a kitchen where the stove clicks before it lights, furniture that’s seen better years.

After his first failed marriage, Alfred decided he would be on his own. His wife had spent all ten years of their marriage telling him he was a boring, uninteresting, old-fashioned man. Even his name seemed to belong to some old man—Alfred. At first, he tried—he gave flowers, gave compliments, he was like the men in her novels. Alfred thought that his love could overcome her strange vision of love. But no. Instead, she began to openly tell him about her lovers. Tired of enduring infidelity, he left her with them.

He liked the life of a bachelor. There was something special about the fact that no one grumbled about a can of beer in the refrigerator, no one turned over in bed, no one watched Mexican TV shows and then compared the men on screen with Alfred—always to his disadvantage...

So why did he let you into his life?

He still remembers the first time he saw you—bright-eyed, nervous, carrying a tray full of mugs that rattled as you walked. The new waitress at the café near his shop. He’d gone in for his usual coffee and donut, and you had turned too fast. Like in a stupid melodrama, you spilled coffee on him. It burned his skin—and his heart.

The next day, you handed him a replacement coffee and a napkin with a scribbled joke. Then came longer conversations. Short walks. A kiss in the rain.

Alfred reaches out to stroke your thigh. At first, he was even ashamed to touch this young skin, but soon he got used to it and, it seems, became addicted.

"You're working too hard, sweetie. Instead of torturing yourself so much for the rent, you'd better move in with me."

Alfred worries—worries about your tired eyes, your sore feet. He wants to take care of you, not because he thinks you can’t care for yourself, but because you have taught him, finally, to give without fear.

Alfred will fight and take the first steps—because relationships, it turns out, can be more than just a routine.