Read Into a Raging Blaze for Free Online

and pleading, a never-ending range of restrictions that made her start to consider her every action through his critical eyes. The Peter she had fallen in love with was gone. But the sterling Carina who wanted to eat, drink, discuss, fuck, and laugh had also disappeared. She didn’t recognize herself, and that frightened her.
    At home, she had, as Peter put it, made a scene. Years of self-control evaporated when Peter began to complain about her behavior during dinner. She broke some of their china on the black marble kitchen counter that Peter had insisted upon, screamed at him that he was an asshole, that he had always been an asshole, and that it was over. She got him to retreat to the bedroom, whereupon she tore through their wardrobes, gathered a few clothes that she shoved into a bag, and left. Sofie, the NATO desk officer, had let her sleep on her couch. A month later Carina and Peter were divorced.
    They had lived together for ten years and when it ended it was liberating. A part of her, the real Carina, had been waiting all these years to reclaim her body again. Just six months later, she could no longer understand how she had been able to live with that man.
    She became skeptical of men—most were uninteresting, to her eyes. She had slept with a few, but quickly became bored. But Jamal surprised her. They had met by chance. One Friday, two months after she had left Peter, she had allowed a few colleagues to persuade her to join them for a drink. In the bar, she ended up next toan unobtrusive, pleasant guy who was utterly beautiful. They spent three hours talking about books, international law—about things she liked. She couldn’t explain what it was about him that fascinated her, but he moved her deeply, on a fundamental level. She fantasized about kissing him, embracing him. That night, she couldn’t sleep for the first time in a long time. She wanted to carry on talking with him and she wanted to fuck him.
    A few days later he called. Under the pretext that Jamal needed to borrow a book, they met in Stockholm’s Old Town for a coffee, which became an endless walk that neither of them wanted to finish. They roamed through the inner city down to Stureplan, continued to Söder and meandered through the district over Västerbron to Kungsholmen, and they talked. Finally, they ended up in a blustery beer garden down by Norr Mälarstrand, drinking wine. She had never talked so much to anyone in her whole life. His parents were from Cairo, but fled when the regime began to threaten his father, who was a lawyer. He had grown up in Sweden. She told him about herself and her family, about Poland, the diffuse wonderland, as her relatives called their homeland. They understood each other.
    He was careful to begin with. Then they had sex for a whole weekend, over and over until, sweaty, they got up to make spaghetti, naked in his kitchen in Hammarby Sjöstad. For one summer week, she completely lost track of time. She wanted to eat him; she had never felt like that with any man. She absorbed him, making him an irreplaceable part of her biochemistry.
    Around three she heard a mass of voices approaching in the corridor. She had been sending e-mails back and forth to the Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Finance for two hours, concerning an EU conference about security policy that the MFA was to organize, but a problem had arisen as to which budget should be used to pay for it. Now a budgetary paper was being sent back and forth between ministries with various amendments. During the last hour she had begun calling around, trying to calm everyone down so they could reach a decision. She needed certification from them, that was howit worked: when a text or a proposal was okay, each affected ministry gave its certification, which meant that the ministry had read the document and accepted the text as it stood. It usually worked well but, for some reason, Finance didn’t want to accept the reasoning by Defense that some of the