Still, she fingered the dress sadly. Oh, there was never any accounting for the human heart. And no one looking at her now, she thought, would ever see anything other than the wispy bald head, the lack of eyebrows, the weight loss. No one would ever see the tentative bride, or the joyously happy teenage lover, or the unfulfilled housewife, or the middle-aged woman who had rather enjoyed living on her own again with no boxer shorts to wash and no huge dinners to make.
It was a terrible dress. A daughter would never have wished to wear it. She sighed. She should probably go to her scarf drawers. Her friends had presented her with a succession of jaunty scarves to wear over her head. She hated them all. She hated having to pretend to be jaunty when all she wanted to do was throw up. But it was so kind of them. It showed that they were thinking of her. And people liked sick people to be jaunty; it made them feel less scared and awkward. So she had better pack a few.
She felt, for the last time, the hem of the floral yellow dress with its tiny picked-out daisies. Alors, she thought. Whenever she thought about Thierry, she always thought about him in French, as if she was adding a layer of code to her most innermost secrets. It was absurd to think on some level she was trying to hide her thoughts—from who? From God? If God still sounded like the Reverend, he didn’t speak any other languages.
Alors. Thierry would get a shock when he saw her. Mind you, from the sound of things, he’d changed a bit too. And did it matter, in the end?
- - -
We pulled ourselves away. He smiled at me, completely unselfconsciously. I couldn’t help it, there was something very attractive about the fact that he absolutely didn’t give a damn about what we were doing or whether anybody saw us. It also made him look a bit wolfish.
“Come with me,” he said.
I smiled. It felt a little late to play the coquette now, given that I had the pink bra on and everything. But my heart was beating painfully, partly from the excitement, partly from the nerves.
“I shouldn’t,” I said. “It’s turning me into a double agent.”
He laughed. “I need a double agent,” he said. “No. Forget that. I need you.”
He took my hand in his great big one. It was hard to believe that his thick fingers could make such delicacies out of sugar and cocoa and butter.
“Race you back to the bike,” he said.
It had gotten later, and the streets around the Île de la Cité were nearly deserted as the crowds went to eat in the Marais or further north.
“I can’t run,” I said. Truthfully, I hadn’t tried.
“Of course you can,” he said, looking at me severely. “You might jiggle a bit, but I like that.”
I stuck my tongue out at him.
“On your mark…get set…”
“No!”
“Go!”
We burst off across the great Place du Louvre, my thin soles crunching against the gravel. It had been so long. The soft evening wind blew in my face, my hair out behind me. Laurent was very fast and looked very young, funneling along, occasionally turning his head to laugh at me, the wind whipping his curls in his eyes.
“J’arrive!” I yelled, redoubling my efforts. Although I was out of breath, running, properly running at the very limits of my capacity suddenly felt so freeing. I hadn’t realized I missed it, didn’t even realize I’d ever done it. I had filed running away with summer sandals and my youth. Now, though, I raised my hands in the air with the sheer exhilaration.
Just as we got to the side of the bridge, I tried to jump a tricky step. As I launched into the air, it flashed through my mind in a heartbeat that I wasn’t going to make it. My toes couldn’t flex properly and I had no stability on that side. I came down on the stairs heavily, right side first, my legs folding up underneath me, knocking the side of my right foot and the tips of where my toes used to be very hard against the harsh stone.
I crumpled, tears springing to my eyes even though I didn’t want them to. It hurt like absolute buggery.
Instantly Laurent turned around, his face full of concern. He leaped to my aid, even as another passerby stopped to see if I was all right.
I blinked, trying to breathe properly and not burst into sobs like a baby.
“Merde,” I said, “That really, really hurts.”
He crouched down by my foot, and just at that precise moment, I realized that of course the force of the impact had knocked off my beautiful shoe, which was lying about a foot away, spattered with blood.
“Mon Dieu!” he shouted. My hand shot to my mouth as I realized what he’d done; he thought my fall had somehow knocked off my toes. I glanced down; they were not a pretty sight, all grazed from the cobbles.
“No, no, it’s okay,” I muttered, feeling like the world’s biggest freak. I had to get up on my own; he was struck slightly dumb. Then he remembered his manners and darted forward, but he felt tentative as he proffered me his arm.
“It’s…it’s just…I had an accident,” I muttered, my face bright red. I wanted the ground to swallow me up. Everything I had ever feared, everything I had worried about me being a big weirdo, impossible to fancy, seemed to be coming true.
“Of course,” he said, and before he could help himself, his eyes flickered up and down my body, as if calculating which other parts of me might be missing. It felt like a slap in the face.
“I…I lost my toes,” I added.
The color came back into his cheeks a little bit. “Sorry, I just got a bit of a shock.”
“Yes, I know. It’s weird,” I muttered. This was every bit as bad as I had thought it would be.
“No, no, it’s…it’s fine.”
But it wasn’t. Suddenly I felt very strongly that it wasn’t fine. That I wasn’t comfortable, that I couldn’t be the kind of carefree European girl I always wanted to be. Traffic honked and signed on the bridge and I had come down to earth with a literal bump.
He smiled at me finally, nervous. “Uh, do you want to come over and tell me all about it?”
But the extraordinary, breathtaking kiss of just a few minutes ago had evaporated; now we looked awkward, and I was covered in blood and needed cleaning up. I was a bit wobbly and he noticed.
“Are you all right? Can I help you?” He put his arm around me.
I shook my head. “Can you just help me home?” I said, leaning into his reassuringly broad chest. “I’ll be fine, I just…Another time maybe,” I said. “It’s getting late. I have to work tomorrow.”