The Chocolate Kiss

by Laura Florand

  That was silly. Of course.

  He started to lift his hand. Lifted it far enough that he could feel the warmth emanating off the bottom of the cup.

  A little bit of sugar, she had said, of his Désir. And, That macaron? with a sneer. And worse, far worse, that freezing, indifferent dismissal when he had offered it to her. Non, merci. Casually dismissing . . . everything. And turning away to walk out on it, the heels of her boots sounding as if they were walking right over him.

  He dropped his hand away from that warmth. “Non, merci,” he said easily, as if the cup didn’t tempt him in the slightest.

  Had his face looked like that when she had refused him? As if he had been slapped? Putain, but he hoped not. He wasn’t a baby.

  He smiled at her.

  Her eyes narrowed and spat sparks that burned his skin. He knew their bad start was getting even worse, and he loved it. To make his insult ice-crystal clear, he turned his back on her and walked out.

  The little silver bell chimed as he went through the door. The back of his neck prickled, as if it had just been hit by a hex.

  He glanced once at the display window with its skull posts. That was a good sign, wasn’t it? If you could escape Baba Yaga’s hut with your skin?

  Why did he feel unsure he wanted to?

  Chapter 5

  Magalie was scowling at a skull hidden by a chicken foot when the aunts breezed in. It was one of her own posts that had lost its skull, too.

  “That’s probably a good sign,” Geneviève said cheerfully. “That means we need another prince’s skull for that post. And aren’t we lucky? There’s a prince insisting on barging right in.”

  Aja looked thoughtful. Magalie crinkled her nose, dissatisfied. She knew she wanted to do something to make Philippe Lyonnais sorry he had thought of her as a peasant, but somehow his skull on a post wasn’t quite it. If she just cut his head straight off like that, he wouldn’t have a chance to beg for mercy.

  Neither Aja nor Geneviève seemed to realize that having him beg for mercy or having his skull on their post was a fantasy. That, in reality, the invasion of this “prince” might be the end of their world.

  What if he took over their island? What if they lost all their habitués? What if all the tourists who might otherwise wander to their end of the street stopped instead at his store? Lyonnais. It was a name to stop traffic, all right.

  What if their business was destroyed? What if Aunt Geneviève could no longer afford to pay the taxes on this building a lover had deeded to her so long ago, and they found themselves kicked off the island?

  She felt physically sick every time she thought of it. And, with Philippe coming, she couldn’t stop thinking of it.

  Some suppressed part of her had always known she would be wrenched from this place. How could she belong in Paris? She wasn’t even French. Born in America and packed up like a suitcase to be hauled back and forth between the lavender fields of Provence and Ithaca, New York, all her life.

  A match made in heaven, her parents. The beekeeper who had fallen in love with the girl in the lavender fields. Only he was just starting an ambitious, tenure-track position in entomology at Cornell, and her mother’s attachment to the family lavender fields was so profound, she almost couldn’t live without them.

  A love that could cross two worlds. And cross them, and cross them. Good God, had they crossed them. Stéphanie Chaudron’s pregnancy far from her parents and her precious lavender fields had not gone well. She had flown home with her daughter when Magalie was only six months old. Her father had followed two months later, as soon as classes at Cornell let out, and spent the summer. Her mother had resolved to try again and had flown back to Ithaca in late August.

  And so it went.

  From American kindergarten until she passed her French bac, Magalie had only spent four complete, but not consecutive, years in one school.

  And Magalie had handled it normally. Superbly, even. Her parents were so proud of her, they could burst, their bicultural child who could jump from one world to the next without even a stumble. She spoke two languages as if they were her own, which they almost were. She had a very strong sense of who she was, separate from all others. Because she was always separate from all others.

  The first time she “went back” to an old school after a year’s absence in another country, at age seven, she’d been so excited. She just knew that as soon as she was back with those old friends, everyone would be so happy, they would play, people would love her, and they would have so much fun.

  But it didn’t work out right. There was a fracture, a disjointing. As if she was a piece that had been pulled out of a puzzle, but the puzzle had a life of its own; it kept growing and changing, and she kept growing and changing, and when she tried to plop back into her old spot, well . . . it didn’t work. She had to try again and again to fit. And as that kept happening, over and over, the attachments on either side fractured and weakened; because the people she left behind also knew she wouldn’t necessarily be around the next time someone got dumped by a boyfriend or needed a friend to go to the movies with.

  At eighteen, she sought out two people who hadn’t moved in close to four decades: her aunts Geneviève and Aja.

  She had always known them by their boxes of chocolate. They would arrive twice a year, birthday and Christmas, straight from Paris, always constant no matter whether Magalie was in Provence or in upstate New York. Stamped with a witch flying across the moon. The witch looked as if its original had been hand-drawn with a ballpoint pen by someone with a drawing style as angular and cryptic as her handwriting. “Ma chère Stéphanie,” each letter would begin, “we hope this letter finds you well and, if not, that this little package will help. We have had a quiet winter so far, only one Sleeping Beauty-type and two Cinderellas, although I wouldn’t go so far as to say the rest of the customers had their heads on completely straight. But the theater season has been excellent. Did you see Médée when it played in Avignon? I must say, Huppert captured the role beautifully. How is Magalie doing? Don’t forget you must send her to us once she passes her bac!”

  And Magalie would stare at her mother’s chocolates, dark and rich and shaped like flying carpets and witches and cow patties (the chocolate sprouting orange peel hay), and sneak one when she could, and dream of the day she would take a train or a plane to Paris, to go to work in a world filled with those chocolates. In a world that stayed the same, for forty years.

  And then one day she did. She was in the U.S. for her senior year, so she got her diploma, headed straight over to pass her French bac, and enrolled in l’Université de Paris. She spent one last August and the start of the wine harvest with her mother in Provence and then packed her bags and took the train up from that south full of roses and lavender, cicadas and sunburnt stone and sunshine, and came to Paris. Where the stone was just as old but grimier, grayer, where nothing smelled of lavender or roses, and where the world grew so packed with possibilities, she almost couldn’t move at first. She wanted fewer possibilities, not more.

  She took a deep breath and began the long walk out of the train station, which was cold and enormous, her small bag rolling behind her. She had preferred to pack light and go shopping. In Paris.

  Paris.

  She was going to live in Paris. And work here and breathe here. Her emotions tangled in an overload of nerves and hope and potential. She kept taking deep breaths of the car exhaust and the smoke fumes. And walking. Walking down busy sidewalks, past beautiful shop windows and café tables crowded with people enjoying the wonderful weather.

  She reached the great river, braceleted with bridges, bejeweled with re-purposed palaces.

  Her aunts had written her specific directions: Follow the river and cross one island filled with tourists and pigeons gathering before God. Thread through them, shake her head at postcard vendors, protect her bag from pickpockets, and come to the little garden tucked like a secret behind the cathedral, hidden by the big tour buses that line
d the street from end to end. There, a bridge arched up, spanning the river in one graceful leap. And at the peak of the arch, a young man stood at the rail of the bridge. His long gold hair was tied with a leather strap at the base of his neck. His white poet’s shirt rippled from the movements of his arm. He played the violin, intensely and with passion, old, rich music she almost recognized escorting her across the bridge.

  How the aunts had known to mention the violin player in the directions mailed to her a month before, she didn’t know. But they had.

  His hat lay upside down at his feet. She dropped a coin into it the way one might toss a coin into a well and looked up at him for a moment. He dipped his violin in acknowledgment of her and kept on playing.

  She passed onto the quiet island, a place her aunts had lived for nearly forty years. They never moved. This was their place, and they stayed. They had an apartment for Magalie, six floors above the salon de thé, and the clear intention of making her their heir, to let her hold this place forever.

  Forever had no ending. Not ever.

  On the island, all the freshly discovered hustle and bustle of Paris seemed to fade away. Stone buildings centuries old rose around her, never taller than eight stories, including the slanted one, under slate roofs. The rare car passed discreetly, inching its way through the people who walked easily in the middle of the street, looking up at old carvings on the walls, into storefronts filled with strange specialties. Time lay over the island like a cloak: the idea that you always had time, that it had been here for a while and wasn’t going anywhere soon.

  It was her place. The one she wouldn’t leave, so no one could grow over her spot and take it from her.

  Until Philippe Lyonnais decided to take it from her, anyway. He brought time in.

  The papers announced the date he planned to open the store: January 15, after the Christmas rush. The islanders rushed to La Maison des Sorcières in great waves of pity, filling the salon each afternoon with promises of loyalty, as if Magalie was stupid. People didn’t keep spaces for people when things changed. She just hadn’t known that she could set herself in concrete and refuse to budge, and still the world could change around her.

  Magalie did everything she could to make those last three months the best, to fill the shop’s coffers so that they could at least last another six months, no matter how many customers they lost. She poured so much of herself into her chocolate that her aunts started frowning at her. “How can you be losing weight making chocolate, Magalie? Is something wrong? My dear, you don’t have to blast them with the scent of it in Timbuktu. Just a whisper released into the air. It will make it to Timbuktu. Don’t you worry.”

  Of course, two women who had managed to stay in one place for nearly four decades would have a false sense of security.

  Workers went in and out of the storefront halfway down the street, and the sawdust got cleared away, and the pure glamour of the place started to gleam into the quiet neighborhood. Even her most faithful friends on the island would stand pressed against its windows, eager to get a glimpse of the palace that would soon be revealed: the lions in the molding, the twining of rosebuds around the gleaming green marble columns. And the display cases—oh, the exquisite, curving display cases, so simple yet gorgeous in design. What elaborate concoctions would fill them and make them the most beautiful sight in the whole fairy-tale chamber?

  His name went up. Lyonnais. A stamp of gold across the mist-green front, a claim of ownership of the street.

  Occasionally they crossed paths, Philippe there to insist on what he wanted from his workers, checking on the progress in the store, looking cool and collected in jeans and cashmere sweaters and lambskin coats. A lion wearing a slaughtered lamb—how appropriate. She gave him an ice-cold look and refused to even cross the street to him when he nodded, walking crisply on before he could cross the street himself. Not that he showed any sign of doing that. He just turned his head and watched her, looking ever so slightly feral.

  He sent them a box of his macarons for Christmas. A treasure box, opened as cautiously as one that might contain an asp, to reveal the jewel tones of ruby, onyx, amber, jade, emerald macarons. Avec mes meilleurs voeux, Philippe, it said, so very correctly. When he hadn’t even tried to barge into their store where he wasn’t wanted since October, Magalie turned away from it whip-fast and boxed up three of Geneviève’s cow patties to send straight over to him, with no message. Then she and her aunts packed their bags and headed south to spend Christmas and New Year’s with her parents and grandparents.

  Chapter 6

  “Are you expecting someone you haven’t told us about?” Noémie asked, amused and searching at once. If there was any chance Philippe might begin bringing someone to the family Christmas parties, his sister wanted to be the first to start the gossip and speculation.

  Philippe glanced down at the place settings and the extra wineglass he held. Noémie twitched the stem from his hand. “How many times do I have to remind you? There are seventeen of us, not eighteen.”

  Philippe, Noémie and her husband, his niece Océane, his fathers’ two brothers and their families, and his and Noémie’s godfather, a longstanding friend of the family whose wife had died of lung cancer several years back, were all in the home of Philippe and Noémie’s parents, proud hosts to the event this year.

  “Right,” Philippe said, and he counted out eighteen of the silver knives a duchess had given his great-great-great-great grandfather after a particularly successful reception of a king.

  Noémie took back the extra knife and gave him another glinting, searching look.

  “Seventeen,” she reminded him as he started counting out the multiple sizes of forks they would use.

  “I can count to seventeen,” four-year-old Océane announced proudly. “Do you need help, Tonton?”

  Philippe laughed and ceded the counting. Noémie made too much out of a man trying to help set a formal table for a large crowd.

  But as the family ate, stood and stretched their legs between courses, laughed, and tried to keep the children up until midnight for the presents, Philippe did keep feeling as if there was someone missing.

  Maybe it was just the holidays highlighting his singleness. The couples around him were so happy, despite their frequent sparring. His parents surveyed the crowd, exchanging smug parental looks with each other. Nice to know he and Noémie made their parents proud, even if he often drove his father crazy.

  His father was of an average height for a man. His Alsatian mother had passed on tall German genes to her children. His tall mother and average-sized father were of an exact height, in fact, something that pleased both of them enormously. His mother only once in a while put on high heels to show off. His father wolf-whistled when she did.

  He wondered what they would think of the woman who needed ten-centimeter heels to not quite reach his shoulders. He grinned, imagining bringing that black-haired witch into his tall, tawny family. His whole left arm itched with a sudden and passionate desire to be able to pull her in against his side. Right then. Right there. To stand with her tucked up to him as he chatted with his family.

  So that was who was missing. He laughed a little. He never could pick anything easy, could he? She had sent him chocolate merde by return courier in response to his Christmas gift the day before. He had sent her a true treasure box and gotten back dark chocolate made to look like oozing cow patties, with slivers of candied orange peel poking out like undigested hay. It had made him laugh until he had to bend over his desk and clutch its edge in a fit of desperate arousal. Which was very bad luck for him, because he didn’t think the cow shit had been intended as a friendly message.

  He hadn’t dared eat the things. God knew what she had put into them. Belladonna, probably. But they still sat there on his desk at work, the most incredible temptation despite the plethora of his extraordinary Christmas desserts in the laboratoire, desserts that should have overwhelmed that whisper of hunger that snuck out from the cow patties and
followed him around his kitchens.

  “What’s so funny?” his father asked him.

  “Oh, just wondering if someone liked the macarons I sent for a Christmas present.” Secretly, in his pocket, his hand curled into a fist as he tried to physically will her to eat them across however many miles. Was she even in Paris today? Taste them. You’ll never recover. Put one into your mouth, and you’ll melt for me every time I look at you.

  “Ça dépend,” his father said. “Did you send her some of mine or those new concoctions you’re always trying? Olive oil and banana. Who makes a macaron of l’huile d’olive et banane ?”

  Philippe grinned at his father, who was pretending not to eye their two desserts jealously, one made by Philippe, the other by his father. It was a source of both pride and rivalry to the older Lyonnais that Philippe was considered to be the best pâtissier in the world. His father had been considered one of the best before his son swept the field.

  Half of Pierre Lyonnais was entirely proud, since he took credit for Philippe’s training, but being in his own son’s shadow made him grumpy sometimes nevertheless. Philippe raised his glass to him. “You taught me how to make the best chocolate macarons out there by the time I was fourteen, Papa,” he said with a grin. “I got bored.”

  “Rebelle,” his father said, but with affection.

  On Christmas Day, Magalie’s parents kissed under mistletoe. They gave each other special presents they had been dreaming about for months during their separation. They hugged at odd moments. Her mother started talking about flying back to the States with her father for a few months, while the lavender was in its winter slumber.

  “Look at my little parisienne,” Stéphanie said of her daughter, eyeing her fashionable city clothes. “Magalie, I’ve always said it. You can make yourself at home anywhere.”

  Her father looked wistfully proud. Magalie got a lump in her chest at that look. Wherever her mother went during their daughter’s childhood, Stéphanie had always taken Magalie with her. There had been no question of anything else. But the wrenching apart of Magalie’s relationship with her father, over and over, was something that would probably never heal.