The Chocolate Kiss

by Laura Florand

  “You’ve always been so bright and strong,” he said.

  Geneviève and Aja gazed at her parents for a moment and exchanged a glance with each other. They didn’t say anything, but a little later, Geneviève slipped her a chocolate witch, and Aja handed her a cup of tea. Maybe the two women really did know magic, or maybe the magic was in the gesture itself, but nibbling on the witch’s broomstick and sipping the tea, Magalie did feel stronger.

  She had brought the box of macarons with her, struggling against the temptation to serve them as a special treat at the end of the meal. But while her grandfather was uncorking the Sauternes to serve with the foie gras, she slipped out into the middle of their winter-dead lavender field. Its power was in abeyance, its hold on her mother loosened. Anyone would think her ambitious, determined, mild-mannered father was Hades, able to keep her mother in his world for only the four winter months of the year.

  The plants’ scent was a mauve, slumbering thing around her in the cold. Bundled in her coat, she opened the box to gaze into it. She had half thought she might sneak one, out here in the night, where no one would know, maybe not even him.

  Instead, something wild and raging ran through her at their beauty, at the lavender fields, at her father’s wistful look, and she threw the box to the ground, stomping and stomping on it, like a child in a temper tantrum, until it was nothing but muddy, obliterated card stock and gluey sugar.

  It didn’t make her feel nearly as strong as she’d thought it would.

  The reverse, almost. It seemed to leave a fissure in her that she could not get to close.

  Philippe was pouring a sweet Sauternes for the table, to accompany the foie gras, when he felt sharp-heeled boots shatter his heart and grind the crumbs into the ground.

  His hand tightened around the bottle until the knuckles showed white. Noémie looked up from the family’s momentary focus on the baby kicking in her belly. “Are you all right?”

  “She didn’t eat them,” he said grimly.

  That . . . witch.

  Had she just stomped his macarons into the ground?

  “Maybe try some classics next time?” his father suggested. “I hear women like chocolate.”

  But he threw his arm behind his son’s back and gave his shoulders a squeeze. His father knew what it was like to pour his heart into his work.

  Chapter 7

  Magalie and her aunts returned to a freezing Paris to find an invitation to Philippe Lyonnais’s opening.

  The bright mood from the Christmas and New Year’s festivities sloughed off Magalie like diseased skin. She just stood there, bleakness invading her. That bastard. He had to rub it in, didn’t he? She had poured all of herself into her chocolate, but their doom was still approaching.

  “Are you all right?” Geneviève asked repeatedly over the next week. “How can you act stressed making chocolat chaud and tartes au chocolat? It’s not good for the chocolate. Maybe we’re too busy. Do you want me to tell some of our neighbors to go away? They really don’t need to sit in here every single day.”

  “I like that new combination of apricots with a pistachio crust,” Aunt Aja mentioned.

  “Don’t you ever worry about the future at all?” Magalie asked, despite herself. She didn’t want to worry them more by talking about the disaster fast approaching, but . . . how did they manage to be so oblivious?

  Geneviève tilted her head. “I used to worry about your mother. Comes from being the older sister. But she turned out all right.”

  Aja exchanged a look with her.

  “Almost all right,” Geneviève amended. “In her own way.”

  “I worried before I left home,” Aja said quietly, referring to her emigration to France. “I was about your age. But it turned out all right.”

  Worry about Lyonnais! Magalie wanted to shout at them. But if worrying did no good, why inflict it on them?

  As the two older women went to the kitchen, Magalie pressed her forehead into the cold glass of their front door, angling to stare down the street at the name Lyonnais. If she could have brought herself to ask him for a favor, could she have saved her aunts? No. How? From the moment he had set his sights on this island, this street, from the moment he had bought the shop, their doom had been sealed.

  She straightened from the door and reached into the window display to adjust a great chocolate fir tree that looked in danger of falling. Then she glanced up and nearly jumped out of her skin when she looked straight into Philippe Lyonnais’s blue eyes. He was standing beside a tall woman with silky, gold-brown hair brushed straight and smooth to her shoulders, a woman with a distinct bulge in her belly.

  Magalie felt as if she’d been kicked, right in her own womb. Was Philippe Lyonnais married? She had never seen mention of it in all the articles she had read on him, but, unlike the American press, French reporters wouldn’t talk about his vie privée.

  No, that was . . . Wait. She was seeing tawny hair and tawny hair, blue eyes and blue eyes, tall and tall.... That was a family resemblance, wasn’t it? Why was she so relieved to find one? Because she might feel some pangs about crushing to his knees the father of a happy family?

  Oh, yes, maybe that was it.

  “It will be a shame if you crush them out of business,” Philippe’s sister said a little regretfully, as they left the display window of La Maison des Sorcières and headed on toward the end of the island. Philippe wanted desperately to turn around and go straight inside, grab Magalie Chaudron’s shoulders, and squeeze that look of horror off her face, but his sister’s presence stopped him.

  Philippe gave her a betrayed glance. “What is it with everyone? Do I act like I go around crushing people?”

  “Not on purpose,” his sister said affectionately. The winter wind swept off the river, down the corridor provided by the street, and buffeted them. Noémie had been working on the last touches of his shop’s interior design but complained that the baby was kicking her too hard and she needed to take a walk. “But no one is going to come here when you’re a few doors away.”

  Philippe glanced back at the display window, not entirely sure of that. Sometimes he wanted to come here from half a block away. Just slip into a world that wasn’t his but where he kept feeling he should have an entry. Even one he had to force open by jamming the toe of his boot in the door.

  “You know you’ll steal all their customers,” his sister said. “You have to admit, it’s a little bit of a shame. That place is like one of the seven wonders of Paris. The hidden one.”

  “And I’m the obvious one,” Philippe said. His sister coughed oddly and bit her lip. He glanced at her, but she just set her hand on her pregnant belly, with her teeth solidly in her twitching lower lip, and said nothing. “So that works out perfectly for them, I would think. I draw people here, and more of them will discover this secret in passing.”

  “That’s true,” Noémie said thoughtfully. “That might work.”

  “I don’t know why they can’t be more grateful, then.” He scowled, thinking of the evil little smile on Magalie’s face as she’d offered him that cup of chocolate. One would think that, at the very least, he wouldn’t have to worry about being poisoned by her. “You know I’ll be bringing in people from all over Paris and a lot farther than that. Not everyone will have the patience to wait in line. They can have my overflow,” he added generously. The witches didn’t really deserve it, the way Magalie kept treating him, but he could hardly set up a barricade between his half of the street and theirs to stop it.

  “You could be right about that.” His sister could assess a business situation just as fast and as matter-of-factly as he could. That was what happened when you grew up with such decisions being made routinely over breakfast, breakfasts consisting of pains au chocolat and croissants regularly voted the best in Paris. “You really might be good for their business,” Noémie admitted.

  “Of course I’m right,” Philippe said indignantly. Getting respect from one’s own family was like trying to d
raw blood from a stone. His mother was the only one who could manage to produce some, and then mostly when his father wasn’t around to feel jealous. “You never look at that scrapbook Maman collects on me, do you?”

  “You mean the one Maman collects on us?” Noémie asked dryly. “On Lyonnais, and my design of the stores, and all that?”

  Philippe tried to look suitably chastened. “The one about my fantastic interior designer, yes. And the brother who helps show off her designs by making world-famous pâtisseries to display in them. Anyway, you know and I know there will be lines down the block. You would think she—they—could appreciate that.”

  Ungrateful witch. He glanced back at the shop window, his shoulder blades prickling. “Do you ever get the feeling that someone could turn you into a toad?”

  Or a beast. He felt much more like a beast when he got near Magalie Chaudron and her chocolate.

  “Me? No. But in your case, we’re not talking about a major transformation.”

  Chapter 8

  The day the new Lyonnais shop opened, La Maison des Sorcières didn’t have a single customer. Not even one loyal neighbor. Its emptiness was a huge hole in Magalie’s middle, one she kept trying not to fall into. What if she and her aunts lost this place?

  Her heart gave a little thump of relief and gratitude when she saw Madame Fernand step out of her building down the street and head their way, her poodle darting back and forth, right toward the wheels of a slowly passing moped, leash tugged ineffectually by a gloved hand. But Madame Fernand didn’t even pull her fancy hat’s broad brim down to hide her face in shame as she walked right past the tea shop and on toward Philippe’s.

  He was probably gloating over how completely he had taken over; there was no one in front of their shop, everyone in front of his. No, who was she kidding? You couldn’t gloat over something you didn’t notice at all.

  Before his shop, a party-like crowd gathered, as if heralding the arrival of an emperor. In new clothes, Magalie thought maliciously, trying to imagine Philippe Lyonnais appearing before the hordes supremely oblivious to his nakedness.

  “Are you all right?” Aunt Aja asked

  Magalie blinked, coming back from a long way away, and realized that she had both forearms braced on the curve of the display case and her head lowered almost to rest on it, as if she was thinking of drowning herself in one of her own tartes just below.

  “I . . . yes, I’m . . .” Whoever had come up with the idea of imagining one’s enemies naked to rob them of their power should be shot. Guillotined. Burned at the stake. Something vile, anyway.

  Aunt Aja handed her a cup of tea. Magalie took a long breath of it, the scent seeming to spice up her brain and clear out an unnoticed fog in the back of her eyes. She desperately wanted to know what was in it but knew better than to ask. If Aunt Aja gave you tea, you accepted it or refused it, but you didn’t ask questions.

  “I can’t believe he sent us an invitation,” Geneviève said grumpily, pulling the heavy card from where it was tucked by their 1920s cash register and tapping it on the display case. “It takes all the fun out of showing up unannounced and cursing him.”

  “He might be smart,” Aja mentioned, as if it behooved her to point out the possibility.

  Magalie turned away. She couldn’t get that crushed box of Christmas macarons out of her mind. What magical array of flavors might he have sent her? What would the shell of one of his macarons have felt like under her fingers? How might it have yielded to her teeth? Smart. She brought up a hand and rubbed the back of her neck. Yes, Philippe Lyonnais was very smart.

  Politic, even. He had probably sent the same box to a hundred different people that Christmas—reliable suppliers, major clients, third cousins.

  She looked at her tea again. It took a lot of courage to toss out one of Aja’s teas undrunk. It would be easier to drop a treasure chest back into the sea unopened. At least with the treasure chest, you wouldn’t risk offending Aja. But it took just as much courage to drink it, blind. What if you didn’t want to have the fog at the back of your eyes cleared, for example; what if you wanted to just remain stubbornly blind?

  “It wouldn’t have to be a curse,” she said.

  Aja smiled at her in quick, surprised approval.

  “Oh, ho!” Geneviève said. “So you did think he was cute. Don’t worry. After nearly forty years of working with all those would-be princesses who wander in here, I think I can land you a prince, if you’re sure you want one.”

  Magalie narrowed her eyes at her aunt and tapped one booted toe. If she wanted such a “prince,” which she did not, the reason she did not want him was not because she thought he was out of her reach. It might be because she thought he thought she was beneath his reach, which wasn’t quite the same thing. She hadn’t drunk the damn tea yet, so she didn’t have to admit that if she didn’t want to. And if she were, for example, to completely lose her mind and decide she did want a prince, she did not need her sixty-year-old aunt to land him for her.

  “We might offer a gift,” she said.

  “Ooh.” Geneviève pursed her lips and gave a silent whistle of approval.

  Aja, on the other hand, stroked her tunic.

  “You would agree that humility is a gift, wouldn’t you, Aunt Aja?” Magalie asked her.

  “I’m not the one who has to agree. You are. If you think humility is a gift—the kind you would like given to you—by all means.”

  Magalie hesitated.

  Geneviève leaned past her, ostensibly to dust off the antique chocolate mold sitting near her on the display case, and whispered loudly into her ear: “Don’t worry. I’m pretty sure that if anyone tried to give humility to you, it wouldn’t take.”

  That was true, Magalie thought smugly. Still cradling Aja’s cup of tea in one hand, she went back into the little blue-tiled kitchen. She took another deep breath of the tea and almost took a sip but then hesitated and set it on the counter. She looked at the pot of hot chocolate, currently going to waste for lack of customers.

  “You will throw the rest out when you’re done with it, won’t you?” Geneviève called back. “We can’t go randomly inflicting—I mean, gifting—humility on every passing stranger.”

  Magalie sometimes wondered if Geneviève genuinely thought Magalie could stir wishes and curses into chocolate. Or if she just liked to believe she believed it, which was not quite the same thing.

  Magalie didn’t believe it. That is, if someone asked her if she could do magic, she would scoff. But she didn’t disbelieve it, either. She always made sure to stir in a wish, because whenever she dipped her spoon into the chocolate, it felt as if she could.

  For Philippe, she stirred three times. Imagining all that confidence stripped from him. Imagining him looking up, not down, which meant, with his height, he would have to be kneeling at her feet. Her stirring slowed. Imagining his shirt half-ripped from his body, in tatters. Wanting something from her, coming to her in a petition she could carelessly crush.

  Her ladle still, she looked down into the warm brown chocolate for a long moment as the vision tried to sneak inside and steal something from her. She took a breath and poured the chocolate into a side-handled chocolatière Geneviève and Aja had picked up just the other day at a marché aux puces. Rounded and carnival-colored, with broad stripes and squiggles, and polka dots up the handle, the pot looked like a Gypsy celebration for a prince. Not too much, she hoped, like something the prince’s Fool might own.

  Geneviève clapped her hands together at the sight of it. “Look!” she said gleefully to Aja. “We come bearing gifts.”

  “I’m going to give him some tea,” Aja said firmly. She declined to say what was in it.

  They were disappointed when Magalie just watched them get ready to leave. “You’re not going to come?”

  She shook her head. She didn’t know why Geneviève and Aja could show up at Philippe Lyonnais’s triumph like bad fairies swooping in to spoil the christening, while she was afraid she would be
mistaken for a tribute-bearer to his court. But there it was.

  She watched them head off, neither one wearing anything more against the cold than Geneviève’s thin cotton caftan and Aja’s cotton kameez and salwar pants, the gaily painted chocolate pot in Geneviève’s hands, a cast-iron teapot in Aja’s, making them vaguely suggestive of Three Queens of the Orient. With one Queen left behind sulking.

  Oh, bon sang. It might be the season for the Magi, but he was not the Prince of the World. No matter what he thought himself.

  The two aunts were talking as they got farther away, Geneviève in the low voice she mistakenly used whenever she didn’t want to be overheard. When she lowered her voice for secrets, it went bass, acquiring a carrying power that Magalie’s mother claimed had gotten her banned at a very early age from any discussions of Christmas presents. “. . . self-confidence,” Genevieve said in that stage whisper. “Do you think she’s ever going to learn some?”

  Magalie’s eyebrows flicked up, and she wondered who they were talking about. It couldn’t possibly be her.

  She pricked up her ears, but now Aja was answering, and Aja never said anything you didn’t have to be close to her to hear.

  Abruptly Magalie felt abandoned, alone with the scent of her chocolate. As if she needed to jump onto a camel and head after them, pursuing some bright star. The emptiness of their shop lodged a hard knot of anguish in her middle, and she couldn’t understand how Geneviève and Aja didn’t show the strain.

  She grabbed Aja’s tea, pressed the cup to her cheek, and almost drank it. Instead she set it down again and pulled on her wool coat. No sorties in thin cotton for her. She had no idea how Aja and Geneviève did it.