by Lucy Kevin
I couldn’t help the slight twist of my lips. “Freedom? I don’t understand. You were a man’s possession. How could there be more good than bad in being paid for—”
Again, I couldn’t just come out and say, How could you let anyone pay you for sex, Grandmaman?
“Oh no, ma petite, being a courtesan is not about being anyone’s property. Nor is it simply about sex.”
She almost seemed to delight in saying the word, in trying to shock me, and were it not for my disbelief I would have laughed.
“Of course it is,” I said, but, amazingly, the seed of doubt had been planted and my words came out far less sure than they should have.
“Being a courtesan is about the art of love. And, indeed, part of that art is when you are in someone’s arms.”
I couldn’t help it, I immediately thought about the way the stranger’s thigh had shifted against mine on the piano bench, the light brush of his knuckles against mine as he played beside me. I bent my head to let my hair cover my cheeks, where a blush was waiting to be noticed—and surely remarked upon—by my grandmother.
“For some, that is where love can begin. But more often, real love begins in the sharing of culture, music, and confidences. Later, when you come together, it is that much more beautiful.
That much more rich. One day, I hope you will learn this for yourself.”
“You don’t have to defend what you did to me, Grandmaman,” I said quickly. “I’m not judging you.” How could I when she’d had to do it? “I would never do that.”
She patted my hand. “No,” she said, “you would not. And no, I did not ever want to marry.”
I gave up the pretense of chopping and after putting down my knife, turned around to lean against the counter. “So you were never in love with—” I wanted desperately to act mature.
Mature enough, at least, to finish at least one sentence. “With any of your protectors?”
“Companions,” she corrected me softly, and then, “I loved with my whole heart.”
“But the guy you loved was married, so you could only remain his courtesan?” I assumed aloud.
She smiled. “No.”
Her smile had always been full of wisdom, but for the first time I wondered just how hard-won that wisdom was.
“So then he could have married you?”
“Yes. He wanted to marry me.”
“I don’t get it. Why didn’t you marry him, then?”
She could have finally been respectable, was what I was thinking. A normal wife rather than a paid companion.
“There were many reasons for continuing our arrangement, ma petite.”
“Like?”
“I had lived my whole life as an independent woman. I had freedoms that other women my age could only dream of. I danced and dined with exceptional artists, debated with the greatest thinkers, played chess with men and women in history books.”
She made the life sound so glamorous, but I knew it couldn’t have been. Not at its core.
“But you were dependent on your companions, weren’t you?”
This time she raised her eyebrow. “Everything I ever accepted from a man was my choice to accept. Whereas the girls I had known from school, from the village, were trapped.”
“Trapped?”
“In marriages. With men who gave them no choices. No art. No stimulation in any area whatsoever. With men who did not appreciate their brains. With men who loved their mistresses rather than their wives.”
And my grandmother had been one of the mistresses the married men loved.
When I had asked her about marriage, I hadn’t thought this is where our conversation would end up. I hadn’t thought to stand in the kitchen and question the things she’d done. I hadn’t thought to wonder if she’d felt guilty to be a party to betrayal in a marriage—the mistress who led the husband astray.
I knew the question would have to be asked at some point. But not today. Still, I couldn’t help but say, “Not all marriages are bad, Grandmaman.”
Even as I said it, I wondered where this judgmental girl had been all my life. Had she been hiding inside me all along? Buried deep enough that I didn’t have to face her pronouncements?
I was ashamed of myself for the shame I felt over my grandmother’s former profession.
“No,” she agreed, “I suppose there may be some wonderful marriages where the partners are equals in love and all else.”
The way she said it seemed so philosophical. As if she’d never actually witnessed a good marriage, one where a woman could love a man and be free at the same time.
Again, I couldn’t let it go. Not because I wanted to hurt her, but because my whole world order was beginning to tip and shift in a dangerous direction—and I wanted desperately to right it. I’d always thought she hadn’t married, that she hadn’t lived a normal life, because she’d had no other choice.
But now she was telling me that there had been a choice after all.
“Couldn’t your marriage have been to one of those good ones? And then you wouldn’t have had to be a courtesan any longer.”
She put down her knife, slid the rest of the vegetables into the pot with her slender yet strong sculptor’s hands, and then picked up the mortar and pestle to grind the freshly picked herbs.
“I dared not risk the love we shared,” she finally said, as utterly honest as she had always been regardless of the subject.
I felt the words jumble in my brain before jumping onto my tongue. “You weren’t afraid to sleep with a man for money, but you were afraid that marrying him would make you lose his love?”
A sudden silence fell hard in the room, punctuated only by the bubbling stock in the large pot on the stove.
“Perhaps you are right, ma petite, and I should have taken the ultimate risk by marrying him, but he was shipped away to war before I ever had the chance to rethink my decision.” And he hadn’t come back. “Still, I never regretted my years as a courtesan. Never.”
She picked up my hands, turned them over, and traced the lines on my palms with the tips of her fingers as if she were trying to read my future. When she looked up into my eyes, a shiver ran through me.
“I can see that you do not understand. Perhaps the time has come to tell you more of the story.”
“I’d like to know more,” I said, and I did. I sensed just how much knowledge my grandmother had to share with me…and just how much I might need it. But not now. Not yet. Not when I needed to try and process everything that had been said already. “But tonight I have some math to finish up.”
I was glad—and incredibly relieved—when she simply kissed me on the forehead and said, “Go. Study. I will call you out when le dîner is ready.”
Later, much later, I realized that all through our conversation she had spoken in present tenses. That she had said what being a courtesan is, not was. That she had regaled me with the virtues of it and worked to steer me away from any darkness that might be hidden beneath her words.
But, even so, at that point it honestly never occurred to me that becoming a courtesan was anywhere in my future.
CHAPTER THREE
In the morning, instead of just taking a shower and letting my hair air dry, I pulled out my blow dryer and mascara. Standing in my closet in my underwear, I scanned my clothes carefully, but it was just the usual mix of jeans and Tshirts and sweaters. Nothing amazing had hung itself up while I was sleeping and I finally grabbed my favorite dark-wash skinny jeans and a long-sleeved red T-shirt.
I’d walked up the stairs to my school a zillion times, but today it felt different. Because for the first time there was someone inside that I really wanted to see.
A guy whose name I didn’t even know.
Missy was sketching something in her blank book when I walked into first period, English Composition. We’d met the first day of City School’s kindergarten. Even then she was larger than life, while I was the quiet one. There was no reason we should have become best friends, except th
at we’d both lost parents. I guess even at five, each of us sensed the hole inside the other person.
For the past twelve years we’d continued to be best friends even though as we got older our paths diverged even more. She lost her virginity at thirteen. I didn’t kiss anyone until I was sixteen (and it wasn’t nearly good enough to make me want to go out with him again, let alone get into bed with him). But the thing that always fascinated me about Missy was how far she went out of her way to seem normal. Having sex with a bunch of losers, to my mind, was simply part of that. A part of her act. Because Missy was exceptional. She picked up languages as if she had been born in France, in Spain, in Russia. When she came over to my house and let her guard down, she would frequently switch into French with my grandmother, who loved it. Just as I knew Missy secretly did. Plus, she could draw and paint like a master.
And yet, apart from her obvious beauty, all most people saw were the red and purple streaks in her hair, the thick eyeliner under her eyes, and her general air of boredom.
I had barely slid into my seat next to hers when she said, “I’m in love.”
“Who is it this time?”
Missy had been “in love” a hundred times…and had rotten taste in guys.
She shook her head, her golden blonde hair with its unnaturally colorful streaks moving around her shoulders. “Seriously, Gabi, this time it’s the real thing. He’s the one.” She looked around the room as if she were trying to find someone, and lowered her voice. “His name is Dylan.”
Still thinking about what had happened in the practice room the previous afternoon—about him and all those strange sensations still swirling around in the bottom of my belly—I was only half listening as she said, “He’s got this gorgeous dark hair that flips over one eye, these incredible soulful eyes, and I swear just the way he looked at me made me shiver. I can already tell that he’s going to be incredible in bed.”
Her words finally registered. Not the part about sleeping with him. The dark hair part.
The soulful eyes.
“His breath smelled like mint,” I said before realizing I was speaking out loud.
Her pencil went still on her drawing pad as she turned her full focus on me. “You’ve met him?” More softly, suspicion ringing in the words, “And you know how he smells?”
I had always been unfailingly honest with myself. I knew that I was pretty, but that my small-boned frame and my black hair and green-blue eyes were not particularly remarkable in any way, just quintessentially French looking. Whereas Missy was stunning. Curvy with great hair and big green eyes, not to mention her wicked sense of humor. Her charisma shone through and made her more than just another gorgeous girl, no matter how average she worked to appear.
There would be no competition between Missy and me for Dylan.
Next to her—along with most of the other talented, beautiful girls at my school—I would not even be a blip on his radar.
Still, I couldn’t help but repeat his name silently in my head.
Dylan.
His name fit him so well. I found myself tasting it on my lips a split second before I stopped myself from breathing it aloud.
No. What was the point? Perhaps he’d like to play piano with me again.
But he’d do everything else with Missy.
My stomach twisted as jealousy fought to take hold…and I fought to resist it.
I forced a shrug. “I met someone in the practice rooms yesterday. But he didn’t tell me his name. It’s probably not the same guy,” I fumbled, totally embarrassed by the fantasies I’d been building up about some out-of-my-league guy. And yet, even though odds were he was never going to come near me again, I couldn’t help but hope that I was wrong.
Because I wanted to sit with him again at the piano. I wanted to hear him play and sing.
I wanted to feel that connection, wanted to be overwhelmed by it again.
The final bell rang just then and our teacher began his lecture. We were working on short stories and mine was about a normal girl who’d just learned that when she turned eighteen, she’d inherit a legacy of extraordinary powers. I hadn’t yet decided what her extraordinary powers were, but I did know that my protagonist was going to be completely confused by the unexpected
“gifts” she’d been given.
I was pulling my English notebook out of my backpack when the class suddenly went quiet and I knew without looking up who had walked into the room.
Dylan.
His eyes locked with mine for split second before he looked away. He handed a slip of paper to the teacher, then grabbed the nearest open seat. My heart was pounding hard. He looked even better this morning than he had in the practice room.
The seconds had never clicked by so slowly as I waited for class to end, waited to see if he would come over to me, waited to see if what I’d felt in the practice room had been real or just my imagination on overdrive.
Finally, the bell rang, and I could feel Missy’s eyes on me as I slowly closed my notebook, slipped it into my bag, and stood up. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Dylan getting up, too, and heading for the door.
Away from me.
All around me, people were getting up and going to their classes, but I just stood there in the middle of the classroom and stared at his empty seat.
“We need to talk,” Missy said as she pulled me out of the room and into the hall. “I’ve got a test I can’t miss next period, but I’m hunting you down at lunch.”
I’m not sure what went on in my classes before lunch. I was there, but not. On autopilot, at lunch I walked into the cafeteria and grabbed a smoothie off the counter. Missy grabbed me from behind.
“Dylan was in my chemistry class too,” she said. “And can we talk about the way he looked at you this morning?”
We sat down at our usual table by the window. I couldn’t let my hopes rise again. It hurt way too bad when they were smashed into the ground.
“He was just scanning the room,” I told her.
“No,” she insisted. “It was like he hit you with a laser beam.”
Not that I didn’t completely appreciate the idea that he might have looked at me like I was special, but at the same time I was confused. “I thought you said that you were in love with him.”
She snorted. “Just a figure of speech. When I meant was that he’s hot.”
Only Missy would think of love as a nothing, meaningless word.
Right then, he walked in. Again, his eyes locked immediately with mine and held them.
Before I could help it, blind, pathetic hope swelled in my chest and I was just about to raise my hand to wave, my mouth opening on a silent Hi, when a couple of pretty juniors behind him said something and giggled. He grabbed some food and sat down with them.
Not me.
“Harsh,” Missy breathed.
It took me less than ten seconds to decide I wasn’t going to sit there and feel bad again.
So he was going to act like we’d never played that Metallica song together.
Fine.
Telling myself the only thing I was really mad about was that I felt like he’d stolen my secret music refuge—and that it wouldn’t be the same to play that song now, not when his phantom presence would be in the room with me—I stood up and threw away my still full drink.
“Whatever.”
Missy looked longingly at her completely intact veggie burger, then tossed it and followed me out of the cafeteria.
“You’re too good for him anyway.” Missy grabbed my arm. “Wanna go splatter paint in the art loft?”
Perfect. That way I’d have a physical representation of the way my guts felt.
CHAPTER FOUR
A week later, the practice room door opened. “I’ve got to get out of here. Come with me.”
I looked up at Dylan in surprise. He hadn’t said a word to me in class or the cafeteria, had acted like those precious minutes at the piano had never happened. I’d been left feeling foolish.
Raw.
But now that he was only feet away, I simply stared at him, my heart jumping as I drank in the beautiful lines of his face. I’d dreamed of him, the barriers I’d erected falling with sleep, but my imagination had not done him justice. He was a hundred times more potent here, in the doorway, staring down at me.
I’d locked the door again—not because I was playing anything I shouldn’t be, just because—but he’d obviously picked it.
Again.
The words, “You’ve got a thing for breaking and entering, don’t you?” came rushing out, dripping with sarcasm and the anger I couldn’t seem to repress no matter how hard I tried.
His brows came down farther over his eyes, his face darkening as he stared at me. “Only when you’re in the room.”
I was shocked that he’d come here for me, surprised that just any girl at a piano wouldn’t do when that’s the way he’d acted so far.
“Come with me,” he said again.
Part of me wanted to leap off the piano bench and go wherever he wanted to take me. But I had a student-teacher conference coming early the next morning and desperately needed to make some headway on at least one song this afternoon.
Still, that wasn’t really the reason why I hesitated. He’d barely said two words to me until now, but now that he wanted my company, he expected me to come alive and jump to do his bidding?
Frankly, the woman in me that my grandmother had molded from a little girl, the one who demanded respect and courtesy from people, didn’t like that at all. Which was why I made no move to gather my notes or stand up.
I hated how I’d felt all week. And it wasn’t even as if he’d slept with me and dropped me cold, something that happened to girls every day at my school. We’d only played a song together and the aftermath of that closeness had been enough to crush me.
I could hear my grandmother’s voice in my head: Chin up, ma petite. Shoulders back.
Proud. LeGrandes are always proud.