Icy Pretty Love

by L. A. Rose

  One of the kids actually wraps his arms around Cohen’s leg, like he’s a tree trunk. System shutdown.

  “I’m leaving,” he growls, shaking off the child and storming out of line.

  “Oh no you’re not!” I yell. “Take one more step, and I’ll have to come after you, and you know I’m capable of guilt-tripping you to stay. Except then we’ll be out of line and we’ll have to get all the way in the back. And we’ll be behind a tourist with three hot dogs in each hand. Make your own choices.”

  Cohen rejoins me, but judging by the expression on his face, sticking his toes into a paper shredder would have been a preferable course of action.

  We are in line for a full hour and a half. In that time, Cohen only makes two mean comments—once to yell at a man who clips him with his elbow, and once to not-so-politely inform a teenage boy collecting signatures that he would never endorse the establishment that employed the kind of person who would hassle people innocently waiting in line. Both times, I pinch his cheek. By the time we reach the entrance to the tower, there’s a red spot on his cheek and a haunted look in his eyes.

  “Oh no.” I stop him as he moves to get onto the ramp that leads to the lift. “We’re taking the stairs.”

  That eyebrow goes up again. “Do you know how high this tower is?”

  “I need some cardio,” I lie. The truth is, there’s an old couple arguing passionately behind us about who ate the last prune this morning, and I don’t want to be responsible for what Cohen would do if he was enclosed in a tiny lift with them for any amount of time. I signed up to make this man nice, not to be responsible for a decrease in the population of elderly tourists.

  I’ve handled a lot and I can handle a few damn stairs.

  Half an hour later, I realize my mistake. I cannot handle stairs. Stairs are the worst of all the bad things. Stairs are the devil.

  A few steps ahead of me, Cohen stops. He hasn’t even broken a sweat. I hate him with the fiery intensity of hell (which is full of stairs).

  “You okay?” he asks warily.

  “Of course I’m okay. Do I not look okay? I’m great,” I say. What actually escapes my mouth is a sound that can only be translated to: “Hnnnnggggaaaaaahhhaaaargh.”

  “What is that, German?” A tiny smirk has sprouted on the bastard’s face. “German, perhaps, for ‘I regret taking the stairs’?”

  “You’re enjoying this,” I hiss between wheezes like a hot air balloon going down.

  He shrugs. “You’ve been torturing me all day.”

  “Don’t you dare compare me making you be nice to the intricate cruelties of the stairs. They can hear you.” I bend down and pat one of the metal steps. “It’s okay, stairs. I know that you’re the grand master of torture. No need to visit your wrath upon us.”

  “Those are probably covered with spit,” Cohen observes.

  I whip my hand back. “Just another evil of the Stair God.”

  He sighs. I have no idea how he manages to maintain the kind of physical fitness that gives him the ability to climb these stairs without dying, especially considering the fact that he doesn’t sleep.

  I’m still wondering about this when he turns around and kneels.

  “Those are probably covered with spit,” I say wittily.

  “Shut up and get on my back.”

  “What?” He couldn’t have surprised me more if he’d revealed that I was already dead and that climbing stairs forever really was my own personal hell.

  “I said, get on my back. You’re taking too long and I want to get this over with.”

  I start laughing. “You’re kidding, right? You’re not going to carry me to the top of the Eiffel tower. You’ll keel over.”

  “Do it or I’m slinging you over my shoulder,” he snaps. I’m realizing that Cohen does not like to be told that he can’t do something.

  I weigh my options. Die of exhaustion from stair-climbing, or kill Cohen from the effort it would take to drag me vertically for half an hour and then climb over his cooling corpse. Well, survival of the fittest. Or, in this case, survival of the least fit.

  I climb one last stair and hop tentatively onto his back. It’s a good back, warm and strong. I wrap my arms around his neck. He guides my thighs into the crooks of his elbows and I stiffen.

  “Not a fan of being picked up?” he asks.

  “No, not really,” I lie to cover the fact that certain parts of me are very much a fan of being picked up.

  “I guarantee I’m even less of a fan of spending a minute more than I have to in this tourist-infested hellhole. Hold on.”

  He starts climbing. I inhale and his scent arrests me: crisp autumn, wood, sunlight sliding through trees. I don’t know what I expected him to smell like. Money, maybe. Goat sacrifices.

  “Are you sniffing me?” he asks.

  “No! Of course not! I’m insulted that you would presume such a thing.”

  “You just sniffed me again.”

  “You’re the one who spent the money on cologne, buddy.”

  After ten minutes of stairs, his breathing graduates from calm to slightly labored.

  “Do you want me to get off?”

  He grunts his refusal.

  I can feel his body working beneath me, the muscles in his back and sides shifting and tensing with each step. I slip a bit and he moves his hands to my thighs to keep me still, cupping them. His fingers make slight imprints in my skin. His neck is warm and his rough, wavy hair tickles the edge of my ear…

  Abort! Abort! Think of—think of—dead fish! And salamanders! You hate salamanders! Definitely don’t think about how you can practically feel the rush of breath through his body, and don’t watch the bead of sweat beginning to form above his collarbone, and definitely, definitely don’t wonder about the other parts of his body where sweat may be forming, possibly under his shirt…

  This is bad. At this rate, he’ll have to have this shirt dry-cleaned. I clench my thighs to quell the warmth between them.

  He sucks in a sharp breath. “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?” I ask, still distracted by the traitor between my legs.

  “Squeeze your…just don’t move and let me climb!”

  I’m close enough to see the flush creep up the back of his neck. Well, hello. It looks like I’m not the only one affected by this. Company’s always nice.

  It’s been so long since I was turned on by anyone, I’d started to wonder if it was still possible. And despite the fact that doing anything about it would break all my rules, despite the fact that the man stirring my naughty bits out of their long slumber happens to be the world’s biggest asshole, I relish the sensation.

  Gears in place? Check. Oil changed? Check. All tuned up? Check. Equipment is still in order.

  I’m not broken after all.

  By the time Cohen reaches the first observation deck, his back is slightly damp with (I hope) sweat. I slide off, letting him catch his breath. What I wouldn’t give to wear him out like this in a different context.

  “How ya doing?” I ask with the totally asexual chipper tone of a first-grader.

  “Fine. That was a breeze.” He straightens and tries to pretend that his heart isn’t two beats away from stopping. If there’s anything men hate, it’s admitting that a workout’s got the best of them.

  “Yeah? Great! I was thinking we shouldn’t bother stopping here, then, and you can just carry me all the way to the top instead.”

  He blanches, suddenly becoming very interested in the view.

  I smirk, but then I notice the view, too, and it blasts all the deviousness out of me. Paris is spread out like an endless buffet table, endless buildings carving out a bumpy horizon against the blue sky. The Seine River twists in a graceful snake curve, widening away from us. I can see patches of big green grass in front of palaces, and an enormous blue fountain, and tiny, tiny people.

  Cohen surveys it for a minute and finally says brusquely, “All right, let’s…you’re crying again!”

>   “I am not!” I rub my eyes hard. Why am I so bad at keeping a lid on my emotions around this guy? The answer comes to me: he keeps such a tight lid on his own emotions that it makes mine itchy to escape. “It’s just…it’s just…”

  “Just what?” His voice is apprehensive, but not outright mean. That’s something.

  “All the people down there look so small. Little toy people with little toy problems. When I’m down there I’m one of them, and my problems seem so big, but when I think about how I must look from up here…” I spread out my arms. “My problems are always miniature from someone else’s viewpoint.”

  He frowns. “The only thing that matters is how big your problems are to you.”

  “No, that’s wrong.” I shake my head. “You have to try to put things into perspective sometimes. You could spend all your time thinking about how tall something is and that you’ll never be able to climb over it, instead of realizing you can just walk around it.”

  He snorts.

  “What?”

  “Do you realize that you do that?” he asks. “Just let everything in your brain pour out of your mouth. Not caring if it makes you look stupid or weak or…”

  “I’m very good at keeping things to myself, as a matter of fact!”

  “All evidence to the contrary.”

  He’s right, though. With him, I let all my carefully-constructed walls melt and puddle at my feet. And I don’t know why. I clear my throat. “It’s good to let some things out sometimes. You wouldn’t leave leftover chicken in your fridge for a month, would you? It’s the same with emotions. After a while they start getting moldy and slimy and they make all your other food smell weird.”

  “If that’s the case, why did you get so good at keeping things to yourself?” he retorts.

  “It’s different when saying something out loud might make someone attack you—” I stop.

  He leans against the wire mesh keeping tourists from plummeting to their deaths, clearly out of his comfort zone. “I…know how that feels.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  He scowls. “I’m trying to be nice.”

  “And one of the rules of being nice is not lying and telling someone you know how something feels when you don’t.” I press my forehead against the mesh and say baldly, “You don’t know what it’s like to hunt for the right thing to say, knowing that if you take one wrong step it’ll be a backhand to the face or someone pinning you to the bed. Keeping men from getting angry is an art all women have to learn. And it’s one I’m better at than most.”

  “You’re right,” he says finally. “I don’t know what that’s like.”

  “Thank you.”

  He gears up. “And I’m sor—”

  I hold up a hand. “I don’t want your pity.”

  “Okay.” He falls silent for a minute. “For someone who’s supposed to be good at keeping men from getting angry, you don’t seem to care if you make me mad.”

  “I guess that means I’m starting to trust you, doesn’t it?” I say, surprising myself.

  He laughs. His laugh sets little bubbles popping in my skin. I could listen to him laughing for the rest of my life. Too bad he almost never does it.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Just,” he starts and then stops. “Out of all the men in the world, you pick me to trust.”

  “Start to trust,” I correct.

  He leans back against the mesh again and looks at me sideways. “You do realize I’m a notoriously heartless asshole who hates everyone and makes no bones about it.”

  “That’s what the niceness lessons are for, remember?” I laugh and then shake my head. “You don’t really hate everyone, though. I can tell.”

  “And you know that, how?” He folds his arms.

  “I know real hate. I’ve seen it up close and personal.” I pull my forehead back, most likely leaving a crisscross pattern. “Whoever you really hate, it’s not other people.”

  “Can I give you some advice?”

  I hesitate. It’s the first time he’s let unguarded sadness slip into his face.

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t trust me,” he says. “Bad things happened to the last person who did that.”

  ~6~

  Cohen’s Diary, Entry #1

  The idiot has demanded I write a ‘meanness diary.’ This is the first entry. What she completely fails to understand (besides everything else) is that the stupid things other people do, annoying as they are in the moment, don’t stick with me. They’re not interesting enough to do that. What someone does to irritate me during lunch, I’ll have completely forgotten about by dinner.

  Except her. The things she does stick in my head like flies. I can’t get rid of her. Even when I’m working at my desk, something she said will float into my head and buzz around in circles, refusing to leave.

  “I guess that means I’m starting to trust you.”

  “You don’t really hate everyone, though.”

  Only confirms what I already knew: that she’s an idiot.

  Damn my father and damn his moronic scheme.

  Worked, though: LeCrue has all but agreed to sell me the company, given I keep this charade up a little longer. Amazing what a fiancé and the prospect of children will do for your image. The idiot is good, I have to admit. If the sale goes through, her fee will have been a fantastic investment by anyone’s standards.

  Still an idiot, though. Only an idiot would dare call me out. Only an idiot would speak to me with no pretense, no sycophancy, no fear. Not used to it. It’s caught me off guard and I have to remember what I learned long ago: that other people are scum best kept at a distance. Preferably a very large distance including several layers of barbed wire.

  Yes, she’s beauti decent-looking. No, I don’t care. I am more than my urges. Succumbing to such stupid impulses is beneath me, not to mention dangerous. I’ve seen where love gets people and I want no part of it.

  Asked for her ‘niceness lessons’ in a moment of weakness. She’s so damn earnest. To listen to her preach about how anybody can change is to almost believe it. I know better, of course. I can’t change. I’m a cruel person, and that drives people away, and that’s for the best.

  I’ll humor her a while longer, though. If I felt things like guilt, I’d feel guilty she got roped into spending a month with me before being warned about my disposition. At least this seems to amuse her. She’s remarkably easy to amuse, for someone who’s seen all the worst sides of people.

  If I felt things like pity, I might pity her.

  But I don’t. And before long, she’ll realize that she’s wasting her time and move on.

  Just like everybody else has.

  Bad things happened to the last person who did that…

  His words cycle around in my head like the laugh track to a bad sitcom, except nobody’s laughing. What does that even mean, bad things? I let my head flop against the pillow, staring at the ceiling encased in shadows. Did he put out a hit on the last person to trust him? Disembowel them himself? Feed them to circus lions?

  Oh, well. At least I had a good time today.

  After our first harrowing climb, we’d decided to take the elevator for the last leg. We got so high up that I could no longer see individual people, and the buildings were tiny as the people had been. When you’re high up like that, it feels like you could close your eyes and fall forever. Fall away from who you used to be.

  I used to think like that, sometimes. About how easy it would be to slip off the edge of my apartment building. Just one step. Just a handful of pills. Just a slip of the knife and I’d never, ever have to link my arm with a strange man’s ever again, a strange man who only knew the mask and didn’t care to know more.

  But I’m smarter now.

  At least, I thought I was. The ache between my thighs that flowers every time I think about the sweat that collected in the groove of Cohen’s collarbone is not smart. The pang I feel when I picture the sadness in his eyes when he told me not t
o trust him? Not smart. Those two things together is a very, very dangerous cocktail to feel for someone who, as it happens, is not gay.

  The ringing of my bedside table phone shocks me out of my not-smart thoughts. I grab for it, half-grateful. “Hello?”

  “Miss Montgomery,” Renard says dryly. “Someone is here to see you. A Miss LeCrue?”

  “LeCrue’s a dude,” I say. “Oh! Wait, no, that’s Annabelle. I know her. Send her up.”

  It doesn’t even occur to me to check with Cohen until I’ve wrapped myself in a silk bathrobe, courtesy of my shopping trip with Renard, and headed out into the living room. As it turns out, it doesn’t matter. Cohen’s door is hanging ajar, his bed empty. I pause to stare at his lonely rumpled sheets.

  What is he doing out there in the Parisian night, if not having wild gay sex parties? What’s so important that it’s worth the lost sleep? Is he safe?

  Oh no—what if he has a mistress?

  I retroactively remove the ‘oh no.’ I couldn’t care less if he has a mistress, obviously. And it wouldn’t be a real mistress, because I’m not his real fiancé. It would a girlfriend. A girlfriend, possibly, who he can tolerate even though he can’t tolerate anybody else. A girlfriend who he kisses and whose shirt he unbuttons while he—

  I slam his bedroom door, put both hands on it, and bang my head on the cherrywood as hard as I can.

  “Ow! Damn it!”

  Never bang your head off anything as hard as you can.

  A second banging noise joins in. There’s someone knocking. Annabelle’s sweet voice penetrates my haze of pain: “Georgette? Are you home?”

  “Coming!” I attempt to call delicately. Instead, the word comes out in a high-pitched squeak of agony. My eyes watering, I fumble for the light switch and then fumble for the doorknob.

  “Hello, dear, I was just in the area and thought I’d…my goodness, what happened to your forehead?”

  Turns out knocking yourself half-unconscious is not a good antidote to horniness, I want to say, but I still have a couple brain cells that aren’t dented. “I was having a hard time sleeping and I tried to make myself a cup of tea in the dark. Bumped my head on the wall. Please do come in—I’m so sorry about the bathrobe.”