by L. A. Rose
"You want Mr. LeCrue's company," I say slowly.
"Not at all! More than anything, I want your happiness and safety. Us girls need to stick together." She winks at me, and that charisma, that sense that we're in on a special secret that the rest of the world knows nothing about, climbs into me for a second. Then she leans back and tosses her arm over her head carelessly. "Cohen would burn that company to the ground in half an instant. He's a wreck, darling. It's only a matter of time until he self-destructs and brings everything—and everyone—nearby him down with it. He's done it before. He's notoriously unstable—"
"You don't even know him," I snarl.
Why am I so defensive?
"I've known him a lot longer than you have, darling. Besides, I deserve control of that company more than he does. What has he done for it? I married that little weasel of a man because I thought he’d have it before long, and now the father's talking of selling. It's nonsense, pure nonsense."
"You mean Claude?" I guess that explains how a woman so beautiful ended up with a man severely lacking in the chin department.
"Of course I mean Claude. Am I married to any other little weasels? If I am, do let me know and I'll call an exterminator." Her laugh tinkles out again.
I gaze at her, baffled. Does she really think I'll just sit down and say, you're right, I'll leave him? And then I realize. She does think I'll say that. She's used to getting everything she's ever wanted with minimum effort. She sees me as the type of girl she easily intimidated in high school, in college…
"No." I stand up. "I'm engaged to Cohen and it's staying that way. But thank you for being honest with me."
Her genial expression drops, revealing something ugly. "You're not serious. You have to be fed up with him by now."
"I'm not," I say. "See, I've realized something. People aren't always what they appear to be on the surface. Cohen's bad on top but there's something better underneath, I can feel it. And you. You're a swan to look at and a snake underneath."
"And what are you?" Her lip curls. "A little mouse? Do you know what snakes just happen to eat whole?"
"If you look at me and see a mouse, maybe you should look a little deeper too," I say coolly.
"Maybe I should." And then she's looking at me in a way I don't like at all. "Georgette Montgomery, appears out of nowhere, no one in my circle's ever heard of her, and suddenly she's bagged the son of Mr. Ashworth. Interesting, that. Maybe I oughtn’t be focused on showing you what Cohen's really like. Maybe there are some people out there who need to get to know the real you."
I wasn't expecting that, and for a second, my expression slips. She sees it. Her smile widens and contentment floods back into her face. "Got a secret or two worth hiding, hmm?"
"I guess every married and unemployed woman needs a hobby," I say lightly. Don't show the panic. Don't show the fact that if she probes into you at all, she'll find out that Georgette Montgomery is nothing more than pretty smoke and mirrors. "I should be going now. I think I've overstayed my welcome."
"Oh, darling," she says lazily. "You were never welcome at all."
I smile tightly, get up, and back out the door. And even though I exposed her lie, it's obvious to the both of us who's won this round.
~10~
It's odd, the routines one settles into.
Making breakfast for someone, for instance. Back in LA, I would usually sleep until three or four before getting up to eat, and then it was usually McDonalds or microwaved mac n' cheese. At the time I told myself I was sleeping so late solely because I stayed up so late, but now I'm starting to see that those long, hazy days half-asleep in my bed with the full-of-holes-and-stains sheets were tinged with depression.
But now I don't feel that way. I'm excited to wake up in the morning. I'm in Paris! I can take a bath and go to bed early at night! I won't have to get into any strange cars with any strange men! And, as it turns out, I like making breakfast. I like the different forms that sizzling can take—the sizzle of eggs, the sizzle of bacon. I like pairing different fruits with different expensive cheeses. And, oh God, don't talk to me about the cheese. By the end of this month I'll have gained five pounds purely from cheese and I couldn't be happier about it. Goat cheese, soft cheese, hard cheese that explodes in my mouth with a ping, cheese that smells like something roused from the grave but tastes so heavenly it could put me in an early one...
Anyway. That's enough about cheese. Maybe later I'll talk about wine.
I haven't heard anything from Annabelle in a few days now. I didn't mention it to Cohen, but I did drop a line to Ashworth Sr., letting him know that someone might be probing into my past. Instead of replying, he sent me documents.
A birth certificate.
A high school yearbook photo for a high school I didn't go to.
A college degree.
A whole life I never lived, written out in pictures and official signatures. He had all these ready from the start, just in case. I was ready to show them to Annabelle if she called again, but she hasn't yet. Maybe she was bluffing.
In the meantime, I tape the fake degree to my wall. I always wondered what it would look like if I'd earned myself a college degree.
Or even a high school diploma.
The weirdest thing is that I'm getting used to this. The expensive furniture, the expensive clothes. I'm settling into it like a new bed. But I shouldn't get too used to it. After all, in a matter of weeks, I'll be moving on to something new. A life better than the old Rae's, but not as good as Georgette's.
And that's fine. A whole life like Georgette's wouldn't be right for me.
I shouldn't get used to him, either.
Even if he's started complimenting my cooking, tentatively at first, like he's not used to saying nice things about anything, and then so enthusiastically that I realize how much he's enjoyed it the whole time. Even though my heart has started doing a happy little skip whenever he walks in in the morning, exhausted from his late-nighters that I've decided not to ask about. Even if I walked into the living room yesterday and caught him sleeping on the couch, all the hardness melted off his features for once, leaving him looking calm and handsome and...
This is getting ridiculous.
"This is getting ridiculous," he says, startling me from my reverie. We're eating a lunch of coffee and cured salmon baguette sandwiches.
"What is?" I ask.
"These niceness lessons." He points at the itinerary I've written out for him. "Today we're supposed to go ride that blight on the earth."
I search my brain for what I may have put down. Oh, yeah. "You mean the Ferris wheel?"
He groans.
"Well, look at what you put down for things that annoy you." I reach across the table and flip the notebook page. "Commercialism, sappy romance, clichés...I can't think of anything that embodies those things more than taking a ride on the big Ferris wheel on Valentines Day."
He blinks. It's almost cute. "It's Valentines Day?"
I laugh. "We're in Paris on Valentines Day, and you haven't noticed all the hearts and roses decorating every possible surface?"
"People's decorating habits usually horrify me. I can't be bothered to pay attention when they get a little more garish than usual." He shrugs, then glances sideways at me. There's something apprehensive in his expression.
"What?"
"You're not...expecting anything, are you?" he asks.
I force another laugh. "I'm not your real fiancé, remember? The only way you have to do something for me for Valentines Day is if Mr. LeCrue is watching. And our next party with him isn't until Saturday."
He breaths a visible sigh of relief. I shake my head.
"I feel sorry for your next real girlfriend."
"Why?" he says. "If I was obligated to, I'd have my assistant send her flowers and an appropriately idiotic card."
"See, there's your problem right there." I stab an escaped piece of salmon with my fork. "That word. Obligation. No girlfriend wants to hear that."
"So I should pretend that I'm interested in a holiday that mass-markets supposedly individual expressions of love, is that it?"
I roll my eyes. "Once you love someone, you shouldn't have to pretend. You'll want to do it all on your own. And I'd hope you'd put some of that brainpower to coming up with something more interesting than flowers and a stupid card."
He finishes off his orange juice. "Who says I'm interested in love either?"
I frown. "Everybody's interested in love."
"I'm not."
It's times like these when he's so unbelievably frustrating that if we were both at the top of the Ferris wheel right now, I couldn't promise I wouldn't push him off. "Have you ever been in love?"
"No."
"Then how do you know it's so terrible?"
"I didn't say it was terrible. I just said I'm not interested." He sets his cup down.
"Love is a great thing," I say firmly. "It's what makes people happy. And you should be interested."
"Why bother being interested in something I'm never going to—" He stops.
"Never going to what?" I prompt.
He stands up. "Forget it. Let's go get this Valentines Day torture session over with."
I smile. "Good. Because the Ferris wheel isn't all I've got planned for today. We're going on a Valentines Day extravaganza."
He starts to groan, but doesn't have time to finish, because I'm already pulling him toward the door.
The car is waiting at the curb. I instruct Geoff to head to the nearest movie theater. There's an American romance showing, with French subtitles. When Cohen hears where we're going, he leans forward to intercept the driver.
"Cancel that. We're not going to go see some stupid romance movie whose writers probably came up with the plot in an online generator."
"Yes we are! Cancel his cancellation, Geoff.”
I am personally very gratified when Geoff does, in fact, take us to the movie theater.
I'd hoped going to see it early in the day would cut down on the crowds, but the approximate population of Paris, and possibly London and Berlin as well, is packed into the theater. Cohen and I have to wedge our way through about a hundred making-out couples to secure seats in the very back.
"Get out of the way," he snaps at two people who have their knees kicked out in the aisle. They understand enough English to look offended.
I reach over and pinch his cheek. He swats me away. The girl half of the couple giggles nervously. "Wrong. Try again."
He scowls so intensely I think a lightbulb overhead just popped. "Please excuse us."
We slip by and settle into our seats, between a three-hundred-pound dude—you don't see many of those in France—making sweet love to a bucket of popcorn and a chic college-aged couple about two inches away from making sweet actual love.
"Stop looking like you're about to murder somebody," I whisper to Cohen. "This is romantic!"
"This is hell," he corrects. I sigh and ignore him.
The movie starts. It's actually a pretty good one. It's a summer romance, a modernized Romeo & Juliet with a Prince and the Pauper twist, with a girl staying on an expensive summer resort falling for the guy who cleans up at the local restaurant. From the beginning, you know it's never going to last. The girl's going to go back to fancy prep school and fall for a trust fund frat boy, and he's going to stay where he is forever, lifting different bags of trash from the same bin every day.
It's rather difficult to enjoy, since Cohen is sitting beside me in a cloud of malcontent, pointing out each and every plot hole and actor mistake.
"That idiot is awful at hiding his English accent. Do you notice how he randomly turns British every few minutes? And the subplot with the little sister is absolutely absurd, everyone knows she can really talk and is just waiting for the most poignant moment."
The couple beside us detach with a sound like a leech being ripped off, and one of them shushes us.
"Maybe you should shush somebody at a time when you haven't been exchanging bodily fluids at a deafening volume for the past hour," Cohen shoots back.
I grab the front of his shirt and turn him back around toward me. "If you get us thrown out of a chick flick movie on Valentines Day, I will actually kill you."
Just then, when the heroine is staring moodily at the sea and trying to convince herself via clumsy internal dialogue—oh God, Cohen is rubbing off on me—that she actually doesn't like the hero all that much, and that she's probably better off without him, the adorable little sister pipes in, saying the boy's name as her first word.
Cohen gives me a look to say I told you so. I roll my eyes as far back in my head as they'll go. That idiot.
The ending is unexpectedly sad, though. The girl goes back to her school without so much as giving the guy her phone number, and the guy ends up tossing a drawing of her that he made into the ocean. The last shot is of the drawing sinking into the water. Then the lights go up and the people who weren't too busy macking on each other to follow the plot start grumbling. I join in.
"That was ridiculous!" I complain on the way out of the theater. "The whole movie, they make you think something really romantic is going to happen at the end so they'll stay together. And then it turns out it really was just a fling after all. What a stupid Valentines Day movie."
"It would have been even stupider if they'd stayed together," Cohen points out, texting someone as he speaks—presumably Geoff. "That's the way life works. People take whatever pleasure they can get out of each other while it's convenient, and as soon as it ceases to be, it's over. People like to prattle on about unselfish love, when in fact selfish love is the only kind that exists. Love is just people sucking things out of each other like vampires."
I can't help it. "That's not the only kind of sucking involved."
There's a moment of silence. I expected him to toss me an expression of utter disgust...not look vaguely interested. And now my mind's stuck on sucking and it won't move on. I clear my throat. "Anyway. It's Valentines Day and you're not allowed to be that disgustingly pessimistic."
"Are there rules for Valentines Day?" he asks sardonically.
"Yes. Make out with people. And...every girl gets a rose, apparently." I look around to confirm. I've seen a couple girls with roses, but now that I bring it up, it seems that almost every girl is clutching a bright red flower trimmed free of thorns. "Did everyone go to the same party or something?"
"It's a Paris thing," Cohen explains as we leave the theater and remount our loyal steed—er, climb into the car waiting for us at the curb. "You'll see plenty of opportunists selling them at every corner."
I start laughing.
"What?" he asks as the car pulls off.
"Nothing. I was just wondering why all these girls were carrying roses around with them, and now I know. It's like a badge of honor. Girls with roses today are the lucky ones. They all look so smug about it. Seems pretty dumb."
"We agree on something for once," Cohen says, turning to face the window.
We stop to get lunch at a cafe. It's February and chilly, but cafes in Paris have heat lamps protruding from the overhang so that people can sit outside even when it's rainy and cold. Cohen and I order two tiny espressos that come equipped with two little foam hearts on each one. Cohen sips his immediately and destroys it. I like the cuteness of the heart so much that, not wanting to ruin it, I wait too long to drink.
"It's cold!" I yelp.
"What did you expect when you wait fifteen minutes to start drinking?" he says.
I punch his shoulder lightly, then run inside and buy two éclairs. They're running a Valentines Day two-éclairs-for-the-price-of-one special. I bring the box back to the table and squeal when I open it. Each éclair has half a heart.
"I refuse to eat something so sentimental," Cohen says.
"You drank the heart espresso," I point out.
"Fair enough."
I study the éclairs. "We'll have to time this just right and eat them at the same t
ime. I don't want one half of the heart to be left alone. That's depressing."
"Spare me," says Cohen, reaching for one of the éclairs and taking a big bite. I cry out and grab the other one, stuffing it into my mouth to keep pace with Cohen, who eats a lot faster than me. By the end, he looks perfectly normal and I have chipmunk cheeks.
"Don't choke," he advises.
"Ffffnnkkoo!"
"What was that?"
"Fuck you," I manage, spraying crumbs across the table.
He laughs. And then, just like it always does when that happens, the sun comes out and shines a little brighter.
What an idiot.
We spent the rest of the day wandering around. Or rather, I spend the rest of the day wandering around and dragging Cohen behind me. Paris on Valentines Day is a pretty cool thing. Most of the stores have special window displays, and I have to stop to gape at each one.
"You know, if you want something in there, all you have to do is ask," Cohen points out. He's standing behind me with his arms folded as I marvel at a white tulle skirt with a lace waistband.
"No!" I shoot back. "I don't need your charity."
"I already technically bought you plenty of clothes from when you went shopping with Renard."
"That's different. I needed those for the job you hired me to do. To be Georgette. I don't want you to buy things for me just because I want them. You're my client, after all."
"Client," he repeats, as if he'd momentarily forgotten what the word meant. "Right."
Client. Client client client client client. It’s an important word for me to remember.
One month. Just three weeks left now. More very important words.
After a solid amount of wandering around, in which Cohen complains vocally about the romance coming in from all sides and I note that every girl except me continues to have a rose—a fact that I most certainly do not care about even at all—my stomach grumbles. I look down. “Crap. Where are we gonna go for dinner? Every restaurant in Paris is probably a mob scene.”
“Not McDonalds,” Cohen says.
I gape at him. There’s something fundamentally wrong about going to McDonalds for dinner on Valentines Day, even if it’s not a real date. “I’m amazed you’d deign to eat at McDonalds.”