Icy Pretty Love

by L. A. Rose

  “Want to take a picture?” Cohen holds up his smartphone. “For you, I’m even willing to be one of those incredibly obnoxious people who takes pictures of themselves in front of a piece of art, as if they’re the interesting thing to look at.”

  I hold up a hand. “One, that was a super annoying thing you just said. I don’t care how cool a piece of art is, a human being is always more important. Two…”

  I glance at the Mona Lisa.

  “Two, hell yeah I want to take a selfie with her.”

  I grab Cohen’s phone and hold it up, angling so that it looks like I’m standing close to her. Mona and me, besties forever. I even flash a piece sign before I snap the shot.

  Then I wrap an arm around Cohen’s waist and take a picture of the two of us, camera facing toward the hallway.

  “You didn’t get the Mona Lisa in the picture,” he points out.

  “I didn’t want her in that one. I just wanted a picture of the two of us. And you weren’t smiling, so we have to take it again.”

  I poke him until he grins, and then I take the shot.

  We wander around some more until we get lost and end up back with the sculptures. I'm admiring the boobs of a particularly alabaster specimen when someone ducks behind one of the statues in the distance. Someone familiar.

  It looks like...no. Couldn't be.

  I glance behind me. Cohen is absorbed in reading one of the placards on the wall. I take the opportunity to dart forward and around the statue. My hand closes on a sleeve. Annabelle's sleeve.

  She whirls and some of the color drains from her face. "Oh, fancy seeing you here, Georgette—although I suppose I can't call you that anymore. What did he say your name was? Retta?"

  "Rae," I say. "Annabelle, you can't expect me to believe we bumped into each other here by chance. Things like that don't happen in real life."

  "I guess not." She sighs and looks at her feet. "I went to your apartment this morning, just in time to see you leaving. I...may have asked my driver to follow you. Although I never complain about the reasoning behind a trip to the Louvre."

  I drop her sleeve. I was expecting her to be furious, indignant, righteous. "Er...okay. Why did you go to the apartment?"

  "I wanted to speak with you, obviously!" She takes a step forward. I wait, steeling myself for the inevitable yelling, but what's flashing in her eyes isn't rage. It's...admiration?

  "I can't believe you pulled that off," she says, shaking her head. "I'm terribly impressed. And terribly interested. All my friends are so very boring, you see. My whole life has been boring. You're the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me."

  I start to talk, swallow my own saliva the wrong way, and cough for a minute. "I—am?"

  "Yes! You have no idea what it's been like. I've been cooped up in this little bubble my entire life. It feels like I've only ever known one single stuffy person with a certain set of ideas, split into multitudes. I want to hear all about you, Rae. How you got into this line of work. What it's like. It must be so glamorous! Do you jet around the world, serving lies to the friends of rich businessmen? How much do you charge? I imagine it must be quite a bit. Oh, I'm so jealous, the adventures you must have had—"

  I put a finger to her lips. That shuts her up. If nothing else, her voice was starting to echo in the large marble chamber, and I'd rather have this conversation without any participation from Cohen. "Annabelle, I haven't had a pretty life like you, okay? You're not...you're not imagining it right at all. It hasn't been an adventure. It's been horrible and I'm leaving it all behind. This is my last job."

  "Your last...?" Her voice falls. "But what are you going to do after this?"

  "I'm not sure yet!" I smile. "I've always sort of want to be a teacher. I like kids. I'm thinking I'll go back to school, get my certification." Of course, I'll have to get my high school diploma first. "We'll see."

  "Oh," she says uncertainly. "Then you must be leaving Paris very soon?"

  "A few days." I mean to say with ease, but it comes out like a shard of glass.

  She scowls, and looks over my shoulder. Behind us, Cohen has finished reading and begun to glance around for me. I turn toward him, but Annabelle grabs my shoulder and hauls me behind an immense statue of a man riding a horse over what looks like a dead lion.

  "But you're not leaving, surely," she hisses. "Not with Cohen being in love with you."

  I shoot upright and bang my head on one of the horse's hoofs. Thank the gods of men in uniform that museum security wasn't around to see that. "He—what? He's not—that's crazy. What are you talking about?"

  She tosses her hair. "Don't play dumb with me. I already know you're smart, at least smart enough to pull of that scheme of yours, so there's no point in pretending. I've never known a human being to change so much in a month. When I tried to drive you away from him, I could at least justify it to myself thinking that he really was a jerk. But he's not now, not at all. What he did at that party was ridiculously brave, and honorable. You've changed him."

  "I—"

  "People only change for people they love." She gives a sad laugh. "Believe me. I thought Claude would change for me, but he never did. I'm leaving him, by the way."

  "You are?"

  "Yes. Around him, I've turned into a person I don't like at all." She shudders. "But don't get distracted by that. My point is that you two care about each other, obviously, and you can't jet off now, not when you have such a fantastic how-I-met-your-father tale to tell your children someday."

  "Children?" I squawk.

  "Don't throw this away, you dratted fool. I'm so very excited to see where it goes." She beams at me. "Everyone in my circle's all in a tizzy. There's an uproar about something interesting for the first time in ages. It's wonderful."

  "Annabelle," I manage. "You've got it all wrong. Cohen and I don't—don't love each other. He's my client. We're doing business together, that's all."

  "Yes, business. And I'm sure that's why you've stuck around even though you were hired, as Cohen said, to prompt old LeCrue to sell the company and that's fallen through. And why you and Cohen are gallivanting off to the Louvre together for no apparent reason other than to have fun."

  "No, that's—these niceness lessons we've been doing, where we go to all the crowded tourist places that would normally drive him crazy and he has to be polite to everyone he sees..."

  But I trail off. I've hardly mentioned the niceness lessons today, and in truth, I wasn't thinking about them at all when I proposed going to the Louvre. What I really wanted was to spend some time with Cohen. And, though I almost didn't notice, he's been nice to everyone today. He thanked the ticket lady when he bought our tickets, helped a woman find her glasses case when she dropped her purse, and even pulled me to the side so a short old man could get a better view of one of the paintings we were looking at.

  My job is done after all, I guess.

  The only thing he needed was one person to tell him to be kind to others. To point out the obvious thing that his father, obsessed with greed and success, never did.

  "I should make a dash for it," Annabelle says, straightening. "It would be a bit awkward for him to see me here, don't you think? Anyway, that was all I wanted to tell you. And I wanted to give you this."

  It's a phone number on a piece of paper. She presses it into my hand. "It's my personal line. Call me at anytime, all right, darling? If you do decide to leave Paris, I'd love to stay in touch and hear all about your thrilling exploits."

  The thrilling exploits of doing lots of homework and working a nine-to-five at Burger King, probably. But I don't say that. "All right. Thanks, Annabelle."

  "Au revoir, darling," she says before backing into the nearest hallway, the one that leads to the Renaissance paintings.

  I stuff the paper in my pocket and stand. Cohen spots me at once.

  "There you are. I was worried you'd abandoned me." He grins.

  I take a deep breath. Annabelle's an idiot. Love doesn't come into this
. "Sorry. I keeled over from hunger for a while. Let's ditch this popsicle stand and go grab some lunch, yeah?"

  We leave the Louvre and head to a cute cafe in the area. He gets steak tartar and I munch on pastries.

  "I'm going to miss the pastries. That's the main thing, for sure," I say through a mouthful of crumbs.

  "Really? What else will you miss?" he asks, cool as can be.

  I play along. "The cheese. And the wine. I've never had cheaper or better red wine. Back home, it was mostly PBR."

  "What's that?"

  "Nevermind."

  He nods. "The cheese and the wine. Anything else?"

  "The food in general. The markets. The museums. And that's about it."

  "Ah." He returns to his lunch, but he can't hide his crestfallen expression. I wonder if he's getting worse at hiding his emotions from me, or if I'm just getting better at seeing through the mask.

  I poke his arm. "And one dumb guy named Cohen Ashworth."

  "I didn't know you'd met someone with the same name as me," he says with a straight face. This time, instead of poking, I punch his arm lightly.

  "Ow."

  "You deserved that."

  "Probably," he agrees.

  I wipe up some cream on my plate with a finger and lick it off, not missing the way Cohen watches me. "So," I say, as if the question wasn't that important. "How long do you think you'll stay in Paris?"

  "I'm not sure. There are some pros and cons."

  "That so?"

  "Pros—it's very far away from my father." He sips his coffee. "Cons - it's full of tourists."

  "You're getting better at tourists, though. In fact, today I'd say you were downright polite to them."

  "Can't disappoint my niceness teacher," he remarks. "Anyway, I came here really in the first place to try and convince LeCrue to sell me his company. Now that that's off the table, there's nothing tying me here, per se."

  My heart leaps, though I do a masterful job concealing it. "Mmm, yes, I understand."

  He watches me silently for a minute. "You want me to leave Paris?"

  I cough mid-bite of pastry. Crumbs fly onto the cobblestones, the future gourmet dessert of mice. "I didn't say that. I definitely didn't even say that at all."

  "Your face did. You're not very good at concealing your reactions with me. I can't imagine how you do it with others."

  So much for my impressive subterfuge. "My other clients don't generally take the time to get to know me, in a non-physical sense."

  "Pity," he says. "They probably can't even imagine what they're missing out on."

  My face flames. "You make me blush, did you know that? I never used to blush, not since I was like ten. Suddenly I meet you and my face could be an advertisement for a cherry farm."

  He smirks. "Nice to know I have an effect."

  That smug dork. I can't believe people are usually intimidated by him. He looks so damn cute sitting there behind his empty plate, with his coat collar turned up against the cold, that I throw caution to the winds. "Maybe I do want you to leave Paris. So what?"

  "Where do you think I would go if I left Paris?" he asks carefully.

  "The U.S., I was assuming. Unless you have a citizenship somewhere else I'm unaware of."

  His face turns suddenly serious. I don't like that. I was doing such a good job maintaining my lighthearted tone.

  "Rae," he says, leaning forward. "What are your plans for your new life?"

  "Oh, I don't know," I say, blushing again. Seriously, that shit has to stop. "I was thinking I'd get my GED. Then...it might be fun to be a teacher. An elementary school teacher, maybe. I'd always thought it would be cool to do interesting stuff in the classroom, like have everyone act out lessons and things. I'd like to live somewhere where it snows in the winter. New England. No cities—I want a small town. A little house where I have to dig out the driveway on Christmas. And a dog. Some really dopey dog I get at a shelter, a mutt. None of that purebred nonsense."

  He nods. "I think that life will suit you very well."

  "So do I, actually. I'd look bangin' in one of those giant oversized sweaters."

  He smiles a little sadly. "I know you'll find a fantastic person to share that life with you."

  I frown. The muscles in my forehead do it all on their own. Annabelle's words repeat in my mind, insistently. "Well, that's just the thing," I say, stammering only a little. "I was thinking, maybe, you know. If you do end up going to the U.S. I'm not saying you'd have to bunker down with me in New England right away, or even ever, that'd be dumb. But maybe—maybe we could hang out a little."

  His melancholy smile disappears. He seems to be wrestling for control of his face. Something twisted and desperate flashes in his eyes, only to be beaten down. "Rae. Believe me when I say that there's nothing I would like more than to see you again after this week is over. To see you every day."

  I don't have to doubt him. There's a wrench in voice that speaks of absolute honesty. For a second the idea of us flashes through my mind—sitting on the couch together, watching dumb movies, cooking dinner together. Annabelle was right. It would be a great story to tell our kids, though I'd probably leave out that initial part of my career.

  "I've thought about it," Cohen says. "I've thought about it hard, and I've tried to come up with some way to make it work. Some scenario in which I wouldn't end up hurting you. Disappointing you. But they all end the same way. And none of them ends with you happy. Which is what I want for you, more than anything. Anything in the world.”

  “That’s a little arrogant of you, don’t you think?” I say, and I hate how tight my words sound. “Acting like you know the future.”

  “I don’t know the future. But I do know myself.” He inhales. “Thanks to you, I’ve learned to act differently around others. I’ve learned that just because I might not deserve kindness, it doesn’t mean other people aren’t deserving. But you can’t change the core of who someone is, Rae. There’s a blackness in me. And I know that if I spent too long with you, it would spread to you, like a disease. Corrupt you. I can’t have that.”

  I want to yell at him. Want to accuse me of utmost stupidity. But a tiny voice in my ear won’t stop whispering. What right do you have, Rae, to essentially demand he try a relationship with you? You’re from different worlds. What if all this is just his attempt to let you down nicely, to dodge around the one thing that you know is truly keeping you apart?

  I stand up. “You don’t have to lie, Cohen. Haven’t I told you I’m good at noticing when other people are lying?”

  “I’m not—”

  I laugh bitterly. “I’ve been stupid. A stupid little girl. I’m sorry.”

  “Rae,” he says, growing angry. “You’re not stupid. I never want to hear you call yourself that.”

  “But I am! If I was smarter, I wouldn’t have let myself hope—” I’m cut off by my own strangled sob. It’s the most pathetic noise anyone’s ever made.

  “No,” he says, standing up. “No, don’t be sad, no—”

  I back away, both hands held up. “I’m gonna—I just want to take a walk, okay? By myself, for a while. I need it. I need to think. I’m sorry.”

  I turn around and leave, and the only thing I do right is that I don’t run.

  I walk until my feet are sore and my nose is frozen solid. I walk until it's past dinnertime and I know I have to go back to the apartment soon and face all the stupid things I said.

  What if I just disappear now?

  Find someplace to lay low until my plane leaves in a few days. A cheap hotel. Buy some wine and hole up and never speak to Cohen again.

  God, I would be such an asshole.

  Instead, I text the only person who's been able to help me so far.

  RG: I screwed up again.

  RG: What, nothing?

  RG: Not even an 'of course you did.'

  Sam: I'm...sorry.

  Sam: What happened?

  RG: You were right, is all.

  RG: I should
n't have let myself get that close to him.

  RG: I expected things I had no right to expect, things I thought I was too smart to expect. But I guess I wasn't.

  RG: I thought I'd learned better than this. But I guess I haven't.

  RG: It's all stupid Annabelle's fault. Saying those things.

  RG: When in reality it's no surprise.

  Sam: What do you mean?

  RG: I worked it out, see.

  RG: Maybe I'm smart after all.

  RG: It would never work between us. He's right.

  RG: But not because of him. That's something all guys say when they don't want to hurt your feelings, or so I've heard.

  RG: Points to him for being the first guy to honestly try not to hurt my feelings.

  RG: Anyway. The point is.

  RG: He doesn't want to be with me for the same reason no one ever will.

  Sam: ...What reason is that?

  RG: Because

  RG: I'm

  RG: Tainted. Dirty, unclean.

  RG: Because of what I've done for my job.

  RG: I'm the type of girl no normal man will ever want, especially not a rich and cultured guy like him.

  RG: The only guy who'll ever want me is the type I've already had more than enough of.

  RG: So I'll just be alone. That's fine.

  RG: I'll have my little house, and my dog, and my snow.

  RG: That's fine. That's enough.

  Sam: ...

  Sam: That's what you really think? That he doesn't want you because you're 'unclean'?

  RG: That pretty much summarizes it.

  Sam: Rae.

  Sam: I can't do this anymore.