by Jill Cox
“Maybe tomorrow,” she said, a sly smile dancing around her eyes. “I have plans tonight.”
“Really? Does that mean Angus will come bounding through the door any minute?”
“Absolutely not.” Her eyes narrowed as she scoffed. “That cretin moved to Stockholm.”
“He did? Why?”
“Because some blonde named Astrid is half my age, and her legs are twice as long.” She smiled wistfully, reaching across the table to squeeze my hand. “Oh, how I’ve missed you, Meredith. All the Americans who lived upstairs after you have been dreadful. This spring, I had no choice but to march myself over to the Centre Lafayette and demand that they find a new place for those little monsters to stay.”
“Little monsters?”
“Twins,” she groaned. “From the second they set foot in my apartment last fall, I knew they were rotten to the core. By Christmas, the neighbors had started to complain about their loud music and all the strange late-night visitors.”
“Interesting. Maybe their definition of education is different than yours.”
Marie-France did that thing French people do where they simultaneously huff out a breath and roll their eyes. “Do you know that once, in the middle of the night, I heard laughter coming from my kitchen? I peeked out of my bedroom and saw that the twins had brought home five young men. You should have seen the mess. They left half the drawers open, they dropped food all over the floor, and they drank five bottles of my champagne.”
I gasped. Marie-France didn’t have just any old champagne sitting around her apartment. Every single bottle came from her family’s vineyard, and even her least expensive bottles cost a fortune. “What did you do?”
“I waited half an hour until I calmed down, then I marched upstairs to confront them, of course – keys in hand. I didn’t care what I found when I opened their rooms. But I didn’t have to use my keys, because your door had been ripped off its hinges.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“But I am. All seven people were half-conscious, piled on top of one another from the hallway into the bedroom. And for some inexplicable reason, they’d scrawled lewd graffiti all over the walls. In permanent black ink.”
“Why would anyone do that?”
“I don’t know, but by the next week, they’d moved in with a family out in Neuilly.”
“The western suburbs? Why so far away?”
“Because that family had small children who required lots of supervision.” An evil grin lit up her face. “That was the deal Madame Beauchamp struck with the twins. They could live in Neuilly for the last few weeks of the school year, or they could fly back to Los Angeles the next day and fail all their classes.”
“Wow. Madame Beauchamp is a genius.”
“She is indeed.” Marie-France scooted her chair back from the table. “Would you like to go upstairs? I finally hired someone this week to fix your old room. He hasn’t quite finished, but we can still peek inside.”
Apart from the smell of new paint and the sawdust covering the recently sanded floor, not one thing had changed about the seventh floor landing. When we arrived at my old room, Marie-France slipped her key inside.
Someone had removed every bit of furniture. I treaded softly over the raw wood flooring until I reached the corkboard along the wall where my desk had been. I ran my fingers over the push pin holes where I’d placed my photos once upon a time. I turned to my left, and without a thought, I opened the volet shutters and the casement windows, leaning out to breathe in the same smell of Paris as I had that first day three years earlier.
Saint-Sulpice was still there. The cloudless sky was still blue.
The only thing different was me.
From down the hall I heard the heavy footsteps of men’s work boots and the clatter of cans against the hardwood outside. “Marie-France, are you up here?” A man said in French out in the hallway. “Listen, I wasn’t sure which color varnish you preferred, so I bought three.”
Something about the voice was so familiar, but it took me a few seconds to realize why. Because the last time I’d heard that voice, it wasn’t in French.
The last time I’d heard him, he was saying goodbye.
I turned away from the window just as the man behind the voice stepped through the doorway.
“Sully?”
THIRTY-THREE
Pete stood motionless in the doorway for so long that I almost believed I was reliving some latent memory from the day we’d arrived junior year. His curls had grown out as long as I’d ever seen them, and he was twenty pounds leaner than I remembered. The scraggly beard I remembered from our sophomore year at Highgate was back, erasing most of his face from view. And the crinkles around his eyes had grown so deep that I was suddenly struck by the number of days since we’d said goodbye. More than seven hundred days, in fact, if you didn’t count his graduation.
It took less than three seconds for Pete to bridge the gap between us. “Hi,” he said softly in English. And then I was in his arms, my cheek resting where his shoulder curved into his neck, his beard scratching my skin as I breathed in his familiar scent.
He held me tight, and I let him. I let myself imagine that the pine and sandalwood smell of his skin was the scent I’d made for him in Grasse junior year. And for the briefest moment, I let myself ignore the past two years and the impending weirdness, and simply let Pete hold me.
Right up until he whispered, “I can’t believe you cut your hair.”
I pushed myself away. That’s what I’d said to him the day he’d suddenly appeared at the Treehouse. “Are you making fun of me?”
“What?” He pushed out a strange laugh. “Of course not. It looks nice. I just… you know, I didn’t expect to see you today, and… hey, why am I babbling like a freak?”
A muscle in his jaw twitched as the walls of my old bedroom seemed to close in on us. Seconds dragged by, and the blood rushing from my heart to my brain ticked, ticked, ticked them off like a grandfather clock while Pete glanced awkwardly at Marie-France.
“I suppose you knew Meredith would be here today?” He asked in French as he crossed his arms. “Were you planning to tell me?”
“Of course I was.” Marie-France sauntered across the room, smiling triumphantly. “It’s not my fault you took so long picking varnish. You left four hours ago.”
Suddenly my eyes noticed the paint smudges on Pete’s clothes. “Wait a minute – you’re Marie-France’s mystery handyman?”
“Don’t act so surprised,” he said, rolling his shoulders. “I learned a few things in China.”
“You learned how to refinish floors?”
“Flooring, painting, plumbing – you name it, I can do it,” he beamed. “I guess I looked bored when Marie-France came over to see the Guénégaud apartment the other day, because she tricked me into helping her up here.”
“Wait, you’ve remodeled your apartment too?”
“Nah. I just repainted and got rid of some living room furniture.”
“And bought new furniture,” Marie-France added.
My jaw went slack. “How long have you been in Paris, Pete?”
“A couple of weeks, I guess?” Pete shoved his hands in his jeans’ pockets. “I figured I should get a head-start on my place before September. The last thing I want to do is inhale paint fumes while I’m trying to read literary criticism in French.”
My mind felt like molasses. Was he completely serious? I mean, yeah, it’s no fun to live in a hotel forever, but what about Brooks? Didn’t she care that he wasn’t in Portland with her?
I was just about to grill him further when Marie-France glanced down at her watch. “Meredith, it’s three o’clock. You don’t want to be late meeting your friends.”
Pete glanced back and forth between us. “What friends?”
I shoved my hands in the pockets of my sundress. “The Addison girls are here. They’re spending the weekend in Paris with some students, and they invited me to tag along.”
/> “Oh.” A strange look passed across Pete’s face. “Well, that’s, um… hey, I hope you guys have fun. Tell them hello for me.”
I looked at Marie-France. The triumphant grin on her lips disappeared as her inner eye finally noticed that between Pete and me, there stood a very tall hedgerow of all the things we’d said that day in the Treehouse backyard. Old Lady Meredith and Grandpa Pete barely resembled her erstwhile favorite couple.
I wanted to walk out the door, hop in a car, and fly home. Instead, I yanked up my big girl pants for a sucky trek up the high road.
“Come with me if you’d like,” I said flatly. “I told the girls I’d meet them at four by the Saint-Michel fountain.”
“Really?” His face lit up. “Give me a five-minute head start. I’ll meet you outside my apartment.” Then he shot out of the room.
THIRTY-FOUR
Twenty minutes later, Pete was waiting for me outside his building on the rue Guénégaud, his curls still damp, still smelling of pine and sandalwood.
Clearly it was his shampoo and not my Grasse perfume factory concoction. Because that would be a couple of years old (and rancid) by now. Ew.
Pete and I navigated our way east along the river, dodging tourists and the occasional pile of dog excrement as though neither of us had ever left Paris. By ten minutes to four, we reached the Saint-Michel fountain. And as we leaned against the base of one of the dragon statues, Pete’s eyes finally met mine again.
“How are your parents? I heard about the bed and breakfast.”
“Oh, yeah?” I suddenly felt like I might faint. “Who was your source?”
He flashed me his most polite smile. “Doesn’t matter. They bought that cute yellow place just up the hill from the river, right? The one with the awesome deck, right? I loved that place. What’s it called?”
“The Juniper House.” I pulled off my jean jacket, suddenly stifling despite the statue blocking me from the sun. “Everything’s going well, I guess. They’re booked up through September. No vacancies. At least, that’s what they tell me.”
Pete scrunched up his nose. “What, you’re not involved in the operations?”
“Not since February,” I said, leaning against the statue behind me. “I live in Galway now.”
“Oh, yeah.” Pete’s gaze slid to the ring on my right hand. “I think I heard that, too. What’s it like?”
“Oh, you know – more people. More things to do. Lots of festivals.”
“Makes sense.” He glanced over his shoulder for several seconds, scouring the crowds across the street near the Gibert Jeune bookstore. When he finally returned his gaze to me, the polite smile had returned. “How’s Drew Sutton? Still headed for the courtroom?”
“Looks that way. He’s working up in Seattle again this summer, only this time he’s clerking with the district attorney’s office.”
“Oh, right. He wants to be a prosecutor,” he said, rubbing his fingers along his scruffy face. “I don’t know if he told you, but I ran into him last December. He seemed… settled, maybe?”
“Settled, huh? That’s a nice choice of words. I think his fiancée would approve.”
He lifted both eyebrows. “Fiancée?”
“Quinn Abbott. Her uncle runs the law firm where Drew did his internship. They go to law school together in Seattle.”
“Oh, right. I remember this now.” He scratched his beard again. “Remind me – do we like Quinn?”
“What’s not to like?” I scowled. “She’s whip smart, she’s hilarious, and best of all, she has some kind of narcotic effect on Drew.”
“How so?”
“Well, for starters, she convinced him to surgically erase that stupid WERD tattoo from his forearm. For the tattoo magic alone, she has my unwavering respect.”
Maybe it was subconscious, but Pete’s fingers slid to the place on his right shoulder where his own tattoo resided, hidden beneath his button-down shirt. “Wow. Everybody’s turning out so serious. It’s like we’re all adults or something.”
We stood there for a long moment, staring wordlessly at each other. In Pete’s new aviators, I could see my own reflection, and to my surprise, my expression was almost… smug? Really? I certainly didn’t feel superior in any way. I felt like I should find the closest manhole and disappear down into the sewer like Jean Valjean escaping that truth tyrant, Javert.
“Well, hey, on to more important things.” Pete clapped his hands together, his brightest smile returning to his face. “Is it really true that you got a book deal? Or is that fake news?”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Where else? The Highgate alumni magazine,” he grinned, almost too perfectly. “I got my copy a couple of days before I left Portland. You didn’t see the announcement?”
“I didn’t even know Highgate had an alumni magazine.” I scuffed my foot along the nearest cobblestone. “What did it say?”
Pete cleared his throat, pretended to lift a microphone to his lips and lowered his voice into a flat, Middle American broadcast journalist’s accent. “Meredith Sullivan, recent graduate and recipient of the prestigious Beckett Endowment scholarship, has sold her first novel, Night and Day, to Reardon Books. It will hit bookshelves next fall in North America, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and in Ireland, which the author now calls home.’”
“Well, okay then.” My cheeks grew warm. “I guess I should be thankful that my mystery publicist got all the facts straight.”
“Facts?” Pete’s forehead crinkled. “Man, Sully. In the past eighteen months, you moved to Ireland, wrote a novel, polished it up, and wrangled yourself a book deal for publication on three continents. I don’t think you need to be worried about facts in a silly alumni magazine. I think you should worry about my head exploding right now onto the Boulevard Saint-Michel.”
If he only knew the whole truth, his head would explode.
“Sorry,” I said, dropping my arms to my sides. “What I mean is I’m sorry you had to find out that way. I guess I figured Dan would tell you.”
“Right.” Pete shoved his hands in his pockets, averting his gaze down the boulevard. “Except I haven’t seen Dan in a while. Not in a long while, actually.”
I knew this, of course. Ever since I’d told him about Jack, Dan had never mentioned Pete Russell again. In my better moments, I believed it was his way of showing respect. In my darker moments, I figured he was protecting me from the truth of Pete plus Brooks.
But ever since Editor Angie had suggested that I strengthen ‘Luke’ and ‘Josh’s’ friendship on the page, a secret part of me hoped my muse would simultaneously work her magic on my favorite real-life bromance. Except now that Pete’s eyes held the same dark expression I’d seen so many times over the years, I could see my secret wish was foolish.
Pete’s phone rang in his back pocket. He grabbed it, angling the screen so I couldn’t see.
Brooks. I didn’t have to see the screen to know that much.
Without looking up, Pete diverted the call to voice mail, then shoved his phone back in his pocket with such ease that I wondered how often he’d practiced that move. But then he flashed me another bright smile, and just like that, the man standing before me was Sigma Phi Pete – just a bro sporting a cheesy grin, armed with a handful of one-liners he’d saved up against anyone who dared to show him pity.
“So, tell me about Night and Day. Is it about leprechauns?” He wagged his eyebrows up and down. “Please tell me it’s about leprechauns, dude. No, wait – selkies?”
“No.”
“Fairies?”
“Sorry to disappoint you.” That’s what I said out loud, but in my head it sounded more like, Please don’t ask if I wrote about us. Please. Please. Please.
For a moment, Pete observed me from behind his aviators. “You’re different, Sully. You even talk differently.”
I rolled my eyes. “Listen, Russell, if you’re going to make some quip about my accent, save it. I’ve heard it all before.”
>
“That’s not what I meant.” The lines along his forehead deepened. “I just lobbed three easy targets your way, and you ignored every single one, like you couldn’t be bothered to mock me.”
“Yeah?” I tucked my arms behind me as I lifted my chin. “Well, who knows, Russell? Maybe I’m like Sampson. Cut the hair, lose the magical snark.”
Pete’s shoulders tightened as he pulled to his full height again. For the first time in years, I could feel the sarcasm bubbling up between us, and I don’t mean the witty, flirtatious banter from junior year. During those first two years at Highgate, Pete and I had hopscotched one another’s patience, and if this moment was any indication, we were on our way back down the bell curve.
But at the very moment Pete opened his mouth to fire back, Kelly James shrieked my name from the crosswalk of the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Good thing traffic was stopped, because when Pete turned his face, Kelly shrieked again and sprinted the final hundred yards between us, tackle-hugging both Pete and me in one fell swoop.
Within a minute, Harper and Anne joined us, sweeping us into a flurry of arms and hugs and high-pitched voices. Twenty-five pairs of adolescent eyes watched us nervously from ten feet away until the Addison girls calmed down enough to introduce us to the group.
As Harper spoke to the students, Kelly’s eyes shifted rapidly between Pete and me from what must have been her assigned spot at the back of the group. And a few moments later, my phone buzzed in my hand with thirteen simple words from my favorite stealth texter:
what’s it like to live inside a hallmark movie?
major swoon avec sigh.
THIRTY-FIVE
I’m no statistician, but it seems like the average person believes teaching is an easy job. Shorter daily schedules, multiple vacations throughout the year, not to mention three months off in the summer? Sign me up for that gig, am I rite?