by Maggie Hall
I let out a low breath. This was not just secret kissing. This was a declaration that, at least for tonight, it was more. And that neither of us was making a secret of wanting that.
Still, I glanced self-consciously at our hands, then in the direction of our friends. One, specifically.
“Jack knows,” Stellan said.
I wasn’t even surprised that he’d understood. “Are you sure?”
He shrugged. “I told him. It would have been bad manners not to.”
I couldn’t help a small, desperate laugh at that. “You told him what?”
“Well, I didn’t go into detail . . .”
I elbowed him, and he grinned. “I told him that . . . I like you.”
I wasn’t sure how I could be thinking so much about dying and still have this kind of giddy smile keep creeping onto my face. “Oh,” I said. “Okay, then.” I linked my fingers more tightly through his as we walked under the portraits of stern-looking men and women gazing down at us from the walls.
It turned out our friends paid no attention to us at all. Everyone’s candles were on the floor. Luc and Rocco and Jack all had their tuxedo jackets off, and the three girls were sitting on them like sleds.
“À vos marques,” Luc said, crouching like he was at the starting line of a race and gripping the arms of his jacket, “prêts, partez!” They took off, the boys pulling the girls, dress shoes echoing on hardwood floors. Colette fell off Rocco’s jacket immediately, collapsing in a laughing heap on the hardwood. Elodie’s and Luc’s feet got tangled up, and Luc yelled as they fell.
“We win!” Nisha exclaimed. She leapt up before Jack had even stopped, and tackled him in a hug. He picked her up and twirled her around with a grin that made me think of all the time Jack had spent getting briefings from the scientists the past couple days, and wonder, just for a second, whether there was something going on there I hadn’t seen. I squinted behind them. “Is that the Mona Lisa?”
“It is,” Stellan said. I let go of his hand and ran across the room, sliding in my slippers on the hardwood. Don’t think about the fact that this might be the only time you’ll see it, I told myself.
“It’s so small!” I said.
Elodie stood beside me, crossing her arms and squinting at Mona’s enigmatic smile. “At least you get to see it up close, without six thousand people taking selfies in front of it.”
“Ugh.” Luc came up behind me. “It’s so boring, and so terribly overhyped. That’s the valuable one.” He gestured over his shoulder at a painting on the opposite wall that must have been twenty feet tall. “It’s a portrait of the Circle from centuries ago. We made up that the Mona Lisa mattered so no one would ever make a move against the one we care about.”
This was something almost no one in the world knew. Almost no one in the world had run around the Louvre at night, or flown in a private jet all over the world. Whatever else the Circle had done to my life, I’d also gotten to do some amazing things.
From outside, there was a boom so loud, we all went quiet.
“Firecracker,” Stellan said after a second of silence. “It was just close.”
Jack nodded. I still couldn’t help but watch the walls like I could see through them to what was going on outside.
Luc grabbed both my hands. “It was only a firework, chérie. They set them off every New Year’s, and it sounds like the world is ending. Do you like your present?”
“This is the best birthday I’ve ever had,” I said truthfully.
Luc pulled me down the corridor and everyone else followed, Rocco ducking into gallery after gallery and shouting out what we had to see. Nisha gave us a lesson on one of her favorite paintings, and Colette and Luc contorted their bodies into the poses of statues while Elodie took pictures. With the domed skylights overhead letting in silvery moonlight, we crowded down a short flight of stairs, and then suddenly, we were in the Louvre lobby.
The outside of the Louvre was one of the most iconic images in the world, but inside was just as beautiful. The pyramid overhead formed a giant skylight, putting the Paris night sky on stunning display. Through the lattice of metal and glass, I could see part of the Louvre façade and beyond it, fireworks from the rioting all over the city. It was the most beautiful and most terrible thing I’d ever seen.
I was still staring when a new song started up on a tiny radio Nisha was carrying.
“Oh!” Luc said, and started to sing along.
Stellan set down our candles, then swept me into his arms and sang something off-key, but enthusiastically. “What song is this?” I asked, but they ignored me.
Luc and Rocco started dancing, too, and Elodie did a ballet leap across the open expanse of floor. When I looked up at the glass above, I could see the reflections of all our candles flickering.
Stellan twirled me, and I caught a glimpse of Jack, leaning against a pillar with his arms crossed over his chest, but smiling. I smiled, too, at this thing that looked suspiciously like joy, pushing defiantly through the terror and sadness.
The song broke into the chorus, and Jack joined in, a deep baritone that rose above the rest of the voices. One by one the rest of them dropped out, and we all turned to stare at him. When he realized everyone else had stopped, he cut off in the middle of a word. “What?” he said.
Elodie giggled and ran up the spiral stairs in the lobby’s center to look out of the pyramid into the Louvre courtyard. The rest of them followed. Jack was the last to leave, and I could tell he was waiting to bring up the rear of the procession, always vigilant. When he realized Stellan and I were still dancing, he gave a quick nod and jogged off to catch up to the rest of them.
My heart squeezed and I rested my forehead on Stellan’s chest, feeling the thump-thump of his heart. I pulled away just enough to look up at him, to run a finger down his jaw, down his neck, to the glowing white of his tuxedo shirt. Then I reached up and kissed him along the same line.
He shivered. “What was that for?”
“Because why not?” I whispered. I might be keeping some of my feelings in check tonight, but in this, I saw no reason to hold back.
“Well, in that case—” He leaned over and pulled at my earlobe with his teeth, and I got goose bumps.
“Come on,” I said. I dragged him across the open expanse of floor, awash with moonlight and the distant flickering of our candles, and held his arm up to twirl myself again and again so my dress fluttered around me. I giggled, felt dizzy, went crashing back into his arms. “Ow!” I squeaked, cradling my injured shoulder. I couldn’t stop laughing. My eyes were filling with tears. I pulled away from Stellan and sank to the floor, still holding my arm, my lacy dress pooling around me. There were more green and red pops through the triangles of glass, blurred now as my eyes swam. I wiped away one tear, two, but didn’t let it go further than that.
Stellan stood above me, his hands in his pockets, looking at me in a way that made me feel unsteady. “Kuklachka,” he said roughly.
I held out my hand. “Come here.”
He unbuttoned his tuxedo jacket and settled beside me, propping himself up on one elbow. That look was still on his face, the soft, quizzical one with a hint of apprehension behind it. He seemed to make a decision.
“I need to tell you something,” he said, lying back to stare up into the sky. Through the delicate web of metal filaments holding the pyramid up, I could pick out three bright stars.
A ball of nervous light sparked in my chest. Was this it? Was he going to tell me he was leaving—or he was staying? I thought he’d wait to see what happened tomorrow, but now I steeled myself. “What?”
I turned my head to see his throat bob with a hard swallow. “I need to tell you that I’ve been lying to you all night.”
My hand, on its way to grasp his, froze.
Stellan kept his eyes trained on the sky. “I think I didn’t know how to handle this, especial
ly with what’s coming up. And so, I lied. I’ve lied to you over and over and over. For a long time.”
The floor hadn’t seemed cold before, but now it did, seeping through the lace of my dress. What was he saying?
Stellan propped himself on an elbow over me and I was paralyzed as he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “I lied to you earlier when I said you looked okay,” he said. “The truth is, when I saw you coming down those stairs, I forgot how to breathe.”
That . . . was not what I’d expected. “What?” I choked.
“And it’s not just the fancy dress,” he went on. “That happens every single day.”
My head reeled, like I’d held my breath for too long.
“And I definitely lied when I said that I like you.” He looped his fingers through mine. The light in my chest trembled. “It’s just that I spent so many years persuading myself not to—persuading myself I wouldn’t be able to—feel anything real for anyone that I don’t think I quite believed it when I fell hopelessly, desperately, absurdly in love with my fake wife.”
The light exploded into a million stars.
He cupped my face in his hand. “Kuklachka. I know everything’s uncertain right now, and this is just about the worst time to be doing this. But it’s also the only time. So, I love you. I’ve been falling in love with you for a long time, and I still don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few days, but whatever it is won’t change that fact. I love you.”
My heart was thumping as violently as it had when we were being shot at. “No one’s watching in here,” I teased shakily, regretting the words before they were out of my mouth. As much as I was trying to learn, I didn’t know how to do this. I knew how to push people away. I knew how to convince myself something was less than it was. I didn’t know how to believe in it.
“I hope not,” he said. It was guarded. Answer him, I told myself, but the words weren’t working. It was like in the hallucination—all I could do was stare at him, silhouetted above me against the panorama of the night sky.
His hand fell from my face. “I’m not expecting you to feel the same way. And that’s okay. I just had to tell you, in case this is the only chance I have—”
I stopped him with a hand in the center of his chest. His heart was racing.
Footsteps thundering down stairs made me startle. “Hello!” Elodie called.
“Hi.” I had forgotten they were there.
“We’re going to eat snack bar chips,” Colette declared, gesturing across the lobby. “And drink snack bar wine.”
Stellan just waved, like it was the most normal thing in the world to be lying on the floor of the Louvre. My fingers tightened on his chest.
As soon as they disappeared around the corner, I pushed myself onto an elbow. “I—” The words still wouldn’t come, so instead, I pressed my lips to his.
Of all the times we’d kissed—the ones that were desperate and wild, and the ones that were halfhearted and artificial—I’d never felt one like this. This kiss was careful, slow—but fierce. Final. This was a kiss that left no doubt about what it meant. And when we broke apart, I saw it reflected in the softness and sparkle between us as clearly as if we were saying it out loud: I love you I love you I love you.
It felt dangerous. It felt amazing. It felt like of course the lights were out, because all the electricity in the city was in my veins.
I felt whatever was restraining us snap, and I was kissing him more deeply, my leg hooked over his, the floor hard under my shoulder. The only thing I wanted was to be as close to him as possible, saying everything I couldn’t seem to say out loud yet.
He pulled away, breathing heavily. And then he got to his feet, hauling me up with him, grabbed our candles, and headed without a word toward the sound of voices.
“What—” I said, but we rounded a corner.
There was a temporary baroque furniture exhibit off the Louvre lobby by the little cafe. Luc and Rocco were curled in an oversized gilded throne together. Elodie lounged on a rug, and Colette sat next to her, running her fingers absently over Elodie’s short, spiky hair. Jack and Nisha sat at a small table. “Want some M&M’s?” Colette held the candy out. “Or we have Snickers.”
I remembered Cannes, unbuttoning Stellan’s shirt, how he’d drawn that line I’d tried to cross. Wondering if he was drawing it again, considering the circumstances.
But he gave an exaggerated yawn. “I’m getting tired. Big day tomorrow. I think I’ll be going to bed.”
Oh.
“Me too,” I said quickly. “Tired.” Stellan ran his thumb across the inside of my wrist, and I felt goose bumps rise on my arms. “Good night. Thank you, guys. For everything.”
Stellan pulled on my hand, and we headed back to the lobby, toward the elevators. “Was that ridiculously obvious?” I whispered.
“Yes,” he whispered back. He held the candle far enough away that it wouldn’t catch my hair on fire, and kissed me until the elevator doors opened and dumped us out.
The hallway was pitch-black. We came to a stop in front of a window with a view out over the Louvre. It was odd to see the pyramid dark and have none of the lights on the outside of the museum, or the street, lit up. In the moonlight, I could see dozens of police officers in the square. Stellan kissed me again.
My bullet wound ached and the cuts from Russia stung and the cool air on the skin he’d just kissed tingled and his mouth on mine felt so good it was like my whole body was alive. This did feel like jumping off a cliff, and I’d never wanted anything more.
“I love you,” I whispered.
His grin in the half-light was so surprised and sweet that I took his face in my hands and brought his forehead to mine. “I love you,” I repeated. Now that I’d said it out loud, I couldn’t stop. “I love you.”
“You don’t have to sound quite so surprised. It’s slightly offensive,” he teased, because he couldn’t do it, either. We were two people who didn’t know how to feel this for each other, much less how to admit it, feeling it out in the dark.
“I’ve been thinking it . . . a lot,” I admitted. “Since before you said it. It’s different to say it out loud.”
He swept me up in his arms so fast, I squealed. We kissed on a grand sofa in a sitting room, on a windowsill in the hallway.
How had it taken me this long to realize I loved him? I’d thought for so long he was just a detour on my path, but that was ridiculous. This felt like the only possible end to the collision course we’d been on for so long.
Maybe it was because I’d always thought being in love would feel . . . fluffy. Cute. Kitten-bliss kiss type of sweet. But that was not how this felt at all. It wasn’t just that saying those words—I love you—made me grin so big I could barely kiss him. It was that this could be forever, or it could be just tonight, and it didn’t make me feel any differently. It was the pinprick of sorrow that my mom wouldn’t get to see me happy. It was the knowledge that we could never just be two normal people in love, no matter what happened. And the fact that every time I thought I was drowning, he helped me breathe again. Love wasn’t perfect, but that didn’t make it less. Like all of tonight, there was sadness and fear, but beauty and joy, too, brighter because of the contrast.
“I think I’ve been falling in love with you for . . . way longer than makes sense,” I whispered. “I wasn’t going to tell you. That’s why I was so surprised when you said it. I was afraid it’d make everything harder. But—”
He set me on a windowsill so my face was level with his. “It’s so much better.”
“So much better,” I whispered, and wrapped myself around him again.
We left his jacket over the back of a sofa in the Napoleon apartments, a section of the Louvre usually full of tourists. We left his shirt— I wasn’t sure where. Someone would find it eventually.
We ducked into a room with a gilded
ceiling that glowed and glittered in the light of our candles, but I barely saw it. Everything was him. After so long pretending I didn’t want to, I couldn’t take my eyes off him. The way his lips parted a little when I stroked the back of his neck, barely ghosting over his scars. His arms, straining in a way that told me he was barely holding back, but so gentle tucked around me. How he watched me openly, letting me look, letting me touch him as much as I wanted, his eyes tracing my every movement like he was as amazed by me as I was by him.
“What’s this scar from?” I whispered. I touched a mark under his arm, hard and translucent against his smooth skin.
“Training fight. I was thirteen.”
I traced the sharply cut lines down his abdomen, the slide of muscle at his hip bones that vanished into the waistband of his trousers. I made my way back up over his arms, arms that had held me after I’d almost drowned, arms that had carried me out of danger in Russia while the stars had spun in my head. Farther up, where the ends of the translucent scars curled over his shoulders.
“This one?” I stroked a thin mark at his collarbone.
“An operation in the Ukraine that was almost a disaster.”
I wanted to ask about it. I wanted to touch every one of his scars and know the story of his whole life. Maybe we’d have time for that later. Maybe we wouldn’t.
I really had changed. I’d been taught over and over that everything good was also temporary, and it was worse to lose something than to never know how it felt at all. Tonight was the opposite of that.
No matter what, though, I didn’t want to think about the future right now. The past was easier. I touched another scar. “What’s the story of this one?” I said, but he could tell something was wrong. He stroked the back of his hand over my cheek with a questioning eyebrow raise.
I circled my finger around the scar on his shoulder and whispered, “I’m just trying not to think that this could be the only—”
He plucked a sweet-smelling white flower from my hair. “I know.”
“We need mint tea to concentrate on,” I whispered.