Romeo, Juliet & Jim

by Larry Schwarz

  “Don’t think on it.” Romeo wrapped his arms around her and kissed her like he was breathing life back into her body. Taking her face in his hands, he stared into her eyes, pulling her back into the moment with his gaze. “I won’t let that happen. Not to either of us. But you see why we have to stay strong.”

  “You shouldn’t have been born a Montague,” Juliet said. “Or I shouldn’t have been born a Capulet. What I’d give to just be some Girl Nobody for you to discover and love.…”

  “You’re so wrong,” Romeo said, his lips curved in the half smile she loved. “I wouldn’t change a thing. The stars crossed to unite us. Our curses are our blessings, too. You don’t mess with that kind of gift.”

  “Patience, then,” Juliet said. They’d been through this before; her lines were clear. But every time they were together, she imagined things could go differently.

  Romeo kissed her, a kiss that unfolded slowly, opening her lips like petals, then pressing his mouth more urgently to hers. “Time is on our side.”

  “I hate being patient,” Juliet said. “I love you. I want you.”

  She skimmed her leg over his body and raised herself above him. She kissed him back until her mind stopped working. She wanted him, and she had her wish. For those moments, she wasn’t a Capulet; he wasn’t a Montague. They were themselves, Romeo and Juliet, and they were one.

  CHAPTER 2

  ROMEO

  HE HATED SAYING no to her. He didn’t want to say no to her. She lay across his chest, dozing lightly while he twirled a piece of her hair around his finger and studied the way the light hit the chocolatey strands. He wished he wasn’t a lousy poet and could say something about how he felt, but words fell short. So, instead, he gazed at her and thought to wake her, to say, Let’s go. Go … wherever she wanted. Because she made him want to.

  And these weren’t the musings of some uninformed idiot who’d never been with a woman before. He’d been, and been, and been.

  She was singular, uncommon, and perfect for him—of this there was no doubt.

  He’d probably known from the start, a month and a half ago.

  He’d been leaving the studio apartment of an artist he was seeing, a woman in her twenties who liked to paint in the nude. Her lithe back was itself a work of art, tattooed in a collage of Art Deco–era women, short-haired in feathered headbands, holding fans, peering out through painted eyes. The effect was mesmerizing. And the artist was a beautiful, slinky creation herself. But he knew he’d grow bored of her gallery eventually.…

  Still, for two days he’d been ensconced with her, only coming up for a little air and coffee and cigarettes, when he’d been summoned back to his life by his father, who knew about and allowed Romeo’s “hobbies.” He’d kissed the artist good-bye and dashed out onto the street below her apartment in Montmartre. There’d been a street fair, which meant slow, strolling shoppers, and he was making his way through a cluster of women browsing a selection of old scarves when he saw Juliet.

  He knew who she was, of course. Before he could even form memories, he’d no doubt been shown photos of her, likely labeled “Capulet: Mortal Enemy.” But now, with the sunlight just hitting his eyes again (the artist kept heavy curtains drawn always), he blinked, not believing one of the heirs to his rival would be rummaging through secondhand goods.

  They’d been going to the same school since Juliet had transferred there earlier in the year. She was no doubt attractive, even captivating, but he had always imagined her to be a princess and knew her to be a Capulet, so he’d never let himself pay her too much attention.

  That day in Montmartre, an idea formed in Romeo’s mind. Not an idea so much as a big Why not? It would be a little fun to see if he could render Juliet Capulet breathless. He wouldn’t let it go too far, of course.

  She was carrying two heavy-looking tote bags, one on each shoulder. Corners of old hardcovers poked out the tops. She looked unfazed by the weight as she picked up pieces of costume jewelry from a table and smiled and chatted with the old man on a stool behind the booth.

  Romeo sauntered through the crowd toward her, his confidence in his game—and the fact that he had the added power of being forbidden fruit—making him feel like this was going to be too easy.

  He came up next to her, and she turned and glanced at him. Her eyes were dark brown and flecked with gold. Intelligent eyes that locked with his for a split second before she turned back to looking at the merchandise.

  Sucker-punched was the only word to describe what he felt then. His tongue went still in his mouth, his hands shook, and his chest hurt. He found himself scanning the same pieces of jewelry, their shoulders almost touching. And even though he’d never had problems coming up with things to say to a woman before, he’d only been able to stand next to her, listening with a dumb grin as she made sly jokes, to the shopkeep’s delight, about whether the old man sourced the jewelry from former paramours.

  Finally, she selected some jade earrings and paid, then turned on her beat-up riding boots and struck his shoulder with one of the bags.

  It jolted Romeo into the moment and he made a quick decision to act as if he didn’t know who she was. “Ouch.” He rubbed his shoulder in an overdramatic way. “Maybe you need help with your bags?”

  She raised her left brow at him, and he knew that she knew who he was, too. But she didn’t admit that. She grasped the game instantly. Juliet just said, her lip curling up on one side with amusement, “That’s cute, but I bought the things. I think I can carry them.” Her dark eyes twinkled as she spoke, but what he noticed were her hands—slim with long, tapered fingers, yet strong and capable, like she used them to make things.

  “Stubborn,” he teased. “I don’t know about that.”

  “Keep an open mind. Being stubborn is important to me,” she parried back, moving into the crowd. He fell into step next to her as she visited the next few stalls, asking questions about this scarf or that brooch as she held them up, seeming to have plans for each one.

  “You like old things?” he said.

  “Some old, some new.” She smiled. “But mostly things that not everyone has, or not everyone knows they want.”

  Every word she spoke was confident but not condescending. He was bewitched by her easy take on things, and by how someone who could have been a princess seemed to prefer being just a member of the public, albeit a gimlet-eyed observer instead of a blind follower. (Romeo had romanced his fair share of the public who hoped to be made princesses through his affections, and now he was trying to woo the one person who seemed uninterested in any such thing.)

  The stars had aligned for them that day, and neither of them had thought for a second what a danger it would be to be seen together. It was March and the first nice day after a cold, gray winter, and everyone in Paris was unconcerned with anyone but themselves and their own sunlit comfort. They talked and walked until the shopkeepers began to put away their wares and fold up their tables.

  Romeo remembered, only then, that he had to get back to his father, and the dangerous way he’d been consorting with—hell, falling for—the enemy hit him in the gut. “You know, we shouldn’t be doing this,” he said as the slanting afternoon sun seemed to draw away from them, leaving them standing in shadows.

  “Doing what? Talking?” Juliet said, and peered at him with a little smile. “We don’t have to talk.” She still had the bags of books on her shoulders. He’d made several more offers and she’d refused his help, in the most guileless way imaginable.

  She didn’t need him, at all, but he could tell she liked him. Maybe even liked him the way he did her.

  And then she’d kissed him on the cheek and said, “You’re very sweet.” Sweet, a word no one ever called him. “We’ll see each other again.”

  She’d left him in suspense for a week—he’d looked for her in the halls of their school but she seemed to have vanished. Then he’d found a note from her tucked, somehow, in his bag. Samedi, 12:30 p.m. and the name of a teahouse in Pet
ite Asie, where no one ever went.

  They’d met and talked and talked about how they could talk more—she’d come up with the idea of the secret email account and sending nothing, just writing each other drafts. And it had been her idea to go somewhere more private, and she’d chosen the Hotel Lemieux. “Are you sure?” he’d said as she led him by the hand up the stairs. He’d almost been trembling when she closed the door. But then, in the privacy they’d afforded themselves, he’d needed to kiss her.

  That first kiss was an affirmation of all they’d both suspected: There was nothing ordinary about them.

  “We can wait,” he’d said.

  “You don’t wait when it might be your only chance,” she’d told him, as sure about that as she was about everything.

  He just wished, now, that he could reward her certainty without certain destruction.

  CHAPTER 3

  JULIET

  AN HOUR LATER, Juliet beamed as she and Romeo skimmed down the last flight of steps and into the lobby. Their hands locked together felt as decadent and effervescent as the bubbles surging in a glass of Dom Pérignon White Gold Jeroboam. The buzz was even more delicious.

  “If I could put the feeling of holding your hand in broad daylight in capsule form, we’d make a fortune,” Juliet said as they stepped out onto the street, full of hustling backpackers and hardscrabble immigrants. Here, they were completely invisible. No one in this neighborhood cared about Capulets and Montagues. It was why she’d chosen it, last month, hoping that it could become their place. It had, even if this was only the third time they’d gotten to be together there.

  “That is extremely lovely,” Romeo said, pulling Juliet into him. She leaned her head on his shoulder as they strolled into Paris’s Chinatown, where the smells of dim sum and Peking duck spiced the air.

  “Lovely but also lucrative,” Juliet said. “Are you sure you don’t want to trust my visions and set sail?” She lightened her tone so he’d know she was joking, but she did—either through naive optimism or shrewd awareness of how everyone in the world desired a romance like theirs—believe they’d make it, even as she knew Romeo was right about all the flaws in her plans.

  They were on their way to their favorite restaurant, a ramshackle teahouse where neither the owners nor the rest of the clientele spoke any French, but that had the most delicious oolong tea Romeo and Juliet had ever tasted. Or, at least, they thought it did, since this was their place. They ducked inside and found their favorite seats, beneath a low-falling eave at a table that might have felt claustrophobic to anyone else but them. Once there, they turned their phones back on, as they did after each meeting.

  They’d just had their first warming sips of oolong when the noise from the street outside rose several decibels. Monsieur Y, the teahouse owner, stood at the door, speaking to a man with a large camera hanging from his neck.

  “I’m sorry to not have a permit, but we can give you cash to shoot here,” the photographer was telling Monsieur Y. “Huge campaign, so you’ll be paid well. The only thing is, we need you to decide now.”

  Romeo looked across the table at Juliet, concern etched on his face. “This doesn’t sound good,” he said. “We can’t be here if photographers come in.” He opened his wallet and put more than the needed amount of euros on the table.

  “Should we go out the back?” Juliet said, her heart racing. Much as she could talk the talk of a defiant woman in love, she knew what being photographed together would do to them.

  Juliet’s phone dinged. The screen read, Gabrielle nearby! A little dot on a map appeared, and Gabrielle, it turned out, was very nearby. Just-outside-the-door nearby.

  “Oh my God,” Juliet whispered.

  Gabrielle’s distinctive purr oozed through the door.

  “Juliet Capulet … are you in there? Why are you in there?”

  Monsieur Y was holding his ground at the door as he negotiated with the photographer, and Romeo and Juliet were well hidden at their table, but still, Gabrielle’s voice was a reality check in the worst way.

  “How does she know?” Romeo asked.

  “We linked our phones so we could find one another when we went shopping last week,” Juliet said. “I just didn’t turn off the app.”

  How could she have forgotten? Gabrielle, one of the top models in Paris—nay, Europe—had gone on and on last week when they were out about how she would be doing a shoot in Petite Asie and how she’d have to be extra careful not to pick up any germs from the backpackers. Juliet had felt so smug asking all kinds of questions about the neighborhood that she’d known the answers to. She’d let Gabrielle go on and on about how different it was from their world, and had feigned curiosity, as if she’d never been there.

  Though she sometimes wished she could tell Gabrielle everything, Juliet had grown up so sheltered and protected that it was now her way to be wary of even people she called friends. It was part of what made being with Romeo feel so good: She finally felt like she was purely herself with someone, and that she could allow him to really know her.

  “Out the back,” Juliet said, imagining the way Gabrielle—and an army of fashion magazine people—would revel in this gossip. Heads would roll, just to find other heads to tell everything to.

  Juliet and Romeo cut through the small kitchen area, ignoring the shocked faces of the teahouse staff. The alley behind the restaurant was blocked off on one side by the high walls of an apartment building. The open end led to the street, where the entire apparatus of Gabrielle’s photo shoot was present. Workers were erecting scaffolding and lights; stylists were rolling racks of clothing along the uneven pavement. This was no small affair, and Romeo and Juliet would not have an easy time emerging from the alleyway undetected.

  Juliet’s phone buzzed. Gabrielle was calling her. She pressed the button to make it go to voice mail and then shut the phone down.

  They were pressed to the back wall of the teahouse, next to a Dumpster that smelled of rotting discarded food from the dim sum restaurant next door.

  Juliet peeked around the corner. Gabrielle was pacing, huffing into her cell phone, probably still calling Juliet. An entourage followed her every step. Steps taken on six-inch heels, each sprouting a plume of peacock feathers that glowed electric blue against her dark-chocolate skin. Gabrielle wore a string bikini made of glittering crystals, red hair extensions blazed out of her head, and her eyes were painted in thick stripes of pink and blue. She was on fire with agitation.

  “Why isn’t she picking up? My phone said she’s right here. Someone get me a cell-phone nerd to figure this out for me.”

  Gabrielle glanced witheringly at a timid-looking assistant. “Are you sure you didn’t see Juliet in there? Dark hair, innocent little face? Like she needs to lose her virginity, stat?”

  Despite herself, Juliet stifled a laugh at the fallacy of the comment. Romeo squeezed her hand tight.

  Of course Gabrielle couldn’t let it rest. This was a part of town neither of them would be in, save for a major fashion magazine shoot or a very secret tryst. Juliet couldn’t exactly walk out and say, “Quelle coincidence!” like they’d just run into each other at Printemps department store.

  Romeo and Juliet were trapped like the rats that haunted this very alley. People might see them, and if those people were Gabrielle and an entire fashion-knowledgeable camera crew, well, they could kiss their secret good-bye. The idea that the very photogenic heirs to the two biggest archrivals of the Paris fashion world were here together, with no discernible reason for being in this part of town other than what they’d just been doing—well, it was the kind of scandal that would be everywhere.

  A woman with black glasses and a clipboard approached Gabrielle. “We have to start.…”

  Gabrielle’s response echoed down the alley. “Look, I’m not going to be able to focus on this shoot unless I know why my phone was saying Juliet Capulet was here, and now it’s not. That isn’t black magic. This is technology! She was here and I want to know why. It will
drive me crazy, and crazy doesn’t look good on camera.”

  Juliet shuddered. Her friend was nothing if not determined.

  “Merde, merde, merde,” Romeo muttered.

  Next to the dim sum restaurant, an old man emerged from an open back door, tossing a trash bag into the Dumpster. Music and smoke poured out into the alley.

  “Let’s go in there—at least it’s off the street,” Juliet said, and they slid past the man and into a bar. It was small and narrow and utterly nondescript, perhaps why they’d never noticed it before. But it was still too bright inside and too close to the commotion outside. Through a graying window, the scurrying of various photo-shoot personnel was obvious. If Gabrielle was as resolute as she sounded, and if she got the rest of the shoot as riled up as she was about Juliet Capulet slumming it, they would be found within seconds.

  At this time of day, there was no crowd to hide in. The only other person in the bar was a man in a vintage motorcycle jacket and black skinny jeans. He hovered over the jukebox, and Juliet couldn’t tell if he was poring over the song list or getting ready to punch the machine.

  “I can’t believe this,” Romeo said, with so much horror that Juliet’s heart dropped. She knew she’d gotten under his skin talking about running away, but now he seemed almost angry. He clutched his forehead with his hand, pushing his longish hair from his eyes.

  “I’m sorry—” Juliet started.