He thought Juliet would look grateful that he’d remembered. Instead, she looked at him like a teenager who just got told she had to eat at the kids’ table.
Like a girl who wanted to speak for herself.
Jim felt instantly like an ass. What was his goal anyway?
Still, he looked at Romeo, wanting to see how he’d respond.
“What do you mean?” Romeo asked. “They have everything.” He gestured to a passing tray laden with sandwiches and a steak.
“She doesn’t eat meat, just fish,” Jim said. He realized he was trying to mark territory, and he didn’t know why it was important to him. “I saw some sushi places back there.”
He gestured to the route they’d taken. Japanese food was evidently big in the Montmartre neighborhood.
Romeo looked from Jim to Juliet and back to Jim.
“Oh, yeah, I know she doesn’t,” Romeo said. “This place has a baguette fromage.”
Jim cringed, wondering why he’d pushed the issue. It was like he had a subconscious need to show himself the better of the two boys for Juliet. That kind of stuff had been fine back at boarding school, to get some other guy’s girlfriend. But he told himself he wasn’t going to steal Juliet. He just had some kind of biological programming to be an overstepping dick. Thanks a lot, Dad, he thought.
“And I can order for myself,” Juliet said, not looking upset anymore. With a skip in her step, she traipsed past the two boys as they avoided eye contact and read the menu posted on the sidewalk. “I just want a giant plate of fries anyway. Let’s go.”
Romeo gave Jim a strange look as he walked inside. “You okay, man? You’re acting kind of weird.”
Jim forced a grin. “Yeah, just hungry. I’ll be fine.”
He wondered if anyone had ever made that same promise and believed it.
CHAPTER 21
JULIET
“I WANT TO do something silly, that all the tourists do.” She’d devoured half the plate of fries already, and dipped several more into the creamy Mornay sauce that accompanied them. Sometimes, the perfect junk food was better than the best gourmet meal.
It was the same way the silly randomness of the day was almost superior to the romance of meeting Romeo for a secret tryst. Almost. But she loved this—the flea market, the disguises, the laughing at everything, the irresponsible eating. It was nice to feel like a normal teenager. No Gabrielle talking about some fabulous party, no awkward conversation with Pierre as her mother lingered, no trying to be genuine with Margaux and Catrine.
The only other time she felt so at ease was with Henri, on his good days. Well, and with Romeo, but that required so many steps to stay protected. But now, she was a normal girl, Madeline, with her boyfriend. And their friend. Jim.
Maybe it had been another intervention of fate that had brought Jim into their lives. Would they ever be out like this if it weren’t for him?
Even Hélène had been happy, when Juliet said she’d be spending the day with Jim. “The American from the party?” She’d looked at Juliet with something like respect. “Fair enough. If Pierre calls, I will tell him you’re out.” For Hélène, that was a huge compliment to Jim. Juliet suspected that Jim appealed to Hélène for the same reasons Hélène had picked Juliet’s father, Maurice: He seemed like someone who could protect a woman. Not that Juliet believed she needed protecting, but she knew how her mother’s primal needs emerged.
“Moulin Rouge?” Romeo suggested, spinning a straw on the table. “That’s touristy.”
“Non,” Juliet said. “You’ll get too uncomfortable if you think people are watching us instead of them.” She knew it was true and she found she wasn’t mad, this time. Maybe because she felt more like Romeo’s true love today than ever before. The secret meetings at the hotel had their good points, of course, but this open-air courtship was what she’d wanted, at least part of the time.
“Catacombs?” Jim offered, scrolling through a list of places on his phone. “Touristy and creepy.”
She shook her head. “Somewhere aboveground.”
“Notre-Dame? Our church?” Romeo raised an eyebrow as Jim looked from him to her with a question in his eyes.
“Your church?” Jim asked, holding his burger in midair.
“We pass notes near there, meeting places on the Love-Lock Bridge,” Romeo whispered. His skullcap was still pulled low over his forehead, and he’d tucked his longish blond hair under it. Juliet loved his hair and his fine features but liked that he looked a little tough in that hat. Maybe she shared some primal needs with her mother.
“Non, the Eiffel Tower,” Juliet said, seeing Jim’s slight frown, and deciding not to think about it. She pointed toward the ever-present landmark in the distance.
“Well, I’ve never been,” Jim said. “I’m in.”
Romeo grinned. “Sounds perfect.”
An hour, two Metro transfers, and a line full of tourists later, they were in the elevator, on the way to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Juliet realized she hadn’t been since a trip with her tutor when she was twelve. Romeo, too, was looking around in wonder. And Jim stared out over the city like he was Rip Van Winkle, asleep for half his life and just waking up to a world that had grown more complex in his absence.
It was dusk, and Paris resembled an artistic dessert at the end of a perfect meal. A feathery pink light dappled the streets below, each building an ivory confection with glowing windows.
What might have been as amazing as all of Paris shimmering below was that no one looked twice at them. The flow of tourists—some in gawky white sneakers, others in flowing linens, plenty carrying shopping bags (many from the Montague and Capulet flagship stores on the Champs-Élysées), and nearly all of them snapping selfies on the way up—meant that everyone was so wrapped up in their own stories that they had no time for (or no knowledge of) the one between Romeo and Juliet. And Jim. He was part of this now, too.
When the doors opened at the top, a gust of cool air greeted them and Juliet tilted her head back, loving the way it felt on her skin.
“Why don’t I come up here more often?” she said. This was what people meant when they said “living in the moment.” Prone as she sometimes was to worrying about what had been and what would be, she didn’t feel any of that now. From up here, everything looked small enough to manage. From up here, she could see her home on Avenue Montaigne and Romeo’s just blocks down the street. Long ago, as the homes were being built, some ancient, angry Capulet had watched the Montague house go up, waiting long enough to make sure the Capulet manse was just a meter wider, a fact that Romeo had once told her still bothered his father. From up here, though, the homes looked exactly the same.
Romeo and Jim had gone to the railing along the observation deck. A chain-link fence guarded against people jumping off, but it was easily ignored. Both boys looked like the epitome of contemplative. She wondered what they thought about, and tried to imagine them as men. She realized she loved them both, just in different ways.
“Let’s yell something off the top,” Juliet said, stepping in between the boys and putting her left hand on Romeo’s right wrist and her right hand on Jim’s left.
Jim and Romeo turned to look at her and then at each other. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know,” Juliet said, more seized by the idea by the second. “I just want to do it—like what if we say, ‘We are young! We are alive!’”
It was the urge to be loud that appealed to her most. Her whole life, she’d been behaving, and even now her biggest misbehaviors had to be kept secret. She was always polite, smart but never calling too much attention to it, never one to rock the boat.
But the boys weren’t excited by the idea. They were still looking at her like they were glad the fence was there to keep her from jumping.
“Please,” Juliet said. “Doesn’t it seem like something they’d do in a movie?”
Jim rolled his eyes at Romeo.
“Yeah, some awful American movie where the
poor inner-city school kids win a spelling bee and get a trip to Paris instead of, you know, new textbooks or something they actually need,” Jim said in a deadpan voice.
“I’m with Jim,” Romeo said. “It won’t be good. It will be lame.”
“I’d rather be lame and happy than look cool and be miserable,” she said. “You’re both just scared.”
That comment got them.
“Fine, whatever, we can do it,” Jim said. “Right?”
Romeo nodded. “Yeah, I’m not scared,” he said. “I don’t get it, but I’m not afraid.” He wove his fingers with hers and squeezed her hand.
“Well?” She offered a hand to Jim, who took her palm into his.
“I’ll start,” she said. People milled around them, snapping photos and gazing at the city, but she didn’t feel strange.
“WE ARE YOUNG!” Her voice wasn’t as strong as she’d hoped it would be—maybe she was a little nervous. A petite Asian woman in skyscraper-tall heels glanced at her but smiled benignly.
She pulled off the fedora and let her waves tumble down. The wind whipped her hair around her face.
“Say it with me this time,” she said to the boys.
This time, neither Romeo nor Jim protested.
“WE ARE YOUNG!”
Her voice was the loudest but she could see the boys grin as they heard their own voices echo out over the city.
“WE ARE ALIVE!”
They yelled it three times, and with each repetition, Romeo and Jim looked as inspired as she felt. They were young. They were alive. They were happy.
With a grin toward Romeo, she added one more significant phrase.
“AMOR VINCIT OMNIA!”
Love conquers all.
She knew she was right.
CHAPTER 22
JIM
JIM WALKED INTO what he figured to be an empty apartment and he was …
… happy.
Yes, Juliet was, maybe, the first girl he’d ever met who he felt utterly beguiled by. But also maybe the first one he ever thought he could be friends with. He was at home with her.
As he was with Romeo. He’d been friends with other similarly rich boys before, but with them, everything was a pissing contest.
Sometime while they were at the top of the Eiffel Tower, he’d decided that he needed to put aside any longing he had for Juliet and instead enjoy the friendship. If he had a therapist, they’d no doubt say that his conflicting emotions toward her stemmed from his joint feelings of love and anger toward his mother, because he was still carrying the weight of her suicide.
Figuring himself to know better than any therapist was exactly why he’d always turned down offers and prescriptions to have one. He’d had to go to one after getting kicked out of Choate, for what had been called “self-destructive behavior” (he called it a finals-missing bender), but that hadn’t gone so well. The therapist had proven excessively hot and just on the right side of crazy to hook up with Jim. Now he knew what the couches were for.
Right now, he’d say he didn’t need a shrink because he felt at home. Or, at home when he wasn’t here, at his actual supposed home. This apartment felt assuredly like his father’s home, not Jim’s. The fact that the furnishings changed overnight with no input from his father honestly made the place more representative of James Redmond than less. Personal expression, to Jim’s father, was a waste of time. Keeping someone on the payroll as a corporate tax write-off, however, was very in line with his personality.
“Have a nice day?”
When his father’s voice came from the kitchen, Jim flinched.
No, almost jumped.
“Yeah, I did,” he said honestly, even as his gut churned with worry his dad would ask how the “mission” was going.
“Want a beer?”
“Sure, yeah, that would be great,” Jim said, answering in the affirmative multiple times because he was so thrown off by his dad’s sudden offer. He stepped through the living room to the kitchen, where his dad actually pushed a bottle of beer across the counter to him. Kronenbourg 1664.
Jim picked up the frosty bottle and took a long pull, surprised to see his dad home and maybe more surprised to have his dad talking to him.
“Wonder if that’s what Ben Franklin drank when he was here, catching syphilis from French whores,” his father said. He poured his own beer into a glass and offered one to Jim, who was already half done with the bottle.
Jim waved off the glass and laughed. His father had almost never referred to sex in conversation with him in his life. And he’d gone straight for the joke about prostitutes and STDs and a guy in a wig. Maybe his dad was not always so serious. “Franklin had syphilis?”
His father grinned and shook his head. “I thought that was the going knowledge. What are they teaching you in that school? I thought it was one of the best in Europe, and they can’t even tell you the activities of our dead statesmen?”
It was rare for his father to joke. No, it was unheard of. He must have been in a very good mood. Or maybe this was the start of some kind of mental breakdown.
“Did you have a good day?” Jim asked. If his father asked about how Jim’s snooping was going, he decided he could tell him something. Something small, though, that didn’t reveal anything too damaging. Maybe just that Romeo’s relationship with Rosaline seemed phony. That wouldn’t hurt anyone, right?
Or maybe his dad had forgotten the assignment altogether. Maybe he had enough ducks in a row. Better yet, maybe he’d found something else to buy and merge that didn’t involve the families of Jim’s first real friends … ever.
His dad patted a ream of papers on the counter. “Yes,” he said. “My clever acquaintance has proved useful at digging into the financial data on our friends the Montagues and Capulets.”
“Oh, really?” He found himself thinking of his friends and the easy way they went through life, like him. He wasn’t stupid; he knew money made things that way. If you could pay for all the things you wanted, you could make your worst problems the ones inside your own heart. It was part luxury, part price you paid. Sometimes, it seemed like being poor would be easier. At least when you’re going hungry, you know exactly what your problem is.
“Yes, all’s not well there,” his dad said. “I’ll have to keep you posted.”
“Me?”
“Of course. It’s your company, too. We’re in this together.” His dad said it like it was a truth as unworthy of mentioning as other taken-for-granted facts like a live-in housekeeper fixing the beds each morning. But “we’re in this together”? James Redmond only said the word together when he wanted to take over more than one company at a time, the way he was with the houses of Montague and Capulet.
His dad took a sip of his beer and peered at his phone. “So, how has your fact-finding mission been going?”
To shrug and say nothing would probably mean his father’s sudden interest in him would retreat just as quickly as it had surged. But what would saying more mean?
“Um, you know, it’s um…” Jim took another swig from his beer.
His dad’s face clouded over. “Hmmph,” he snorted.
“What is it?” Jim asked, knowing that the answer was a litany of fatherly disappointment that fit neatly into “hmmph.”
His dad shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose I was too impressed by your trailing them. I should have guessed you’d get distracted by whatever it is you do.”
Now his father looked away, sipping his beer like he wished he were somewhere else, with a better son.
“You know, I think they might be dating,” Jim blurted out, wanting to prove his dad wrong. He had gotten information.
He regretted it the instant he said it. And as soon as the guilt coursed through him, he started to rationalize revealing such a huge detail. He tried to tell himself it was a strategic move. It was noncommittal—he’d just said they might be dating—and he hadn’t given up anything about where they’d been or things they’d said abou
t their parents. Really, what harm could actually come of their dating? How could two high school students being a couple amount to anything real in this world of his father’s? At least he hadn’t spilled what he knew about Henri’s drug problem.
He knew, though, that his motivation for revealing the Romeo and Juliet fact was Psychology 101: He wanted his father’s approval. And he wanted Juliet and hoped that blowing their cover would break them apart. But he now regretted the subconscious selfishness.
Because his dad looked like a hungry tiger at the zoo who’d just been thrown a hunk of bloody meat.
“Hmm, that’s extremely interesting.”
“Why?” Jim asked, now feeling panicked. He could hear the edge in his voice, so he adjusted his question. “I mean, how would teenagers dating really matter to the businesses?” He desperately wanted it to not really matter. Romeo was his first real friend, and Juliet … well, he never wanted to hurt her. Or did he? Sometimes, he thought it would be nice if he could trade places with one of them, either of them, instead of being the conflicted son with the dead mom and the uncaring dad, who was trying so hard to make everything work out.
His dad grinned. He wasn’t a smiler, so he wore it about as comfortably as he would a Santa Claus suit in June. “Those families have been enemies for more than a century,” he said. “Their mutual hatred is governed by laws I don’t even fully understand yet. And besides, anytime two enemies are in bed together, they shrink in scope. It’s easier to move them around when they’re bound together. Really good work, son.”
The effect of being called “son” was as pride-inducing as the sense of having put his friends in danger was guilt-inducing. Turmoil mingled with the beer and his empty stomach. He hadn’t eaten since the café near Les Puces.
“Have you had dinner?” his dad asked, bringing Jim back to the present.
“Not yet.”
“Come on. I’m joining Jennifer tonight,” his dad said. “She wants to eat at the restaurant in that tin thing.”
He waved toward the Eiffel Tower out the window. Its lights were ablaze, casting little rays of gold into the darkening sky.
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