All for You

by Laura Florand

  (That throat-tightening effort not to wait for mail, not to hope for anything.)

  He could wait with purpose, as long as he needed to, for his opportunity to live to fight another day to open up.

  This waiting didn’t feel like any of those waits. It hurt his throat, this waiting. Struck in his chest over and over, this hard battering in time to his heart. Made him want to bow his head.

  He tried to press his shoulders back against the wall, tried to make himself look slouching, because he was much less obtrusive that way, but he couldn’t. His hands felt funny tucked in his pockets, chained, the hands of an idiot, and they kept slipping out again, where they could be ready for trouble.

  He’d stuff them back in. Then a few minutes later, he’d realized they had pulled themselves right back out.

  He missed the weight of a FAMAS across his chest while he waited—it would give his hands something useful to do at least—but an assault rifle would do no good here.

  He only had a few skills transferrable to this situation. He couldn’t fight that guy up there, her boss presumably, and mess up her life and her work situation. And get himself arrested, just as if he was still another loser from the banlieue.

  But he could wait. He could persist. He could take hurt and keep going.

  Sometime she would have to leave her hidey-hole. Have to go home.

  Sometime … maybe she would want to see him.

  Célie used to like him, or she seemed to, anyway. She used to make him feel he could be the greatest man in the world. That he had to become a better man, to be worth the opinion she had of him.

  He couldn’t let that trust and pride she showed in him be misplaced, wither and die as he dwindled into yet another aging loser, still stuck in an HLM where he couldn’t even make sure his own wife and kids were safe taking the elevator.

  He’d had to do better by himself for her sake. Better by her.

  But those postcards she sent him, there at the beginning, with the heart over the I in her name the way she always wrote it, revealing how young she was, how much of a teenager he shouldn’t be hitting on … those postcards had trickled and died from lack of response. From all the times he stroked them and twisted a pen in his hands and didn’t find the words to write back.

  They’d died quickly, within the first six months. And he never did find the words that paper could hold.

  So now he waited.

  Outside this fancy chocolate place Célie had found for herself, in Paris of all places. Not in its rejected fringe, where the idea of the romantic, glamorous city only a subway ride away left people bitter and desperate, but here. In its glittering heart. Instead of fleeing Paris as he had, for a better chance, she had marched right into the city’s heart and made it accept her. His mouth softened. Wasn’t that, when he thought about it, just exactly like Célie?

  The beautiful glass doors—the kind of doors you could have in a country where bombs and guns didn’t go off regularly—slid open. A small, curvy woman in a short-sleeved black chef’s jacket stepped out, Célie, her eyes holding his even before the doors slid aside.

  She flexed her fists uneasily by her thighs and then crossed the street to him. It was all Joss could do not to jump forward to cover her body with his, her crossing the street so recklessly, but he caught himself before he could act like an idiot. No snipers ever on rooftops here.

  As she came up to him, she got smaller and smaller, until she was just the size she used to be back when she trailed around after her brother—small enough to fit under his arm if he ever forgot himself and draped it around her shoulders. Small enough to tuck up against his chest while his hand slipped down to cup her butt, if he ever let himself do that. Small enough he’d have to pick her up to get their bodies to fit right together. He still sometimes, at odd moments, remembered how easy it had been to pick her up to boost her over a wall in some of their escapades back then. At very odd moments, lying plastered on his belly in low cover, for example, that memory would ghost back across the muscles in his arms, as if they craved that lightness.

  That spunky, stubborn cheer.

  Her eyes and nose were red, this raw, swollen red, and his throat closed all the words out of him again. Deprived of words, his hand—which had known it needed to be free and ready for action, after all—lifted of its own accord toward her face.

  She knocked his arm away before his hand could touch. Her mouth set hard, as she looked up at him, and her eyes shimmered again. “Fuck you,” she said bitterly.

  The scent of chocolate came off her, strange and enticing, making him feel like one of his grandparents after four years of war and occupation, when the American soldiers started sharing their chocolate ration bars. She’d cut off all her hair and dyed it a vibrant red. His palm tickled with the urge to test what that winged, impudent hair of hers felt like now, compared to the long braid she’d self-streaked burgundy that last year in high school.

  Of course, he hadn’t touched it when she was in high school either.

  His fingers closed slowly back into his palm, and his hand lowered to his side. He had no words, and no actions, and no idea what to say or do. He swallowed, trying to get her name out at least. “Célie.”

  His voice sounded rough, as if it’d been scraped too much in desert sands.

  “You bastard,” she said, and started crying again.

  His hands closed into tight fists by his thighs. Utter paralysis of word and action. He wasn’t even sure if he could have uttered his name, rank, and serial number.

  She dashed her tears away again, and then again, until the water on her face was a damp smear rather than a flow, and glared sullenly at him. “What do you want?”

  He tried to reach for her, to give her one of those dangerous hugs he’d twice or thrice given her at bad moments when she was eighteen and he was twenty-one.

  She shoved both hands flat against his chest, pushing herself away since he himself wasn’t very pushable. Anyway, his back was already up against a wall.

  “What do you want?” she repeated, furiously.

  That fist around his throat tightened and widened its grip, until it was squeezing all the way down his esophagus into his stomach. He had too much room in his chest, with so many things squeezed so tight. It hurt. And yet, like so many of the words he couldn’t say now that he was back in polite society—even Paris was less riddled with swearing than a Foreign Legion unit—he also couldn’t let himself say the one word, that one syllable that was the only one that could communicate the answer. You.

  I’m bigger now. I’m stronger. I’m genuinely tough enough to handle any asshole you might ever encounter. So—I’m ready. Can’t you see that?

  Didn’t it show in his arms, the width of his chest? Should he have worn a tighter T-shirt? You told me I could do anything, Célie. Well … I did it. See?

  She was so full of so many temptations to touch, like something multifaceted and shiny being twitched in front of a cat. That perky nose, those flashing earrings. The second set of earrings were studs, but the first were more dramatic, and he reached again before he realized, this time aiming for the dangly part of the earring, to twist it just enough to see what it was.

  She tossed her head, hard enough to knock his hand fiercely with her jaw, and took another step back, glaring at him.

  He dropped his hands back to his sides. “Célie,” he tried again. He could say that. It made sense. It was even an answer.

  “I’m working,” she said, furiously.

  That shocked him. Her old home address had no longer been good, but people from around there knew where she worked. Of course he had come straight here, not waiting for working hours to be over. Five years, merde. She couldn’t take fifteen minutes to see him? She would rather he have waited even more?

  “It’s a beautiful place to work.” Oh, look—words he could say. “You’ve done really well, Célie.”

  For some reason that made her start crying again. “No thanks to you.”

>   The knife went right into his gut. He could only stare at her, while his whole body flinched around it, already starting to go into shock.

  And … of course no thanks to him, he realized slowly and dimly. Célie had still been in her pastry apprenticeship when he left. He hadn’t been there.

  It was such a different perspective from his own. Because he was pretty sure that what he had accomplished—well, it was thanks to her. To that sassy, teasing teenager who had looked up at him as if he could be her hero.

  But she didn’t owe him any of her at all.

  He looked down, that skimming view of his own big body. Maybe if she could see that body in action, how much stronger and smoother he moved these days. “Can we walk a little?” He glanced up at her big, black-haired boss and the woman with reddish tawny hair watching them from a second-floor casement window, the two other people in chef’s gear pressed to another casement window there. “Will it be okay? You won’t get fired?”

  She blinked, and just for a second past the swollen eyes and tears, he saw spunky Célie. “I’m Dominique Richard’s chef chocolatier!” she said indignantly. “I won’t get fired. I make those things!” She gestured back to the gorgeous glass doors and presumably the shop inside, that beautiful, luxurious space of exposed stone, velvet curtains, and white rosebud walls, with its steel and glass cases elegantly displaying beautiful chocolates.

  That space that was like stepping onto another planet, as if none of his life matched any of hers at all. They weren’t even the same sentient species, nor members of the same galaxy. And that was strange, because they’d grown up in the same building.

  “The best chocolates in Paris!” she said.

  His mouth softened, surprising him. He couldn’t remember the last time his mouth had softened. But that was so like Célie, to stick her chin up and insist she was the best. Maybe it was part of the reason he’d wanted to become the best, so that they’d match. “Are they?”

  “Yes.” She put her hands on her hips. “They really are.”

  “I haven’t tried them.” Or any of the other chocolates in Paris. Back before he joined the Legion, he’d had to make do with supermarket chocolate bars, the gorgeous, elusive luxury of Paris well out of his reach, and not just in terms of chocolate. He’d given some special chocolates to Célie once, for her birthday, and they’d cost him far more than he could afford back then for something so ephemeral. But they’d made her really happy. She’d hugged him, and he’d had to use all his strength of will not to turn that hug into something else.

  She stared at him a moment. And then she spun on her heel and stomped right back across the street. Again his heart jerked in his chest when she did that without checking the rooftops, and he had to force his reflexes to calm down and remember where they were.

  The glass doors slid open, and she disappeared back to her safety inside that beautiful shop.

  Damn.

  He braced his feet apart and settled his weight into a soldier’s waiting stance again, then reminded himself to press his shoulders back against the wall so he wouldn’t look so obviously military in a city far from enamored of the military.

  But only a few minutes later, Célie came back out, carrying a small, flat, shiny aluminum box aggressively, like she was going to attack him with it.

  He almost managed not to jump out of his skin this time when she crossed the street without looking up.

  “Here.” She thrust the box at him.

  He took it cautiously. Obviously she wasn’t going to hand a bomb to him—not Célie, no matter how mad she was—so this might be a … present?

  He was going to go with the idea anyway. Pretend it was a present. Pretend she had given one single thought to his twenty-sixth birthday two weeks ago.

  He eased off the tight-fitted aluminum lid stamped with an adamant DR and gazed at the contents. Nine exquisite, tiny chocolates, perfectly square, flat, each with a different elegant motif—a hint of green leaves, or a tendril of white, or a pattern subtly etched into the chocolate.

  “You make these?” he murmured, fascinated. Célie did?

  Wow, she must love that. Love it with everything in her.

  Oh, thank God. Célie had grown up happy. Free. Big. He’d come back to get her out of there, now that he was big enough to carry them both to the top of the world’s glass mountain, but she’d already done it for herself.

  All by herself.

  He lifted his gaze from the chocolates to her.

  She’d forgotten to be angry or cry. She had a little curve to her mouth, utterly smug and trying not to show it.

  He smiled at her in pure pride at what she’d managed.

  She blinked, and her arms flinched around herself in a protective hug.

  So he looked back at the chocolates, his smile fading. He was clearly supposed to taste one. He almost didn’t want to, and he didn’t even know why. This was going so badly, and—parting his lips left his insides vulnerable.

  But he swallowed and carefully eased the edge of one thankfully clean thumbnail under the edge of a chocolate and worked it free from the others. Merde, the thing was no bigger than the pad of his thumb.

  He looked at Célie again. Her gaze flicked eagerly between the chocolate and his face.

  So he slipped it between his lips.

  Sensation burst through him, this exquisite, hungry sensation of chocolate melting on his tongue, soft and rich and with some flavor to it he couldn’t begin to identify.

  “Wow,” he said, and reached for another.

  She smiled, for the very first time since he’d seen her. A real Célie smile, full of triumphant pleasure, her eyes sparkling.

  The second one tasted different. Coffee? It melted, too, on his tongue, and the third was mint.

  “Wow,” he said again, and tried to take his time on the fourth one, to really look at it, how perfect it was, this tiny exquisiteness. How did she do that?

  One of her eyebrows went up, a little scar in it from where she must have tried a piercing while he was gone. Smiling, she watched him eat the fourth, and then the fifth. By the time he finished the box, both her eyebrows were up in this blend of amusement and bemusement. “People, ah, usually savor these over a few days.”

  “Oh.” He looked back down at the empty box. The square of metal was barely bigger than his hand. “Chocolate usually melts. In the desert.” Which he wasn’t in anymore. “I didn’t want to waste them.”

  She shook her head. He couldn’t decipher her expression.

  “Why do they put off eating them, exactly?”

  “Money, mostly. That’s about forty euros worth of chocolate, so unless someone is rich, it’s a luxury.”

  Forty euros. It was probably a good thing he stuck mostly with supermarket chocolate bars. He’d be spending hundreds a day otherwise.

  “Plus, they are works of art,” she told him, with her chin up in the air again.

  Damn, she was cute. This sudden, fresh wave of her cuteness washed through him again, after five years of fading memories.

  “Yes,” he said. “I can see that.” Can I kiss you? Just right now? He’d fought five years to be the man who deserved to kiss that mouth, and maybe he’d been assuming she’d recognize his right immediately.

  Again, his gaze downward let him skim his own body. As far as he could tell, strength and competence and confidence pretty much radiated off his every cell these days. His personal radius felt about ten times bigger than anyone else he crossed paths with in the street. He tried to be polite and not pushy, but people shifted out of his way on the sidewalk before he could even start to shift out of theirs. “Walk?” he asked again, low.

  She hesitated and then shrugged defiantly and turned to head up the sidewalk toward République. She had a brisk Paris stride, and he kept his much longer one slow, not in a rush to get to a café to meet with friends but in steady determination to get through terrain or his day.

  It didn’t take them long to reach the great Place de la R
épublique, empty of protestors today, people hurrying across it and a few families lingering at the fountains. Célie headed toward the canal, a nice, quiet place to walk. He only knew where they were because he’d had to look up her work address on a map of Paris and always liked to scout out the terrain before he stepped into new territory. Paris had not been his stomping grounds, in the old days.

  The canal was pretty, though. Even prettier than in films, because now it felt like a real place. Shaded by plane trees, arched with bridges, filled with this quiet, dark water that rippled only when someone tossed a stone into it.

  He glanced down at Célie and caught her in the act of sneaking a glance up at him. She quickly looked away.

  “How’s your brother?” he asked, for something to say.

  “Oh, is that why you’re here?” she demanded truculently. “You’re looking for him?”

  He cut her an astonished glance. Their whole cité and every gang in it had known that the only reason he kept putting up with her brother was that she came with him. If he had beaten the crap out of Ludo the way he’d wanted to when her brother started getting into drug trafficking and trying to drag Joss and Célie after him, he’d never have gotten a chance to see Ludo’s sister again.

  And he’d needed Ludo’s sister. Seeing Célie nearly every day had made him feel like he had a—a teddy bear or something he could take to bed with him at night. Something that made him feel warm and secure and happy against darkness. He’d even tried as hard as he could not to fantasize about her too explicitly, because it had seemed wrong. Tender fantasies, more, where he tried not to let his mind go below her shoulders, and then tried not to let his mind go below her waist, and then the clothes above the waist had slowly faded away, and now, now … well, in the past five years, he’d long since lost all barriers to the fantasies. They’d gotten hotter and deeper, and she’d given more and more of herself, more and more willingly, every time. They’d kept their sweetness, though.

  “I was looking for you,” he said, and her brown gaze lifted and caught with his. He reached for her arm and pulled her out of the way of an elderly lady with a grocery trolley bag.