by Helena Maeve
Javier shifted his weight as I opened the door. “Hey.” He looked oddly rumpled, like he hadn’t had much sleep since we’d parted ways. The illusion lubricated my ego into a rare flash of magnanimity.
“Hi.” I beamed, blaming the next words out of my mouth on booze. “Come in.” I was a little tipsy already, the wine uncoiling the tense, irate parts of me that were normally so keen on holding grudges.
Javier obediently stepped over the threshold. “Oh, I didn’t know you had company…”
“Piotr’s just a friend,” I said airily. “Piotr, Javier. Javier, Piotr.”
I turned to close the door, tottering a little from the liquor in my veins. When I swiveled back around, Piotr and Javier were shaking hands, a study in contrasts drawn vivid before my eyes. One was tall and pale and geeky, the other cool and relaxed, his hair the color of the ink blot on his shirt collar.
They couldn’t have looked more different if they’d put their minds to it, but even I could see the spark of interest glimmering to life between them. It was a long time before they released each other’s hands.
I suppressed a groan. “I’ll get you a glass, Javier.”
Their bashful grins didn’t fool me for an instant.
Chapter Six
The knock reached me through the haze of a dream. I scrubbed at my eyes and perked up my ears. The rap didn’t repeat. Either I’d imagined it or Ashley was already making his way to bed. Can’t have that.
It took every last ounce of strength I could muster to drag myself from the couch and peek through the peephole.
No sign of him in the gloomy hallway. Conventional wisdom dictated that I should keep my door locked—that I’d be to blame for the consequences if I didn’t—but I turned the key in the latch all the same.
Ashley had made it halfway down the hall. “Hey…” He smiled at me. “I thought you’d conked out.”
“I did.” I hid a yawn behind my hand. “Are you coming in or not?”
He trooped over to my side instead of bothering with an answer. His lips tasted of coffee and sugar when we kissed.
“Party went well?”
Ashley smiled absently. “Battle was waged, but my tattered pride endures. Looks like you had an interesting evening, too…”
The wine glasses strewn around the coffee table told a story. “Call me the neighborhood yenta. In the morning. I’m beat.”
To his credit, Ashley steered me into the bedroom, grabbing for the remote to switch off the TV before following me to bed. I’d changed into a pair of cotton PJs after Javier and Piotr had left for Café Cox. They’d suggested I tag along, but I’d already felt like a third wheel, so I’d declined and curled up on the couch with the rest of the wine and a Vietnamese takeout menu for two that I wolfed down all by myself.
I would’ve slept between wine bottle and takeout carton were it not for Ashley’s timely arrival. “You saved me again,” I mumbled into his shirt.
“I did?” He patted my shoulder. “That’s good. I like saving you.”
“You have no idea…what I’m talking about,” I yawned. “Do you?”
“Not the slightest.”
“Tell you in the morning.” My eyelids might as well have been weighted with millstones for all that I could keep them open.
Sleep found me quickly.
* * * *
I woke to the pitter-patter of the shower and a pale sun outside my window. 8:14 a.m. Shit. I shot up in bed like a jack-in-the-box. I’d promised Yvonne I’d come in early today—partly to make up for my impending absence and partly because I felt guilty shirking my duties at a time when the department needed me most.
I kicked off the covers and doffed my PJs in a frenzy. I didn’t have time for breakfast, let alone a shower. Luckily my wardrobe was organized by color and outfit. I didn’t have to dive into the crowded racks to come up with something to wear that would look suitably professional without being too eye-catching.
Ashley found me scrabbling to tint my eyelids with brown powder, the back of my dress hanging open. Our eyes met in the mirror.
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
“Was I supposed to?” he asked, frowning.
“Not if you don’t want me to make it to work on time!” My hands were shaking as I exchanged eyeshadow for a tube of Chanel lipstick. I didn’t have time to fuck up my makeup. I was already late. “Can you get my zipper, at least?”
Ashley scowled, lips thinning as he came up behind me. I could feel the humid heat of his body behind me, a cloud of steam billowing out of the bathroom in his wake.
I took one last look at myself in the mirror. The Carven dress fit me as well as it was ever going to. I made a mental note to get it taken in under the arms when I got back from Kansas. “Thanks,” I added absently. Ashley was hovering, looking at me with an expression I couldn’t parse. “I’ll see you tonight?”
“Sure.”
“Great.” I grabbed my purse on the way out but left him the house keys with instructions to lock the door before he left.
I don’t know why I bothered hurrying. It was a law of nature that once the day started with one delay, others would inevitably follow. My train was late, my cell phone ran out of battery when I tried to dial Yvonne’s number, and I very nearly broke a heel crossing Rue de Sèvres.
Naturally, I was too late to help with the displays in the back. The mannequins were already dressed in their summer florals. Yvonne looked up from adding the finishing touches as I stepped through the door. The other girls had either gone down to grab a smoke or they were already manning their counters.
Then there was me—harried, out of breath, and brimming with excuses.
Yvonne’s glare could have iced burning coals. I thought better of justifying my lateness. “You know,” she said quietly, an edge of steel in her voice, “I’m beginning to question your commitment to this job.”
The stone in my belly morphed to cinderblock.
“You are.” It wasn’t a question. Yvonne had been employed by the store five years longer than me. She knew everyone in HR, she had their trust. I was the new girl. And I wasn’t playing nice anymore.
Penalties were to be expected.
She made an acquiescing noise low in her throat and flicked up a meaningful glance at my neck. “You might want to put some foundation on that hickey, by the way. It’s grotesque.”
I didn’t know what she meant until I made my way to the ladies’. Through the fog that blurred my vision I noticed that Ashley had indeed left a bruise on my neck. How had I missed it before I left the house?
Why hadn’t Ashley told me I was walking around looking like a battered woman?
Mortified, I dabbed concealer over the blue-brown weal, then set it with loose powder. I wrapped a diaphanous scarf I found in my purse around my neck for good measure, but it was too late. The damage was done.
Yvonne let me be for the rest of the day, but I could feel her hostility radiating like a pulsar. I had the unpleasant feeling that she was just lying in wait, hoping to see me screw up again—as she knew I would.
My nerves frayed like rope, I called Melanie during my lunch break, hoping to hear a friendly voice. I thought of calling Ashley, but complicated didn’t begin to cover what I felt about our relationship. Mel picked up on the second ring, her voice iced with professionalism.
“Hey,” I murmured. “Can you talk?”
“Laure? Just a sec…” I heard her say something else, but it was muffled, not addressed to me, and I couldn’t be bothered to eavesdrop. The sound of click-clacking heels echoed down the line, followed by the thump of a door. I wondered if she’d made her way to the rooftop, like me—if she could even escape the glass cage of her office to take a breather.
On the other end, Melanie sucked in a breath. “Okay, talk to me.”
“I—I think I’m going to get fired.” Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but the seed was planted in my head and I could feel the roots digging in.
“What ha
ppened?”
I told Mel everything, starting with Barnes’ frequent calls and ending with Yvonne’s sneer. “The thing is, she’s right. I said I’d be here and I wasn’t. And I can’t go around flashing a hickey to our clients. It’s—it’s unprofessional…”
“So is terrorizing your employees,” Melanie pointed out. “Take a deep breath.”
I sucked air into my lungs. At such high altitude, the smell of exhaust fumes was almost impossible to detect.
When she spoke, Melanie seemed to pick her words with care. “When we met the other day…you didn’t say you were thinking of going back to the States.”
“It’s a short trip.”
“To see your father,” Mel clarified. She had her finger on the pulse. She’d already figured out the reason why I hadn’t told her about my intentions.
“I’m not doing it for him.” In fact, I was pretty proud of myself for not wasting a single moment dwelling on how the whole encounter would go down. Nineteen years after the trial, I expected I wouldn’t recognize him if he passed me in the street. Although it didn’t hurt that the odds of that happening when he’d been sentenced to life without parole were zero. “This guy Barnes—I don’t know. I guess I felt bad,” I temporized. “Don’t judge me.”
Melanie scoffed. “This is me you’re talking to. Like I don’t know you’re a marshmallow… The way I see it, Barnes harassed you for a month and now you’re giving him what he wants—”
“A chance to find his daughter’s remains?” It was hardly the kind of terrain I wanted to haggle on.
Mel went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “And that’s fine. But it doesn’t sound like you’re the one calling the shots.”
I couldn’t argue with that. If a chain reaction was at work here, had it started with Javier and I parting ways, or Barnes appealing to my better nature? Was it the anniversary getting to me in spectacular fashion?
“What does the boyfriend think?” Melanie asked, effortlessly cleaving through the quagmire of my jumbled thoughts.
“Ashley? He thinks I should go.”
Did he? I hadn’t asked. We’d discussed logistics, but his opinion was opaque to me. We skirted around his daughter and my father, and spent our time together either in bed or wishing we were.
“Interesting,” Melanie drawled.
I picked at a yellowish bit of moss on the stone balustrade. Below, cars darted in and out of Rue de Sèvres, lights flashing like alarms. “If this is the beginning of an I told you so, spare me. He’s not pressuring me to do anything. If anything, he’s doing his best to protect me.”
“That’s good.”
“Mel.”
“Laure,” she retorted, matching me pitch for pitch. “Relax. I’m not slinging mud at your middle-aged Lothario. I’m just wondering why you’re talking about this with me if he’s so understanding… What gives?”
I didn’t have an easy answer for her. I leaned my elbows on the railing and rested my chin on my forearm. “How do you do it?” I hated shifting the spotlight to Melanie when I began to sweat under the bright glow. It wasn’t fair, even if it worked. I did it anyway, blaming the cheap shot on poor impulse control.
Melanie laughed and it was neither as measured nor as mirthful as I was used to hearing her. “I’m five months pregnant, single, and I work in an all-male department, in a job I hate. How do I do what, Laure?”
I bit my tongue in three places. “You’ll make a great mom.”
There was silence on the other end for a protracted moment. Then Melanie murmured, “Not like I have a choice now… Listen, I have to get back to work.”
“Oh, yeah. Of course, I—”
“Laure?”
I swallowed hard. “Yeah?”
“Call Ashley. Better yet, go home and talk to him in person. You’re either in this together or you’re not. But you should probably know which.”
Something told me Melanie was speaking from experience. Guilt swam in my belly as we got off the phone. Paris kept turning at my feet like an infernal machine, traffic snarls untangling and reforming in tight little knots woven through with motorcycles and bold pedestrians. I gave myself another moment of rubbernecking before I went back to work.
In the end, lacking Melanie’s courage, I didn’t call Ashley. I did fire off a text to ask how his day was going. I kept my phone close by as I worked, but no reply came. I was still waiting by the time my shift ended.
I happened across Yvonne on the escalator. The thought of slowing my steps so I wouldn’t catch up crossed my mind, but lacking courage didn’t mean I was totally spineless. I grabbed my dignity with both hands and prepared to have it trampled. “Yvonne, wait up…”
She twisted around as I hurried my steps, a look of hostile bemusement on her freckled face. “I thought you’d left.”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
She arched an eyebrow.
“I’m really sorry about this morning. About—well, leaving you in the lurch like that, for one thing, but also these past few days. I haven’t been myself.” My usual meek self, that is. I wore so many faces in the space of one week that sometimes I forgot which suited which occasion.
Yvonne let me hang for a long moment. Her nosiness won out. “Is it the break-up?”
“Yes and no,” I answered. “I’m actually glad Javier and I split. It’s just—some personal matters came up. Family stuff, you know.” I thought about Yvonne’s seven siblings, her working class parents in sunny Marseille. Even if she wasn’t close to them, she must have understood the way family could be a distraction. Yet her features betrayed nothing. She expected more detail than that before she pardoned me.
“I met someone,” I said, because that seemed like the lesser evil. “And it’s not the right time for either of us. We couldn’t be more different—that’s why I’ve been so distracted.” As I said it, I realized it was at least partially true. Melanie was right.
Yvonne sighed as we stepped off the escalator. The ghost of expensive perfumes hung in the air like fog, choking me. She pushed the doors open and stepped out. “I understand.”
“You do?”
She nodded. “Of course. And while I empathize because it’s not easy finding the right partner these days, that’s really not an excuse, Laure.” She cocked her head. “Come to work on time, do your job and don’t let me down again. This is no place for lovesick schoolgirls. Understood?”
I stood there dumbfounded as the night-crawling crowds bustled past us. Blue skies had given way to a humid evening illuminated by hundreds of billboards, street lamps and shop windows. A gaggle of tourists drove by in an open-roof bus, music trailing them.
“Yes,” I said, a moment too late to hide the hitch in my voice.
“Good,” Yvonne replied with a frosty smile. “Goodnight.” She turned on her heel and swept away, the folds of her leopard print coat fluttering behind her like the pelt of an animal she’d just slain.
Quick—five words to describe Laure Reynaud! Compromised, threatened, scared, angry.
Screwed, I thought. And not in a good way.
* * * *
I would’ve liked nothing better than to make my way home and spend an evening in my own company—possibly with Hugh Grant on my TV screen, depending on what comedy of his I found on pay-per-view—but my apartment keys were not in my possession. I had no choice but to troop down to Ashley’s if I didn’t want to sleep in the hall.
It took one knock to hear him fumble the door latch. He didn’t seem surprised to see me on the other side.
“You look terrible,” was the best he could do for a hello.
“How swiftly the romance dies,” I shot back. “Can I have my keys?”
Ashley scowled. “I didn’t mean it like that…” He grabbed my keys off a hook by the door and handed them over. “I’m guessing you had a bad day, but please don’t treat me like I’m to blame.”
It’s Javier all over again. Just leave it be. Go home. Sadly, I’d never been good at letting thin
gs go when they hurt. I suppose it was the masochist in me drawing sick pleasure out of twisting the knife.
I wasn’t about to let this golden opportunity slip by.
“I never said it was your fault I was late,” I shot back from the other side of the threshold. “But I really don’t know who else to blame for this…” I hooked a finger in my scarf to reveal the hickey he’d left on my neck.
Ashley stiffened. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. His expression shifted from indignation to dark, barely contained wrath. “You’re right. I apologize. It won’t happen again.”
The finality in his voice reached me through the irritation that had snared my common sense. I slammed a hand against the door as he made to close it.
“Hold on. What won’t happen again?”
Ashley glowered. “This is not a conversation I want to have in public.”
Like that was going to deter me. I stepped into his apartment and nudged the door shut behind me. “Answer the damn question.”
I watched Ashley flex his hands at his sides and draw up his shoulders as though bracing for a physical fight. I wondered what his marriage had been like if this was how he went about a measly row.
“I won’t engage in the kind of behavior you find so repulsive… Although I gotta say I don’t remember you protesting when we were together,” Ashely shot back. “And I gave you plenty of opportunity.”
Confusion gave way to disbelief, then to ire. I raked a hand through my hair. “Unbelievable. You’re saying this is my fault? You think I have a problem with you roughing me up in bed?”
“I’m not trying to—”
“Did I ever ask you to stop?” I snapped.
“No, but—”
I had no interest in qualifiers. “Did I complain about the bruises on my hips or the fact that I couldn’t walk straight after you fucked me?”
Ashley squeezed his jaw tight, a muscle tensing in his neck.
“You could’ve told me the hickey was showing, you dick. I got chewed up by my boss for something I could’ve prevented with a little greasepaint!”