by Hazel Parker
It was exciting. I loved American women. Once you got past the initial awkward stages, it could be enthralling.
But it was also a little unnerving.
What if she was here?
What if I went to the bathroom, bumped into her, and locked eyes with her?
It didn’t matter how often I told myself that she couldn’t be here. It didn’t matter how much math I did to convince myself that she would not be here.
Vengeance and karma had a way of defying even the greatest of odds, and I knew that at some point, I would have to accept the consequences of my actions. I did not regret what I had done, but I felt embarrassed that I had never confessed as to why I had walked out.
“Hey, you.”
I looked up and smiled as two American girls came to me, each of them from one side. A pincer attack, of sorts. They would make it so that I would have to choose one, perhaps even both.
This would be fun.
“How are you?” I said.
“Good,” the one on the right side. She had long, flowing blonde hair, tan skin, and a pink dress. The one on the left had dark brown hair, paler skin, and a blue dress. It was like choosing between the two archetypes of American women—the blonde bombshell, and the busty brunette.
It was a shame that, given where my head was at for the moment, I probably would not wind up taking either.
“We noticed your friends were dancing and you were sitting back here by yourself,” the blonde said. “Come dance with us! It’ll be fun.”
“I do not dance,” I said.
Not at nightclubs with strangers I do not know, at least.
“Oh, don’t be a party pooper!” the brunette said. “How about a shot? I bet that will get you to open up and to dance with us.”
Funny, these two.
“I will take a shot,” I said. “But do not expect me to dance. It is not my style.”
“We’ll see about that,” the blonde said with a smirk.
Yes, yes, we will.
I poured us three shots of Patron. We clinked glasses, tapped the table, and downed our shot. If ever there was a moment this evening for me to decide to get swept up in the fire of passion, this was it.
But there was not so much as an ember, not so much as a single spark that danced its way to the strings of my heart. I simply felt content to think, watch, and ponder.
“So now are you ready to dance?” the blonde said.
I gave her an askance look that she may very well have considered flirtatious, but it was only meant to be dismissive.
“I have made my point once, and I will not make it again,” I said.
“Ohh, hard to get,” the brunette said. “Caroline, I told you they’d be like this.”
“You’re no fun!” the blonde, I presumed Caroline, said. “You’re in Paris during Fashion Week and you’re just going to sit back and drink?”
“Yes.”
The blonde stammered in frustration as I took a sip of my original drink. The brunette actually seemed amused by this whole display, as if she had warned the blonde not to spend her time on me. Eventually, I called Antoine over and told him that I had two lovely women that were looking for someone livelier than me.
It worked insofar that it got them away from me, and Antoine and the blonde were dancing with each other within five minutes. In fact, within fifteen, the two of them were passionately kissing on the dance floor.
I smiled, recalling how I had had my own experience like that five years ago, except it was not on a dance floor; it was in an elevator. And unlike Antoine, who would leave this woman in the morning and return to his own life, I had extended my visit by more than one night. It had gone two nights, actually.
But then…
A couple more women tried their hand at seducing me, but I was not in the mood. If anyone asked, I merely said to exercise patience, that this was just the first of four nights in which things would be fun and wild. I had no concerns about libido; if I wanted to, I could have taken both blonde and brunette back, enjoyed my time with them, and then returned to the club for another hunt.
No, it was a little bit more complicated than that.
Sometime after eleven, I grew bored and decided it was time to leave, using Antoine’s urgency to leave with the blonde as an excuse to follow them out the door. I bid him farewell as he told me he would call me when he woke up tomorrow; knowing Antoine, I was fully aware that I probably wasn’t going to get a phone call until Friday or Thursday late afternoon at the earliest. Women and alcohol had a way of distracting him.
The instant I was free, though, I didn’t feel like I had wasted a night of bottle service. I felt like I had given myself the space I needed to reflect. Forty was not the age to celebrate with four nights of nightclubs and women. Forty was the age to start taking stock of my past and reflect on the good and the bad.
And boy, was there a lot of bad that I needed to ponder and possibly atone for.
There was also a lot that wasn’t something I had done wrong, but something I needed to just let go of. But asking me to do that...well, it was why I had acted like an American jackass five years ago. I did not need to revisit it now.
I got to my hotel, Hotel Plaza Athenee, about five minutes later after a short walk. It was admittedly a step-down from where I usually stayed, but I had reached the point of preferring the simple. And in any case, it was not so poor of a hotel that a woman would run in the other direction if she saw it. It was just simply a good hotel, not a luxury hotel where you had a personal butler.
I made my way to the bar, which was not nearly as crowded as I would have anticipated, though, again, I reminded myself that this was Wednesday, not Friday. I relished the quiet, walked up, and ordered a dirty martini. As the bartender made my drink, I leaned against it and looked out—
Her.
It had to be.
She was walking by so quickly, and she was not looking at me.
But…
How could this be?
Impossible.
But there she was. There was the woman of five years ago, the one whom I pretended to know nothing of but knew every detail of, down to where in the United States she worked. She was here, not just in Paris, but in the same hotel as me.
Layla Ferrari.
It was going to be a very interesting few days.
Chapter 3: Layla
My alarm went off at seven a.m., an unjustifiably cruel hour for how little I had slept the night before.
While someone might have just waved off the lack of sleep as coming from having napped the entire afternoon and early evening, I knew the truth. I knew it was because I had seen him in the hotel bar, and that that had set off a whole wave of thoughts and emotions that I could not wrap my head around. The only way I even began to fall asleep was by lying to myself enough to say that it could not have actually been him.
I had laughed at myself. To say that I must have seen him because I was in France was as absurd as someone saying because they had seen a blonde in the streets of New York, they had seen the same girl who said she was from Los Angeles. It was not like going to a small town of a few hundred people and seeing the same person. Not even close.
Not...even...close…
You can lie to yourself as much as you want, but some part of you will know—
I sat up, gulped down two cups of water, and pulled out my phone to look at my itinerary for the day. I would be stopping by three of the hotels today, which featured Ferrari Wines, to make sure they were satisfied with the product and possibly push for a little more sales to be done. Afterward, I was expected to make the rounds at the various Fashion Week celebrations and see whom I could get to talk to. I had to hand it to Grandpa—as grumpy as he’d become personally ever since Grandma had died, he had become much less hands-on with me. Perhaps more than Brett, he trusted me to do my job well.
Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately, depending on how uncooperative and wandering my mind wanted to be today—my firs
t meeting with a hotel client was not until ten-thirty. I had time to work out, shower, eat breakfast, answer all of my emails, and maybe even relax before hitting the road. I grabbed my gym clothes, put in some AirPods, and began streaming some pop music as I made my way to the gym.
I felt pretty certain that I would not run into anyone I knew inside of this gym. Seven a.m. was not an hour at which most people, especially during Fashion Week, would run into me. And yet, wouldn’t you damn well know it, every time someone walked through that door—especially a man with facial hair—I felt my heart skip a beat.
You can lie to yourself as much as you want, but—
That morning’s workout was one of the best ones I’d had in recent memory. Though by no means was I a fitness buff, I liked to think that I kept myself in great shape. I was only helped whenever I had something nagging in the back of my mind, and today was no exception whatsoever. No exception whatsoever...most especially when that door swung open…
I closed my workout by doing sprints on the treadmill, something I only did when I wanted to exhaust myself to the point of being unable to think. More than a couple people peered over at me, and not because—or not just because—I was the only woman in the fitness room at that hour. They’d probably never seen someone burn themselves out so hard so early in the day.
When I was finished, I headed back upstairs, intending to shower and go get food, but I was so tired that I just fell straight to the bed. An hour passed. It was now half-past eight. I’d have time to shower and eat, but not if I did not pick up the pace. And what was the point of rushing myself this early when I had an entire day of feeling rushed ahead? Better to call in and place an order for room service.
Just like…
Everything’s going to be like this, isn’t it? Why don’t you get your shit together, Layla, and stop making everything about him?
I grabbed the phone, ordered a breakfast platter with eggs, sausage, and biscuits, and jumped in the shower. I gave up trying not to think of Pierre—at this point, I would gladly accept not bumping into him again as a win.
* * *
I walked out of my hotel half an hour before my first meeting, and I wasn’t sure that I had ever looked so intently at something as I had the front door of the hotel when I got off the elevator. I refused to look to the bar or the checkout area; I could excuse my wandering mind and eye while I worked out or ate breakfast, but as soon as I was “on” for work, I was on.
I put on some sunglasses and walked briskly and purposefully to the Saint James Paris, where I would meet the owner, an older man named James Berger. Though it was merely coincidence that he and the hotel shared the same name, James, in many ways, was typical of some of the older clients that I had. He was charming, he was rich, and he was doing everything in his power to try to seduce me. It was too bad for James that even before five years ago, I would not have mixed business with pleasure, since there would have been no pleasure in that.
But just because there was no romantic pleasure didn’t mean there couldn’t be mutual financial pleasure.
I walked into the front lobby, smiled politely at the front desk, and removed my sunglasses.
“I’m here to see the owner, James.”
“Ah, yes, and you are?”
“Layla Ferrari,” I said. “He will know who I am.”
“That, I most certainly do!”
I turned and gave a polite but professional smile to James. He looked like he had aged a decade or so since I had last seen him; his belly, already not exactly tiny, had grown, and he had added a beard that extended well below where I imagined his chin line to be.
“Come, have a seat with me, won’t you?” he said as he kissed me on the cheek.
Though customary, these kisses on the cheek always put me a little on edge. They made me feel as if it was a convenient excuse to “accidentally” brush up against my lips, like an awkward teenage boy using a hug as an excuse to touch a girl. But, like I said, if I could use it to increase sales at Ferrari Wines, I could not say I was too bothered by it.
“Of course, James,” I said. “How have sales been for you at the hotel?”
“Nothing short of majestic,” he said, taking me to a table roped off from the public, as if trying to put us on display. “Ferrari Wines is like the elixir of sales here. Whenever people come, it is the first thing they want to try.”
“Is that so?” I said, fully aware that he was trying to flatter me. Hey, it was all part of the game.
“Quite!” James said with a laugh, putting his hand on my arm. “You know how it is here. We get many guests who think they know wine, but when they are put in the confines of a place that actually offers great wine, they suddenly crumble and turn to our sommeliers. And I can say with full confidence that whenever that happens, we direct them to Ferrari Wines. Of course, you get the occasional customer who cannot believe Americans would make such good wines, but…”
“You tell them it comes from near Napa Valley and that it’s a family of Italians?” I said, arching a playful eyebrow.
“Indeed!”
“Well, good news for you, James, is that now, we’ve got three vintage wines that we’d like to introduce to the The Saint James,” I said.
“Ohh, we’re special!”
“That, you are,” I said with a grin, knowing full well that two more of these hotels would carry very similar wines. We tried not to have too much overlap with our specialty and vintage wines, but that didn’t mean there couldn’t be multiple versions of those wines.
“Well, madam, if this is something that you are truly offering, then perhaps you can share it with me over dinner tonight.”
And there it was—James’ usual attempt to try to get me to bite the bullet, to hang out with him after, and to eventually get romantic and seductive. Forget the fact that he was about forty pounds above my size, at least fifteen years older than my preference, and not enough of a fun guy. He was a client.
But clients had to pay us, and we all had to get our money somehow.
“I cannot tonight, but perhaps next time we meet, we can discuss in detail.”
“Hohoho, Miss Ferrari, you are ever most elusive, like a rat slicked in oil.”
I was not quite sure if that was a compliment. I knew of at least one person who would not so stumble over their words, but thinking about him…
“I’m a busy lady, sorry.”
“That, we all recognize,” James said, sounding very serious. “You always come in here knowing not just your wines, but the industry. Too often, we get new people in here pitching their product, failing to recognize how redundant and unnecessary it is. Those folk waste my time. But you, Layla Ferrari, you fulfill my time, not waste it.”
OK, that was a little better. But still.
I stood up and shook James' hand, then came the minimum distance needed to do the whole kiss on the cheek dance before departing. I headed over to two more hotels, but both of these hotels were run by women, making my job a hell of a lot less awkward. The less I had to flirt with men in Paris, the better.
Yes, of course, James was just professional. Yes, of course, James was not someone I flirted with. But...yes, of course, every time I did, the same questions, the same thoughts…
As I left the Saint James Paris, I checked my email. One caught my eye in particular. It was an invite from an old friend of mine from college, a woman who actually modeled. Her boyfriend had had to bail at the last second for an event tonight to a Fashion Week party—would I be interested?
Well, as my grandfather liked to say, was the Pope Catholic?
* * *
By the time I finished up with the third hotel, it was already past seven in the evening, and I had not eaten since that morning’s breakfast. I was feeling lightheaded, exhausted, and burned out; my feet felt like they had gotten back on that treadmill and sprinted to the point of burning everything off, and I had begun to question if I really wanted to go to the Fashion Week event.
; But this was how conferences worked, I reminded myself. I had to just go at a hundred miles per hour from start to finish, and when I got home, I could sleep until I woke up five months later. The legwork from today would not just get us three hospitality customers; it would give us three hubs from which many new customers could originate from. And that was just from today’s work.
Who knew what tonight would bring?
I got back to my hotel and trudged to the elevator, a sort of half shuffle. I pressed up, leaned against the wall, and half-closed my eyes. A ding sounded behind me, and I turned.
Three men stood in the elevator. Two exited. And the third…
No.
No!
It was Pierre.
It had to be.
I’d recognize that electric, seductive face anywhere.
The long jawline. The perfect-length black beard. The charming, inviting brown eyes. The tall, limber, elegant body. The scent…
And he just walked right by me.
His name got caught in my throat, the instinct to shout his name stunted by something within me. His walk suggested that he had not seen me or noticed me, but I knew full well that that was a load of bullshit. He knew I was there. He was not so tall and I was not so short that things could just be so easily overlooked. He had deliberately chosen not to engage me.
What a coward he was.
What a coward I was.
I couldn’t help but watch him as he left the hotel. And he was dressed so well, too. Was he going to the same party I was? What would I say if I saw him?
I gulped at the prospect. Five years of hatred had quite possibly culminated in tonight. If I got the chance to talk to him alone, I would cuss him out. I’d tell him what an ass he was. I’d tell him how I had a litany of trust, security, and happiness issues because of him.