9 Days and 9 Nights

by Katie Cotugno

  I shrug, lifting my chin up at him. “That’s because you didn’t know me then.”

  Ian gazes back at me for a moment, and then he nods. “No,” he says slowly. “I guess I didn’t.”

  We’re done with lunch now; Ian feeds the last of the strawberries to a mangy French squirrel, and we crumple up our garbage and toss it into the trash. “Thanks for telling me all that,” he says, wrapping his arms around me and bumping his forehead against mine. “I know it couldn’t have been, you know. A picnic.”

  That makes me smile. “I mean, you told me about Alyssa from the dance team,” I point out, tilting my head back and stamping a kiss against his mouth. “It felt like maybe I owed you one.”

  “You know, I kind of like this whole emotional honesty thing,” he continues as we head for the Metro; there’s a famous English-language bookstore he wants to take me to, full of rare first editions. “It’s kind of sexy.”

  “Oh, that’s what you’re into, huh?” I ask with a laugh.

  “I mean, maybe,” Ian says thoughtfully. “What else you got?”

  I consider that for a moment. “I’m really glad it’s just you and me today,” I confess, lacing our fingers together and squeezing. “It feels like I’ve been waiting a really long time to be alone with you.”

  Ian looks down at our interlocked hands, then back up at me, and smiles. “How about that,” he replies. “Me too.”

  We spend the rest of the afternoon like that, strolling hand in hand through the busy streets of Paris, browsing shops and munching macarons and telling each other stories. I feel closer to him than I have since we got here, find myself talking about things I haven’t thought of in years: sitting next to Imogen on the dock beside the lake weaving key chains out of lanyards, the cacti that grew outside the window of my dorm room back in Tempe. Ian, for his part, tells me about learning to behave himself in fancy restaurants when he was a kid and about the parade of weird nannies they never managed to keep on account of his little sister being a holy terror.

  “My mom’s an environmental consultant for big banks, so she traveled a lot,” he explains over a midafternoon snack of crepes purchased from a tiny street cart, butter and sugar dripping down the back of my hand. “We lived in Germany for six months when I was a baby. She was in Stockholm for a lot of the year when I was in middle school. One year we did Christmas in Kyoto.”

  I nod. I knew this, I guess, or pieces of it. But until now he always talked about it in a different tone of voice, in between stories about family trips to the Hoover Dam and his dad mowing the lawn in a pair of short shorts and all of them getting into a fight while playing Settlers of Catan on Thanksgiving. Normal, slightly dorky stuff—that fit, I realize now, into the normal, slightly dorky narrative I’d created around Ian in my head. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that we see what we’re expecting to see when we look at other people.

  “It was always really important to them that we knew not everybody was this lucky, though,” he says, offering me a bite of his crepe. “My parents, I mean. Like, not letting money make you a monster was always a really big thing for them.”

  “Well, they succeeded,” I say, reaching up and wiping hazelnut spread off the corner of his mouth. “You are emphatically not a monster.”

  Ian laughs. “Aw, sweetheart, that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” he teases. I drag him down for a kiss in reply.

  Ian says there’s one more place he wants to show me after dinner, taking my hand as we amble through a quiet, leafy neighborhood not too far from his parents’ house. Cozy yellow lamplight spills from tall apartment windows. A young woman walks a slouchy, grumbly dog. Ian leads me down a winding lane that reminds me of Beacon Hill back in Boston, the two of us bumping across the uneven cobblestones. The sky has turned a soft, lovely navy, like you could reach up and wrap it around you like a shawl.

  “Okay, are you taking me somewhere to murder me or what?” I joke as we peel off down a narrow, shoddily paved alley butted up against the backs of the grander buildings one block over; these must have been servants’ entrances, once upon a time. “Is this about the app?”

  Ian grins. “We’re almost there,” he promises. “You’ll see.”

  He’s as good as his word: a moment later he stops in front of a wrought-iron gate about halfway down the alley, reaching up and pulling open the thick, rust-pocked latch. He lays a gentle palm at the small of my back as he pushes it open, ushering me into a tiny courtyard surrounded by moss-covered walls on three sides and canopied by sinuous, winding grapevines. A massive fountain burbles quietly away in one far corner, a tall, elegant goddess holding court in the center. A waterfall of long marble hair ripples down her back.

  “Holy crap,” I blurt, looking around in astonished wonder. “Ian. This is incredible.”

  “Yeah?” Ian asks, following me deeper into the courtyard. He’s standing behind me, but I can hear the hopefulness in his voice. “Better than the Eiffel Tower?”

  “I mean, yes,” I admit, a little embarrassed by my own dopiness. “It’s better than the Eiffel Tower.” I take a few steps closer to the fountain, drawn both by the welcoming gurgle of the water and the statue’s warm, intelligent expression.

  “It’s Aphrodite,” Ian tells me.

  That makes me smile. “Goddess of love?”

  He makes a face. “Too on the nose?”

  “Not in a bad way.” I turn in a slow circle, taking in the herringbone brick and the flowering shrubs, the recessed lights glowing softly in the basin of the fountain. “This place is public?” I ask in disbelief.

  “It’s technically a city park, yeah.” Ian nods, settling himself on a wooden bench beside the fountain and stretching his long legs out in front of him. “My dad proposed to my mom here a million years ago,” he explains, wincing a little bit as he says it, like maybe he’s not sure if I’m going to rich-shame him again for having parents who do things like get engaged in France. “So when we used to come as a family they always liked to bring us by and check on it.”

  “I see why they love it so much,” I tell him. “It’s romantic as all hell.”

  Ian grins at me. “That was kind of the idea, yeah.”

  I gaze at Aphrodite for another long moment. There’s something about her that calls me closer: the cool, clean smoothness of the marble, the honesty and self-possession on her face. I look from Ian to the fountain, back to Ian again. “I kind of want to get in,” I hear myself confess.

  Ian laughs; then, looking at me in surprise: “Wait, really?”

  I shrug, suddenly bashful. “I mean, a little bit.” I was joking, truthfully, but as soon as it’s out of my mouth I realize how badly I actually want to do it. My feet are aching from all the walking we’ve been doing; my hands and arms feel gritty from the dirty city air. More than that, though, I keep thinking of what Gabe said the other day: you’re always up for an adventure. That fountain—that goddess—is calling, and I want to go. “Why not?”

  “Well, because I don’t want you to get arrested and wind up in a French prison like Jean Valjean, to start with,” he points out.

  “Do you see any cops?” I ask, gesturing around the deserted courtyard as I slip out of my sandals, wiggling my blistery toes: no matter how hard I tried to break them in, these shoes never got any comfier. “They’re probably all busy looking for our lost luggage.”

  Ian considers that. He still looks a little nervous—but not, I note with a warm lick of pleasure, entirely put off. In fact he’s watching me with interest, head tilted just slightly to one side and a half smile playing across his mouth. Maybe I’ve been underestimating him, all these months that I’ve been so quiet and demure and receding. Maybe he could love the person I really am after all.

  “Come on,” I tell him now, leaning down and bracing my hands on his shoulders, planting a kiss on his curious mouth before I turn and head for Aphrodite. “It’s a kuddelmuddel!”

  Ian laughs then, the sound of it warm and r
umbling. “I guess you’re right,” he agrees—or at least, I think that’s what he’s saying. I can barely hear him over the sound of my own splash as I jump in.

  It’s full dark by the time we get back to Saint-Cloud that night. The house is quiet save the low hum of the refrigerator, the door to Gabe and Sadie’s room shut tight. I wonder what they did today, if they fought, if Gabe was happy to be rid of me. Then I remind myself I don’t actually care.

  Upstairs in Ian’s parents’ giant bathroom I spend an extra-long time brushing my teeth and washing my face, anticipation blooming like a climbing vine inside me. Last night I was so exhausted and brattily cranky that I collapsed into bed as soon as we got back from dinner, mumbling a good-night into the pillow when Ian came upstairs a little while later. But now . . .

  By the time I make it into the master bedroom my heart is thumping expectantly, my whole body warm and alert. Ian is lying on the bed watching French television, one sturdy arm propped behind his head. “Hey,” he says sleepily, his voice the tiniest bit slurred. We split a bottle of wine at a café on the way back from the Metro, though I think he actually drank a lot more of it than me.

  “Hey,” I say, barely resisting the urge to explode into hysterical giggles. Ugh, why am I so nervous all of a sudden? I stand awkwardly at the end of the bed, watching as two Parisians argue on a street corner on-screen, all wild gesticulations and the angry red slash of the actress’s lipstick. “So you understand all of this, huh?” I ask.

  Ian smiles at me a little crookedly, like he knows I’m making small talk to cover my own anxiousness but finds it charming. “Yeah,” he says, nodding, and turns off the TV.

  I take a breath. There’s nobody to interrupt us now—no alarms going off or friends knocking on the door or marching bands playing “The Entertainer” parading through the room. It’s just the two of us, Ian and me.

  “Molly,” he says quietly. “Come here.”

  He reaches for me as I climb under the covers; his mouth is warm and eager and wet. I scratch my fingernails through the hair at the nape of his neck, running the bottom of my foot along the back of his calf and trying to relax. After all, it’s not like I’m ever going to find a more romantic venue: the moonlight makes patterns on the plush Oriental carpet. The duvet is cumulus-fluffy and soft. If ever there was a perfect moment to have sex with your boyfriend for the first time—if all my hesitation really has been about waiting for one—alone in his parents’ French vacation house is probably about as ideal as a reasonable person could hope to get.

  Still, as we lie there with our limbs tangled together I’m surprised to find myself wishing for the grungy comfort of Imogen’s cottage. I find myself wishing for my mom’s place back in Star Lake. The muscles in my shoulders are balled tight as socks underneath my skin, my fight-or-flight instincts all humming; when Ian reaches for the drawstring on my pajama bottoms, I freeze.

  I take a steadying breath and kiss him harder, knowing even as I do it that I’m overcompensating, that it feels fake and forced and strange. God, what is my malfunction tonight? It’s Ian. I love him. We had an amazing day together. Our whole trip has been leading up to this moment—in a lot of ways, our whole relationship has.

  In theory the reason is obvious, of course, and for a moment I imagine just sitting up and blurting the whole truth, or at least more of it than I let slip this afternoon: that I got pregnant last year and had an abortion, that I’m gun-shy and terrified to make any more mistakes. But something stops me. Even in my head, that explanation feels like a cop-out: what I’m feeling isn’t as simple as worrying I’ll get pregnant again. It’s not as straightforward as shame or regret for the choices I made. I might not be entirely sure what’s going on here, but I know it’s broader and deeper and messier than that.

  I remember how much I wanted Gabe the other night in the alley outside the bar in Kerry, the force and ferocity of it. I remember how I could feel it in my teeth. I think again of what Imogen said, about perfection not mattering if you’re with the right person, and cringe. There’s nothing wrong with Ian, I think, even as he’s trailing a neat row of kisses along my stomach. But no matter how much time I’ve spent the last few days trying to convince myself otherwise, I know something about this isn’t right.

  “Wait,” I say, sitting up finally, my feet sliding against the starchy sheets as I push him gently away. “Hang on a sec, I just—”

  “Hm?” Ian’s voice is a tiny bit slow, distraction, or maybe he’s drunker than I thought. He goes for my waistband again, smiling a little like he thinks we’re playing a game.

  I shake my head. “Easy.” Then, more forcefully, wrapping my hand around his wrist: “Hey.”

  Ian’s smile falls. “What?” he asks.

  “Just hold up a minute, okay?” I take a deep breath. “I just—I don’t—” I break off. “I don’t know if tonight should be the night.”

  “Oh.” Ian sits up, scratching at the back of his neck. He exhales, something that might be a normal breath and might be a sigh. “All right.”

  I wince. “Don’t be mad, okay?”

  “No, I’m not mad. But, like—this trip is almost over, you know?”

  I blink. “Meaning what, exactly?”

  Ian shrugs; his T-shirt is in a puddle at the foot of the mattress, and he makes a fist in it with one hand. “Meaning we’ve been together a long time, we’re exclusive, we’re in France—”

  “Wait a second.” I sit bolt upright. “Did you bring me to Europe specifically to have sex with me?”

  “No!” Ian says, sounding honestly offended. “Of course not. But—”

  “Because I don’t actually owe it to you to have sex with you,” I inform him, swinging both legs off the mattress and standing up. “You know that, right? We could date for twenty years, we could be married, and I do not have to have sex with you if I don’t want to.”

  “Of course I know that,” Ian says, shaking his head like I’m being dramatic. “Come on, Molly, don’t make it like that.”

  “Don’t make it like what?”

  “Like I’m a fucking sex predator!” he all but shouts. He’s never sworn at me in anger before, not once in all the time we’ve been together; I flinch, glancing instinctively at the closed door. The last thing I want is for Gabe and Sadie to overhear us. Ian takes a breath. “You’re my girlfriend,” he continues, lowering his voice with what seems like some effort. “It doesn’t make me a creep to want to have sex with you.”

  “I’m not saying you’re a creep,” I protest. “I’m saying it’s not cool to put pressure on me when—”

  “I’m not putting pressure on you!”

  “Then what do you call this?” This time, I’m the one who’s yelling; Ian looks startled, then slightly cowed.

  “It’s not some gross, cheap thing,” he says after a moment, raking a hand through his beard roughly enough to yank it right off his face. “I want to be close to you. I want to know you. And yeah, sex is a part of that for me.” He looks at me for a moment. “Really, in all honesty. Do you even l—”

  “Don’t you dare,” I interrupt him, holding up a hand. “Don’t you dare ask if I even love you.” I’m furious; I’m actually outraged. But I’m also worried that he’s right. After all, at what point do I need to admit out loud that this isn’t about waiting for some hypothetical perfect moment? At what point do I need to admit that this is just about . . . me?

  “Look,” Ian says, sounding so calm and logical it makes me want to fling myself on the floor and throw a tantrum, “we’re both tired. The last couple of days have been wild. And you haven’t really been yourself all week.”

  That surprises me. “What do you mean, I haven’t been myself?”

  Ian shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says, looking uncomfortable. “It’s just been little things, you know? Like a vibe I’ve been getting. But ever since London you’ve just seemed kind of . . . off.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lie. The truth is
I know exactly what he’s talking about; what I don’t know is how to explain to him that those so-called little things—jumping out of an airplane, wearing a bright-red dress, sticking up for Sabrina Hudson even if it was weird and awkward—were the closest I’ve felt to myself in a year.

  Neither one of us says anything for a moment. I stare miserably down at my hands. Earlier today I thought there was a chance Ian could be into the real me, that it was just a matter of being brave enough to introduce him to her. But suddenly I’m not so sure.

  “Okay,” I tell him finally; it feels like all of the energy has been drained out of me, like someone’s pulled a plug somewhere. “I’m calling it.”

  Ian startles. “Calling what?” he asks, alarmed.

  “This fight,” I amend quickly. “I’m calling this fight.” I tuck my hair behind my ears, trying to figure out how to fix this. “Look,” I say finally, sitting down on the very edge of the mattress. “Can we just . . . lie here and not talk about any of this for a while? And can we just agree that that’s all it’s going to be?”

  Ian looks at me warily. After a long moment he nods.

  I can’t sleep at all that night, lying awake in the darkness listening to Ian’s deep, even breathing. Finally I slip out from under the covers, careful not to disturb him, and pad as quietly as I can down the narrow, creaking stairs. I’m going to get a drink of water, maybe sit with my feet in the cool blue pool for a while, but when I turn the corner into the kitchen there’s Gabe sitting on the counter, beer in one hand and his phone in the other.

  “Jesus Christ,” I swear, holding both my hands up. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  Gabe shrugs. “Sorry,” he says, in a voice like he’s not, really. “Couldn’t sleep.”

  “Yeah,” I say, exhaling, my heart still chattering nervously away. “Me either.”

  We stay where we are for a moment, looking at each other. I can feel my pulse ticking in my neck. I know I should go back upstairs—the only thing that could turn this night into more of a disaster would be another brawl with Gabe—but sleep seems more foreign and unfamiliar than any country we’ve been to so far. “You hungry?” I hear myself ask.