French Kiss, page 21
As I stood outside, looking up at the imposing facades, my heart started beating faster, thinking about the night before and worrying that I wouldn’t have the right words to say to Josh.
Maybe coming to track him down had been a mistake.
Or maybe it was my only option.
30
George V
July 13
Another Part of the Right Bank
More than a dozen motorbikes sat parked on the sidewalk in front of La Maison du Chocolat, and traffic backed up in the street, waiting for the light to turn green. An older couple, bundled in coats that looked too warm for summer, exited the chocolate shop and called their goodbyes to the owner. The man paused at the open door to let the woman, maybe his wife, walk through. She gripped his elbow with one hand and bent her other arm under the weight of her paper bag of chocolates. Pedestrians passed me by going both directions, and when the light turned green, the cars and bikes zipped by with purpose.
Everyone had someplace to go.
I’d been following the series of streets leading toward Josh’s location, checking every ten minutes or so to make sure I was on the right street and getting closer. I glanced down again to estimate where to go. Even if I could isolate the building he was in, I wasn’t sure how I would get inside.
That turned out to be irrelevant because the dot on the map had moved and was now on a different street a few blocks away. Since the time since I’d last looked, Josh seemed to have started walking, which meant I had to chase a moving object. I turned down a small street, passing some hotels and more shops and trying to gain on the tiny dot moving on the map on my phone. Nothing in that area looked familiar, and I started to jog, ignoring what I was certain were strange looks from the pedestrians I wove around, trying to gain on Josh and seeing the dot turn down Avenue George V. I followed.
I couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes behind him when I looked at my phone and saw that the dot had stopped moving right near where I stood. I couldn’t see Josh in any direction, but his location seemed to be squarely in the Hotel George V, which I knew cost thousands of dollars a night.
What the hell?
Maybe he was asking for directions. I stopped in front and looked up at the enormous circle of glass over the doors, with sweeping gold filigree leaves and black iron swirls and the hotel’s name in large gold letters.
I was intimidated even standing outside.
A well-dressed doorman opened the door, looking me over. “Mademoiselle, are you a guest of the hotel?” I immediately felt tongue-tied. Of course, people came to the hotel all the time to gawk, and he probably wouldn’t let me past the threshold.
“Um, I’m meeting a friend. A guest.” This wasn’t true, but I had to get past the entrance, or I’d never track down Josh.
“Oui, you can ask for your friend at the desk,” he said, pointing me through the well-appointed lobby to an equally grand reception area.
The first thing that struck me when I moved inside was the display of flowers. I’d never seen anything like the tall glass vases of long-stemmed purple lilacs, hydrangeas, and white lilies. The collection of giant vases was displayed on the marble floor on pedestals and reflected in mirrors, creating the impression of thousands of purple and white blooms ringing the lobby.
And there, a few feet past them, was Josh.
My brain was busy trying to square this opulent location with the hoodie and jeans friend of mine when I saw the incongruous image of him waiting for the gilded elevator. He looked as comfortable and casual as if he did it every day. I felt a moment of intimidation and fear. Maybe he’d met someone and was headed up to her room.
What am I doing here? Do I know the right thing to say to him?
I was tempted to bolt. It had been a mistake to chase him down at one of the most famous hotels in Paris. Fortunately, my body went on autopilot and solved everything for me. “Josh,” I called out.
He turned, confused at first, probably assuming the shout was intended for someone else. But then his eyes landed on me. Still baffled, he took a few steps closer.
A part of me wanted to turn and run away, but an equal part wanted to run and jump into his arms. I had so many questions and so much to say. “I owe you an apology,” was all I could manage when he got close enough to hear me.
“You do?” His voice was quiet. And sounded a little confused.
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?”
“I know Maddox didn’t write that letter.”
The look on Josh’s face confirmed my suspicions. He nodded. “And I owe you a bigger apology.”
“Not bigger,” I said. “But I accept it.”
I didn’t know why I’d been so worried about what I’d say to him. This was Josh. I could tell him anything. Still, I didn’t know how to get us from an awkward meeting in the lobby of a too-fancy hotel to where we’d been headed the night before.
Maybe that was too much ground to cover in a conversation. Maybe the apology was enough for the moment.
“D’you wanna go somewhere and talk?” he asked.
I nodded, looking around the lobby to see if the doorman or some other hotel employee was hovering, wanting to kick us out for being impostors. Then I remembered that Josh had been standing by the elevators just a few minutes earlier, and I felt foolish. “Wait, are you visiting someone here? Do you have somewhere to be?”
“Come,” was all he said, leading me toward the bank of elevators. I hesitated, not in the mood to see his parents or whoever was upstairs.
“I’m not dressed for here… maybe we should just get coffee down the street…”
“Just come. You’re dressed fine.”
We rode the elevator to the twelfth floor and walked down the hallway. I was surprised when Josh took out a key and opened the door to one of the rooms. “Whose room is this?” I asked, knowing it didn’t belong to Josh, the guy whose budget dictated that he eat ramen noodles twice a week in order to have cash to go out on the weekends. “Did you meet a French sugar mama?”
“It’s my room,” he said, taking a seat on a pale-blue-upholstered bench at the end of the bed, which had a cream-colored comforter and a few dozen overstuffed cream and pale-blue pillows. His words made no sense. It couldn’t be his room.
“I thought you were staying at your parents’ friends’ place.”
“That’s this. My parents are close friends with the general manager of the hotel. So when I asked for a recommendation on where to stay in Paris, he insisted on giving me a room here.”
I thought back to my much smaller room at the Hôtel de Seine and wondered if it made Josh more comfortable to stay in a place like that. Neither one of us had a Four Seasons kind of life.
But I had to admit the room was gorgeous.
The floor-to-ceiling windows, flanked by long cream drapes under a sweeping sash, were unlocked and opened to a balcony with a sweeping view of Paris rooftops and the Eiffel Tower in the near distance.
I walked over and looked out, wondering if Josh had stared at the Eiffel Tower the way I had and thought about our two days together. I wondered if he had regrets. Then I was aware of Josh’s presence behind me. I still didn’t know what I wanted to say to him. But he made it easier, reaching for my hand and turning me toward him.
When I looked at his face, I wanted to kiss him. I felt the magnetic energy between us, and my body threatened to take the matter out of my hands. For the moment, though, my brain was still in control.
“In the three years I’ve known you, there have only been two things that I knew for sure,” he said. “One, I want to be your friend forever. And two… I’m completely in love with you. What I don’t know… is if I’ve ruined both.”
With my hand in his, I felt the electricity of his touch. My heart was doing backflips, but I didn’t understand why he looked so sad. “Of course you didn’t. Why would you think that?”
“I said you could trust me. And I never meant to betray that.”
“It’s not your fault. I know you were trying to protect me. I get it.”
Josh took my face in both hands and kissed me gently on the lips, which melted me into a puddle and pulled me in deeper, to a place I couldn’t imagine. More heat coursed through me until I felt his kiss grow more urgent and my whole body responded. All thoughts or doubts left my mind.
Then Josh pulled away, looking concerned. He sat in the chair near the bed and I couldn’t help thinking he looked very natural in the opulent setting.
“I don’t like that look. You should look happy,” I said.
“I am happy. But we should talk.” Through the open balcony door, a faint breeze blew in as I stood there feeling the distance between is. “I need you to understand why I did what I did,” Josh said.
“You did it to protect me. I get it,” I started to say, but he shook his head.
“I wrote that letter partly because I felt like you deserved more than a text or whatever Maddox planned to do to say he was bailing.”
“I appreciate that. He did end up calling.”
“Big of him,” Josh said. “But what I said in the letter, that was mostly my own feelings about you. And they’re still true.”
I thought about what the letter had said about worrying that the reality wouldn’t measure up to the idea of us together. “But we’re past that. The reality does measure up… doesn’t it?”
“It’s not that. I saw the look on your face when you thought Maddox wrote that stuff to you. And that’s not the way you look at me. I mean, hey, I’m not sorry we got together. I never will be, and for the rest of my time on earth, I’ll remember those two nights. They were the best nights of my life.”
He was talking about us as though it was part of the past, like he’d already accepted that we’d never move beyond those two days together.
“Why are you saying it like that, like it’s over?”
“Because I think it is.”
“I was surprised when I read the letter. And confused. But I don’t want to be with Maddox, let’s be clear on that. I want to be with you.”
He smiled and closed his eyes. “I just…” He shook his head.
“Please. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“We’re in a romantic city, we drank a ton of wine, we got swept up in all of it. We’re still swept up in it,” he said, pointing to the balcony and the perfect view of the Eiffel Tower.
He was right, of course. The city was amazing and it had played a part in getting us together. But beyond that, we had to take a gamble on doing it ourselves.
“I don’t know what to say to convince you,” I said. “But it feels real to me.”
Josh reached out and put a hand on mine. “It feels real to me too. I guess I’ve done a pretty good job over the years of convincing myself we could never be together.”
“Please stop doing that,” I said.
He ran a hand through his hair and leaned forward on his knees. I couldn’t see his expression, but I knew him well enough to understand that we might be done. He’d given things a lot of thought and he didn’t make decisions lightly. Our two days together might be all we’d ever have.
I also knew I had to try to change his mind. Because he was wrong.
“Josh, please hear what I’m saying because I’m only going to say it once. I don’t know what the hell was wrong with me for the past three years in not seeing everything I see in you today, but maybe us being friends for so long is the reason I feel the way I do about you now. And it’s not a two day feeling. It’s a forever feeling. I only want you. I love you. I am one thousand percent, head over heels in love with you.” Then, just in case he didn’t get it yet, I added, “I’d even eat another snail for you.”
He looked at me but he didn’t speak. His expression was still serious as he pushed himself out of the wingback chair and walked over to where I stood. Then he hugged me. No wild, soul-stirring, passionate kiss. Just a hug. Like a friend.
“You’re really only going to say that once?” he asked, his lips curling into a smile. “Because it was pretty magnificent. I mean, I’ve dreamed of stuff like that and even then it didn’t hold a candle to what you just said. So I’d really like to hear it again.” He planted a soft kiss on my lips. And I knew we were going to be okay.
So I humored him. “I’ll say the important part. I love you.”
Because it was that simple.
31
The Key
July 13
Hôtel George V
The pristine bed with the perfect pillow shams and creaseless down duvet didn’t stand a chance after I’d professed my feelings to Josh and spent the next two hours showing him exactly how much I loved him.
Later, Josh called room service, and we sat on the balcony of his room in plush bathrobes, sipping Perrier and eating mussels and french fries. Though really, I stuck to the fries and he ate the mussels. I still wasn’t that European.
Looking out over the city, I felt a sense of peace that I hadn’t experienced in years. Of all the people to feel comfortable following an uncertain road with, Josh was it. We could make mistakes, and I knew we’d be able to find our way out of them again. That was what three years had given us.
I remembered what Heidi had said about needing to have some area of her life where she could rebel. All the rest was planned, so she looked for small ways to make things less predictable. Maybe I could look at love that way. Maybe I could let it be untamed and a little scary.
“So… does this mean you’ll stick around Paris a little longer?” I asked.
He laughed. “Is that what those wheels in your head have just been working out? I’ll stay as long as you want. I have no plans for the next two weeks.”
“And the hotel room?”
“I have it as long as I want. As long as we want.”
“What about my little cute Hôtel de Seine?” I asked.
“Or we can stay there. It’s perfect. We don’t need a fancy place.”
“But I do like this bed and these linens,” I said, eyeing what had felt like about a million thread count.
“We don’t have to decide where to stay right now.”
“I do want to decide one thing. I want to know it’s you. Forever. With me. I don’t want to second-guess anything or worry about anything.”
He was looking at me like maybe I’d gone round the bend. Or maybe he was just giving me time to finish.
“Oh my God, you are such a planner,” he said, laughing. “And you don’t need to worry. I love you too. I think I’ve been in love with you since the day you showed up early to be on time. I just never thought it could happen, so it seemed like I needed to be honest with myself and give up.”
“Thank you for not giving up on me,” I said. “And thank you for coming to meet me under the Eiffel Tower.”
“Seriously, why under the tower?” he asked and we cracked up.
It was destined to be an inside joke for a long time.
Later in the afternoon, we got dressed and took a walk. Josh kept insisting that there was something I just had to see. We planned to meet up with Shelby and Amrita, but he promised our stop on the way wouldn’t make us late. Of course I asked him where we were going.
“Not telling. You’ll see.”
“You’re just protecting yourself in case you can’t find it.”
“You’re just trying to manipulate me into telling you, and I’m not going to do it.”
A few blocks later, I asked again.
It wasn’t that I felt nervous or that I thought he was taking me someplace I wouldn’t want to go. I just wanted to know. I always wanted to know.
That was why I’d chosen a career in medicine. There was something reassuring about the human body and its functions. There were so many puzzles that were already solved, and so many of the questions could be answered by looking at what was right in front of me. I could study, I could learn, I could follow a path, and I could succeed. I liked those kinds of odds. But somewhere along the way, I’d started applying that kind of reasoning to every aspect of my life. And I was just beginning to realize that I was shortchanging myself out of the best parts.
I was so busy looking for guarantees in the real world and imagining fantasies in the safety of my mind that I never thought the two could meet. Until I took a gamble on Maddox and tried, for first time, to meld my fantasy with the real world. That had blown up in my face.
But maybe it had landed me exactly where I was supposed to be: walking through the streets of Paris with the better guy, the one I never had to worry would break my heart.
Maybe Maddox, in his dumb way, had done me a solid by putting together this magical concept of two people meeting in Paris under the Eiffel Tower. On the ground, where they could see the road in front of them. I wasn’t about to give him credit for knowing how it would work out, but maybe I could give myself credit. I’d gone after the fantasy.
And I’d gotten exactly what I wanted, even if I hadn’t known exactly what that was when I began.
After about ten minutes of walking, Josh and I had arrived at the water. The calm blue made me feel peaceful, the same way I felt in San Francisco when I caught views of the bay. I didn’t know much about astrology or whether I was born under a water sign or anything else that didn’t qualify as hard science. But there was something about the water.
“We could just stand here,” I said. “I’d be happy.”
Josh wasn’t satisfied to gaze out over the water. “We’re not there yet.”
