The man stage-whispered as he gestured toward the auburn-haired woman. “My wife claims she is not romantic. She pretends she is just a practical Midwestern American woman like you. But she knows, too.”
The woman rolled her eyes, but she was smiling.
“Knows what?” Kelsey said, glancing at both of them.
“You’re in love.”
“No.” She snorted. “No. I’m just…” She felt her eyes drift. In love. She tried to shrug it off, but for some reason, all she could think of was Peter on-screen, strumming a chord. “I’m just seeing a friend.”
“You’ve got quite a smile on your face for someone who is just a friend.”
“Leave her alone, sweetheart,” the woman said.
“It will happen in Paris,” she heard the man saying to his wife. “She will have to kiss her friend in Paris, yes?” Kelsey closed her eyes, pretending not to hear.
“She’s trying to rest,” the woman said lightly. “Let her be.”
When Kelsey awoke, the couple was fast asleep. She will have to kiss her friend in Paris! She ran her finger over her mouth, and tried to picture Peter’s against it. It could happen, couldn’t it? They would probably be quite bad at it, considering they had never kissed before. Considering Peter was expecting someone who wasn’t her.
She wouldn’t let him, of course. She would pull him aside and do what she had set out to do. But as she put a movie on the in-flight screen to pass the time, Kelsey noticed, for some reason, she had goose bumps.
Kelsey wandered in a daze through customs at Charles de Gaulle, her mind still at rest, replaying snatches of dialogue from one of the movies she slept to as she crossed the Atlantic. You are, and always have been, my dream.
Soon she was rolling her suitcase through a linoleum tunnel, a new stamp on Michelle’s passport, to the smell of bleach and the buzz of overhead lights.
The tunnel opened into the international arrival gates, and Kelsey gasped. The giant, endless archway looked like the main hall of a castle, each groove composed of infinite windows, dropping fifty feet from ceiling to floor into miles of red carpet. Thousands of people pulling suitcases streamed backward and forward, passing shops she knew but now seemed different, as she caught French and Italian and German requests for Starbucks and sandwiches.
“Michelle!” she heard a man’s voice cry out, and Kelsey closed her eyes tight. This was Paris. There could be many Michelles here.
“Michelle!” she heard again, close, and she turned around.
Peter, taller than she remembered, jogged from the center of it all. He wore a tan army-issued T-shirt and fatigue pants. Before she could get out the calm, honest “hello” that she had practiced, he was hugging her so tight her feet left the ground, and he spun her around, her face in the clean scent of the crook of his shoulder, and then, without ceremony, he set her down and kissed her.
He tasted like salt and then nothing; there was only the feeling of his lips on hers. Kelsey couldn’t help but start to smile. When he let go, she was speechless, too aware of everything around her to say anything, let alone a rehearsed speech.
“It’s so good to see you,” Peter said, his blue eyes now hitting her harder than they ever could through a screen.
“You, too,” Kelsey replied.
“What is ‘welcome’ in French?” Peter asked her.
“It’s—” Kelsey started, breathless, pretending to fiddle with her suitcase as they walked. “Bienvenue,” she said, grateful that she had remembered the pilot’s words.
“Bienvenue,” he said.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Kelsey should have pulled away, but now it was too late. And she was in shock, listening to him talk about their plans for the evening as they strolled through the busy airport. She tried to remove the taste of him from her lips by licking them, but, of course, it just intensified.
Her body seemed to be vibrating with every beat of her heart.
Two more men in fatigues, canvas bags on their backs, greeted them at the entrance to the train into the city. She would have to break the news later, at the hotel. Now wasn’t the time.
“You found her, I see,” the shorter redhead said, and held out his hand. “Remember me?”
“Rooster?” Kelsey asked.
“Sam, if you don’t mind, ma’am,” he said, revealing freckles as he got closer.
“No, he likes Rooster better, trust me,” said his companion, a lanky, bespectacled guy with caramel-colored skin.
“I do not,” Sam said matter-of-factly.
The other guy rolled his eyes. “I’m Phil.”
“Hello, Phil,” Kelsey said, shaking hands all around.
She took a deep breath as they descended into the metro, and remembered what her parents had told her before she left for the airport, pleased that she was trying to move forward from her grief. Just try to have fun, they had said. They may have been mistaken about where she would be having fun, but Kelsey took it to heart, anyway. She had to.
She gave her biggest Midwestern smile to the severe-looking women in high heels and the old ladies with dark lipstick and the men with sculpted, curly hair who stared at the four Americans as they rode through the underbelly of the city.
She soaked in the yellowed brick and gilded block letters of each platform, just like in the movies, trying to identify the artwork on the rows of posters.
Even the advertisements are beautiful, she found herself telling Michelle in her mind.
That one is Edgar Degas, she thought, looking at the rough sketch of a woman stepping out of a tub on an ad for a museum called Musée d’Orsay. Next to it, women from a hundred years ago, lifting their dark skirts to reveal petticoats and calves. Next to that, the iconic tulle brushstrokes, her favorite of his before she even knew who he was: The Pink Dancers, Before the Ballet.
Peter leaned close to Kelsey, pointing at their stop on a map, and she could feel her skin getting hot under her sweater, from all the excitement, from the pressure of what she had to tell him, or maybe just from having him around, a pair of arms and eyes and boots to go with the face she had grown to know.
They emerged onto the Place de Clichy, at the edge of what Kelsey could only call a roundabout. Motorcycles, old-fashioned taxis, and tiny cars wound around a cement circle to their various branching roads and, in the center of it, a giant copper sculpture.
Even the traffic is influenced by art, she took note for her sister.
Their hotel was nearby.
Soon, everything might fall apart, and Kelsey dreaded it. Especially here. It shouldn’t happen here, where it was midday, the sun at the highest point in the sky, bouncing off red awnings and wet stones and linen on tables, beneath the twisting streetlamps, and windows that opened onto narrow streets lined by balconies.…
“Coming?” Peter called to her from ahead, holding out his hand.
She nodded and followed the group down one avenue, then another, then back the other way for a wrong turn, and finally to a building marked only by the number painted above the doorway.
“Okay,” Peter said, glancing at the directions he had printed out. “40 Rue Nollet.”
He rang the bell.
Inside, they found a steep wooden staircase and a wizened caretaker, whose tiny frame disappeared into her apron.
“C’est ici,” she said after four flights, pointing to a thick white wooden door.
She led them inside to find two large beds, and a window from ceiling to floor, opening to a small iron balcony.