Chapter 7
CHELSEA
Iwent out for flowers.
That was all. The vase on the windowsill had been empty long enough to become a statement I hadn't intended to make, and I'd been sitting in the dark in my coat for the better part of an hour. At some point, the sitting became intolerable and the flowers became a reason to move.
It was late. Later than the market stalls near the Madeleine, which had packed up hours ago.
Later than most things that sold flowers to women in Kensington, which was the version of this errand I was equipped for.
But I'd seen a small shop near the pont—the kind that kept buckets outside under an awning and didn't appear to close so much as gradually become less formal as the evening progressed.
It was twenty minutes' walk, which was twenty minutes of not sitting in the dark.
I changed my shoes. The boots that had introduced me to the blister were not invited. I switched to ballet flats, which were wrong for the weather but right for my heel.
The night was cool and clear and Paris was doing the thing it did after dark where it stopped feeling like a city and started feeling like a decision someone had made about beauty and then committed to completely.
Streetlamps pooling on damp cobblestone.
The Seine catching light in the middle distance.
A couple arguing on a corner with the passion of people who were either very much in love or finishing a relationship. In Paris, you genuinely couldn't tell.
The flower shop was still open. Barely. The woman inside was pulling buckets toward the door, but the anemones were there, purple and white in a galvanised bucket under the awning. I crouched to look at them with the relief of a person whose day had contained very few small victories.
I was reaching for a bunch when someone else reached for the same one.
Our hands arrived simultaneously. Mine, and a man's—large, tanned, a scar running faint and diagonal across the back of the knuckle of his index finger.
We both stopped.
I looked up.
He was tall—considerably taller than I'd registered in the fraction of a second before I registered everything else, which happened in the order that things, apparently, happened when you looked at someone like this.
First, the fact of him, then the details, then the belated instruction from some reasonable part of my brain to arrange my face into something neutral.
Sandy-blond hair, longer than it was short, the kind that looked deliberate without being fussed over.
Strong jaw, a few days of something that wasn't quite a beard.
Eyes that caught the light from the shop window and held it—darker than you'd expect from someone that fair, watchful in a way that wasn't unfriendly but wasn't entirely relaxed either.
Open shirt, dark jacket, the kind of effortless presentation that either cost nothing or cost a great deal and had been practiced until you couldn't tell which.
He looked at me. Then at our hands, still both hovering over the anemones.
"Go ahead," he said.
American. The accent landed cleanly, without the Hollywood broadness I'd been braced for—something more Eastern, more clipped, educated.
"They're the last good bunch," I said.
"I can see that."
"I've been planning these flowers since this morning."
Something shifted in his expression. Not quite a smile. "You planned flowers?"
"Emotionally planned," I said. "It's been a day."
He considered this with what appeared to be genuine attention—the look of someone who was actually listening rather than waiting for their turn to speak.
"Take them," he said, and withdrew his hand.
I took them. Straightened up. We were closer in height than I'd expected now that I was standing—he had several inches on me, but not in the way that made you feel small, in the way that made the air between two people feel proportionate. I didn't examine that thought.
"Thank you," I said.
"Sure."
I turned toward the shop door to pay, and he turned with me, because, apparently, he also had business inside, and we navigated the narrow doorway in the awkward proximity of two strangers who had just shared something minor and hadn't yet finished resolving it.
Inside, the woman behind the counter was counting the float from her till. She looked at us—at me with the flowers, at the man beside me—and said something in French I mostly caught: twelve euros for the bunch, and there was a small blue thing in the back if Monsieur wanted anything.
I put my hand in my coat pocket.
The pocket where I'd put my card that morning.
I checked the other pocket. The inside pocket. Looked down at my hands as though the card might materialise through concentration.
It didn't.
My card was in the bag I'd been carrying when I went to Dr. Devereaux's, which was the bag I'd set down when I came in and hadn't picked up when I left in a hurry, because I'd been focused on not crying in front of someone who was being paid to watch me cry.
Apparently, in that process, I had left the seventh arrondissement with my coat, my dignity at partial capacity, and no method of payment.
I had, in my coat pocket, a lip balm, a crumpled receipt from the bouquiniste, and four euros and some centimes.
Twelve euros for flowers.
The comedy of this was not lost on me.
"I don't—" I started, and then stopped, because there was no version of this sentence that didn't end in embarrassment.
I looked at the woman behind the counter.
"Je suis désolée. Je n'ai pas—" I gestured at my pocket in a way that was hopefully universal for the money situation has not resolved itself as expected.
The woman's expression moved from end-of-day impatience toward a sympathy that was more uncomfortable than the impatience had been.
"I've got it," said the man beside me.
"You don't have to—"
"Twelve euros." He'd already put the note on the counter, unhurried, the way people put money down when it doesn't require thought. Not a show—the opposite. The reflex of someone for whom twelve euros was genuinely not the variable in the equation.
I knew that reflex. I had that reflex. Or I'd had it, until a quai in Paris and a savings account calculation had suggested I should probably start treating it as a loan rather than an assumption.
"I'll pay you back," I said. "I live near here—I could get my card and—"
"It's twelve euros."
"It's the principle."
He looked at me with something that might, on closer inspection, have been amusement. "What principle?"
"I don't—" I stopped. Started again. "I don't like being in debt to strangers."
"Then, let me introduce myself." He held out his hand. "Remington. My friends call me Rem.”
A beat.
"Chelsea," I said, and shook it. His grip was steady—the handshake of someone who'd been taught it properly and had since stopped thinking about it.
"Now we're not strangers," he said. "And you owe me twelve euros."
The woman behind the counter had been watching this exchange with the expression of someone who'd seen everything and had a bus to catch. She handed me the flowers. I took them, and we both moved back out onto the street.
The night was still cool. The couple on the corner had resolved whatever they were resolving—or escalated it somewhere private. A taxi passed.
I should have said goodnight and walked. It was late, and I was tired in the bone-deep way of a day that had asked too much. I had flowers and a destination and no particular reason to stand on damp pavement in the ninth making conversation with an American who'd bought me anemones.
"There's a café," I said instead. "Around the corner. I've walked past it twice this week and not gone in."
He looked at me.
"I'll buy you a drink," I said. "Toward the twelve euros."
"With what?"
"I'll—" I looked at the flowers. "I'll leave these as collateral and go back for my card."
The corner of his mouth moved. Definite amusement this time, though it didn't become a full smile—stayed at the edge, like he was considering it.
"I'll buy the drinks," he said. "You've had a day."
The café was small and warm and had the slightly scuffed quality of a place that had been there long enough to stop trying to impress anyone, which was exactly what I needed.
We took a table near the window—his choice, I noticed, the seat with his back to the wall and a view of the door, which I filed away.
He ordered wine without looking at the list, which in London I would have read as affected and in Paris I was beginning to understand was simply a different relationship with confidence.
"So," he said. "What kind of day requires emotional flower planning?"
"The kind where you walk out of your therapist's office, kiss a stranger, and end up sitting alone in the dark."
A beat. He absorbed this without visible alarm, which I appreciated. Most men received that sentence in the order of its most dramatic elements—therapist, kiss, dark—and responded to the kiss. He didn't.
"In that order?" he said.
"More or less."
"The kissing didn't help?”
"The kissing was fine. That was the problem." I looked at my wine. "I'm not looking for fine."
He was quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of someone who didn't know what to say—the quiet of someone making a decision about what to say.
"Where are you from?" he asked.
"London. Kensington."
Something moved across his face—recognition, I thought. Not the place. What the place meant. "How long have you been in Paris?"
"A few weeks. You?"
"Just arrived. Second time this year."
"Do you live here?"
"No." He turned his glass. "I don't live anywhere, really."
I looked at him. Something in the way he'd said it was familiar in a way I couldn't immediately place. The way people spoke when they were editing rather than simply answering.
"What do you do?" I asked.