Chapter 7 #2
"Currently? Not much." He said it with the ease of someone comfortable with the answer, which was interesting. Most men uncomfortable with that answer oversold it—consulting, between projects, a few things in the works. He just let it sit.
"That sounds expensive," I said.
His eyes came up to mine. "Does it?”
"Doing nothing in Paris tends to be." I picked up my glass. "I'm discovering this, personally."
"What do you do?"
I opened my mouth to produce the usual answer—the gallery work, the cultural foundations, the film company with the architectural documentaries—and heard, preemptively, how it would sound. A résumé of interesting adjacencies with no actual job in it. "I'm figuring that out," I said instead.
Something in his expression shifted. A recognition that was different from before. He knew this one from the inside.
"That's also expensive," he said.
"Extraordinarily."
We sat with that for a moment. The café moved around us—a couple at the bar, a man eating alone with a book propped against the salt cellar, the waiter doing his rounds.
"I had a bill come through today," he said, unprompted. "From somewhere I'd stayed. Longer than I meant to."
"Expensive somewhere?"
"Very. The kind of place where you don't see the prices because the prices aren't the point."
I looked at him. "I know those places."
"Everyone should, once." He paused. "The problem is when they're the only places you know."
There it was—the thing I'd recognised and not been able to name.
The fluency with expensive things paired with the slight discomfort of someone who had recently started questioning whether fluency was the right word.
He carried it differently than I did—more settled, more worn-in, the posture of someone who'd been examining it longer—but the shape of it was the same.
"You grew up with money," I said. Not a question.
He looked at me steadily. "So, did you."
"Is it that obvious?"
"The coat," he said. "The way you handled not having your card—embarrassed, not panicked. People who've been short of money get panicked. You got embarrassed." He paused. "There's a difference."
I thought about the coin in my palm at the bouquiniste. The counting I hadn't chosen.
"I might be getting there," I said. "To panicked."
Something in his face—not pity, nothing so condescending as that. Interest, maybe. The interest of someone who recognised a version of a road they'd already been on.
"Uncle," I said. "Not parents. He raised me. He's—" I stopped. "He has opinions about what I'm doing with my life that have recently become financial in nature."
He was quiet.
"And you?" I said.
"Parents. One of them, anyway." He turned his glass again. "Old money. The kind that doesn't ask anything of you except to exist inside it, which turns out to be its own kind of trap."
"Because you can't prove anything."
He looked at me. "Because you can't prove anything," he agreed. "Every room you walk into, the money got there first."
I thought of Robert's circle. The dinners. The way the conversation always found its register and I found mine within it, the performance of ease so complete it had become indistinguishable from the real thing.
"So, what do you do?" I asked. "About the trap."
He considered the question with the seriousness it seemed to genuinely warrant for him. "I went somewhere it didn't follow."
"Did that work?"
A beat. Something complicated moved behind his eyes and was dealt with, quickly and privately, before it reached the surface.
"It worked for a while," he said.
Outside, Paris was doing its indifferent, beautiful thing—the streets wet and lit, the city running its own agenda, unhurried and unconcerned.
I looked at it through the window and thought that in the space of one drink I'd said more true things to this man than I'd managed in weeks of sessions with a professional I was paying to extract them.
"I'm supposed to be finding my purpose," I said. "That's why I'm here. Robert—my uncle—gave me a deadline. Find something real or he cuts me off at the end of the year." I picked up my wine. "I haven't told anyone that. In those words."
He didn't react with the sympathy I'd been braced for. He just nodded—once, slow—the way people nodded when something confirmed what they'd already understood.
"How much time do you have left?" he asked.
I thought about the four months. The coin. The wrong headache tablets. The pharmacy. All of it adding up to a picture I'd been composing all day without wanting to finish it.
"Not enough," I said. "To answer your question properly."
He held my gaze.
"Chelsea," he said.
"Rem."
"You're going to be all right."
It was such a simple thing to say. Not it'll work out or you'll figure it out—the placating versions, the ones that asked nothing and offered nothing. Just you're going to be all right, delivered with the even, unhurried certainty of someone who didn't say things they didn't mean.
I felt my throat tighten, which was the second time today my throat had done something without asking me. I was beginning to understand that it was going to keep doing that until I stopped holding everything at the distance I'd been holding it.
"You don't know that," I said.
"No," he agreed. "But you're sitting here telling the truth to a stranger over cheap wine because you ran out of other options." He leaned back slightly. "That's not someone who isn't going to be all right. That's someone who's getting started."
I looked at him.
He looked back, easy and unhurried, like he had nowhere to be and had decided this was the right place to not be there.
And I looked back, which was the problem.
I'd been looking at him since we’d met in the careful, managed way you looked at someone when you were aware you were looking—measured glances, the polite social register of noticing without acknowledging.
But something in what he'd just said had dropped my guard below the level where management was possible, and now I was simply looking.
He was extraordinarily attractive. I'd registered this at the flower shop and filed it under irrelevant, you're having a day, do not. But the filing system had, apparently, been compromised, because it was surfacing now with some insistence.
The jaw. The way the open collar of his shirt sat against his throat. The hands around his wine glass—those same hands that had reached for the anemones, the scar across the knuckle I'd noticed before I'd noticed anything else.
There was a quality to him that was different from the men I was used to—the polished London ones, the European ones with their practised ease.
He was more contained than ease, more deliberate than polish.
Like something that had been built rather than assembled.
Like a person who had been tested by things that didn't show on the surface and had come out the other side of them and kept going.
It landed in my body before it landed in my head, which was new. I was not that person. I was a person things landed in the head and were then passed down through several departments for review.
What I felt right now bypassed every department entirely.
Low and immediate and inconveniently honest—the warmth of wanting someone in a way that had nothing to do with thinking they'd be suitable and everything to do with the fact that he'd said you're going to be all right and meant it, and his hands were what they were.
Apparently, it had taken a bad day in Paris to remind me what it felt like to want something I hadn't pre-approved.
Dr. Devereaux would have had thoughts about this. I chose not to have them on her behalf.
"The wine isn't cheap," I said.
"No," he said. "It isn't."
We both knew that. We'd both known it from the first sip, the way you knew things when you'd grown up in rooms where the baseline was always higher than other people's rooms. The knowing was part of the problem and also, just occasionally, a kind of shorthand.
A shared language neither of us had asked for and neither of us, at this particular moment, was sorry to have.