Chapter 9
CHELSEA
Iwoke up thinking about his hands.
Not immediately—there was a breath of ordinary morning first, the grey Paris light coming through the curtains, the distant sound of the street below finding its rhythm.
And then, before I'd fully decided to be conscious, the hands.
The scar across the knuckle. The way he'd put the note on the counter without looking at it, without ceremony, the way you did things when they cost you nothing and you'd stopped pretending otherwise.
I lay there and let it happen, which was new.
I was not someone who lingered in the half-awake space with thoughts about men.
I was someone who got up and made tea and imposed structure on the morning before the morning could impose anything on me.
But the structure wasn't coming today and the hands were still there, and underneath them—gradually, the way light came up rather than switched on—the rest of him.
The jaw. The open collar. The eyes that were darker than they had any right to be on someone that fair, and the way they'd moved across my face when I'd said I'm not looking for fine. With attention. Someone listening because they were interested, not because they were waiting.
I sat up. Reached for my phone.
His number was still in my coat pocket on the receipt. I hadn't put it in my phone last night. I'd come home, put the anemones in the vase, and then I'd sat on the sofa in the dark for a while not thinking, which had been the most successful not-thinking I'd managed in weeks.
I'd gone to bed without adding his number.
This had been a decision, though I hadn't acknowledged it as one at the time.
I acknowledged it now, sitting on the edge of the bed in the grey light, and what I acknowledged was this: I hadn't added the number because adding the number made it real in a way I wasn't ready for after the day I'd had.
And I'd left it on the receipt because I wanted to make the decision in the morning, when I was sober and rested and the usual machinery was running.
The machinery was running. The decision was the same.
I got up, retrieved the coat, unfolded the receipt.
The handwriting was good.
Then I put it in my phone and set the phone face down on the kitchen counter and put the kettle on, because some things required tea first.
I called Dr. Devereaux's office at half nine. She had a cancellation at eleven. I said I'd take it. She said she'd see me then and rang off, and I stood in the kitchen holding my phone and feeling, obscurely, that she had known I would call before I had.
The seventh arrondissement looked different in morning light.
Less the Paris of evening and more the Paris of people who lived here.
A man hosing down the pavement outside a brasserie.
A woman in a good coat walking a small dog with the brisk authority of someone who had a full schedule and the dog had better keep up.
The smell of bread from somewhere I couldn't see.
I thought about Rem walking these streets last night after I'd left.
He'd said he was walking—not going anywhere, just walking, the aimlessness of someone with too much in their head and no other way to move it around.
I knew that walk. I'd been doing it myself for weeks.
The discovery that someone else was doing it, too—and that the someone was him—produced a warmth I didn't entirely trust but also didn't want to examine into nonexistence.
Dr. Devereaux was already at her door when I arrived, which meant she'd either heard me on the stairs or had simply known, the way she seemed to know most things, slightly before they happened.
"Chelsea," she said. No surprise. No commentary.
"I know I walked out," I said, before she could not say it. "I'm sorry."
"You don't need to apologize." She stepped back. "Come in."
The room was the same. The plant. The neutral furniture. The quality of light that seemed deliberately uninformative about the time of day, as though whatever happened inside existed slightly outside the clock.
I sat. She sat. The notebook was on her knee.
"How are you this morning?" she said.
"Better," I said. "And also considerably more confused, which I think counts as progress."
"Tell me about the confusion."
I told her about Rem.
Not everything. But the flower shop, the missing card, the café. The conversation that had gone somewhere real before either of us had decided to go there. The number on the receipt.
She listened with the quality of attention that was her professional signature—fully, in a way that created a container for what you were saying without shaping it before you were finished.
"You said he grew up with money," she said, when I stopped.
"Old money. American. East Coast, I think, from the accent and the—" I paused. "From various things."
"And he's in Paris alone?"
"He said he just arrived. He didn't say why." I looked at the plant. "He was vague about several things in a way that felt deliberate rather than evasive."
"What's the difference?"
I thought about it. "Evasive is hiding something you're ashamed of. Deliberate is choosing what to give. He wasn't ashamed. He was—editing."
"And you found that attractive."
Not a question.
"I found it interesting," I said. "Which is not the same thing."
She looked at me.
"It's also the same thing," I admitted.
She wrote something. "Tell me what you felt. Physically. When you were with him."
I'd known this was coming and had prepared for it in the way I prepared for things—by deciding, in advance, to be honest, so that the honesty arrived in an organised manner rather than being extracted.
"Unsettled," I said. "In a way I haven't felt before. Not—I've been attracted to men. Obviously. But it usually comes through a process. I see someone, I think about whether I find them attractive, I decide, and then the feeling follows the decision." I paused. "This didn't do that."
"It preceded the process."
"It preceded the process entirely. We were in a flower shop. He'd said four words." I stopped. "I noticed his hands before I noticed his face."
"What was that like?"
Inconvenient, I thought. Clarifying. Like standing somewhere familiar and realising the floor is slightly different than you thought.
"Like being reminded that I have a body," I said. "Which sounds strange. But I think I'd—" I stopped again.
"Take your time."
"I think I'd been living quite far from mine." I looked at my hands in my lap. "He was the first person in recent memory who made me aware."
Dr. Devereaux was very still. The kind of still that meant she thought this was important.
"Chelsea," she said. "Yesterday you told me you'd never lost your head over anyone. That you were competent at intimacy rather than—present in it." A pause. "What do you think was different about this man?"
I knew the answer. I'd known it since last night, sitting on the sofa. I'd known it and not let myself say it because saying it required committing to the idea that it was real, and real things could disappoint you in a way that ideas couldn't.
"He didn't look at me the way men usually look at me," I said.
She waited.
"He didn't—catalogue me. Most men, when they find you attractive, there's a quality to the attention. It's acquisitive. You can feel it.” I paused. "He looked at me like I was saying something he wanted to understand. Like the point was what I was, not what I looked like or what I came with."
"And that felt—"
"Like being seen." The words came out stripped of all their defences. "Which I spent most of yesterday telling you I've never had and apparently respond to physically before I respond to it intellectually, which is either very good news about my capacity for intimacy or a catastrophic design flaw."
Something moved across her face. Not quite a smile—but something warm, briefly, before professional neutrality resettled.
"What are you going to do?" she said.
"About Rem?"
"About what Rem represents."
I looked at the window. The uninformative light.
What Rem represented was the possibility that the gap Dr. Devereaux and I had been circling for weeks—between performing closeness and actually experiencing it, between being competent at intimacy and being undone by it—was not a permanent condition.
That it was a wall rather than a foundation.
That walls, unlike foundations, could be walked through if you found the right door.
Or, more accurately, if the right door found you at a flower shop when your card was in the wrong bag and the only flowers left were anemones.
"I think," I said slowly, "that I'm going to let myself be unsettled. Without immediately trying to resolve the unsettled."
"That's new," she said.
"That's terrifying," I said.
"Often the same thing."
I was quiet for a moment. Outside, Paris was running its morning. I could hear it faintly through the walls—the sound of a place that didn't adjust its pace for anyone's internal reckoning.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
"Of course."
"When you said yesterday that women who don't feel things deeply don't cry in your office about yellow scarves." I paused. "Did you mean that I feel things and I've been—not accessing it? Or that I feel things and something happened that made it unsafe to?"
She looked at me steadily. "What do you think?"
"I think," I said, "that when two people die on the M40 and a nine-year-old goes to live in a house where love is expressed through logistics and the removal of obstacles—I think that child learns to feel things quietly. Where no one can see."
The room was very still.
"And then," I said, "a man in Paris reaches for the same flowers she's been planning since morning, and he has a scar on his knuckle and dark eyes and he says you're going to be all right like he's considered it and decided it's true, and, apparently, that's enough to bring the whole thing down."
Dr. Devereaux didn't write anything. She just looked at me with the expression she wore when something real had been said and adding to it would only diminish it.
"I didn't sleep with him," I said. "In case that needed clarifying."
"It didn't."
"I wanted to." The honesty arrived without fanfare.
"And you didn't act on it."
"I didn't act on it." I paused. "He didn't suggest it. Which was also—" I stopped.
"Also what?"
"Also part of the problem," I said. "The fact that he didn't suggests he either wasn't interested, or he was interested and chose not to—press the advantage. And I don't know which, and I can't stop thinking about it, and if I'm being fully honest I think it's the second one and that's—"
"That's what?" she said, when I stopped.
I looked at my hands again.
"That's the most interesting thing that's happened to me in years," I said quietly.
Dr. Devereaux closed her notebook.
Not because the session was ending—it wasn't, there were still twenty minutes. She closed it because what I'd just said didn't belong in notes. It belonged in the room, where I'd said it, between the walls and the light and the plant that asked nothing of anyone.
"Chelsea," she said.
"Yes."
"I want you to do something before our next session."
"All right."
"Call him."
I looked at her.
"Not because he's the answer to anything," she said.
"Because something moved in you last night that hasn't moved in a very long time, and the woman you're trying to become does not ignore that.
" A pause. "The woman you've been ignores that.
That's been the arrangement. I'm suggesting a different one. "
I sat with that.
"What if it's nothing?" I said.
"Then it's nothing," she said. "But you'll have found out, which is more than you've been willing to do before.”
I left the session without walking out on it, which felt like progress.
On the street, I stopped. Took out my phone.
His name sat in my contacts—just Rem, because that's what he'd given me. A small act of equivalence. We were both just names in Paris. Just people. No money, no history, no rooms full of furniture that cost more than most cars.
Just two people who'd reached for the same flowers.
I typed: Twelve euros. I owe you. —C
Sent it before the departments could convene.
Then I put the phone in my pocket and walked out into the morning, which was cold and bright and smelled like bread and exhaust and the river somewhere not far away, and I thought about weather.
About things that happened regardless of your position on them.
About what it felt like to stop pretending the rain wasn't coming.