Chapter 13
No, Ben, I immediately tell myself. Stop it. ARRETE!
This isn’t a movie.
In real life, Tyler gets to be the leading man, and leading men only ever go for other leading men.
Tyler will probably have tons of perfect Paris nights.
This one is just a blip. He could actually meet a sexy Parisian stranger and have a life-changing, whirlwind romance.
Someone much hotter than me, more perfect, more conventionally “masculine”—the trait that all the gay boys in the LGBTQIA+ Alliance seem to value more than anything else. Someone more like himself.
He’ll move on and forget, while I’ll hold on to this memory forever, like I always do. And after everything that’s happened, I can’t afford another scar on my heart.
I can’t afford to entrust my heart to Tyler, of all people.
I hurriedly finish my madeleine and sip my tea.
As I do, I notice that my paperback copy of The Paris Wife is still out on the table between us.
Remembering my to-do list, I pick up the book, open to the page I was last on, and start reading.
A good way to avoid Tyler and cross an item off my Paris to-do list. Very efficient.
“You’re really committed to the bit, huh?” Tyler asks me, sounding amused but maybe also a little impressed. It’s hard to say.
I glance up from the page. “What do you mean?”
Tyler smirks. “From your list. ‘Read a book at a cute outdoor café.’ ”
I’m actually shocked he remembered. “A charming outdoor café. But yes.”
“Carry on, then,” Tyler says, leaning back in his chair and waving to me. “Don’t let me stop you.”
“Fine,” I say a little stiffly. I go back to my book, but I realize I keep reading the same line over and over again. I’m not able to focus.
“What’s wrong?” Tyler asks, and I’m annoyed he can tell.
“I feel weird reading while you’re just sitting there,” I tell him.
Tyler pulls out his phone “No problem. I have my Kindle app so I’ve always got books.” He taps the screen and pulls up his virtual library, which looks full. I’m surprised.
“What will you read?” I ask him.
He smirks. “Well, I’m predictable, so probably Proust.”
I make a face. “Isn’t it sort of cliché to read Proust while sitting in a Paris café?” I challenge him.
Tyler makes a face back at me. “What about reading a book with the word Paris in the title while sitting in a Paris café?” he shoots back.
I scowl at him, then get a random idea.
“Okay, Mr. Literary Influencer,” I say, handing him The Paris Wife. “What if we swap? You read one page from my book, and I’ll read one page from Proust, and we can see what we like better.”
Tyler rubs his hands together eagerly. “Deal. All right, pressure’s on. Let me find the perfect spot for you to read.”
As he swipes through his phone, his face is locked in total concentration. I realize my heart is kind of racing. I flip through The Paris Wife and find one of my favorite passages. I keep the book open to that page and hand it across the table to Tyler.
He smiles and hands me his phone.
“I don’t need you to read a whole page,” he says. “Just one sentence. I found a sentence that’s just very … you. And it’s not even 958 words long.”
“Now I’m definitely intrigued,” I say. I feel a jolt of anticipation as I take his phone and look down at the screen.
I read the line he picked out for me:
If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
Here’s the thing about being seen by another person: It’s the most exciting feeling in the world, but it’s also the scariest. That sentence squeezes the air out of my lungs.
I’m more captivated by it than I was by the sparkling Eiffel Tower.
It’s not just the words themselves but the fact that Tyler picked this sentence out from his favorite book and said it was me.
I shake my head. I’m getting too carried away again. So what if Tyler picked this line for me? It’s a good line, but it doesn’t have to mean anything.
“That’s cool,” I tell Tyler, trying to sound as unbothered as he does. But he’s totally absorbed in The Paris Wife and doesn’t even hear me (ha!).
I look back down at Tyler’s phone. With a jolt, I see in the upper corner of his screen that Tyler’s phone battery is about to die—it has just a tiny sliver of red left. That’s not good for us. Not at all. What happens when and if Tyler’s phone dies?
“You need to charge your phone right now,” I tell Tyler, handing it back to him. “Or maybe we should just play it safe and go back to the hostel …”
“Shh,” Tyler tells me, still reading The Paris Wife. “This is a really good book.”
“Told you!” I laugh, feeling triumphant.
While Tyler keeps reading, I ask the waiter for the check. Tyler and I split the bill, and I practically have to pry Tyler away from the book so we can get up and leave.
“Okay, so now you’ve gotten me hooked on The Paris Wife,” Tyler says with a grin as I drop the book back in my tote bag. “Maybe you could be a literary influencer, too.”
I roll my eyes. “Gee, thanks. I was waiting for your stamp of approval.”
I glance around. The night is breezy and quiet, but the bars and cafés are still full of raucous parties. I realize I don’t want to go back to the hostel. I feel surprisingly awake and energetic, and I want to soak in even more of Paris’s energy.
As if reading my mind, Tyler says, “We are so not going back to the hostel. Come on, I bet there’s some store around here where I can buy a phone charger.”
We start walking again, along the winding streets of the Latin Quarter, passing more beautiful buildings and crowded cafés. We stop at a corner to wait for the light to change.
“Look,” Tyler says, pointing in the distance to a grand white dome. “That’s the Panthéon.”
The dome is lit up as if a spotlight is beaming on it. With its classic columns, I imagine the building is full of demigods in robes.
“What’s it used for, exactly?” I ask Tyler, glad for once that he’s an expert on all things Paris.
“It’s kind of like a museum,” Tyler says. “But a lot of famous people are buried there. Like Marie Curie. Victor Hugo. Josephine Baker.”
“Cool,” I say, because it is. “Hey, where is Proust buried? Is that a morbid thing to ask?”
Tyler laughs. “Nope. It’s not morbid, and he’s not buried here. But he is buried in Paris. At Père Lachaise Cemetery.”
I get a bit of a wild thought. “Do you think we could … go there? Now? Tonight?” My heart starts racing. It’s well after one a.m. Who even am I to suggest a plan like this? Sneaking into a literal cemetery in the middle of the night in Paris? I shiver.
Tyler raises his eyebrows. “Wow, okay, look who wants to break the rules now.”
I blush. “Whatever. I was just asking!”
Tyler grins. “I’m sure the cemetery is closed and it’s really hard to sneak in there. If you’re worried about getting in trouble, we should probably not do that.”
“Oh,” I say, and I feel the slightest bit of disappointment, which is so weird.
We’re still walking, and though I’m keeping an eye out for a store that might sell phone chargers (too bad Paris doesn’t have Target), I realize I’m also just kind of letting the night carry us.
Which is nice. For once, my brain isn’t whirring with plans and worries.
I feel more in the moment than I have in a long time.
“Do you know what a flaneur is?” Tyler says.
“A flaneur?” I repeat. “Like … the custardy dessert?”
Tyler raises an eyebrow. “That’s flan.”
“I knew that.”
He chuckles. “A flaneur’s a type of person. French writers came up with the term for someone who walks around the city, observing everything around them.”
“Um, isn’t that just a tourist?” I ask as we cross a busy street, passing a bunch of cafés.
Tyler shakes his head. “Flaneurs didn’t really have an agenda. They went where their curiosity took them. They wanted to see their city from a new angle. I mean, I know we have your list, but I kinda feel like we’re doing that right now. We’re the new flaneurs.”
“The new flaneurs,” I repeat. “I like that. Like the New Romantics. Imagine us wearing old-timey Parisian clothes, like from the 1800s. Hats, ruffles. Monocles. We’d just stroll all day, eat long lunches, make witty observations.”
Tyler laughs. “Exactly. They turned chilling and wandering around into an art.”
“Is that what you did in New York?” I ask without thinking. “Like, why you snuck out at night and went to gay bars?”
I hold my breath. It’s probably too personal a question, but I need to know more about Tyler since he left—what turned him into such a different person.
After a beat of silence, Tyler says, “It was more that I just couldn’t take my parents anymore—well, mostly my dad.
After he found out I was into dudes, he flipped out.
He couldn’t believe—still doesn’t believe—that his only son, who plays varsity basketball and doesn’t wear dresses, is queer.
That’s about how enlightened my father is.
” He tugs the back of his hair nervously—there’s real pain on his face, and I kind of want to stop walking and give him a hug.
We cross the street, passing by another musician, a young guy playing a guitar and singing in French. I don’t know the song, but it’s really pretty. The singer’s voice is deep and soothing, filling the night.
“Dad blamed the whole culture for ‘making’ me gay,” Tyler goes on, rolling his eyes.
“He’s one of those Boomers who think ‘woke’ America is ruining everything—big surprise, right?
He even blamed TikTok, and I’m barely on TikTok.
So basically, he made sure I had no time at all to be able to have any space to think about what I want.
He packed my schedule with sports, personal training, investment boot camp—please don’t ask me what that is, it’s even worse than it sounds—as if he could reprogram me, one extracurricular at a time, all while not actually being around in person. ”