3 Ginger
3
Ginger
Dean, Dean, Dean.
Where should I start? What should I say?
Rhys was waiting impatiently while I tried to decide if it was worth it to talk to a stranger about my ex. Rhys was a guy who was nothing like Dean, a guy who hadn’t bothered combing his wild, dirty-blond hair, whose eyes were intense, piercing my skin instead of lingering on the surface. I don’t know, I feared that a person like Rhys wouldn’t understand my story, but even so, I wanted to share it, to let out all the things I felt in the hope that the knot I’d had in my throat for hours would finally disappear.
“It’s a long story.”
“Great. Your plane doesn’t leave till the morning, right?”
“Very funny.”
Rhys could tell I was struggling to jimmy the box where I kept everything pertaining to Dean, so he rested his forearms on the table and bent forward, making me feel closer to him. I noticed the almost invisible dusting of freckles around his nose. And his eyelashes. And the small imperfections in his skin. Those, too, were somehow attractive.
“Can I tell you a secret? I studied psychology.”
“Come on! I don’t believe you,” I responded.
“Why not?”
“Let’s see. You don’t look like a psychologist; you look like a rock guitarist. Or a movie star who’s trying to pass unnoticed. Or a melancholy writer who’s come to Paris looking for inspiration.”
“Okay, you caught me. I dropped out before my second year, but I still know how to listen.” He gave me a patient, good-boy smile. It made me laugh.
“You’re not an easy person to read. Anyone ever tell you that?”
“A lot. In a bad way.”
“I think it’s a good thing.”
“You must be the first.”
“Great. So, getting back to the Dean Files… that’s what we’ll call it, okay? Where should I start? We’ve known each other forever. Since we were kids.”
“Interesting.” He took a sip from his bottle of beer.
“We went to private school in the center of town, and our parents are really close, so we also saw each other outside of class. Then we got older, went to another private school, started going out, and that probably explains why we decided to attend the same university, and…”
“So you’re like Siamese twins.”
“What? No! Of course not!”
“Can I ask you something then?”
“Sure. Shoot.”
As he stared at me, I noticed the blue points in his gray eyes, like brushstrokes of light in an ashen sky.
“This trip…all this nonsense about catching a plane without thinking…is this the first time you’ve ever done anything totally on your own? Without Dean, I mean.”
“Well…I…I mean, I do a lot of things on my own. I paint my nails. I go to the bookstore; I love doing that…” I sighed, defeated. “Fine. You got me. It’s the first time I’ve done anything without him. And I think that’s why I’m so scared and why I feel so lost. But I had to do it. It doesn’t even make sense.”
“It does though.”
His voice was hoarse. Sincere. I was grateful as I took another bite of my crepe, enjoying the melted cheese and sauteed mushrooms. He was distracted as he chewed, and his knee struck mine once in a while, moving to the rhythm of a song coming from a radio on the counter. Something in French. Slow, pretty, soft.
“Where’d you learn French?” I asked.
“I don’t speak French. I can get by. Same with German and Spanish. You live somewhere, you wind up picking it up. But don’t change the subject. We were talking about the Dean Files , and you didn’t finish. Why’d you leave him?”
I stirred uncomfortably in my chair. “Let’s just say after five years together, Dean apparently wants some time for himself, to have new experiences in the year and a half we have left of school, before he settles down or whatever. Honestly, I feel cheated.”
“Cheated?”
“Yeah. Just think: it’s like if you buy a gorgeous sweater, bottle green or that mustard yellow everyone’s wearing this year…”
“Where are you going with this?”
“Imagine the salesgirl is like, Oh, it looks perfect on you , and you save for it for months and months. You wear it, you’re like, Wonderful , and then you put it in the washer, and it comes out all covered in little balls of fuzz.”
“That’s quite an image, Ginger.”
“I just wasted all that time.”
“I don’t believe in wasted time.”
I took a deep breath. He got up to break the silence. As I finished my last bite, I watched him at the counter paying and ordering two more beers. I didn’t even bother offering him any money. I was still thinking of that damned raggedy sweater. When Rhys motioned for us to go outside, I followed him. I followed him like it was the most natural thing in the world, taking the bottle of beer he offered me and walking along the Seine toward the bright lights of the Eiffel Tower. We were two strangers in the middle of the city under a dark winter sky, strolling as if we had all the time in the world. I liked it. I felt good.
“Weren’t you ever tempted to do the same as him?” he said, picking up where we’d left off. “You never wanted to have new experiences? You thought you’d just, what, finish college, marry Dean, have kids, and that’s that? I’m not judging you. I’m just wondering.”
“When you put it that way, it sounds boring.”
“Those are your words, not mine.”
“I don’t know. I guess. I’m a simple person.”
“You don’t seem simple to me at all.”
He turned and walked backward. It looked funny. I laughed and took a sip of beer.
“What kind of person am I, then, Rhys?”
I could tell he was thinking. I could feel it.
“Contradictory. Sweet. Clever.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah. Complicated.”
I almost savored that word. No one had ever thought of me that way. It was probably the last word my friends or family would use to describe me, and I was surprised it struck me so much. My eyes stung.
“Thanks, Rhys,” I whispered.
“Hey, what’s up? Are you crying? Shit…”
He set our beers on the ground and grabbed my shoulders. It was the first time he’d really touched me, and his hands felt firm on my green army jacket as his fingers squeezed softly and he crouched down to my height and looked me in the eye, and I stopped running from him.
“Sorry. You must think I’m crazy.”
“No.” He slid a thumb over my right cheek and wiped away the tears. “You want to know what I actually think of you?” We were very close, and his other hand was still on my shoulder. Our breath was turning to vapor in the cold and mingling with the darkness. “I think you want a lot more than you know. I think you’re the kind who says they just want one piece of candy, but you really want to close the shop down and grab handfuls of everything you want and throw it all up in the air.”
I laughed despite my tears. It sounded so stupid, so childish, but there was so much truth in his words. We looked at each other in the silence. Intensely. Intimately. I blew my nose. Nothing could have been less attractive, but it didn’t bother Rhys.
“I guess you’re the type to be happy with just one piece?”
“No.” He smiled, a dangerous sort of smile, wry, the kind that burns into your memory forever. “I robbed the shop a long time ago, and I took everything I found there.”
“This is nice. You not knowing me, I mean.”
“Yeah.” He took a breath. So close…
Then he looked away, helped me take my backpack off, and threw it over his shoulders without explanation before bending over to retrieve our beers and passing me mine. He walked, I followed him, and I asked myself how long it had been now since our paths crossed for the first time. Two hours? Maybe. Maybe less. And I thought of something I’d heard of so many times and that I never thought had anything to do with me. How you could know a person , supposedly, even when you barely knew a thing about them. What other way was there to explain something so strange, so magical, and so unexpected? Behind him, I tried to catch certain details: the way the damp wind blew his hair all over, the sharp masculine outline of his features, the way his threadbare jeans hung off his hips, or his long steps, hard for me to keep up with even if he seemed to be just ambling.
He turned and caught me looking, and I blushed.
“What time’s your plane leave?”
“Eleven thirty tomorrow morning.”
Ten minutes later, we were in front of the Eiffel Tower, which stood just past the river that cut through the city. I leaned my elbows on the wall in front of me and exhaled, satisfied. I was here; I was in Paris. A few hours before, I’d been crying into my pillow, regretful, and now I was here contemplating one of the most famous monuments in the world with a guy with gray eyes and a mysterious smile who had effortlessly managed to make me start to forget Dean. Or at least to make me able to think of him without feeling sorrow.
It was the most wonderful madness I’d ever known.
“You know the Nazis almost destroyed it?”
“I heard that,” I said, not looking away.
“It was in August of 1944. The Allied troops were approaching, and Hitler knew they would lose the city. So he ordered it destroyed. He and Choltitz came up with this complex plan to demolish it, but fortunately, the Swedish ambassador intervened. Imagine. And here we are now.”
We looked at each other and smiled.