Chapter 55
Chapter fifty-five
Yosh
Shadows shield me from the burning sun.
Heat. Pressure. The sickening sensation of being lifted off the ground.
“This one’s alive!”
Voices float through the haze, distant, telling me I need to let go.
I don’t.
I hold on tighter.
Hands everywhere. Gripping my arms, my shoulders, prying at my fingers.
A helicopter thunders above us, blades beating in a mechanical rhythm.
Shouting. Urgent. Close to my ear, yet impossibly far away.
“We need to separate them.”
No. No. No.
He’s slipping from my arms.
A face appears above me, someone yelling words I can’t make out. Lips moving, hands pressing down on my chest, my shoulder.
Pain explodes through my body, sharp as a knife and blinding.
Then the movement again. The helicopter grows louder.
The sound fills my skull, rotors tearing the sky apart again and again and again.
I wake up gasping for air. The weak light of dawn filters through the snow-covered windows, casting a blue-grey glow across the car. A helicopter flies overhead.
Tom is still asleep against my chest, breathing softly like a purring cat. I notice his lips. The same unsettling shade of blue as yesterday when we came back from the forest. Tiny crystals of ice are clinging to his lashes.
I blink, realizing mine are frozen too.
“Shit. Sapphire, baby, wake up,” My voice shakes from the cold.
Falling asleep in these conditions was a terrible mistake.
I cradle him closer, patting his cheek. The grey tint of his skin sends another wave of panic through me. His lashes flutter, and I hold my breath until he opens his eyes.
“You okay?”
“Yeah…” he grunts, brushing sleep from his eyes.
I need to act.
I dive between the seats for the keys, which isn’t easy with my trembling fingers. The ignition resists for a moment before the engine coughs once, and finally roars to life. Air begins to breathe through the vents.
“We’re okay,” I murmur, mostly to calm myself.
I rub my arms, fighting the cold while the heater slowly wins the battle inside the car. Tom wraps his arms around my chest from behind. His sleepy face presses into my back, warm and comforting for a moment before he gathers himself.
“We need to check the situation outside, clear the car, and see if we can keep going.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
I brace myself for the cold. We don’t have jackets or anything remotely warm. We left in the middle of chaos, abandoning everything at Heatherfell except what we had in our pockets.
“Let’s do this fast,” Tom mutters, gripping the rear door handle on his side.
The door doesn’t budge. Frozen solid.
Tom grits his teeth, slamming his shoulder into it. Once. Twice. On the third hit the door bursts open and Tom tumbles straight into the snow.
I laugh so hard my stomach hurts, and yes, that feels amazingly good after yesterday.
“Oh my god! Sapphire, you okay?”
A groan drifts up from somewhere below the door. Then, out of the white, his fingertips appear first.
“Hmmpff. Soft landing,” he mutters, rising from the snow mass.
I push my door open; it swings easily. If only we’d tried this one first. I step out into the cold to meet him at the front of the car.
The highway’s a mess. A few cars have started moving, but most are still stranded next to the road, half-buried in snow.
The helicopter that woke me landed a few hundred metres away. One of the rescue workers runs our way, his neon-orange jacket bright against the grey morning.
“Avez-vous besoin d’aide? Votre voiture démarre toujours?” he asks, breath fogging in the cold air.
“Tout va bien,” Tom replies with surprising ease.
The man nods quickly and hurries toward the next car.
“You speak French?” I ask, a nervous chuckle slipping out.
“Basic.” He shrugs.
Yeah, right. That accent was hot and didn’t sound basic to me.
I hug myself, taking in our surroundings. Everything is flat and white. The contrast with home couldn’t be sharper.
Home.
Turquoise water. Warm sun on my skin. Fruit so ripe, juicy and sweet. That warmth belongs to a different world. In this one, the only warmth I have is the man standing beside me.
“Sapphire, we should check if people need help.”
I glance up. For some reason he’s grinning at the horizon, so I follow his line of sight.
Through the pale haze of dawn, something rises against the skyline. My hand flies to my mouth as the shape becomes clear.
“Is… that…?” I grab Tom’s shoulder, pointing at the pointy structure in the distance.
He smiles at me, threading his fingers through mine before kissing the back of my hand.
“That’s the fucking Eiffel Tower.”
I was still trying to wrap my head around the fact that we were actually in Paris when Tom had whispered surprise in my ear. From that point on, excitement took over completely, and I couldn’t wait to explore the city.
But the roads still hadn’t been cleared, and when I saw rescue workers helping an elderly couple out of a car ahead of us, we rushed in to assist.
Me handling frostbite, Tom translating.
I have to admit, we made a pretty good team, reassuring them, keeping them warm and talking until the first ambulances arrived.
I called him my nurse for the rest of the day, and he liked that far more than he let on. I think he knows I go weak for hot, caring nurses.
Once the snowplough passed, Tom drove us to his favourite hotel in Paris.
A whole team of receptionists welcomed us and immediately called their manager down to greet Tom in person. That was the moment it really hit me how famous he is on this continent.
Tom greeted the man like an old friend, put on the full Tom McKenna charm, and asked for his usual suite.
His usual suite.
He dropped it so casually I nearly fainted on the spot.
And the suite… it felt like a dream. Floor-to-ceiling glass, snowy Paris spread out below us. In that moment, I was certain the weekend was going to be our fairytale.
The view took me back to the West House at Heatherfell. It gave me that same sense of standing in front of something bigger than yourself. Only in Paris, the world felt huge and alive, and Tom… he was thriving instead of burning out like a candle.
So what exactly did the city have to offer us? Not your usual Paris trip, but it was perfect.
For starters, we slept. A lot. Especially that first day. After being snowed in for the night, all I wanted was warmth and rest. We took a hot shower, and the second my head hit the pillow, I was out. Tom too.
We woke in the afternoon, still sleepy but starving.
We went to a restaurant Tom swore by whenever he was in the city. The place had that cozy Parisian atmosphere I only knew from the movies. Small tables, candlelight, waiters with… let’s call it sass.
No, who was I kidding. They were just straight-up rude, and we had the best time because of it. Especially once I thickened a New York accent and Tom used his McKenna charm to walk the line.
We came to the quick conclusion that somehow, the two of us are incapable of behaving like decent people in restaurants. Joan would’ve called it ‘so so scandalous.’
We walked back to the hotel and went straight to bed. Though, to be fair, sleeping wasn’t exactly the first thing we did. I lured him into a little roleplay, braided my hair like a real Viking, and told him I was his for the night.
Tom accepted the offer greedily, and by that, the night meant the entire night.
The next day, Tom announced it was time for the real Paris experience. Determination wasn’t the problem. The city simply wasn’t cooperating.
The Eiffel Tower? Closed, thanks to the blizzard. The Seine? Cold and grey. And walking the Champs-élysées? More like a full-body workout, every step heavier as we trudged through untouched snow.
“You can’t visit Paris and not have croissants,” Tom insisted.
Well, croissants usually aren’t dairy-free, and changing the recipe? I’m fairly sure that counts as treason in France.
So we went on what felt like an impossible hunt. Every boulangerie we passed had golden, buttery pastries in the window, and each time I told Tom to go in and grab one for the way, he refused.
“We’ll eat together,” he kept saying, refusing to cave no matter how good they smelled.
Three hours, twelve stops, and a couple of near face-plants on the pavement later, we finally found a tiny boulangerie hidden away in an alley.
We danced and cheered in the petit café when the owner told Tom they had dairy-free croissants. I had almost given up hope by then, but Tom hadn’t. And somehow… that says everything about him, doesn’t it?
After brunch, we made our way back to the penthouse suite. The cold was biting, and after that whole frozen-to-the-bone experience in the car, neither of us was eager to go through it again.
So Tom came up with a plan.
Conveniently, we came across an art supply shop when Tom suggested a “more scenic route.” He picked up a sketchbook and a set of black-lead pencils, and the look he gave me when I joined him at the counter was a mix of knowingness and pure filth.
“I want you to model for me,” he said.
And so I did.
A solid fifteen minutes later, I was lying on my stomach on the bed, looking out at Paris in snowy December through the wide glass windows.
Yes, I was naked, but the sheets beneath me were warm and comfortable.
Tom sat against the headboard with his sketchbook resting on his legs.
The soft scratch of pencil on paper soothed me so deeply it drew me into the best meditation I’d had in weeks.
And just like that, hours passed without words.
I got lost in the view, and in the feeling of being seen but not exposed, studied but not judged. It was intimate in ways I couldn’t explain.
Was that what safety truly felt like?
I cried in silence.
No one ever told me that feeling safe could be this overwhelming.
Tom didn’t talk when he finally set the pencil down. He took a bit of distance from the paper and tilted his head to decide whether it was finished. Curiosity got the better of me, so I crawled over to peek over his shoulder.