Chapter Twenty-Three #3
Her gaze snapped to his, but before he could decide if it was incredulity or something else in her expression, she pulled away, spun. Gripped the back of her chair. After an eternal moment, she pivoted slowly to face him again, mask in place.
La patronne, clearly about to give an order or offer a solution he hadn’t thought of yet. He straightened, ready to listen.
“I don’t blame you if you want to take the opportunity to leave.” Her voice didn’t sound calm, not like she looked. It sounded frayed, like a violin string ready to snap. “I have done to you the exact thing I hated.”
“What?” He moved a step toward her but stopped when she held up a hand.
“Jacques always made me feel as though every time I didn’t do the expected thing, I lost a bit of his love. Like it was coins he put in a bank and withdrew every time I disappointed him. He made me think that love was a transaction—that if I didn’t do, I couldn’t receive.”
He saw where she was going now but shook his head. “It’s not the same, Zelie. He was your husband—he’d sworn to love you, and he didn’t uphold his end. But you—you never promised me anything. Not loving me isn’t the same thing. You never told me you would if I did the right things.”
Her laugh was anything but amused, her mask cracked and tossed away. “No, I told you it was impossible. Made you think you were nothing to me but a pass across the demarcation line.”
Was she saying he was more? Or just regretting having hurt him in the same way she’d been hurt? “I know I’m your friend. And I know I put you in a difficult place when I said I love you. You don’t need to apologize for anything though.”
“Will you stop being perfect for a moment and listen?” She squeezed her eyes shut but then opened them again.
“I’m afraid. Afraid of risking my heart and losing it again.
Afraid of believing you love me, only for you to see later that you shouldn’t have.
Afraid I can never give enough, never be enough to satisfy you.
Marcel, I’m not the woman you should want. ”
“Zelie.” He shook his head, a soft smile stealing over his lips. “When do you ever let fear rule you? When do you ever choose the safe path, when the right one is there? You only ever have to see the choice, know it’s yours to make, to grab hold of the right decision.”
He held out his arms, not in invitation but in display.
“You don’t have to love me. You don’t have to choose this.
It would be messy and complicated and difficult and could well end with one of us mourning the other.
If you don’t want to love me, then don’t.
But if fear is the only thing stopping you—then be the star I love and burn that away. ”
He’d seen that battle waging across her face now many times before. The day Navarre told her he was leaving. The night they heard he’d been caught. When Marcel had told her about his cousin’s treachery. When her son looked her in the eye and told her to send them away.
He recognized the armies skirmishing through her mind—her own expectations, society’s, Alliance’s, God’s. Her desires, her hopes, her fears.
On some level, she wanted what they could have. If she didn’t, she never would have kissed him in January. Or in April. Or in June. Or in August.
But she wanted to be with her children right now too. Wanting didn’t mean she’d act on it. Zelie was a master at sacrifice. And he had no confidence at all that, when given this choice, she wouldn’t decide now what she always did.
Alliance. Alliance above family. Alliance above comfort. Alliance above herself. Because she believed, down to her soul, that it was through Alliance she would be able to reclaim those things. Through Alliance she’d give them all a world worth living in.
So he waited, like he’d done in the kitchen of the house in Vichy. On the seaside cliff outside the villa. In a bistro in Marseille. In his own mother’s kitchen. He waited to see where her heart would lead her.
He saw when she’d reached a decision but couldn’t read what it was, not even as she marched over to him, not even when she pulled his head down and pressed a short, hard kiss to his lips. Not even when she pulled away to look into his eyes.
“You’re not joining the Maquis, Marcel,” she said, somehow both la patronne and his shooting star as she said it.
“I need you here. With me. I need you challenging me and encouraging me and telling me what I need, not what I want. I need you playing the piano when I’m anxious and praying with me when I try to do everything myself.
I need you here, being you, because I can’t be me anymore without you. ”
“Ah, cher.” He shook his head, but his lips had no choice but to smile. “You were you before you met me. You’d be you no matter what. But if you want me by your side, then that’s exactly where I’ll be. There’s only one problem with your demands.”
She lifted her face toward his, undoing him with the gleam of moisture in her eyes. “What’s that?”
“There’s no piano here for me to play for you.”
Laughing, Zelie buried her face in his neck. “We’ll fix that.” And then she pressed her lips to the hollow at the base of his neck and said the words he’d always hoped but never dared to believe she’d say. “Je t’aime.”