Chapter 24
Love-struck Girl
Violent tremors were going through Ana?s’s shoulders as Celine dragged her up the stairs, into her room.
But she had to let go of her friend to lock the door, and the second she did, Ana?s began pacing the length of the room, muttering a string of shocked and excited, “Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!”
“Don’t be so loud, please!” Celine begged.
“Mon Dieu!” Ana?s shouted defiantly. “What did I just see out there? Please tell me I’m severely hallucinating. Please!”
Celine started chewing on her nails. Ana?s chancing upon them was bad enough. But Ana?s chancing upon them while kissing? It was disastrous! “You are. That’s it, you were hallucinating.”
“Celine!”
“Let me explain,” she shot back. “Just sit down and I will explain.”
Ana?s moved to the bed distractedly, then shot to her feet again.
“I can’t sit down.” She smoothed her hair behind her ears in one forceful movement.
“This isn’t a sitting down talk! You and Bastien—I don’t—” Suddenly, she snatched a pillow from Celine’s array, brought it to her face and let out a sharp shriek into it. “How long has this been going on?”
“Nothing is going on,” Celine said, breathing hard. She was starting to hyperventilate now, too.
“You call that nothing?” Ana?s chucked the pillow on the floor. “What about Jacques? I thought you loved him. He will be proposing to you in a week for God’s sake!”
“You don’t think I know?”
“It doesn’t look like you do.”
A desperate wish to crawl under the covers and die overcame Celine. “I—” Closing her eyes, she sat on the foot of the bed. Ana?s deserved an explanation. For Celine to hide something like this from her…it was unforgivable.
“I…I don’t love Jacques,” she finally admitted.
Four simple words. She had been holding them inside for so long—too long—that shivers crawled down her spine at the relief of letting the words take form outside of her.
Ana?s stopped her fidgeting and slowly eased closer, but she didn’t sit on the bed.
“You don’t?” she asked faintly.
Celine shook her head, tears burning behind her eyes.
She brought her palm to her chest, massaging the strain there.
Her heart was pounding hard, as though it wanted to break out of her chest and escape from all the guilt and the lies she had stuffed it with.
“And…” She sighed. “I don’t want to marry him, either. ”
“But—” Ana?s frowned. “I thought you two were getting engaged so young because you were foolishly in love.”
“It was an arranged affair,” Celine confessed, her voice no louder than a hum.
“My father and your grandfather decided on it last year. I wanted to tell you. I just—I didn’t have a choice.
I thought I could turn the lie we were telling everyone into the truth.
I really wanted to love Jacques, so I figured that if no one else knew about it, then all was left to do was convince myself. ”
Ana?s’s expression yielded nothing. “And Jacques doesn’t love you either?”
Celine couldn’t meet her gaze. “I think he does.” That ache in the back of her throat intensified until it formed a hard lump.
“I don’t know why I can’t love him back.
I never meant to lie to him about it…I just didn’t want to hurt him.
He would put on a smile for me during those first dates, but then I would catch him off-guard, staring into the distance, and I could see the pain he was in because of Emilie. I didn’t want to add to that.”
Had she been a little more headstrong against her mother’s demands, she might have avoided worrying about heartbreaks altogether.
If she had told Jacques no earlier… But back then Celine hadn’t had a choice.
She had let her mother push her into this relationship because she didn’t have the competition to look forward to, nor Adalene’s studio.
She didn’t have someone else in her heart and had assumed Jacques would be able to enter it easily.
“Ana?s?” She chewed on her lip when Ana?s didn’t respond. “Please, say something. Are you upset?”
“Yes, I’m upset. At myself for not finding out sooner,” she tsked, and in one swift, irritated motion crossed her hands over her chest. “I have a reputation to upkeep, you know. Paris’ Gossipmonger and all that.
I should have listened to those maids whispering about, but I thought maids whisper all the time, what could they possibly know about my brother that I don’t? Ugh, plenty of stuff, apparently.”
Celine flitted her eyes to her. “You are not angry with me?”
“How could I be, Cel?” She must have noticed the anguish on Celine’s face because her eyes softened to that colour of melted caramel that was so familiar to Celine.
Jacques would look at her that way too. “I know what it’s like to be with someone you don’t love,” Ana?s said. “I mean,” she pointed at herself.
Celine recalled all the men Ana?s had pretended to like just to throw off any rumours of her escapades with girls in dark dance halls. She mustered a smile. “I think this case might be a little different.”
Ana?s shook her head decisively. “All hearts are the same. You cannot force them to feel something they don’t, just as you cannot force them to change.”
Something in Celine’s chest hurt when she looked at her friend again. She loved Ana?s, more than anyone else in her life, but it wasn’t always easy telling her things. Ana?s’s world was very different from Celine’s; she had never been able to grasp that exactly.
Still…
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” Celine said, her voice soft and regretful. “You deserved to know—about this and other things.”
“Such as you kissing Bas?”
Celine had hoped she would forget about that. “I didn’t plan on kissing him. It just…happened.”
“I understand Bas has his ways,” Ana?s said, looking slightly perturbed. “But a kiss doesn’t just happen. Things lead up to it.” She pointed a finger. “And you were kissing him back.”
“Because he kissed me first,” Celine replied petulantly. “It was the polite thing to do.”
“Oh, please,” Ana?s scoffed, but there was a slight smirk on her lips. When she joined Celine on the bed, her neck craned back eerily as though she had just realised something. “What I saw out there didn’t seem like a first kiss.”
Celine scratched at an invisible spot on the covers. She cleared her throat. “Well…”
“Well?”
“…it wasn’t.”
Grabbing a pillow, Ana?s slammed her face into it and released another, muffled scream.
“Stop that.” Celine scrambled towards her friend, hauling her backwards onto the bed. “My mother will hear.”
Ana?s peered up at her. “You have kissed him before?”
“Just once before, now be quiet.”
“Mon Dieu!” Shooting to her feet again, Ana?s started pacing the room anew. “Just once, she says.”
“That is the opposite of being quiet,” Celine pointed out wearily.
“This is too good to be quiet, Cel.” Walking to the window, she slid open a pane.
The sky had darkened to a near black, peppered here and there with stars and the blurred yellow lights of the residencies across the street.
The air that rushed in smelled of jasmine and cooling concrete, fluttering through Ana?s’s hair.
She took out a cigarette from the bodice of her dress, lighting it swiftly.
“What do you mean you two have kissed before? Was it at the masquerade? I can’t remember a thing about it, I just know your costumes matched. ”
Celine refrained from mentioning she hadn’t even been there.
With how things were going, the best she could hope for was that Ana?s kept her screeches and gossip inside Celine’s room.
“It wasn’t at the masquerade. It was after.
I just wanted to retaliate for something he had said.
It meant nothing. It still means nothing. It just…happened.”
Ana?s stared at her for a good minute, then exhaled a stream of smoke outside. “It doesn’t seem like nothing. You are being too defensive about it.”
“I am not.”
“Sure, because you are known for being nonchalant.”
Celine looked away. She didn’t want to admit it. It was fine if she kept it to herself—she could push it somewhere deep and hidden, and pretend it wasn’t there until she forgot about it.
But one look at Ana?s’s inquiring gaze and her resolve crumbled into specks.
“It was nothing at first,” Celine clarified.
“I knew it!” Ana?s muttered under her breath. But when she looked at Celine, she winced. “Sorry, old habit. Go on.”
“That’s all.” Celine shook her head. “I don’t know what I feel anymore. Bas…he… It’s a long story.”
Ana?s pushed off the window sill and shuffled over to the dresser. Silently, she began rummaging through the clothes until she found what she was looking for: two sets of silk pyjamas, and tossed them on the bed.
“I was going to stay out regardless,” she said plainly. “Might as well sleep over.”
Celine’s bleary eyes lightened at that; a smile broke across her lips.
She had missed talking to Ana?s. But between the challenges at Maison Baudelaire, and designing at the abandoned house, and meeting with Jacques, and going shopping with her mother, she hadn’t been able to spare a fifth of herself to her friend.
They turned the lights off, except for one Tiffany lamp beside the bed which remained on. Pink and green geometric patterns floated along the ceiling as they pushed off the extra pillows Celine kept on the bed and slid under the thin covers.
Celine told her everything that had happened after Ana?s had left her alone at Folies-Bergère that night, two months ago, holding her breath every time Ana?s just stared at her without responding.
But then her friend would smack her arm, feigning hurt that Celine hadn’t told her any of this before, even though the thought of knowing in detail what her brothers did behind closed doors made her violently gag several times.
“I can’t believe he took you to Adalene’s studio,” Ana?s said at last. “That’s like sacred ground to him.”