Chapter Two
Lissa sits outside a café on one of her favourite streets in Paris, the back of her neck warm in the late-afternoon sun, her head bent over her sketchbook.
She doesn’t know how exactly she knows she’s in Paris given that a) she’s concentrating on what she’s drawing rather than on her surroundings, and b) she’s never actually been to Paris, but there’s no arguing the fact.
The smell of coffee and cigarettes lingers in the air, the clinking of metal against porcelain mingling with the low hum of chatter.
She loves this place. It’s mere streets away from some of the worst damage from the Blitz, areas that haven’t quite recovered despite the fact it’s been ten years now.
This café opened after the war, she knows, the owners determined to see Paris be all that it had been and contribute towards that in some small way.
Every time she comes here – mainly at weekends, since she got the job at the school – she feels hopeful, invested in the idea of new beginnings, of building something out of the ashes.
The face is beginning to take shape in the charcoal as she sketches. It’s a face she once must have known so well, but over time she’s forgotten the exact texture of her sister’s expressions, even as she tries to call them into focus.
She hears a feminine laugh coming from inside the café as the bell on the door jingles.
Hears a man’s voice calling out a goodbye.
She doesn’t look up, too lost in her work now.
She hears the muttered oath a split second before she feels it – searing-hot liquid seeping through the sleeve of her dress.
She yelps, then reacts on instinct, pulling her arm towards her and scrabbling to her feet, her hand coming to cover the spot where the liquid scalded her.
There is a man there, apologising to her, catching his balance from his stumble and bending to pick up his now empty coffee cup.
She doesn’t look at him, though. Instead she looks down at her sketchbook, at the drawing of her sister.
Coffee stains one side of her sister’s face, the charcoal edges blurring into one another. Ruined.
‘Je suis vraiment désolé, excusez-moi, puis-je …?’ The man is reaching towards her sketchbook now, like he might pick it up, try to save it.
‘Don’t.’ The word is a harsh snap, and she’s alarmed to find that tears are burning the back of her throat.
It doesn’t matter, she tells herself. She has countless of these drawings, tucked away in a drawer in her bedroom, somewhere her mother will never find them.
And she has other sketchbooks at home – she doesn’t need this one.
So without acknowledging the man – or his stupid apology – she bends to pick her bag up off the floor by her chair, then turns to leave. But she feels a hand on her forearm, pulling her to a stop. She wrenches it from his grip, glaring at him.
‘What are you doing?’ Her voice is clipped and perhaps – objectively speaking – angrier than the situation warrants. She registers, dimly, that she is speaking French – she didn’t even know she could speak French, but there you go.
He lifts his hand in apology. ‘Sorry. I was just trying to stop you making the same mistake I did.’ When she frowns, he gestures down to the pavement by the café door. To the doorstop there, which he clearly tripped over.
She huffs out a breath, pushes a hand through her curls.
‘Think it’s a bit late to be playing the hero.
’ She raises her arm for emphasis, showing off the coffee stain on her polka-dot dress – the dress that her friend encouraged her to buy with the majority of her salary, and that she thought she should make the most of.
He grimaces. ‘I really am sorry.’ He glances down at the table, at her ruined drawing. ‘It’s beautiful.’
Her stomach tightens. She doesn’t like people seeing her work, especially not things like this, which are only ever for her.
‘It was,’ she says shortly. She was, is what she really wants to say.
But she realises, even through her temper, that this is the kind of behaviour she’d scold her class for.
He didn’t mean it. He is apologising. So she sighs.
‘Look, I’m sorry too. You caught me off guard, that’s all. But apology accepted, okay?’
He cocks his head to the side as his gaze travels along her sleeve.
He has a nice gaze, she thinks. Hazel eyes, on the edge of brown and green.
And though she tells herself she’s ridiculous because of it, she feels goosebumps prickle underneath the fabric of her dress, along the line where that gaze travels. ‘You’re not hurt?’
She shakes her head. ‘I’m fine.’ It had been a brief flare of pain, but it’s gone now.
Still, she’ll make sure she checks it later, to see there is no lasting damage.
Can’t be too careful, after all. ‘And I was finishing up anyway,’ she lies, ‘so I’ll just …
’ She gestures to the street before moving towards it.
‘Wait.’ He looks like he might reach for her again, then seems to think better of it, shoving his hands into his pockets. ‘Can I buy you a coffee to make up for it?’
She hesitates, lingering when she probably shouldn’t.
I have somewhere I need to be. The lie is there, on the tip of her tongue.
She doesn’t have anywhere to be – would rather, in fact, have an excuse not to head home to her tiny apartment or to her parents’ house, where they will inevitably be arguing.
Maybe that’s what makes her do it. Or maybe it’s looking down at the ruined sketch and thinking that, perhaps, when it dries in the sun, it won’t be that bad after all.
Certainly the rest of the sketchbook will be usable, at least.
She meets that warm brown gaze. ‘One coffee.’ She says it sternly, in what has become her teacher voice in the few years since qualifying. ‘And as long as you promise not to spill the next one on me.’
‘I can promise to let you spill it on me if that would make you feel better.’ She almost gives in to the smile. Almost.
He turns to the door, then glances back at her as she sits back down on the woven rattan chair. ‘What’s your name?’
She makes a show of smoothing out her skirt. Beside her, on a bed, somewhere else entirely, a man’s body shifts. ‘I only give out my name to people who earn it.’
She looks up in time to see an almost-smile cross his face, a twitching at the corner of his lips, before it’s controlled, like he’s not sure how she’ll react to it.
She can feel it now, that pull towards consciousness, those moments where you hover between sleeping and waking. But the dream lingers just a moment longer, the sound of his lyrical voice travelling along the outskirts of her subconscious.
‘I’ll take that as a challenge.’
His face blurs in front of her as Lissa blinks into an unfamiliar room. Sunlight filters through the gap in the thick blue curtains, slicing a path right over her eyes. A heavy arm is slung over her waist, too hot on her skin.
Her head feels fuzzy, disoriented, like she drank too much last night, even though she only had a few gin and tonics.
It’s like part of her is still there, sitting al fresco on the streets of Paris.
She didn’t know she had it in her to conjure a place up so vividly.
Maybe she watched a documentary on post-war Paris recently or something?
Bits of it are already fading away, the way dreams always do. But she can still hear the sound of his voice, speaking French no less – who knew her GCSE French had made such a lasting impact on her? Mrs Cullen would be so proud.
She supposes it’s just another way of her brain processing the anniversary of her sister’s death – clearly she still has issues, if she’s imagining drawing her like that.
She used to do it in real life, though it started to feel sad trying to capture someone who would never show any laugh lines or signs of ageing, the things about faces she finds so fascinating in art.
But now is not the time to be thinking of any of this. Now is the time to be figuring out how to extract herself from under the heavy, hot male arm currently pinning her to the bed.
She grimaces as pieces of last night come back to her in a blur.
It’s often like this, the morning after, if she ever gives way to that reckless side of her that she mostly keeps at bay.
She remembers nearly getting run over, yelling at a random man – a man with blue eyes.
Then seeing Mark at the bar, that wide smile he gave her as she crossed to him.
She likes that about him – his smile. He has very straight, white teeth.
And last night she figured, if that wasn’t a reason to sleep with someone, what was?
They’ve been skirting round the edges of it for months at work, and although she’s always used the fact that they are colleagues as a reason not to go there, that key piece of information somehow slipped her mind last night.
Something she will pay for in the weeks to come, she’s sure of it.
She tries to edge out from under him, freezes when he lets out a light snore. Then blows out a breath when he doesn’t stir.
She is as quiet as she can be as she shuffles around his bedroom in the half-light, collecting her discarded clothes.
His flat is bigger and more modern than hers, and is close enough to the centre that they were able to walk back together last night, neither of them questioning whether she’d go home with him, that having been decided the moment she sent the text.
He’d stopped to kiss her in the street, under the glow of a street lamp. It was all very romantic, really.
Now, though, she wants out. She can feel panic spiking her system, and the last thing she wants is to have a full-blown panic attack in front of her one-night stand.
And yes, okay, he’s heard about her ‘episode’ in the office, but hearing about it and seeing it are two different things.
She cringes at the memory, shoves it aside and fumbles on the floor for her phone instead.
She finds it in the pocket of her jeans.
Only 10 per cent battery. Lucky she knows Bath as well as she does, otherwise she’d be worried about getting home.
She bites her lip as she sees two missed calls and a text from Mia, asking if she’s okay.
Shit, she should have checked in. Mia will be worried, and she hates to be the cause of that.
There are also three missed calls from her mum.
At that, her heart clenches with something akin to dread.
When she’d left, her mum had been tucked under a blanket in front of the TV, seeming settled if not exactly happy.
So Lissa had done her duty, hadn’t she? She’s sure it’ll be okay.
It’ll all be fine. The more you say it, the more you believe it.
The wooden floorboards creak as she pulls on her jeans. She tenses and glances at the bed. To where Mark’s eyes are opening and he is running a hand through his fair tousled hair.
‘Hey, sleepyhead.’ His voice holds that distinct early-morning rasp. She resists the urge to point out that he, in fact, is the one still sleeping.
‘Hey.’ She bends to pick up her top, slips it on, then casts her eyes around for her jacket.
Mark stretches. ‘Fancy breakfast?’
‘Ah …’ He looks up at her, then frowns, as if he’s only just noticed that she’s been trying to dress herself in the dark.
She works up a smile. ‘I’d love to, but I’m meeting my dad for lunch today.
’ The lie comes easily, and she has the briefest moment of guilt about it.
But she can’t stay here for breakfast of all things.
She can’t tell him that it feels too hot in here, despite the fact that it is, objectively speaking, a perfectly normal temperature, or that she didn’t think this through, or that she wasn’t really intending to have breakfast – or anything – with him after.
And given that it’s a Sunday, and they’re employed at the same company, she can’t exactly use work as an excuse.
Luckily he doesn’t know her well enough to know that seeing her dad – or her half-sister, for that matter – is a rare occurrence.
‘Oh.’ Disappointment flashes across his face. Dark brown Bambi eyes, Darcy calls them, with eyelashes longer than hers. Lissa doesn’t like being the cause of anyone’s disappointment, but in this case she can’t help it.
She hesitates, then leans down to kiss him on the cheek, trying not to breathe out because she hasn’t brushed her teeth yet. ‘Thanks for last night.’
He grins then. ‘No thanks needed.’
She slips her jacket on, hating the embarrassment of dressing in her clothes from the night before, like a big red arrow is hovering above her head telling the whole world what she’d been up to.
‘I’ll walk you out,’ Mark says, throwing the duvet off.
‘No, honestly, it’s fine, I …’ But he’s already up, and she averts her eyes even though it’s stupid given that she saw every inch of his body last night. It’s an impressive body too – all those hours he spends at the gym before work are clearly worth it.
There is a dreadful second when she thinks he’s going to walk her to his front door naked, but he grabs a dressing gown off the back of the bedroom door, fluffy and white like a hotel one.
‘Where are you meeting your dad?’ he asks as he escorts her down the corridor.
‘Oh.’ She gives what she hopes is a perfectly innocent-seeming shrug. ‘Just at his house. It’s in Frome.’
‘Nice. Well, have fun, yeah?’
She’s relieved when he unlocks the front door and holds it open for her – she can’t concentrate enough right now for the obligatory small talk, too distracted by the anxiety of what else she may have said or done last night.
Mark grabs her hand as she steps outside. ‘I had a really great time, Lissa.’
‘Me too.’ Why is her voice squeaky? Why can she not be a bloody grown-up? It was her who initiated things, for fuck’s sake.
There’s a moment where it looks like he’s going to say something more, but thankfully he seems to overcome the urge and kisses her forehead instead. ‘I’ll call you.’
That seems a bit redundant, given she’ll see him in the office tomorrow, but she manages a bright ‘Yes, okay.’ She reaches up, but then isn’t sure what to do with her hand, and ends up patting his arm like a bloody imbecile. ‘Bye, Mark.’
And that, she thinks to herself as she walks away from his block of flats, is why she really should have just gone home last night.