Chapter 24 Taylor
Taylor
Now
Next thing I know, I’m lying on the carpet, alone, as a door slams shut.
My heart stammers in my chest as I feel around my body.
Nothing seems to be broken but my head feels like someone took a hatchet to it.
I think maybe I hit it on…something. The bed frame?
I’m so thirsty it feels like my tongue will remain stuck to my palate if I don’t keep it moving.
My memory is fuzzy, but slowly it comes back to me.
I was in Cassie’s room, watching her in the bath.
Trying to work up the courage to take a step forward, to do to her what…
what I’ve often wanted to do, if I’m being honest. We didn’t have to be friends.
We didn’t have to act like sisters. But she didn’t have to be like this, either.
The light is bright and dizzying, and I struggle to focus on the brass number on the wall. Six. I’m right outside Cassie’s room, where the music has been turned off. Patting down my pocket, I find the key card. Not that I intend to use it again.
My heartbeat doesn’t slow down until the elevator door closes in front of me.
I check my phone: 9:39 p.m. It’s been less than half an hour since I stepped foot in this hotel, since my plan went completely astray.
At least my question has been answered. Olivier stopped me.
I can still feel his hand on my mouth, his arm wrapped around my waist. Whatever I was about to do, he wouldn’t let me.
He loves her. He loves and will protect her always. Why am I so surprised?
Outside, the sweet summer breeze is at complete odds with how I’m feeling on the inside. I wanted her dead. But would I have gone through with it? I twist my brain over this all the way back to my hotel, but the truth is I’ll never know the answer.
I’m still battling with these thoughts when I enter my own hotel lobby, my gaze fixed ahead on the much smaller and less swanky elevator. There must be some wine left in my room. Maybe I’ll turn on the music and have a bath, too. A few more steps and I’ll be alone. Again. Alone for good this time.
“Hey there!”
It takes me a moment to realize that the greeting is directed at me. It’s coming from the front desk.
“Bonsoir!” Amir says, giving me a little wave.
His smile is so friendly that my instinct to make a beeline for the elevator is already vanishing. It would be rude to pretend I didn’t hear him. I know that’s Good Taylor talking, but still. I’ve been her more often than I’ve been myself.
“You looked like you were in a different world,” he says.
Taking a deep breath, I make my way to him. “I guess I was.”
“How are you enjoying Paris?” He leans over the counter and rests his forearms on it, like we’re two friends about to share a secret.
“It’s not really going how I’d hoped.” My smile is weak but hopefully genuine. It’s the truth, after all.
And now I know: despite everything, Cassie and Olivier belong together.
Yes, they’re liars and cheaters. Of course I know that.
You’d think the big, fat engagement ring, the wedding, and skipping away on their Paris honeymoon would have been enough proof that Cassie and Olivier were going to stick to each other no matter what.
But I needed to be sure. So what if they have issues?
What if she and Olivier don’t have the perfect marriage or the dream honeymoon?
They have each other. When it came down to it, he was there to save her.
Maybe he’s just after her money, when I thought it was the other way around.
But it doesn’t matter anymore. I know what I need to know: they deserve each other.
“We don’t like to hear that your trip is not going so well,” Amir says. “We want people to come to Paris to have a good time. You shouldn’t go home and tell your friends you didn’t enjoy it. That’s bad advertising.”
I attempt a smile. It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.
“Paris is not the problem.” And there’s no home for me to go to anymore.
Cassie is selling the house. And Olivier will out me, won’t he?
He doesn’t give a shit about what will happen to me.
She’ll make me pay for that, one way or another.
A laugh escapes me now. It’s dry and chalky.
“I won’t tell anyone I was here. Trust me. ”
His eyes drill into mine. “I have an idea.”
I should run away before he shares it. There’s something about this guy, with his overt friendliness and his dimpled cheeks, that screams trouble. Though maybe the trouble is me. It’s followed me for so long, stuck to me like a bad smell. I can’t get rid of it.
Amir looks around, double-checking that no one’s here. “I get off work in twenty minutes. Come out with me. We’ll go dancing, have a few drinks, and then who knows where the night will take us.”
My head won’t stop hurting. Rubbing against the back of it, I can feel a bump coming on. It makes me wince in pain, so of course I touch it again. The way this night started, there’s no way it can end well.
But then Amir says something else. “You’re only here for one more night, yes?”
He’s right. When I got on that plane, I didn’t have any real plans. Cassie and Olivier would be in Paris for a week, and I booked my own room for five nights. I wasn’t thinking clearly, but I knew I should be home before they returned. Now I can’t imagine going back.
“Do you have any painkillers, by any chance?”
He nods. Smiles as he hands me the packet. Then he watches me walk away; I can sense it. Because he knows what I will do. He knows it before I do.
Twenty minutes later, I’m freshly showered, made up, and ready to go. When he sees me, Amir’s jaw goes slack with awe, his gaze running over every part of my body, undressing me.
“Is that really you?” he says, startled.
I’m wearing a black fitted dress, all cleavage—one I bought on my first day but haven’t worn yet—thick eyeliner, and red lips. I dried my hair with my head down and now it’s wild, like a mane. “It’s a version of me.”
For a moment we just stand there, gauging each other. The tension in the air is thick and hazy, making me feel like I haven’t in a long time. Alive.
“You look different,” he says, coming around from behind the desk and grabbing my hand. “I like it. A lot.”
He pulls me tight alongside him, his hand warm but his skin a little rough, and then we’re out into the Parisian night.
We go to Pigalle. The neighborhood is renowned for Le Moulin Rouge, the cabaret where feather-clad dancers perform the famous French cancan, but that’s not where we’re headed.
Turning off bustling boulevard de Clichy, Amir and I pass by a few sex shops—with whips and vinyl lingerie in the windows—and stop in front of a black door.
It’s unmarked except for a purple neon sign above it in the shape of a key.
Amir knocks three times, then two, then three again.
A bouncer appears, to whom Amir whispers something I can’t hear. A password, maybe. And then we’re in.
Inside, the walls are painted a dark shade of violet and lined with matching velvet booths, barely big enough to fit two people.
The lighting is so subdued I can barely make out where the bar is.
The music is trancelike, with few lyrics.
Still gripping my hand, Amir pulls me through the crowd of sweaty bodies to a booth in the back.
He hangs on to me so tight that it sends electricity up and down my spine.
He wants me here with him, won’t let me go.
The booth is even more private than the ones we’ve walked past, with black partitions going up halfway. We sit down.
“Taylor? Yoo-hoo, Taylor?”
Amir waves his hand in front of my face, the whiff of cooler air bringing me back.
He must have been calling this name for a little while.
I’ve always hated it. Taylor, it’s so basic.
For a long time I refused to answer to it.
It’s just a name, Rae would say with her kind, motherly smile.
You don’t mind, sweetie? I did. I still do.
But that’s what Cassie wanted to call me so, just like with everything else, I let her.
Rae acted like it was Cassie’s fault, but she left me no choice, either.
“Is this okay?” Amir says.
“This is perfect.” Dark, anonymous, a million miles away from Cassie’s swanky hotel room and her fucking husband.
Truly fantastic. I’m so lost in my thoughts that I don’t notice Amir has ordered drinks until they appear in front of us: clear liquid in no-frills glasses, with a couple of ice cubes that won’t melt the liquor away.
“Santé!” I say lifting mine and clinking it against his.
Amir follows my lead with an amused smirk. “You speak French. You’re here on a honeymoon, but with no husband. Are you married? Have you ever been married?”
I tip my head back, swallowing the drink in one fell swoop. It burns my insides as it travels down my throat. Blurs my edges, too.
I slam the glass back on the table. “I thought we were going to dance.”
Amir nods. “There’s something dark about you. Something twisted.”
He’s a complete stranger and yet he sees me. Or maybe it’s that I’m ready to be seen. To be myself. Free of Cassie, of…him. Of the crushing hope I felt for a few weeks. I glance at my empty glass. “What if there is?”
He leans out of our little black and purple cocoon to wave at a server, making the another-round gesture with his index finger.
Then he grabs my hand. “Did a man do that to you? Make you that way, I mean. Your ex?”
I shake my head. “It’s the women who fucked me up.”
All of them. My mother, who left me for dead and never came to get me back, even after she was released from prison.
Rae, who looked the other way when her daughter tortured me every which way.
You girls! Stop fighting already! But I never fought.
I didn’t have it in me and I knew I’d always lose.
Cassie finished me. She thinks I’m the worst thing that ever happened to her, but she doesn’t realize how mutual the feeling is.
Our next drinks arrive and are gone almost immediately.
I want to dance. Amir follows as I pull him to me, my bare legs brushing against the soft velvet.
On the dance floor, we melt into the crowd and the chemical, smoky air.
My arms wrap around his shoulders, his around my waist, our bodies making one as we move to the mellow beat.
Then he presses his lips against mine, working in his tongue softly, but eagerly, too.
It feels so good, better than I could have imagined.
Why haven’t I been living like this all along?
Kissing this stranger in a Parisian nightclub tastes like an escape, like after all the disappointment and the heartache, there might still be something out there for me.
We kiss for a long while, our arms traveling down each other’s bodies, ignoring the elbows bumping into our rib cages and the drinks being sloshed onto our shoes.
I’m always so afraid of change, of messing with the course of things. Not anymore.
“Let’s go back,” Amir says, eyes burning with desire and pointing at our booth.
Next thing I know we’re slipping down in our dark and quiet nook, and I’m straddling him while his hands search under my dress, unhooking my bra. Maybe I drank too much or maybe the partitions around the booth are as high as they look, but it feels like we’re all alone.
I unclasp his belt and he lets out a hungry gasp. “I don’t have a condom,” he whispers in my ear.
“I do.”
A spark lights up Amir’s face as I retrieve the condom from my wallet and hand it to him.
“Here?” he says at last.
I don’t miss a beat. “Here.”
I need this. I need it fast so it can erase everything else.
I need it hard so tonight is not the night Cassie won again.
Amir reaches under the bottom of my dress, pulling my underwear to the side.
I forgot how it feels to be wanted, to see that glow in his eyes, to feel the softness of his breath.
To be one with somebody else, even for a few minutes. To be wanted for who I am.
Afterward, we both lean back, sweaty and panting, not looking at each other.
“This was…” Amir wraps his hand around my neck and pulls me closer for a kiss. “I was not expecting that.”
I was not expecting the night to go this way, either. I smooth my dress back into place and reach for my bag as he pulls his pants back up. Then I check my phone. This is the longest I’ve gone without looking at Cassie’s Instagram.
But I don’t make it that far, because a text message has come through, from an unknown number, with the country code +33. A French number.
It’s a link to Google Maps, with the red drop pin placed on a little square off Montmartre. The text is brief and to the point.
Please come
“Hey, listen,” Amir says, his mouth on my neck. “The night isn’t over yet and we could—”
I push him away, harsher than I intended. “I can’t.”
His forehead creases in surprise. “I thought we were having fun.”
It could be a trap. I stole her money, her wallet. I broke into their hotel room. But it doesn’t matter, because there’s only one thing I can do.
“Yeah, well, the fun’s over,” I say.
I shuffle across the seat and get up. Then, without looking back, I walk away.