Chapter 10 #2
We walk out of the market together. There is no announcement to it, no shift dramatic enough for anyone else to notice.
Still, the air feels different once we leave the crowd behind.
The streets outside the market are brighter now, the day fully opening, shopfronts lifting their grates, café tables appearing along the pavement, a dog barking from an apartment window above us as if personally offended by morning.
He takes the heavier bag from my hand before I register he is doing it.
I stop. “I can carry that.”
“I know,” Damien says.
“Then why are you carrying it?”
“Because I can.”
“That is not an argument.”
“It is not meant to be one.”
I hold out my hand. “Damien.”
He looks at my hand, then at my face. “Serena.”
The way he says my name is not a challenge exactly. It is worse. It is calm. Certain. A man used to doing things not because he has to prove he can, but because he has decided he will.
I should insist.
Instead, I let him keep the bag because fighting over figs on a Paris sidewalk feels like a bad use of dignity.
“This is not chivalry,” I say.
“No,” Damien says. “Chivalry is usually louder.”
“What is it, then?”
“Practical.”
“Because the bag is heavy?”
“Because I want my hands occupied.”
My breath catches before I can make it behave.
Damien looks ahead, giving me the mercy of not watching my face while the sentence lands. That may be the most dangerous thing he has done so far.
We walk toward the canal.
The city changes as we move. The market noise fades behind us, replaced by morning traffic, the scrape of café chairs, the soft rush of bicycle tires over pavement.
Damien knows where he is going. He does not check his phone.
He turns down narrow streets, crosses at the exact moment gaps open, avoids tourist-heavy corners without comment.
It is not tour-guide confidence. It is lived-in familiarity.
“You know this area well,” I say.
“Yes,” Damien says.
“That is a beautifully empty answer.”
“It was an easy observation.”
“Are you always this committed to giving nothing away?”
He glances at me. “Are you always this committed to collecting?”
“I have a notebook. It would be wasteful not to use it.”
“You aren’t using it now,” Damien says.
“I’m remembering.”
He looks at me again, and the corner of his mouth lifts.
“Of course you are.”
By the time we reach the canal, the morning has turned warm enough that the shade feels earned.
The water lies green and still beneath the trees, broken only by the occasional ripple from a passing boat.
A small café sits near the edge, its chairs arranged carelessly enough to seem sincere.
The tables are mismatched. The awning is faded.
No one has bothered to make the place look like a discovery, which is usually how I know I might have found one.
He chooses a table near the canal without asking. I sit across from him because pretending to deliberate would make the moment too obvious. A server appears almost immediately. He is young, thin, and still tying his apron as he reaches us.
“Bonjour,” the server says.
“Bonjour,” Damien says. “Deux cafés. De l’eau. And whatever pastry is still warm.”
I look at him.
The server nods and disappears.
“You ordered for me,” I say.
Damien sets my bag beside my chair. “I did.”
“That is bold.”
“You can object when the pastry arrives.”
“What if I wanted tea?”
“You didn’t.”
“What if I object on principle?”
“You might,” Damien says. “But you’ll still eat the pastry.”
I lean back in my chair. “You’re insufferable.”
“Yes,” he says.
He says it so calmly that I laugh. The coffee arrives first, then water, then a small plate with two pastries still warm enough to release butter when the server sets them between us.
One is folded with apricot. The other is darker, filled with something almond-scented and glossy at the edge. He pushes the apricot toward me.
I look at the plate. “Why this one?”
“Because you bought figs, cherries, and goat cheese, which means you like fruit when it still has a little acid.”
I stare at him. He drinks his coffee as if he has not just reached across the table and plucked a piece of truth out of my basket.
“You are a little terrifying,” I say.
Damien lowers the cup. “Only a little?”
“I’m being polite.”
“No,” he says. “You are not.”
I pick up the pastry and take a bite because refusing it now would be giving him more satisfaction than eating it.
It is excellent.
Damn him.
The apricot is soft but still bright, the pastry flaky, the butter deep without heaviness. It tastes like morning and bad decisions made slowly enough to justify themselves.
He watches my face.
I swallow and set the pastry down. “It’s good.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“I was hoping to be right on principle.”
“You still can be,” he says.
“Principles are very adaptable when people are determined.”
“That sounds like experience.”
“It is.”
We sit there longer than I intended. The canal moves beside us.
The shade shifts over the table. I eat the pastry despite my objections and drink coffee that is better than I expected.
Damien eats his almond pastry with the same attention he gives herbs and wine, not reverent, not theatrical, simply present.
He asks me about San Sebastián, and I tell him about the anchovy pintxo that slowed an entire room down.
He does not laugh at the line. He asks what was under the anchovy.
“Slow-cooked onion,” I say.
Damien nods. “Of course.”
“Of course?”
“Anchovy needs something willing to disappear underneath it.”
I look at him.
He looks back.
The morning warms around us. We move from the café to the street without deciding when the morning becomes afternoon. Damien pays before I can reach for my bag.
I look at him. “I was going to pay for mine.”
“I know.”
“You keep saying that.”
“You keep telling me things I already know,” Damien says.
“That is not how this works.”
“How does it work?”
I open my mouth but nothing useful comes out because the answer is not simple and we both know it.
This is not a date, because neither of us called it that.
It is not work, because I haven’t written a single note since he appeared at the herb stall.
It is not nothing, because nothing does not make a woman stand on a sidewalk in Paris with a bag of figs and an inconvenient awareness of a man’s hands.
Damien waits. He is very good at waiting when waiting will make the other person speak first. I refuse to reward that.
“It works with fewer assumptions,” I say.
He smiles. “I will try to make fewer assumptions.”
“That sounded insincere.”
“It was.”
We walk as Paris opens around us in the slow, lush sprawl of a late June afternoon.
We pass bakeries with open doors, a florist carrying buckets of peonies, a bookstore with sun-faded novels stacked in the window, cafés full of people pretending not to watch one another.
Damien knows small streets that avoid the worst of the crowd.
He points out a cheese shop not because it is famous, but because the owner will refuse to sell a cheese before it is ready.
He tells me about a bakery that changed hands three years ago and lost its soul but kept its line because tourists do not know when grief has entered the crumb.
I laugh at that.
He looks pleased.
Not smug.
Pleased.
There is a difference, and it is terribly inconvenient that I can see it.
By late afternoon, we cross the ?le Saint-Louis.
The light has shifted again, warmer now, sliding over the facades and turning the river gold where it catches between buildings.
The island is crowded, but softly so. Couples with ice cream.
Families with strollers. A musician near the corner playing something old enough that everyone thinks they have heard it in a film.
He walks beside me, close enough now that our arms brush when the pavement narrows.
The first time it happens, I tell myself it is the crowd.
The second time, I know better.
Neither of us moves away.
At a small café near the river, he holds the door open for me. His hand brushes the back of my shoulder as I pass. Barely. It’s a touch so light it could be dismissed by anyone interested in lying.
I’m not interested in lying. My body registers it with absurd precision. The warmth of his palm. The brief pressure near my shoulder blade. The way my breath catches and then returns too carefully, as if I can discipline a physical reaction by arranging my face.
Inside, the café is narrow and dim after the sun, all old mirrors, small round tables, and the smell of coffee, wine, and sugar.
We sit near the open window. Damien orders something cold and sparkling for both of us, then a bottle of something simple after I say I should probably return to my hotel and do not stand up.
The bottle arrives sweating lightly in its bucket. The wine is crisp and pale. It tastes like citrus peel, stone, and the kind of afternoon that should know better.
He pours my glass first. I watch his hand around the bottle. The scar near his thumb. The steady wrist. The ease of it, neither performative nor careless. He does everything with attention. Opening doors. Choosing herbs. Ordering coffee. Pouring wine. Looking at me. Especially that.
He sets the bottle down.
“You are thinking very loudly,” he says.
I lift my glass. “You are very invested in my thoughts.”
“They are usually worth the inconvenience.”
“That almost sounded like a compliment.”
“It was a compliment,” Damien says.
“You should work on delivery.”
“No.”
I laugh again, and this time the sound feels different in my own mouth, lower and easier, the kind that comes when a day has slipped its leash and decided to become something else.