Chapter Eleven #2
“Wait,” she said, which is probably what she should have said before she’d let Griffin practically drag her down the steps of the upper deck, and also before he swiped three pristine white cloth napkins off a serving cart and shoved them into her free hand, and also before he stomped down the metal ramp that led them back onto land, and also before she simply stood, stunned and silent and desperate not to smell herself, somewhere along the Pont Royal, watching the man who’d brought her there flick determinedly back and forth through a roster of icons.
Rideshare. Maps. Browser. Maps again. And finally, most satisfyingly: a translation app.
Now, he turned his head to her in the car, looking at her as if he’d just remembered she was there.
As if she’d spoken to him in a foreign language.
“This is not the way to the hotel,” she said.
“Correct.”
Correct? She leaned slightly to the right, trying to get a peek over the driver’s shoulder so she could see the address he must’ve had up on his GPS, but she couldn’t get a good angle.
She looked at Griffin again, who now kept his gaze straight ahead: one hand still holding his phone, the other—the one that had held hers so tightly—laid flat on his thigh.
“Where. Are. We. Going,” she bit out, insulted by his cool distance, the put-together way he held himself. Meanwhile, she was using one of her hands to awkwardly hold her now napkin-covered dress away from her thigh, while the other one still hummed and heated with the imprint of his.
He’d held it for so long this time.
“To get you clothes.”
She blinked. “To get me—”
“In case you haven’t noticed, your dress is ruined.”
Did he not see her doing the weird napkin-holding? “I have noticed that, yes.”
“I wasn’t sure.” He cast his eyes briefly sideways, toward her lap. “The color blends.”
She gaped. Gaped. He was the rudest person she’d ever met in her entire life. And she’d gone to medical school.
In Boston!
“I have other clothes at the hotel,” she said. “Obviously.”
His jaw ticked, his shoulders shifting slightly. She felt as though she’d scored a point, as though—for the first time since he’d taken her off the boat—he was realizing flaws in his plan.
“Too late,” he finally said. “We’re on our way.”
“To where? This is Paris! There’s not…you know, a Walmart. Stores close early here!”
“Not all stores.” He swiped his thumb across his phone screen, tipped it toward her.
It was a good three seconds of stupefied silence as she looked at the name—the images—in front of her.
Then she simply said, “No.”
“No?”
“No,” she repeated. “We’re not going there.”
“We are. We are currently almost there.” He tipped his phone back toward himself, swiped back to the rideshare app. “Three minutes away. It’s open until eight thirty. Plenty of time.”
She’d always wondered what it really meant, in books, when someone was described as sputtering.
As soon as she tried speaking again, though, she got it.
Two aborted Buts that came out like Buh. An attempt to change course, into something like, What are you thinking, which only came out as You. A final, limp I, which she let drown beneath the too-honest possibilities.
I don’t want to. I feel like I might cry. I am pretty sure I ruined that boat cruise.
I think I liked holding your hand?
“It’s not that kind of place!” she blurted, finally.
“What kind of place?”
“The kind of place that you go with vomit on your clothes?”
He looked over at her again, assessing. “You’ve been there?”
“Yes.”
A pause, and then: “On your honeymoon?”
She swallowed. The rank mortification of this night continued. “Who told you that?”
“Your ex’s aunt. With the—” He broke off, made a casual gesture around his neck.
Layla rolled her eyes, hoping to distract from the heat rising into her cheeks. “Yes,” she said. “On my honeymoon.”
He snorted. “Well. Unless your ex-husband threw up on you there, I doubt this trip will remind you of that.”
Under his breath, he muttered something.
Somehow, she knew not to ask for clarification.
“It’s a nice place,” she continued instead. “You don’t go in there and buy a cheap backup outfit.”
“I’ll pay. For whatever. An expensive backup outfit.”
“That’s not what I—” The driver blared his horn, cutting Layla off, and then the car slowed to a crawl, packed-tight traffic in the street.
She wanted to take her own patience-gathering inhale, but there was still the matter of her lap.
Ahead, through the windshield, she could see it: the Galeries Lafayette, the jutting front of its entrance on a corner, making it look deceivingly manageable.
But inside, it was vast. Stunning. So beautiful it’d once made a newlywed Layla clutch at her chest in plain, overwhelmed awe.
“What about the dinner?” she said, quietly now, unsure whether Griffin would even hear her. “I promised Emily I’d be there for her; I said I’d—”
“We could not stay on that boat,” Griffin interrupted, as quiet as she had been, but still as effective as any car horn. Grim and final. “We weren’t helping.”
Suddenly, it cut through her, that we.
We, when it had been her.
We’re going.
She could not imagine it was a kindness, not from this man. He must mean something else, something harsh and censuring. We, because you couldn’t be left to your own devices. We, because I had to stop you from somehow making it worse.
“I,” she said, a note of defiance in her voice, and didn’t let the next thing drown. “I wasn’t helping.”
He turned and looked at her, not a sideways glance this time.
Somewhere between the boat and the walk and this car ride, the black hair that had been pushed neatly back from his forehead had gotten mussed, and now a lock of it fell over his brow, like an arrow that directed her right to the dark pools that watched her.
Saw through her.
“We,” he repeated, and before she could ask him what exactly he meant by that, he said it again.
This time in his halting, careful French.
This time, to the driver.
“Nous descendrons ici.”
We’ll get out here.
* * *
In the dressing room, behind a thick, floor-length velvet curtain, Layla tried to appreciate a moment of relative silence.
Outside, the Galeries was still, only thirty minutes from closing, packed with people—tourists, judging by the way they posed for selfies beside luxury brand displays, or crowded along the inner edges of each floor to gape up at the massive dome, to record videos that Layla knew from experience would never quite do it justice.
Experience, as it turned out, had come in handy when she and Griffin had first walked through the building’s glass doors.
She was still mortified to walk into Paris’s most famous luxury department store in a vomit-stained dress, still dreading the fact that this place wasn’t one of the Band-Aids she’d thought to rip off during her walk today.
But once inside, something had shifted between her and the man who’d basically dragged her here: gone was the frustrated haste from the boat, the purposeful determination of the rideshare.
Gone, too, was any trace of that we.
Instead, Layla felt immediately the way he seemed to shrink into himself—hands in his pockets, shoulders hunching against the tide of people on the ground floor, eyes going unfocused in spite of all there was to see.
She wasn’t even sure if he’d yet registered the dome, despite its near inescapability once you were inside.
“Up,” she’d said, and gone for the escalators, instinctively knowing he wouldn’t want one of the elevators, no matter that they were a tourist attraction in themselves.
He’d followed her mutely, seeming to relax slightly once they emerged into the less crowded space of the third floor: women’s fashion, but the sort that didn’t require a second mortgage.
When Layla had first come here—her arm linked with Jamie’s, three hours of gaping at every level—she’d giggled to see a Levi’s display on this floor, a funny American anomaly in a place of such elegance.
If Griffin Testa noticed any familiar brands, he didn’t show it. Certainly not with a giggle.
“I’ll just…pick something,” she’d mumbled, and tried not to notice the way he trailed her, an absent presence, a shadow she tried not to keep checking for.
Now, the curtain separated her from him, but there was no real relief.
Instead, she stood before the floor-length mirror in her underwear, her ruined dress carefully balled into itself on the floor, tied against an unfurling with its straps, her heels set upright beside it.
On the hooks beside her, there hung her two options:
First, a not-all-that-cheap black dress, one that would look fine with her shoes and her purse, fine for slipping on and showing up to the post-boat-cruise restaurant, for waving a hand at the gathered guests and saying, “We took a detour!” and rejoining the party smoothly, maybe even laughingly, as though nothing had happened at all.
And second, a pair of light-wash jeans—Levi’s, even, because she knew how they’d fit—and a lightweight gray sweater, neither of which would work with her heels or her clutch, neither of which would do for rejoining the party, neither of which would do for anything other than going back to the hotel, to admitting that tonight was a total wash, a complete failure that she could not hope to fix.
She could not guess how long she’d been standing here, not picking either one. If Griffin was still out there, he was dead silent. Shadow silent.
What do I do? she thought, blinking at her reflection, suddenly feeling as alone as she’d ever felt in her life.
“Layla,” came a voice from the other side of the curtain, way too familiar to her already, but brand-new, too.
Because he was saying her name. Deep and scratchy. A rasp of rolling thunder, instead of a lightning bolt. It was definitely the first time he’d ever said it.
“Um?” she squeaked back. She was practically naked in here.
“I had someone bring shoes,” he said, not acknowledging the squeak.