Chapter Thirteen
“Michael, you have to see this part,” Emily said, her voice breathless with excitement.
Layla watched, restless but grudgingly pleased, as Emily linked her arm through Michael’s and tugged gently, leading him along the thin, delicately draped rope that separated their small, spread-out party from the garish display arrayed before them.
Marie Antoinette’s bedroom.
God, there was so much gold everywhere.
On the headboard, in the bedspread, all over the canopy. On the curved arms of the fussy chairs flanking the bed, on the wainscoting and wallpapering, in the two gigantic chandeliers that hovered symmetrically down from—you didn’t even have to guess it—gold sculptural carvings in the ceiling.
“That’s the door,” Emily was saying to Michael, “that she escaped through on the night the palace was invaded!”
“Too bad,” muttered a low voice from beside Layla, close enough to keep her in the same semi-electrified state she’d been in since this morning.
Since she’d been being friends with Griffin.
Looking at him so no one would be looking at her.
They met in the hotel lobby this morning, a few minutes before Michael and Emily’s careful itinerary had suggested: That way, when the rest of the party arrived to set off on their grand Versailles adventure, Layla and Griffin could already be carefully arranged on one of those weird sofas, feigning an amiable, casual chat, two friends forged from an unexpected derailment the night before.
We’re so sorry we never made it back for the dinner!
they would say—or, rather, Layla would say, since despite this entire ruse being Griffin’s idea, he clearly had no meaningful experience at making excuses for himself—We got caught up trying to find me something different to wear, and then one of my shoes broke, and then we figured we wouldn’t make it in time for the restaurant reservation…
She hadn’t really needed the excuses: Their very presence was enough to please Robert and Manon endlessly (“Oh, we were so worried!”), to unite Emily and Michael in sagging relief, to even have Jamie and Samantha offering sheepish words of apology to them both (“It was completely fine, I promise,” Layla said gently, to a still-wan-looking Samantha, while Griffin had managed a gruff, practically clenched-teeth “No problem”).
She would’ve liked to be able to say, That won’t work, your minimalist No problem; she would have liked to have been able to tell him that his acting skills were far too subpar—nonexistent, really—for this new plan to support Michael and Emily to ever have a hope of working.
But the problem was, it was, apparently, No problem.
Because everyone seemed to be buying it.
Everyone seemed to be doing better.
They sat together on the train out of Paris—forty minutes that Layla thought she’d have to tick off like acts of torture she’d survived—but it had passed unexpectedly quickly, and not because she’d done a bang-up job of fake chatting with her fake new friend.
Instead, it had been Griffin to start the conversation, if it could be called that.
First, he asked her bluntly, “Have you been to this place?” nodding in something like smug approval when she answered, truthfully, that she had not.
Then, he had simply turned his phone into a bizarrely effective intermediary—his head tipped down for a few minutes at a time before passing it to her, the screen lit and stopped on some weird, detail-oriented fact about the very place they were about to visit.
Twenty miles of pipes for the largest fountain.
Twelve hundred fireplaces. Too many flowers and trees for many of its original guests to handle, overwhelmed and sickened by pollen allergies brought on by the sheer excess.
“You know,” she’d said at one point, after maybe two back-and-forth passes, the warmth from his phone an oddly intimate transfer from his skin onto hers, “they probably have one of those headset tours. For all these facts.”
“Can’t wear a headset,” he’d said, gesturing vaguely toward one side of his face—the scarred side—and taking his phone again, going right back to scrolling through results. No further explanation on offer.
It had very effectively kept her from asking any more questions about this weird ritual they were doing together, and also, oddly enough—in spite of his refusal to explain—made her feel less like he was faking it as her friend.
And while she waited for whatever he’d show her next, she would catch snippets of the pleasant, unstilted conversation from the rest of their party—Rosie chatting with Robert and Manon about wanting to adopt a cat this year, Jamie telling Abram about work, Céline explaining to Samantha why it was a crime not to have seen the Sofia Coppola Marie Antoinette.
Michael and Emily, leaning into each other, looking decidedly less stricken.
Just like they did now.
“They’re good,” Layla said, keeping her eyes on the pair, even as she spoke to the man beside her, the one she was supposed to be looking at. Michael was, of course, not looking at the door through which Marie Antoinette escaped. He was looking at Emily, a soft, adoring smile on his face.
“This is good for them,” she added.
Griffin made a noise, something like Hm.
Not a note of agreement.
She couldn’t help but turn her head to look at him.
She’d noticed, over the course of the day so far, that he always stayed next to her on the same side, the unscarred plane of him always facing her, even if it required him to sidestep, to reposition himself.
She wanted to say, “It doesn’t bother me, you know,” which would be a very mild expression of what she actually thought about his face, but also, she figured that the problem was that it bothered him.
That he probably wouldn’t believe her, even if she told him what she did actually think. That she could probably be doing one of those awestruck faces that Michael was pulling right now, just at the sight of his stern, set brow line.
“You don’t think so?” she said.
He shrugged, and she suspected, like on the train again, he wouldn’t clarify. But eventually, he spoke, quietly, keeping it a secret between them. “Not the sort of place for honest feeling, is it?”
She blinked at him, instinctively knowing what he meant.
But also not knowing what to say.
“Distracting place,” he added. “Mirrors everywhere. Little mysteries, like that door in the wall.” He flicked a hand dismissively at the scene in front of them. “All this gold-covered shit.”
Yes! she wanted to say. It’s too much, right?
It’s not even pretty to look at! Part of her felt desperate to recap the range of feelings she’d had over the last hour and a half, since they’d passed through the entry gates: over-warm in the particularly crowded spaces, overwhelmed by the relentless excess, frustrated by the endless space, the endless stuff.
Another painting, another candelabra, another sculpture: everything, eventually, becoming oddly indistinguishable.
But also, she was prickling with annoyance at the way he was bursting her lone bubble of comfort: her feeling that today was going so much better, that the visual assault of Versailles was uniquely suited to stop her from being an Is she looking at Jamie?
sideshow, that Emily and Michael looked like they were having fun, like they were going to be perfectly fine.
So she said, “Isn’t this, like—the decor of your people?”
He slid his eyes toward her, narrowing them slightly.
“Let me guess. Someone told you I’m rich.”
She snorted. “Someone told me you’re a billionaire.”
He laughed.
He laughed.
A short laugh, but still: a huff of air out, a rasp of the lowest register of his voice escaping through the flash of his straight, white teeth, which Layla had never gotten a good look at.
She felt, for a second, like one of the hideous, heavy chandeliers had fallen directly onto her head.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Michael’s face turn toward them—as though even from several steps away, with several sets of people milling between them, he could hear Griffin’s laugh, too.
“You’re…” She trailed off, temporarily stuck on the wrong completion of this sentence.
You’re even more handsome when you laugh. You’re like a secret door in the wall. You’re an electrical storm in my spine.
“…not?” she eventually got out, hoping she didn’t sound too breathlessly curious.
He wasn’t smiling anymore, not really. But on that side of his face he let her see, there was still a different set to his mouth, a slight quirk. He’d put his eyes back on the big billionaire bed, but somehow, it still seemed as though he was side-eyeing her.
“That’s what all the at least I have a job stuff is about, I guess,” he said after a few seconds.
Her cheeks warmed. She had said that a couple of times. If it wasn’t true, she supposed she should be embarrassed. Then again, her threshold for being embarrassed on this trip was now absurdly high. At least he wasn’t considering moving hotels because of her. At least he hadn’t thrown up on her.
At least she wasn’t lying crushed beneath an ugly chandelier.
“So you’re not a billionaire,” she said.
“No.”
That quirk again. A little line in his cheek, as interesting as any one of his scars.
“And you do have a job.”
He didn’t answer. Just kept the quirk, kept staring at every ugly thing in this ugly room inside this ugly palace.
“You know,” she said, surprised at the jokey, casual note to her voice. Surprised at how comfortable she sounded. Like they weren’t faking anything at all. “A friend would tell me.”
He made the noise again—the Hm from before, but deeper this time, and all sense of jokey, casual comfort fled from her body. Maybe it was only a simple, more contemplative Hm, but something about it—Layla thought it sounded, somehow, like a promise.
Like a noise someone would make right against your skin before they kissed it in exactly the right way. Exactly the way you always wanted.