Chapter Fifteen #2
But it was Cara again, short and simple.
And Layla?
Yeah?
Have a great fucking time out in Paris tonight.
* * *
Luckily, the heels were comfortable.
Not flats comfortable, not clogs-for-the-hospital comfortable, but night-out-in-Paris comfortable.
Good-with-her-outfit comfortable. Black velvet, block heel, a little platform.
An open toe, and thank god she’d had a (neutral) pedicure before coming.
When she got into the mirrored elevator again, she thought of herself two nights ago, dressed in demure blue.
Now, she thought she looked like the better part of a bruise.
He was waiting when she emerged: in the lobby like he had been this morning, but this time, standing.
Staring toward the glass doors, hatless, and he’d shaved since she last saw him.
Clearly, his outfit had not taken any additional planning time, because it was, as usual, all black: shoes, pants, one of those soft-looking long-sleeved shirts again.
But it didn’t seem so remote to her now. It didn’t seem so rudely lazy.
It seemed like they matched.
“Hello,” she said, when she got close, trying to close an imaginary fist around every single one of those pesky butterflies in her belly.
At least one—at least one—still flapped wildly when he turned to look at her.
He did not return her hello, but she felt his roaming eyes like a greeting anyway. Top to open-toe, and then back up, lingering, for the most perfect few seconds.
First at the V.
Then at the bow on her hip.
She was probably pink all over.
“I picked a place,” she said, or possibly blurted, but that was better than simply standing there, blushing under his black gaze.
When he didn’t say anything, she started to wonder whether there was still time for him to cancel—whether he’d met her here to tell her in person, whether she’d end up watching him walk out those doors alone again.
She shifted in her heels.
Then she saw that little quirk at the corner of his mouth, the one from earlier today.
The Versailles quirk, is how she thought of it. The Maybe I’ll tell you when we’re somewhere more honest quirk.
“That’s my favorite color,” he said.
* * *
The restaurant was on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, cozy and small, with an orange-and-white-striped awning jutting cheerfully out from the building’s Haussmann facade, the big-windowed, iron-balconied floors above dotted with planter boxes of trailing ivy and bright flowers, some better maintained than others.
Square, wood-topped tables were arranged neatly under the awning, tiny bud vases of wildflowers in the center, or shoved to the side of diners’ plates and glasses.
On the street, smaller round tables spilled out more haphazardly, some pushed together, surrounded by smoking patrons who leaned back in their woven café chairs, effortless and unbothered and so enviably used to a night like this, in a place like this.
She had not picked somewhere she had been before, because nearly every place in Paris she had been to before was weighted with the memory of Jamie, and their honeymoon, and because this was the first time since she’d arrived on Monday that she had the chance to be truly free of it—no Emily to protect, no ex-husband not to look at, no former family to make feel comfortable—she wanted, at least, to eat somewhere new.
But she had picked a place that was on a street she loved, and felt some attachment to as an individual.
On her trip here with Jamie, there’d been one afternoon they spent apart—him, completely exhausted by their morning at the Louvre (I’ve just been so many times, he’d said) and desperate for a nap, and her, wired from the newness of it all, absolutely incapable of imagining sleeping during the day when there was so much to see.
They’d agreed that he’d get his nap, had kissed goodbye at the Place du Carrousel, and Layla made her way across the bridge that shared its name, a guidebook in her hands that she hadn’t had the chance to use much, not when she was with Jamie.
On her own, she’d been comfortable being a cliché.
She went to the Café de Flore; she waited too long for a table and ordered a hot chocolate; she snapped a photo of the white cup with its cursive writing; she sat and read her guidebook—specifically, she read her guidebook about the very place where she was sitting.
She thought that Saint-Germain was Paris: stylish with its luxury shops and uniformly beautiful buildings, but also subversive—coffeehouses where Albert Camus and James Baldwin wrote, where Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre thought and talked and argued, where Picasso probably stared weirdly at women he’d eventually turn into painted cubist nightmares.
She loved that afternoon she’d spent on this street, all alone. Alive and curious and adult, but with the comfort of knowing she had her new husband to go back to.
With Griffin, she felt it all still.
Well. Minus the comfort, of course.
Once they were seated—outside, under the awning, not that anyone asked their preference—Layla noticed that the symphony of her nervousness, which had quieted somewhat on the walk over, was roaring back in a new key as his eyes tracked around the space: the interior of the restaurant on the other side of the glass, the street across the way, lined with a few flower vendors, the other diners in various stages of their meal.
She realized how much she wanted him to like it.
Not because she needed his approval, or his praise for picking something good and interesting and not-too-cliché.
But because she wanted him—after the way he’d helped her today, and after that awful, awkward exchange with Michael’s parents—to enjoy himself.
To feel comfortable.
He shifted in his seat. Tapped a finger lightly against the cloth-wrapped roll of his silverware, as though he was wondering whether he should unwrap it, or give up altogether and leave without saying a word.
She almost said, Are you okay? but before she could open her mouth to ask a question that she knew now, from a couple of days of experience with him, would not go over well, he blurted—no possibility about it—definitely blurted, “Let’s talk about something.”
Her brow lowered in confusion. “Talk about what?”
“Anything,” he answered quickly. “Your favorite food. Where you went to college. Why so many places have these weird Edison bulbs hanging everywhere now. Why you picked this place. What you’re going to order.”
She blinked at him. In his eyes, there was something wild—like the plane, like the first night on the elevator, maybe a little like the boat last night.
Not like the walk over here, when he’d been seemingly calm—his steps slowed to match hers, his occasional harmless and sometimes even bluntly amusing commentary (Honest to fucking god, could they be consistent about where they put these street signs?
; Whose job do you think it is to cut all the trees into this shape?
; The trash can placement in this town is inexplicable.).
“Are you having a panic attack?” she asked.
“Not yet,” he answered quickly. Starkly.
For a few terrible seconds, her mind went completely blank of everything except all the questions she absolutely couldn’t ask in this situation: How often do you have these, when did they start, does this have to do with your scars, are you agoraphobic, do you take any medication or illicit drugs, does Michael know?
She tried desperately to grab on to the questions he’d posed to her, but it was like she’d never eaten food in her whole life, like college was memory-holed, like Edison bulb was a phrase that might as well have been the rarest French slang—
“Because I never came here with him,” she said finally, and she watched as his wandering, panicked eyes darted back to hers. She wanted to hold them there. “This restaurant, which—well, I’ve never been here before, but also…this street. This street…it feels like it’s mine.”
“How?” he said, and two days ago, his voice would’ve sounded cutting to her. A slice through all her halting pauses.
Now, it sounded desperate.
So, she told him. First, about the morning at the Louvre: not the parts where Jamie trailed her, bored but indulgent, but instead about her favorite piece (the Winged Victory of Samothrace, not in any way a letdown, even if you’d seen it in pictures a hundred times), her biggest disappointment (the Mona Lisa, small and huddled behind a pack of clamoring tourists with selfie sticks), and her biggest surprise (Death of the Virgin, Caravaggio, huge and dark and sad, punishingly but beautifully secular).
Then, about the Boulevard: the shops she’d passed, the Café and its cursive-branded cups, its intellectual history.
She even told him about her dog-eared guidebook, the way she’d read it at that café table as though it was a novel, not caring if anyone at all thought it was embarrassing.
At one point—maybe when she was talking about the shops and their careful window displays—she thought dimly about whether she sounded silly, or naive—uncultured and overawed about an experience from a decade ago.
But she shoved the doubt away, because the main thing was, this—her talking—was working.
Griffin was listening, looking at her steadily and a little too intensely at first, until she could sense him settling slowly, the look in his eyes less wild, his head nodding, sometimes, in understanding or encouragement.
When he finally unrolled his napkin and smoothed it over his lap, she had to concentrate on keeping at it, adding detail. On not letting him know what she was noticing.
And when he ordered a drink from the server—only sparkling water, but still, that was something; that was a commitment to this—Layla had to try so hard not to smile in winged victory.
“Thank you,” he eventually said, right when she was starting to run out of material about that one afternoon in Paris that felt uniquely hers.
She looked up from the menu she hadn’t really started to read yet. She’d been letting her eyes course over the French words she recognized, hoping that any one of them might jog an additional memory that she could offer up for him.
“When I said I don’t get out much,” he continued, “I was maybe not being completely honest.”
She cocked her head slightly. Tried for a Versailles quirk. Something clever and casual to keep him at ease. “You get out a lot, then?”
His mouth curved, but it didn’t last. He cleared his throat, reaching for the sparkling water, his hand clutched too tight around the glass as he brought it to his lips. When he set it down again, she suspected that they’d both steeled themselves for what was coming next.
“I haven’t left New York in almost twelve years,” he said. “Upstate,” he added almost immediately. “That’s where I’m from, originally. Not the city.”
“I didn’t think the city,” she said, which was not the most sensible response, but somehow, it felt important to say: an acknowledgment of something she had observed about him, knew about him without him having to tell her.
Griffin Testa had never once struck her as a man who managed himself in New York City, of all places.
“Mostly I stick to my own house. My mother’s, sometimes, when she needs something.
I do my own errands, but at specific times.
To specific places. At night, I go for walks a lot.
It used to freak people out, around where I live, which isn’t the sort of place you can be anonymous, but they’re used to it now.
Also I built a gym in my garage. Put a shed out back, heating and cooling and everything.
When I do work, I do it from back there. ”
He paused—another reach for and sip of his water. She could tell he wasn’t quite done, so she waited, her menu in her lap, leaning against the table’s edge, long forgotten.
“I did twelve weeks of therapy to get ready for this trip. I ate out four times. Four different restaurants. Two in different towns. Once with the fucking therapist, if you can imagine anything more uncomfortable.”
Sympathy, she knew instinctively, would be exactly the wrong move here.
“My ex-husband’s new girlfriend threw up on me last night,” she said.
He smiled. No teeth, but a bigger curve.
“So,” he said. “Now you know. That’s why the—” He broke off, made a dismissive gesture with his hand that she supposed was meant to account for the almost–panic attack, the need for her to talk. “Because I don’t leave my house much. I don’t ever travel.”
She nodded. Did not look at him for her next question.
“Do you want to tell me about why not?”
She kept her eyes on her menu, making an effort to look in earnest at the dishes now. She hoped his therapist hadn’t done this exact thing. She hoped this night felt different to him.
“Do you want to tell me about your divorce?” he eventually responded.
She blinked up at him. Kind of, she thought, but she shook her head.
No, she tried to tell him with her eyes. Not tonight. Not on this street, which was always entirely mine.
He picked up his menu, put his eyes on it. Not in a disappointed or dismissive way. Somehow, in a way that seemed as though he understood her—her and this street—completely.
“Maybe you’ll tell me,” he echoed idly, after a few seconds of silence, while they both, she suspected, pretended to peruse the options.
He didn’t have to finish the sentence.
The quirk of his mouth finished it for him.