Chapter Sixteen
It was the best food he’d ever had in his fucking life.
A plate of roasted Camembert, drizzled with the darkest, thickest honey he’d ever seen, a different taste entirely from what his mother made on the farm, that he and Layla scooped up with slices of crusty, airy baguette.
A piece of sole so thinly sliced it was almost translucent, soaked in brown butter—beurre noisette, the menu said, and he thought it was so good he might write to Rosetta Stone directly; he might tell them that beurre noisette should be an essential phrase for all travelers to France.
A dessert—god, a dessert; he never ate dessert, not in years and years, and no real reason why—that he let Layla order for him, a chocolate soufflé. Lighter than air, lighter than the color of her eyes. Richer than any gold-covered ceiling.
Despite all that, it had not been a night without incident.
In the first place, there was the moment when they first sat down, when he almost lost his nerve—a thousand eyes on him, it felt like, every person in the restaurant turning to look at the monster come down from the tower.
But even after he recovered from that—after Layla leaned forward in her chair and told him about one perfect afternoon she’d had alone in Paris, and after he’d come around to realizing that probably every person in the restaurant was looking at her, her swoop of hair and soft healing hands moving animatedly as she talked, her pale, candlelit V of skin rising and falling with the breaths she took to keep talking—even after that, there were moments of almost-ruination.
A knife cutting across a plate nearby: one of those shrill, unexpected sounds that got Griffin’s wires crossed, his left ear vibrating with it, the shock spreading down his neck and across his scapula in a short but still breath-stealing, shooting pain.
The server too close behind him, squeezing by to get to someone else, and the movement he made to tuck his chair further in—too automatic, too careless, a split second forgetting that he had to be diligent about pressing his left hand on textured surfaces like this woven rattan.
Both times, he tried to hide it. But by this point, with Layla Bailey, there was no going back.
There was the Look at me, after all, and there was also him telling her about never leaving his house, his twelve weeks of trip therapy.
There was her dressed head to toe in his favorite color, doing him this favor of getting him away from the Placketts tonight, of giving Michael a reprieve from managing an unexpected outing with both his parents and Griffin in close quarters.
So, she noticed, a darting flick of her eyes over the parts of him that probably showed it most—his knuckles whitening, his jaw clenching, his brow probably shining.
Six out of ten, his mind supplied automatically.
But blessedly, she hadn’t asked. She hadn’t said a word.
And it made it easier just to talk to her—to talk to her about the sorts of things he imagined regular people, not bell tower people, talked about when they went to restaurants.
The food here, but also the food elsewhere—I tried something like this once in Colorado, or My mother grows Swiss chard.
The art on the walls, or even the proliferation of Edison bulbs—Why are they everywhere?
or a joking What is Big Edison hiding? The street outside, and how different it was from home—the sidewalks so wide, the corners so splashy with their big awnings and lit-up signs above, the random McDonald’s squatting awkwardly in a building that looked like it was made for a prince.
Now, even the squabble they were having over the bill felt normal. Natural.
“I’m the one who invited you,” she said, reaching for the portfolio he’d set his hand on top of as soon as the server placed it on the table, his eyes on Layla’s triumphant.
“It wasn’t so much an invitation. More like a hostage-taking.”
He used her moment of stunned—but still good-natured—outrage to pull the portfolio toward him.
“That is such a lie,” she was saying as he opened it.
Good, a QR code for paying. One of his practice restaurants had used these.
That night, it’d been helpful for getting off the premises before anyone had the chance to see him go into full-blown, sweating meltdown mode.
Tonight, with a couple of taps, he could stop Layla from doing something sneaky like slipping a credit card to the server.
“In fact,” he heard her say as he finished up, and he was possibly smiling, though he could admit that it was a relatively new sensation. He was eager to hear what she would say. Eager, for some reason, to hear how she would scold him over his teasing truth-bending.
“You were the one—” she began, but then, she abruptly cut herself off.
He looked up from his phone. Saw her lips purse, her eyes widen. She was looking at him, but he had the sense that she’d caught sight of something else. That she’d only just looked back at him in panicky shock.
Oh, what the fuck, he thought, immediately on alert, and because of the last two days—the boat, the ballroom—he was on alert for something, someone specific, no matter how unlikely it was in a city of this many people, this many places.
If it’s the ex-husband, he thought, turning his warning gaze to the restaurant entrance, I will tear this entire place to the ground.
I’ll make it so there’s no trace of his infectious presence on this street that belongs only to her.
I’ll make it so there’s no memory of him here that she has to reckon with, even if it means erasing a memory she had with me.
But there was no one familiar at the entrance, and he was both relieved and disoriented, reckoning with those wild thoughts of defending her that came so quick and easy. When he looked back at her—her still-stricken face, reddened now, he was grounded again. He lowered his brow.
“Wha—”
He stopped.
Because he heard a…was that a slurp?
He tilted his head, listening through the din of restaurant noise, louder than any one of those practice restaurants he’d been in, but still—he heard it again.
A slurp, and then a sort of…smacking noise.
He turned his head, the briefest look over his shoulder that he could manage, but if he was being honest, probably not brief enough. Probably one second past polite, not that he had any real sense of what was polite anymore.
In his defense, this was certainly not part of any of his practice runs.
Two people who’d put themselves on the same side of their small table. Their woven chairs pressed tight together, their plates cleared or perhaps not yet come, their wineglasses empty and clearly long forgotten.
So that they could, apparently, focus fully on sealing their mouths as tightly together as they had their chairs.
Except for those brief, head-slanting half seconds where they…
Holy shit, that was so much of a stranger’s tongue he was seeing.
He looked back at Layla. This time, her eyes weren’t on him—they were over his shoulder, watching the couple kiss.
And kiss, and kiss, and kiss. He could tell by the slurping and smacking that it was still going. It was, admittedly, not the best sound to be party to, but even he could tell when two people were lost to themselves—when the feeling was too good for a thing like an accidental sound to matter.
He maybe heard a moan, and that’s when Layla’s gaze returned to him, her cheeks pinker now, the whole bare-skinned V made by her black top a delicate, blushing pink.
It was the slowest, softest way he’d ever been made to feel warm.
The first time in forever that he wasn’t worrying while someone looked at him.
The first time a phantom sensation in his lips wasn’t a pain signal.
Abruptly, she blinked and said, “We should go,” shoving back from the table and starting to stand when she was still on the word go, clearly not making much of a suggestion.
Most times, when he’d seen Layla move, he noticed how careful she was, how graceful and deliberate—the two notable exceptions being that one startled moment on the boat last night, and the stuttering step she’d taken into him for their dance today.
Both times, because of the ex showing up.
His eyes followed her as she rose: her head tipped down, her hair swooping forward, as though she’d commanded it to shield her from seeing any more. For a second, her hands fluttered uselessly—like she was looking for a coat she didn’t have, like she forgot how to pick up the purse that she did.
He followed her slowly. A punishment he couldn’t even admit to himself he was enacting on her—for taking away that warmth, for his lips still tingling pointlessly.
When he stood, pivoting slightly to push his chair in, he couldn’t help but catch sight of the couple again: still at it.
Older than he might have thought, fairly or not: the woman’s hair streaked with gray, the man wearing wire-rimmed glasses that didn’t have a chance of staying on straight with all that slanting, their clothes bland and casual.
Not French, he suspected, but what did he fucking know after only a couple of days.
Wedding rings on them both, plain yellow gold.
He thought, Sorry for staring, not that they seemed to notice, and turned back to catch up to Layla, to the long line of her back retreating from this restaurant.
The warmth in him was something else now. A familiar, frustrated heat: the way he felt when he saw her kneeling on that airplane floor. The way he felt when she opened her hotel room door to him. When she stood up from a table to save a sick woman she had every reason to stay away from.
Out on the street—her street—she turned to the left. Started walking, back the way they’d come, not waiting for him. Not even, maybe, remembering he was fucking there.
Erasing the memory of him from this night.
“Is that what you did?” he said.
Called it to her, practically, since she was steps ahead.
She didn’t stop.