Chapter Nineteen #2
But there was so much the matter, so much her mind couldn’t let go of.
She was thinking of Emily, quiet in the van, wondering about what secrets Michael might be keeping from her.
She was thinking about Jamie and Samantha at the opera, and why she’d barely been truly thinking about it at all.
She was thinking about the press of tears behind her eyes last night, and how she wanted to call Cara to talk about it, but she’d shoved her phone under the pillow instead, unable to think of how to even begin.
And she was thinking so, so much about Griffin.
She thought she might get a reprieve when she and Rosie caught up—not just to Em and Fitz and Paula, but to the whole group who’d left together this morning: Céline, the only one of them to get an audio guide, standing elegantly by a window, listening intently (“I don’t even need this,” she whispered to Layla, when they’d first walked in.
“I just need a break from Paula.”); Robert and Manon, comfortable in the museum they’d declared “their Parisian favorite!” this morning; Jamie and Samantha beside them, holding hands, Samantha’s head resting on Jamie’s shoulder.
Great, she thought earnestly, fixing her posture, disentangling herself from Rosie to smooth her still-not-wrinkled shirt. A distraction from thinking about Griffin. A reason to put a good face on. Maybe someone will even throw up, and give me something to do.
Of course, then she really looked, and realized what made this a room everyone wanted to dwell in.
“Hot,” Rosie said.
It was The Kiss: big and bone-white in the center of the room, sun and shadow lines cast across two nude figures as they embraced, curling around each other—his huge hand on her hip, her arm curled around his neck, their fused-together mouths hidden by the curve of her shoulder.
Oh no, Layla thought immediately, because there was no way she was hiding her reaction to this. A reaction that was so specific to today—to this morning, to seeing something in the light of the sun that she’d done with Griffin in the dark of last night.
That sculpture was…it was how it had felt, to be kissing Griffin. The two figures looked so beautifully alone atop the great slab of marble, the shape of which was nothing specific, really. A chair or a rock or a cloud, it didn’t matter, because only their kiss mattered.
In this room, in this world, in this universe.
Layla was…she was bereft. That’s how it felt to look at this sculpture this morning.
That’s how it felt to look at it without him.
“Blergh, sorry,” Rosie whispered, and Layla looked over at her, still in the thrall of that kiss, confused and then newly embarrassed. Could Rosie tell; had Layla’s face undone that No! Absolutely not from before; if Rosie could tell, could everyone else—
“With your ex in the room, very awkward,” Rosie said.
Layla blinked. She almost said, Who? but it was only a glitch, a second of being too stuck in a memory of someone else. And because she was out of sorts, she didn’t think to say anything calm and amicable like, Oh gosh, it’s completely fine!
She just snapped her eyes up, across the room, to where Jamie stood.
Which was a critical mistake.
He was looking at her, too, Samantha still by his side, but separated from him now—a slice of space between them that was so deliberate, so respectful and sympathetic, like the look on his face, an expression she’d gotten so accustomed to in those last few months.
In their therapist’s office, in the mediator’s conference room, across the table from her in their condo during quiet dinners when they both already knew it was over, when it was only the didn’t-really-matter details that needed to be worked out.
It didn’t make me think of him, she thought frantically, her words from last night that absolutely wouldn’t work here—not in this lovely room of elegant treasures, everyone subdued and respectful, this…
this monument right in the middle to what people did in secret, to what she and Griffin had done in secret on that street he claimed for himself last night.
“Do you want to duck out?” Rosie said, and the truth was, even the gentlest note of pity from Rosie—truth-telling but still slightly oblivious Rosie—was worse than sympathy from Jamie, or Samantha, or probably every other person from their party who was looking at her now.
She was about to say no. She’d already, in fact, turned back to Rosie and put the placid smile on her lips.
But then someone said, “Emily,” too loud for a museum, and both she and Rosie turned to find Michael striding across the black-and-white tile of the vestibule, crossing beneath the arch into the room where they all stood in this awkward tableau, not even stopping for a second of staring at The Kiss.
He went straight to Emily.
Bent to kiss her. Not like The Kiss, not secret and sensual. A short but serious I’m sorry kiss, which still made Layla ache with longing.
And not for anyone that was in this room with her right now.
“I shouldn’t have stayed back,” Michael said to a soft-eyed, glowing Emily. “Want to start from the beginning?”
Emily beamed, and big-sister Layla was genuinely happy, but also—also, there was that other half of her body, pulling down that middle line, thinking of Griffin.
Where is he?
Is he okay?
Would he like to see The Kiss?
For once, she didn’t really care what everyone thought about what she would do next.
She hoped that their collective attention had been turned, at least, to the couple that this week was truly all about—Michael’s minor grand gesture, and Emily’s clear adoration of it.
But if it wasn’t—if it wasn’t, and they all thought that she’d stared at that sculpture a little too long, too intensely, too longingly, and thought of Jamie—well.
Well, that was fine for now.
“I’m going to go outside,” she whispered to Rosie, and then, without looking at anyone else, she left the room.
* * *
She didn’t find him at first.
She figured—wrongly—that he would’ve started toward the beginning, or at least the beginning according to the path most people followed when they entered.
The rose garden, lush and fragrant, conical shrubberies at its center, surrounding another famed, pedestaled figure: The Thinker.
Layla knew that if she stood just so, facing him head on in his curved, contemplative bronze glory, she would see the top of the Eiffel Tower in the blue sky behind him, like it had sprung from his head as another grand, fully formed idea, all in a day’s work.
But she didn’t stand just so. She kept going, walking too fast for a park this beautiful, for a place dotted with art.
She made it all the way to a grand, circular fountain, a bronze sculpture in the center that looked too cruel to contemplate, and turned back, staying on the westward side of the gardens now, growing more determined.
Ignored faces and bodies carved from stone or cast from bronze and looked instead at every real person she passed and thought, Not Griffin, Not Griffin, Not Griffin.
Finally, she saw him.
Standing alone, perfectly still, in front of a bronze-cast sculpture, onyx-black: three men, naked and huddled together, heads bent awkwardly in, each of them with an arm extended to a center point between them.
For a few seconds, she didn’t move. She thought how odd it was that he stood so alone there, as though everyone milling about—a not insignificant number of people—had looked at him in his all-black, not-bronze glory, and decided to leave him be.
She thought, Should I leave him be? Like he asked me to last night, like he forced me to last night?
As though he heard her ask the question of herself, he shifted his eyes away from the sculpture and looked straight at her.
Nothing so cold as sympathy.
Nothing so simple as I’m sorry.
He kept his eyes on her, and took one deliberate step to the side.
Making room for her beside him.
When she stood next to him, he was already looking again at the figures: eyes up, expression grave, and she felt unequal to the moment, unsure of whether to speak.
She looked in vain for a placard to read, and had a disturbing urge to apologize to Fitz, who maybe was reading, obsessively reading, because he had no idea what to say.
“You’re flushed,” he said, an opening so unexpected—not the least of which because he wasn’t even looking at her—that for a second, she could only stare at his profile.
“It’s warm in there,” she finally said, but honestly, it wasn’t. Not until she’d seen The Kiss.
“Hm.”
Hm?! Her brain shouted back, that one syllable flushing her anew—this time, with anger.
At his reticence and remoteness. At herself for rushing out here, for risking everyone’s attention, everyone’s pity, for thinking there was some reason to come out here and find a person who did not really want to be found.
For looking at something like The Kiss and thinking it had anything to do with her, and him, and all he had to offer was Hm.
“Are you enjoying the gardens?” she said, her voice dripping with politeness, distance, because she knew it was the tone that would make him the most mad.
He didn’t take the bait.
“I wouldn’t say enjoying.”
She scoffed. Of course he wouldn’t be enjoying it. Of course he’d make Michael late and then only drag himself along; of course he’d make the rest of the day more difficult by being aloof and—
“I’m thinking,” he clarified, and there was something so soft in how he said it. It wasn’t closed-off, heavy-brow, bronze-cast thinking.
It was an invitation, as sure as that step to the side.
Everything in her softened again, too.
“About what?”
He shrugged, but it wasn’t dismissive. Just more of that soft contemplation as he kept his eyes up, coursing over the bodies in front of them. She wondered if this is how she’d looked inside, in front of The Kiss. She wondered if she should walk away, and leave him to his thinking.
“Pain,” he finally said.