Chapter Twenty
He wouldn’t say they abandoned Michael and Emily.
He wouldn’t say they ran.
But the truth was, from the second he admitted to Layla Bailey—to himself—what it felt like to kiss her last night, he didn’t figure either of them wanted to think all that much about their respective reasons for being in Paris right now.
In the shadow of those three shades, she looked at him, alive and pink-cheeked, her eyes on him interested and hopeful and free of what he feared most from her: disgust or remorse or pity.
She said, “Do you want to get out of here?”
And yeah.
He fucking did.
He wanted her to be the only reason he was here today.
He wanted to find a way to fix what he’d broken in her last night.
As they made their way out of that sculpture garden and back out onto the street, they were quiet—awkwardly so, a sort of what have we done quiet that made them stand too far apart, their footsteps sounding too loud beneath them, their eyes on anything but each other.
For him, it had to do with trying to shake off those hulking bronze doors they’d left behind, the gates to the hell he’d described to her.
He thought he could feel it biting at his heels, the monstrous voices of those sculptures calling out to him about how he shouldn’t have told her all that, shouldn’t have opened the door far enough to let her see anything, even only a slice of it, how if she only knew the whole, horrible thing about his pain and why he had it, she would change her mind about him.
For her, he suspected it was something else.
On the corner outside of the sculpture garden, she slowed her steps, staring ahead at the huge golden dome he and Michael had passed on the way here, another museum—this one, some old military hospital that was the group’s next stop on the itinerary after a lunch break (“Em thought my dad would like it,” Michael had said in the car, his voice tinged with regret, his leg bouncing with his restless need to get back to her).
Layla looked at that gold dome like she owed it an apology.
He thought, with a rising sense of dread, that she was about to change her mind.
But she only said, “We should probably text them and let them know.”
So, they did. Both of them, separately, sliding out their phones.
No coordination of the messaging, which was either risky or genius.
Griffin typed to Michael, Turns out, I can’t, which was both not true and also not a lie, and because Michael was Michael, he’d written back, No problem, man. Take it easy today.
Layla took longer—her thumbs hovering over her screen for a few seconds, her lower lip tucking in on one side where she must have been nibbling on the inside of her cheek. He almost said, Don’t do that, almost set his thumb against that plush curve to tug it back to safety…to maybe kiss her again.
God, he wanted to kiss her again.
But then she started typing—fast, determined, not particularly brief. By the time she sent it, Griffin could see it was a rectangle of text she was sending along, nothing so short as I can’t.
He held his breath, waiting for her to put the phone away again, torn between wondering what that long message said and wondering what they’d do next.
“I don’t have a plan,” she said, her tone almost defiant as she put her phone back in her purse, not waiting for a response from, he assumed, Emily. “I had plans, before. For different days. Or…different times of days, when I thought I’d be alone. But I don’t have a plan for this.”
This, she said, a casual wave of her hand between them, but he supposed he was still breathing out the relief of not having to go back into that other place, where that terrible door was.
Because when Layla said this, he heard it like it was a whole different door, creaking on its rusty hinges, opening back into heaven—a thin crack of light he wanted to spend his whole day working his way into, at least until the dark took him back again.
He said, “We don’t need one.”
* * *
It was an old confidence that made him say it.
Not a good confidence, not always, but he couldn’t deny that saying things similar to We don’t need one had, in the past, made for some transformative moments in his life.
We should try this, to a classmate in a group project at Rensselaer; I could draw that, to the professor who eventually became his business partner; It’ll work, to a team of investors who were all at least twenty years older than him.
He could see now that something about Layla Bailey brought it out in him: her on the airplane floor, her hotel room door. A river cruise, a department store, a garden ballroom.
A kiss on the street, and a sculpture that said too much about him.
She made him want to do things.
He was always doing things, ever since he first saw her.
But this time—with the whole entire day and the whole entire city open to them, with last night’s bad decisions still haunting his body—his confidence pretty quickly abandoned him.
Sure, he was pretty good—pretty practiced—at walking without a real plan, like he’d done last night after he’d left her, but that was more…
that was kind of a stomping and breathing situation. A fully alone situation.
With her by his side, with her hurt from last night still so close to the surface, he’d need to do something different.
It helped that, at first, she struggled, too.
“I had this spreadsheet,” she said, still sounding kind of stunned, after only a block or so of him pretending to lead them somewhere specific. “I could pull it up on my phone.”
“No phones,” he said, which was not really a demand you could meaningfully make of another person in the twenty-first century, especially in a city you didn’t live in, but she didn’t object.
And so they came to an unspoken agreement.
A slower pace, a lack of direction, no real meaningful knowledge of any one thing they looked at.
He thought it felt like training, like two puppies on a walk, a long leash letting them wander a little, but no running wild, their bodies always close.
Can we stop here? one of them would say, and the answer was always Yes.
Can I look at this? Do you smell that? Do you want to try one of these? Should we go over there?
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Like that, they were aimless. They got buttery, folded-over crepes from a place with dark red walls and wood crates mounted behind the register, filled with bottles of wine and oils and jars of jam.
They took side streets, avoiding thoroughfares, occasionally coming across a perfectly framed view of part of the Eiffel Tower between buildings that neither of them took pictures of.
They crossed a mostly nondescript bridge over the Seine, swapping a knowing smile as they both tracked a huge, slow boat filled with people on the top deck.
They went into bookstores, English and French, into shops with macarons and pastries and chocolates that might as well have been museums for the way they were filled with edible art; they sat in front of a giant sculpture of a hand holding what looked to Griffin like limp, half-formed balloon animals.
They went into a massive domed building with columns and finials and winged figures over an imposing arched doorway, flanked with gold, and Layla laughed at how he said, “This is the Petit one?” and then they didn’t even look at any of the place’s obvious treasures anyway; they just drifted to a courtyard with palm trees that seemed to belong to a whole other world, and Layla made Griffin try the too-sweet hot chocolate she ordered from the café there, more whipped cream than cocoa.
She broke the no-phone rule, but only to photograph the floor beneath them—tiny tiles turned into swirls and diagonals.
Later, they walked by a line of people on a pristine street, and Layla—bolder by then, more openly curious by then—asked someone what it was for.
Another museum, of course another museum, this one about clothes, and he watched her expression transform with interest, so yeah, he took out his fucking phone for that—two tickets with a few taps, even though they had to wait two and a half hours to come back for their own line-up time.
But there was plenty more wandering to do anyway. Window displays, cheese shops, produce stands, places where you could stop and say, This is so different from home, but still feel oddly comforted to see a plain old banana in a city as beautiful as this.