The Paris Match

Chapter Twenty-Nine

For the second morning in a row, she woke up in Griffin’s bed.

This time, it was not a slow waking, not sleepy and stretching.

It was more of a snapping to, her breath catching as soon as her consciousness came online.

She sat up quickly with the sense she’d overslept, but when she turned to look out the windows—the curtains undrawn—it was still dark, though after many years of odd hours, Layla knew it was close to dawn.

Soon enough, that sky would turn, casting pastels all over Paris, the only place in the world, she thought, where color looked quite like this.

Beside her, Griffin slept.

He slept.

She could admit, in a dark, selfish corner of her heart, newly discovered to her, that she felt a sense of pride over his slumber—his slack face, his deep breathing, his left hand resting lightly on his abdomen, rising and falling with the movement of his lungs.

I won’t sleep, he’d insisted so many times, during the worst of last night, when it seemed like he would never stop gritting his teeth, when he kept lapsing into short, shallow breaths, when the parts of him that hurt the most seemed to twitch and curl without any intention or purpose.

She hadn’t argued with him about that, of course.

He knew himself; he knew his pain. And she knew it, too—that people with pain like Griffin understood the tides of it the way no one else ever would.

This kind of pain had, she’d thought at one point last night—with no small sense of the irony—its own gravity.

To the person experiencing it, it was its own universe.

But even as she expected to stay up with him all night—to walk, if that’s what he wanted, to wrap the leg again, if that would help, whatever—she also started, around midnight, to see signs of him slowing down, mostly in what he was able to say to her.

Once, he said, “How do you like it in here?” and she looked up at him, confused and concerned.

It would not be good, if he started getting disoriented.

She said, “In your hotel room?”

“In my bell tower,” he answered.

I might not be able to handle this here, she thought. I might need to take him somewhere else.

But he had not been disoriented. If anything, it was the beginning of him slowly coming around.

He stopped pacing back and forth in front of the long bank of windows, and pointed.

Then, he explained to her about the bell tower.

About playing pretend, about the movie he remembered watching with Michael on an Easter weekend a long time ago, about calling his mother the morning they went to Versailles.

You’ll sleep, she thought as she listened.

She thought it again over the next hour, as they stayed near the windows, as they watched the city together in a new way, wandered through it from above.

You’ll sleep, she didn’t say, when he grudgingly agreed to lying down with her—“Five minutes,” she said.

“Just until I fall asleep”—even though, by then, she could see his eyelids growing heavy, his movements growing more careless.

“Go on vacation,” he murmured, maybe four minutes later, and by then she’d learned to wait before assuming disorientation. “You go on vacation, and take care of sick people.”

“You’re not sick,” she said back, and she thought the snort he made in response had a sense of humor in it.

In the end, he was asleep before she was.

Now, assured that he still was, she sank back into the bed, reaching for her phone.

Before she drifted off last night, she’d changed the notification alert for texts on her phone to the same sound her pager app made, determined not to accidentally sleep through anything that might come: from Emily, from any of the MacKenzies, from Rosie, even.

But there had been nothing, and now—only four thirty a.m., to be fair—there was still nothing.

We just have to wait, she told herself, the same thing she told Griff, but it wasn’t so easy now.

She was awake, awake at four thirty, which everyone knew was like a witching hour for worrying about things, your personal laundry list of very stupid things, every insecurity or unsolvable problem or devastating mistake of your life, unless you were up to actually do something.

Without the immediacy of helping Griff, her brain whirred with everything she’d learned in the last few hours, and everything she still didn’t know.

The things Griffin told her…god.

The way Emily must be feeling. The way Michael must be feeling.

Whether he would be able to see what Griffin had done for him.

Whether Emily would.

And even after everything—after that conversation with Griffin in the café yesterday, after realizing, well and truly, that she wasn’t a MacKenzie anymore—the silence of her phone still felt painful, or at least…

revealing. Surely, someone knew something; someone had heard from Em, or Michael, and maybe there had been some kind of consensus about her and Griffin, maybe Jamie told everyone and they all thought…

“Layla.”

Ridiculously, she automatically slammed her eyes shut. Like he was going to scold her for being awake. Like she was actually going to try and fake it.

She opened them again. She said, “Yes?” in a way that sounded extremely prim. Way too prim for being in his bed in nothing but her underwear and one of his excellent, nearly seamless black shirts.

He made that snort again. “I can hear you over there.”

“No, you can’t.”

He made a noise. A doubtful Hm. When he was waking up, the register of his voice was so much deeper, and a deranged vibration settled between her legs. After everything! she scolded herself. It’s not the time!

“What can you hear?” she finally said.

“Your mind.”

The flat tone of it was so unexpectedly funny that she had to press her lips together. Mind over matter, she thought, and almost laughed again.

“Come over here,” he said. In this huge bed, after everything last night, she’d stayed pretty firmly on her own side, worried about disturbing him. No part of her touched him now, and she hated that. But also, she didn’t want to hurt him.

She could hear him shifting in the covers.

“I’m okay,” he said. “Come over.”

What happened next was so…she did not have another word for it other than to say that it was intimate—shifting toward him, saying, Where, the shared knowledge that a moment like this could not be automatic for them, the shame he seemed to let go of, enough that he could say, Not there or Here, put your leg here.

All this for something couples took for granted every night, every morning.

All this for a cuddle.

The best one she’d ever had.

“Does it hurt?” she whispered, when they settled into it.

“No.” He pressed a kiss against the top of her head. She thought the kiss might be him silently adding, It doesn’t hurt enough to stop.

“Nothing from Em,” she said.

He didn’t say anything for a long time. She knew it was for Michael, that silence. She knew it was so heavy on him.

“We just have to wait,” he finally replied. “Like you said.”

She nodded, but she thought now they were both in the four thirty a.m. thick of it, picking through their individual laundry lists.

“Layla,” he said again.

“Sorry,” she answered this time. “I’m—”

“Roll over,” he said gruffly. “On your back.”

“Oh! Sorry, am I—”

“No,” he answered, then he shifted, moving more swiftly than she was anticipating, and in a second she was on her back, Griffin leaning on his right elbow over her.

Beneath the sheet, his left hand moved; he found the hem of her—his—shirt, and she thought, Oh, thank god.

Thank god he can touch that fabric so easily, that he can push it up over my stomach, that he—

“Help me out,” he said, when he had the shirt pushed up enough to expose her breasts, and yes, she was so glad he asked; he would have to get used to asking her things like this; she would have to get used to anticipating it—

She cut off that train of thought, that get used to.

She lifted herself enough to take off the shirt, felt his palm settle against her sternum, pressing her down again.

She was already breathing hard, already desperately wet—the worry, the intensity of everything, the temptation to think about getting used to him—all of it short-circuited her, driving a need for a release.

“Is this okay?” she said, but when he answered, his mouth was already on her right breast, a muffled Mm-hmm that intensified the sensation of his wet sucking.

He stayed there for so long—alternating between her breasts, leaving a mark at one point, she was certain; he stayed through all the times she begged him to do something else—to let her come, to please let her come—as though he would not indulge her until he was sure, completely sure, that he had destroyed her laundry list, every single item on it.

He stayed until she maybe did not know what a list was, until she was disoriented, unsure of any place in the world except the expanse of this bed.

And then he finally, finally lowered his head and licked right through the center of her, one time and she was coming—so quick it would have been humiliating except that he simply kept going, as though he had moved on from her list and was now hell-bent on destroying his own, eating her even as she knew he had also reached down to touch himself, groaning into her as his own pleasure crested, and as she came again—fast and forceful this time, obliterating.

Distantly, she felt him move over her, felt the warm wetness of his release on her abdomen, felt him finally flatten himself beside her on his back, out of breath and she thought—she hoped—sated.

“I’ll get up,” he said. “One minute.”

She reached back, grabbed for the shirt. Shoved it beneath the sheets and cleaned herself off.

He chuckled.

“You have so many, what does it matter?” she said, and he laughed again, then quieted. A serious quiet that settled over them, as sure as the sheets on their bodies. Outside, the sky was growing lighter and lighter. Pink-purple, Paris dawn.

“Thank you,” he finally said. “For last night.”

She turned her head, looked over at him.

She wanted to say something like, What if it wasn’t just last night?

but that wasn’t right; she knew it wasn’t quite right.

She wasn’t trying to say that she wanted him to have more nights like that, or that it had been good or interesting or even rewarding to care for him that way.

She wanted to say, Just so you know, last night sucked, but I do not care. I would never care. A million more nights like that, and I don’t think I would ever care.

But maybe that wasn’t right, either. Maybe it was too big for only knowing him as long as she had. Too big for only minutes after having her mind blown by him again, and probably only a few hours from finding out whether this wedding had been blown apart.

So she would try saying it smaller. She whispered his name, barely more than an exhalation. A test, maybe. A question.

“Griff?”

The pause was so long she thought he might not have heard.

But he finally said, “Yeah?” in that rough voice, rougher now from his breathlessness.

“I would do it again,” she said, and as it turned out, when she said it, she realized it wasn’t small at all.

It was not last night: It was this whole week that she would do again; it was maybe even every single thing, good and bad, that got her to this week in the first place.

She would do it again. Get scolded by him on the plane, get shocked to her core to see him again.

Get dragged off a boat, get danced with in a garden ballroom.

Get kissed in a doorway, get left alone in a rideshare, get her cracked heart patched up while looking at a piece of art.

Get lost with him in Paris. Get found for who she really was.

Everything, she would do again.

She stayed still, flat on her back and naked beneath the sheet, now not touching him at all. It was scary, but she knew already that she didn’t regret it.

He moved his hand, sliding it across the expanse of mattress between them. Taking hers, and twining their fingers together.

“I would, too.”

It was no kind of vow, not that she wanted one. Not that she was sure whether she would ever want one of those again.

But it was something. Something beyond this week. Beyond whatever happened today.

And that’s when her phone—newly set with its pager-sound notification—blared its intrusion into the room.