“Are you staying close by?”
The woman with the diamond ring finally set her phone down and turned her attention to her future husband. She looked as if she was gushing and cooing over him, but her eyes never left the glittering diamond on her left hand. For his part, the weariness of the man’s expression from earlier had slightly waned and he drank up his fiancé’s attention like he was parched and lost in a desert.
“Yes,” he said.
“I’m across the river.” Leonidas tipped his chin toward the northeast.
“What are you doing all the way over here?”
“Looking for lost Americans.” Leonidas’s lips pulled into the smallest hint of a smile, and Andy was certain he’d just been given a gift.
“I’m not lost.”
“Aren’t you?”
Andy had been lost when he left Carrolwood to travel, and he was fairly certain that somewhere between Bali and Prague he’d figured it out, but standing here he wasn’t sure. He knew exactly where he was, though. He could tell you on a map he was less than a kilometer away from Luxembourg Palace and its famous gardens, he could walk northwest and reach the Eiffel Tower in under an hour if he didn’t make any stops along the way, and if he crossed the river Seine to the east, he would be wherever Leonidas was.
“I know where I am,” he corrected.
“And where is that?” Leonidas asked with a delicate laughter to his rich voice.
“Here with you.”
“Very true. Would you like to be somewhere else with me?”
The question was quiet, but he still heard it over the sounds of car engines and horns and laughter, and Andy didn’t know the answer.
That was a lie.
He definitely knew the answer, but he didn’t know the justification, and in this passing moment, he didn’t know if he really needed either.
“You don’t even know my name,” Andy answered.
“Tell me, then.”
This shouldn’t bea thing. Andy had spent almost a month in Berlin. He’d teased and played and fucked his way through the club scene there, then he’d repeated the process in Amsterdam. This man, this stranger—Leonidas—was offering himself up as a sure thing in a line of other European sure things, and yet Andy hesitated. His pause filled him with doubt, uncertainty…all things he hated.
“Andy.”
“A child’s name,” Leonidas countered.
He bristled at the insinuation. “It’s mine.”
“Andrew?” Leonidas tested.
His name sounded robust with the lilt of Leonidas’s accent and he bit back a low growl. He didn’t succeed though, and Leonidas heard it. He huffed out a quiet laugh and then said, “Andrew it is.”
Andy didn’t say anything in reply.
“Where are you off to next, Andrew the lost American?”
There were a thousand answers, a hundred of which would have been suitable, but none of those words were the ones that left his mouth.
“That way, I think,” Andy answered, pointing across the street, toward the river.
“Hmmn,” Leonidas made that pleased humming sound again, and it resonated deep in Andy’s chest. “I hope you like what you find.”
“Enough talking,” Andy snapped, a little testy and a lot concerned about why he couldn’t keep his head on straight.
