The stoplights changed and Leonidas stepped into the intersection, pausing as a throng of people bustled around them, carrying on and moving forward.
“Are you coming?” Leonidas asked, giving Andy a quick look before continuing across the street.
“Fuck,” he muttered under his breath, stepping off the curb and following behind Leonidas. He caught up to him a few buildings past Le Select, slowing his pace and falling alongside the taller, darker man.
“There you are.” Leonidas offered him another grin, then crossed the street, skittering around a Vespa that had taken the corner a little faster than it should have.
“I’m here,” he confirmed.
“We have quite a walk ahead of us, Andrew. Maybe you should tell me your story.”
4
Leonidas
Andrew was painfullyhandsome and he was so self-aware, but also so…not. Leonidas wanted to let Andrew, or Andy, as he insisted, do extraordinary things to his body. He’d watched the way Andy had tucked his hands away so Leonidas couldn’t see them tremble, but he’d seen it anyway. He and this quiet American were cut from the same cloth, of that he had no doubt.
“Have you been to the gardens at Luxembourg yet?” Leonidas asked as they bypassed Le Guynemer and entered the garden grounds. The air changed quickly, the tall chestnut trees shading the sky. It was going to rain, but at least the canopy of leaves offered some relief from the humid air.
“No.”
“Well…” He gestured grandly. “Here you are.”
Andy looked as disappointed as he had when Leonidas found him scowling at the patrons of Le Select, but he didn’t comment on it. He wasn’t particularly fond of Paris himself, but they liked his money here and he’d found as much pleasure as he could in the city. Leonidas had been in Paris for nearly a month, and he’d found a small apartment to rent above an art studio a few blocks away from the Bastille.
The man who owned the place was old and his spine crooked with age, but he let Leonidas toy around in the studio whenever he wanted and that pleased him greatly. He’d always thirsted for a life like this—a life where he could roam and travel and not be beholden to any place or any man.
His family had more money than he’d ever know what to do with, and hispateraindulged him his jaunts away from home whenever the mood struck him. This round was meant to be Rome, up to Zurich before Paris, then down to Saint-Jean Pied de Port to begin the pilgrimage he’d planned his entire adult life.
Of all the excursions he’d ever wanted to do, this was the one his parents had fought him the most on. His mama mostly hated the idea of him backpacking five hundred miles across the Iberian Peninsula, but he was her youngest and she loathed to tell him no, so she didn’t, and then he’d gone.
Hispaterahad made it sound like this needed to be the last trip, but Leonidas was still a year shy of thirty. The prospect of returning to Greece and returning to work sat heavy in his stomach, so he’d done his best to not think about it. Having Andy here beside him helped a little bit, and that surprised him, though not in a bad way.
He also tried to ignore that.
“There’s a lot of plants here,” Andy observed, and Leonidas couldn’t help but laugh.
“Over fifty acres of them.”
“You an expert?” Andy arched a brow.
“I read the pamphlet when I first arrived in Paris,” he answered.
“And when was that?”
“This time? A month or so.”
“Not your first visit?” Andy stretched his arm out and tickled the dangling leaves of a nearby tree. His hands were no longer shaking, Leonidas noted.
“No.”
“How long are you here for?” Andy glanced over at him and the sunlight sparkled off his amber eyes, then another cloud obscured the rays.
“Until I’m not.” He shrugged. “I’m going to the south of France when I’m done here, then Spain.”
“And after Spain?” Andy asked.
“Home,” he answered with a frown. “At least, that’s what is meant to happen.”
