God, how many times have I wished that I could cry? When the pain wells up, along with the loneliness and the feeling of missing Momso hardand then right behind it, the knowledge that I didn’t even know her when she was alive and that she never got the chance to know me.
The fact that the tears have chosen tonight, of all nights, to overflow is incomprehensible to me.
Why? Why do I care about any of this?
I love Paris, yes, but it’s not like it loves me back. I’ve had great food here, yes. Made a wonderful friend and now had great sex, but that’s not enough to keep me in this place. Is it?
Is it?
Great sex.
My forehead thunks against the cold glass and my vision goes totally blurry until I have to shut my eyes to squeeze the tears out and it’s only the sound of a door slamming somewhere below that drags me out of this sappy mire of emotion.
It’s Christmas doing this to me. And the late night. And feeling like a hamster on a wheel of my own creation.
But I like my wheel.
Don’t I?
My mind skips over the next few months. I’ll be in Milan and then Athens and then I don’t know. Someplace else. Busy. Different. Fun!
I blink out at a lone figure walking down the alley, just a dark silhouette hunched against the cold. I shiver just thinking of how freezing it must be out there and that makes me think of the bone-deep chill in the elevator. And then how hot it got once we touched.
There’d also been the still and the quiet.
The closeness.
I don’t think I ever felt that before tonight.
A tear escapes the corner of my eye and slides down my cheek and, rather than sit here questioning everything that I am, I pull the curtain closed on the city’s eerie pink light and crawl back into bed.
Tomorrow, I won’t feel this weight on my chest. Tomorrow, it’ll be ancient history. Or a dream.
I wish that didn’t make me feel so sad.
CHAPTERSIXTEEN
Colin
An hour later, I’m standing in the Place de la Bastille, out of breath and hope.
I stare up at the Colonne de Juillet, the Génie de la Liberté statue floating atop it, all tarted up in fresh gold, with its tiny todger and wide wings, the whole thing tipped with an actual bloody star, like the Christmas tree I still haven’t managed to locate.
It shouldn’t be that hard, should it? Finding a tree? I know I’ve never once tried and I’m ridiculously late, given that it’s now four o’clock on Christmas morning, but the fated miracle feeling tricked me into thinking—
“Eh, qu’est-ce que tu fous là, toi?” A familiar voice asks me what I’m doing here.
I turn and see Raf, the man who sells chestnuts outside my pub. I can’t believe I saw him just last evening. Feels as though a lifetime has passed between the two.
“T’es perdu?”
I shake my head. “Not lost. Just…found myself too late, I suppose.”
Raf, being French and a pragmatic man to begin with, doesn’t bother asking what the hell I’m going on about or whether I’ve lost more than my sense of self in the last few hours. Instead, he looks pointedly around us at the empty roads, the darkened brasseries, and shuttered shops, their Christmas lights still twinkling cruelly from within. “Trop tard? No, it’s never too late, my friend. Not in Paris. Not tonight. Do you need help?”
Not believing for a moment that we’ll find it, I tell him what I’d hoped to do. He nods at a pile of electric scooters, dumped a few meters away. “Can you rent us a couple of those?”
I nod, pulling up the app.
