Chapter Twenty-Four
At first, Griffin thought Montmartre seemed designed for one thing.
Pain.
He could appreciate that he was operating at a significant disadvantage. The regular ones for him, but also—more so—the morning-after ones. It was his legs and feet, sore from all the walking, but it was also the sleepy fatigue, a sort he wasn’t used to. Usually, when Griffin’s body got overtired, his brain got wired—hyper-focused on whatever hurt, hyper-alert to every sensation, so much so that he would sometimes avoid simple, necessary things. He’d think,If I eat, I’ll have to chew, and there’s that one spot on my jaw sometimes.All the thinking, all the vigilance—it would make him more tired, but still not sleepy tired, and the day would go on like that until the whole system shut down, and he’d sleep in a deadened, unsatisfying way, waking up with a feeling like a hangover.
This morning, though, Griffin was tired like someone had dropped a veil over him, like he’d never been hyper-anything. He’d woken—woken!—on his side, with a note beside him, Layla’swriting. A messy scrawl, same as every doctor whose writing he’d ever seen, but he liked it. It didn’t say anything likehypertrophicorescharotomyornerve compressionorautologous fat grafting.
It said,I had to go for the spa morning. I set your alarm for you.
Then, a small, uneven heart—as if, halfway through, she’d doubted the sanity of putting it there. He stared at that heart until his lids drooped, and then, who knew how long after, he’d woken again to a sound he didn’t think he’d ever heard his phone make.
He moved through getting dressed with the veil, made his way to the lobby with the veil, answered Michael’s quiet, concerned queries with the veil. The veil was made of that bed upstairs, of Layla’s scent lingering in it, of everything he kept remembering from the day and night before.
He did not want to take the veil off.
But then, everyone else finally made it to the lobby: Fitz, looking upright and already annoyed; Robert, bright-eyed and cheerful; Abram, talking into a Bluetooth headset; then, of course, Jamie, who also looked tired, which made Griffin think—smugly, immaturely, disrespectfully—You’re not tired like I am. You’re not tired from her.Robert announced a “special arrangement” he’d made for “just us guys,” and that’s when Griffin found out that they’d be going to Montmartre for the morning, though Robert was still keeping it a secret, what they’d be doing there.
The first thing was, they had to take the Metro: Griff’s first time, since every other day he’d been here, he’d either used his feet or a rideshare. It wasn’t as though he was philosophically opposed to public transportation, and he could tell, as these things went, that Paris’s version of it was special: easy, elegant, clean. But holy fuck, the fucking stairs. He was not in good shape for the stairs, and it embarrassed him to lag behind, to have Michael lag, too, tosee Fitz flex his jaw in annoyance and have Robert pat his shoulder encouragingly when he finally caught up.
Then, after the Metro, Montmartre itself: one giant hill, that’s how it felt to him, and not a gentle, rolling situation, either. Streets that went straight up, a huge church at the height of the whole thing, white and glaring. He thought,Fuck you, you fucking show-off church; he thought of Notre-Dame and how he liked it much better. At one point, when he caught a snippet of conversation that he largely couldn’t process through the effort of making this slanted-walking look easy, he heard Robert say, “Moulin Rouge,” and he had a memory of that—a movie he watched with his mom a long time ago, strange and color-saturated and extremely boring. He thought,If this man is taking us to some place where people are going to cancan dance in front of me before noon, I’ll probably die of hating it.
He also thought,But I’ll die having been with Layla Bailey.
And then—and then! They finally made it to theiractualdestination, a glass-fronted shop halfway up one of the murder hills, the sign above it covered in blooming, trailing pink flowers, which to be honest looked very nice, very like postcard-photograph-Paris, except for the fact that when you stood right under them and looked up, you saw that they were not real. They were polyester, like the kind that were stuck into the various seasonal wreaths his mom kept on the front door of her house.
Griffin hated the feel of polyester.
“So, as soon as this group finishes up,” Robert said, gesturing to the glass, “it’ll be our turn in there,” and that’s when Griffin realized he’d be hating the feel of at least two other things this morning: First, whatever he’d have to touch to get through Robert’s “big surprise,” a fuckingbakingclass, a bachelor party for assholes, because “knowing how to make a good pastry has saved me many atime in my marriage!”; and second, the feeling of doing the whole thing in a glass room, so that anyone walking by on the street could see him.
I should’ve slept through the alarm, he’d thought.In case she wanted to come back to me. In caseshewanted to look, since I don’t seem to mind that at all.
So.
So at first, Montmartre was mostly morning-after pain.
But once they finally got inside the Maison-Something-or-Other—the other part of the name obscured by the fake flowers—Griffin was surprised to find that things improved considerably.
One thing was the smell—warm butter, sugar, cinnamon, chocolate—maybe the only combination of smells that could make him miss Layla’s scent slightly less. There was also the tiny cup of espresso each of them was served as they were introduced to their instructor, a Black American woman who’d trained as a pastry chef here in Paris and who’d lived here for the last thirty-five years, the last ten teaching classes like this to tourists. She wore a tidy white coat and hat and she did not laugh at any of Robert’s little attention-stealing asides, and as Griffin sipped at the cup of jolting caffeine, which he did not typically allow himself, he started to feel okay enough to lift the veil himself, to pay attention to what Chef Williams was telling them about what they’d be learning.
When they got started, Griff and Michael stood together at one of the butcher-block tables, like they had when they were lab partners in tenth-grade AP Bio. Croissant-making was, as it turned out, not hugely unlike some of the lengthier, more complicated labs Griffin had done in school, so some parts of the process had been prepped for them in advance, with Chef Williams still explaining every step carefully. Griffin thought that all the touching of things he’d have to do—appliances, ingredients, dough, utensils,whatever—would cause a problem, but on the whole, he escaped with minimal disruption.
He concentrated. He learned things. He showed off his superior lamination skills to Michael, and he even once laughed at an exchange between Abram and Chef Williams, who said Abram rolled his croissants like he was pushing a boulder over a speed bump.
He couldn’t believe it, but he was fuckingenjoyinghimself.
“You dickhead,” said Michael. “Of course your croissants look like that.”
Griff smiled down at his six fairly perfect-looking, still-unbaked croissants, then he let his eyes drift over to Michael’s less-than-impressive efforts. He only had five, because Chef Williams had already thrown one away wordlessly, clucking her tongue in disgust.
“Yours aren’t bad,” he said, which is also the kind of thing he used to say in AP Bio, before he took over and redid most of Michael’s work for him.
Michael sighed. “Let me have your tray. I’m going to go show it to Robert and say it’s mine.”
Griff shrugged, noting that there was still enough pastry on the corner of their table to maybe try rolling another small croissant.
“Whatever, man,” he said, and Michael took the tray, muttering, “Dickhead,” again, which made them both laugh. Griff watched him cross the room, to where Fitz and Robert looked as though they didn’t have a single thing to talk about comfortably, and then set his attention on the leftover pastry dough.
