He would never change his mind. Not for anything, real or imagined.
She kissed him, because she could not help it, because she wanted to seal this: this street that was not an aisle, these not-promises, this sadness way deep down, and the seed of hope she knew some part of her was planting in her soul, small and sacred.
When he broke away, it was with a groan, a pleading whisper of her name that she knew meant they were out of time.
She loosened her fingers, letting his slip free.
She thought,I am not going to let this burn me to the ground.
“What will you do now?”
He tucked his hands back into his pockets, straightened his shoulders. Looked down the street, toward the hotel.
“Go home,” he said. “Hope Michael doesn’t hate me.” He brought his eyes back to hers. “Do a hundred other things that people have been telling me to do for a long time, but that I’ve never wanted to do.”
A long pause.
“Not until you,” he added.
Maybe a few more tears slipped down her cheeks. Maybe she brushed them away sloppily. Maybe she couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
“Will you go back?” he asked her, after a few silent seconds. “To the apartment?”
She shook her head, a finality to the small movement that would be almost impossible to explain to anyone but him.
“I think I’ll walk for a while,” she said.
Until I know you’re gone, she didn’t add.
As though he’d heard her, he said, “Layla. Don’t wait for me.”
He wasn’t talking about her walk. He wasn’t saying,Come back to the hotel whenever you want, whether I’ve gone or not.
He was warning her of something else.
“I won’t,” she said, and she thought it sounded very convincing. She thought he would not dare guess that no matter what he said, no matter how long it took, she would keep watering that seed of hope for him—forthem—inside her soul.
But just in case—in case something might give her away—she said, “You should probably go.”
One last long look before he nodded. Before he did not say goodbye.
Before he turned away.
She did not want to watch him go, not this time—not like the times she’d watched him walk away before she ever truly knew him, not like the times when she hadn’t known yet what kept him running scared. So after a beat, she turned, too, planning to follow the street’s curve and turn the opposite direction from the apartment.
Before she got quite there, she heard Griffin call her name again.
She turned, saw him standing on this perfect Paris street she would remember forever.
“Yeah?” she called.
“Would you still do it again?”
The question she’d asked this morning, in the bed that would always be theirs. Before the mess in that apartment, before the wrenching pain of this inevitable conversation.
She couldn’t quite say she smiled. She was still too sad and raw for that.
But her voice was clear when she called back to him with her answer.
