Chapter Sixteen
It was the best food he’d ever had in his fucking life.
A plate of roasted Camembert, drizzled with the darkest, thickest honey he’d ever seen, a different taste entirely from what his mother made on the farm, that he and Layla scooped up with slices of crusty, airy baguette.
A piece of sole so thinly sliced it was almost translucent, soaked in brown butter—beurre noisette, the menu said, and he thought it was so good he might write to Rosetta Stone directly; he might tell them thatbeurre noisetteshould be an essential phrase for all travelers to France.
A dessert—god, a dessert; he never ate dessert, not in years and years, and no real reason why—that he let Layla order for him, a chocolate soufflé. Lighter than air, lighter than the color of her eyes. Richer than any gold-covered ceiling.
Despite all that, it had not been a night without incident.
In the first place, there was the moment when they first sat down, when he almost lost his nerve—a thousand eyes on him, it felt like, every person in the restaurant turning to look at the monster come down from the tower.
But even after he recovered from that—after Layla leaned forward in her chair and told him about one perfect afternoon she’d had alone in Paris, and after he’d come around to realizing that probably every person in the restaurant was looking ather, her swoop of hair and soft healing hands moving animatedly as she talked, her pale, candlelit V of skin rising and falling with the breaths she took to keep talking—even after that, there were moments of almost-ruination.
A knife cutting across a plate nearby: one of those shrill, unexpected sounds that got Griffin’s wires crossed, his left ear vibrating with it, the shock spreading down his neck and across his scapula in a short but still breath-stealing, shooting pain.
The server too close behind him, squeezing by to get to someone else, and the movement he made to tuck his chair further in—too automatic, too careless, a split second forgetting that he had to be diligent about pressing his left hand on textured surfaces like this woven rattan.
Both times, he tried to hide it. But by this point, with Layla Bailey, there was no going back. There was theLook at me, after all, and there was also him telling her about never leaving his house, his twelve weeks of trip therapy. There was her dressed head to toe in his favorite color, doing him this favor of getting him away from the Placketts tonight, of giving Michael a reprieve from managing an unexpected outing with both his parents and Griffin in close quarters.
So, she noticed, a darting flick of her eyes over the parts of him that probably showed it most—his knuckles whitening, his jaw clenching, his brow probably shining.
Six out of ten, his mind supplied automatically.
But blessedly, she hadn’t asked. She hadn’t said a word.
And it made it easier just totalkto her—to talk to her about thesorts of things he imagined regular people, not bell tower people, talked about when they went to restaurants. The food here, but also the food elsewhere—I tried something like this once in Colorado, orMy mother grows Swiss chard. The art on the walls, or even the proliferation of Edison bulbs—Whyarethey everywhere?or a jokingWhat is Big Edison hiding?The street outside, and how different it was from home—the sidewalks so wide, the corners so splashy with their big awnings and lit-up signs above, the random McDonald’s squatting awkwardly in a building that looked like it was made for a prince.
Now, even the squabble they were having over the bill felt normal. Natural.
“I’m the one who invited you,” she said, reaching for the portfolio he’d set his hand on top of as soon as the server placed it on the table, his eyes on Layla’s triumphant.
“It wasn’t so much an invitation. More like a hostage-taking.”
He used her moment of stunned—but still good-natured—outrage to pull the portfolio toward him.
“That is such alie,” she was saying as he opened it. Good, a QR code for paying. One of his practice restaurants had used these. That night, it’d been helpful for getting off the premises before anyone had the chance to see him go into full-blown, sweating meltdown mode. Tonight, with a couple of taps, he could stop Layla from doing something sneaky like slipping a credit card to the server.
“Infact,” he heard her say as he finished up, and he was possibly smiling, though he could admit that it was a relatively new sensation. He was eager to hear what she would say. Eager, for some reason, to hear how she would scold him over his teasing truth-bending.
“You were the one—” she began, but then, she abruptly cut herself off.
He looked up from his phone. Saw her lips purse, her eyes widen. She was looking at him, but he had the sense that she’d caught sight of something else. That she’d only just looked back at him in panicky shock.
Oh, what the fuck, he thought, immediately on alert, and because of the last two days—the boat, the ballroom—he was on alert for something,someonespecific, no matter how unlikely it was in a city of this many people, this many places.
If it’s the ex-husband, he thought, turning his warning gaze to the restaurant entrance,I will tear this entire place to the ground. I’ll make it so there’s no trace of his infectious presence on this street that belongs only to her. I’ll make it so there’s no memory of him here that she has to reckon with, even if it means erasing a memory she had with me.
But there was no one familiar at the entrance, and he was both relieved and disoriented, reckoning with those wild thoughts of defending her that came so quick and easy. When he looked back at her—her still-stricken face, reddened now, he was grounded again. He lowered his brow.
“Wha—”
He stopped.
Because he heard a…was that aslurp?
He tilted his head, listening through the din of restaurant noise, louder than any one of those practice restaurants he’d been in, but still—he heard it again.
