“Because before that,” he said, low and quiet, “before that, for me—it was heaven.”
Chapter Twenty
He wouldn’t say theyabandonedMichael and Emily.
He wouldn’t say they ran.
But the truth was, from the second he admitted to Layla Bailey—tohimself—what it felt like to kiss her last night, he didn’t figure either of them wanted to think all that much about their respective reasons for being in Paris right now.
In the shadow of those three shades, she looked at him, alive and pink-cheeked, her eyes on him interested and hopeful and free of what he feared most from her: disgust or remorse or pity.
She said, “Do you want to get out of here?”
And yeah.
He fucking did.
He wanted her to be the only reason he was here today.
He wanted to find a way to fix what he’d broken in her last night.
As they made their way out of that sculpture garden and back out onto the street, they were quiet—awkwardly so, a sort ofwhat have we donequiet that made them stand too far apart, theirfootsteps sounding too loud beneath them, their eyes on anything but each other.
For him, it had to do with trying to shake off those hulking bronze doors they’d left behind, the gates to the hell he’d described to her. He thought he could feel it biting at his heels, the monstrous voices of those sculptures calling out to him about how he shouldn’t have told her all that, shouldn’t have opened the door far enough to let her see anything, even only a slice of it, how if she only knew the whole, horrible thing about his pain and why he had it, she would change her mind about him.
For her, he suspected it was something else. On the corner outside of the sculpture garden, she slowed her steps, staring ahead at the huge golden dome he and Michael had passed on the way here, another museum—this one, some old military hospital that was the group’s next stop on the itinerary after a lunch break (“Em thought my dad would like it,” Michael had said in the car, his voice tinged with regret, his leg bouncing with his restless need to get back to her).
Layla looked at that gold dome like she owed it an apology.
He thought, with a rising sense of dread, that she was about to change her mind.
But she only said, “We should probably text them and let them know.”
So, they did. Both of them, separately, sliding out their phones. No coordination of the messaging, which was either risky or genius. Griffin typed to Michael,Turns out, I can’t, which was both not true and also not a lie, and because Michael was Michael, he’d written back,No problem, man. Take it easy today.
Layla took longer—her thumbs hovering over her screen for a few seconds, her lower lip tucking in on one side where she must have been nibbling on the inside of her cheek. He almost said,Don’t do that, almost set his thumb against that plush curve to tug it back to safety…to maybe kiss her again.
God, he wanted to kiss her again.
But then she started typing—fast, determined, not particularly brief. By the time she sent it, Griffin could see it was a rectangle of text she was sending along, nothing so short asI can’t.
He held his breath, waiting for her to put the phone away again, torn between wondering what that long message said and wondering what they’d do next.
“I don’t have a plan,” she said, her tone almost defiant as she put her phone back in her purse, not waiting for a response from, he assumed, Emily. “Ihadplans, before. For different days. Or…different times of days, when I thought I’d be alone. But I don’t have a plan for this.”
This, she said, a casual wave of her hand between them, but he supposed he was still breathing out the relief of not having to go back into that other place, where that terrible door was.
Because when Layla saidthis, he heard it like it was a whole different door, creaking on its rusty hinges, opening back into heaven—a thin crack of light he wanted to spend his whole day working his way into, at least until the dark took him back again.
He said, “We don’t need one.”
* * *
It was an old confidence that made him say it. Not agoodconfidence, not always, but he couldn’t deny that saying things similar toWe don’t need onehad, in the past, made for some transformative moments in his life.We should try this, to a classmate in a group project at Rensselaer;I could draw that, to the professor whoeventually became his business partner;It’ll work, to a team of investors who were all at least twenty years older than him.
He could see now that something about Layla Bailey brought it out in him: her on the airplane floor, her hotel room door. A river cruise, a department store, a garden ballroom.
A kiss on the street, and a sculpture that said too much about him.
