She made him want todothings.
He was alwaysdoingthings, ever since he first saw her.
But this time—with the whole entire day and the whole entire city open to them, with last night’s bad decisions still haunting his body—his confidence pretty quickly abandoned him. Sure, he was pretty good—pretty practiced—at walking without a real plan, like he’d done last night after he’d left her, but that was more…that was kind of a stomping and breathing situation. A fully alone situation.
With her by his side, with her hurt from last night still so close to the surface, he’d need to do something different.
It helped that, at first, she struggled, too.
“I had this spreadsheet,” she said, still sounding kind of stunned, after only a block or so of him pretending to lead them somewhere specific. “I could pull it up on my phone.”
“No phones,” he said, which was not really a demand you could meaningfully make of another person in the twenty-first century, especially in a city you didn’t live in, but she didn’t object.
And so they came to an unspoken agreement. A slower pace, a lack of direction, no real meaningful knowledge of any one thing they looked at. He thought it felt like training, like two puppies on a walk, a long leash letting them wander a little, but no running wild, their bodies always close.Can we stop here?one of them would say, and the answer was alwaysYes.
Can I look at this? Do you smell that? Do you want to try one of these? Should we go over there?
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Like that, they were aimless. They got buttery, folded-over crepes from a place with dark red walls and wood crates mounted behind the register, filled with bottles of wine and oils and jars of jam. They took side streets, avoiding thoroughfares, occasionally coming across a perfectly framed view of part of the Eiffel Tower between buildings that neither of them took pictures of. They crossed a mostly nondescript bridge over the Seine, swapping a knowing smile as they both tracked a huge, slow boat filled with people on the top deck. They went into bookstores, English and French, into shops with macarons and pastries and chocolates that might as well have been museums for the way they were filled with edible art; they sat in front of a giant sculpture of a hand holding what looked to Griffin like limp, half-formed balloon animals. They went into a massive domed building with columns and finials and winged figures over an imposing arched doorway, flanked with gold, and Layla laughed at how he said, “This is thePetitone?” and then they didn’t even look at any of the place’s obvious treasures anyway; they just drifted to a courtyard with palm trees that seemed to belong to a whole other world, and Layla made Griffin try the too-sweet hot chocolate she ordered from the café there, more whipped cream than cocoa. She broke the no-phone rule, but only to photograph the floor beneath them—tiny tiles turned into swirls and diagonals.
Later, they walked by a line of people on a pristine street, and Layla—bolder by then, more openly curious by then—askedsomeone what it was for. Another museum, of course another museum, this one about clothes, and he watched her expression transform with interest, so yeah, he took out his fucking phone for that—two tickets with a few taps, even though they had to wait two and a half hours to come back for their own line-up time.
But there was plenty more wandering to do anyway. Window displays, cheese shops, produce stands, places where you could stop and say,This is so different from home, but still feel oddly comforted to see a plain old banana in a city as beautiful as this.
He dreaded it, a little, having an appointment—too close to an itinerary, too close to what they were supposed to be doing today, had they stuck with the wedding party. But once they were ushered through the glass doors at their assigned time, he let it go—Layla’s eyes lighting as she looked up at a spiral staircase that rose through a three-story glass display, a rainbow arrangement of dresses and handbags and shoes and hats. Obviously, Griffin himself had no interest in clothes, other than making sure they didn’t touch him the wrong way, but he could see right away it was different for Layla. If she noticed the horde of tourists that staged dramatic, social-media-ready photos on the staircase, irritatingly slowing the foot traffic up the steps, she didn’t betray any annoyance. She kept her eyes moving over the rainbow, the same way she kept her eyes on every set piece they eventually passed—mannequins in puffy skirts and tight jackets and dramatic, swooping hats, gowns made of what looked like flower petals or the falling parts of the brightest stars. At one point, they entered a two-story room that was clearly meant to be a culmination: music playing, the kind he imagined he should’ve danced with her to in that grand garden ballroom, light softly changing and projecting images over the ceiling and walls. He looked at gowns he wouldn’t ever be able to describe except to say that Layla gazed at them withpure wonder, and all he’d been able to think about was why he’d never seen her in something,anythinglike this, why she wasn’t right now wearing that gauzy white dress with the smallest pleats all over the full skirts, like little envelopes waiting to be opened, revealing her secrets.
The best part was after, when she talked and talked about why she liked it, but all in the form of questions to him:Did you like the way—? Did you see how—? Did you notice that—?
Mostly, the answer to everything was no, or at least,I only liked the way you liked it, but by that point, he was so well settled in to how comfortable it was to be asked. All day, it was asking each other—easier and easier, further and further beyond what was right in front of them for their wandering. She would ask him,Are you still okay?orShould we sit for a while?and it didn’t make him snap in frustration or embarrassment. He would ask her,Did you go up to the top of the Eiffel Tower before?orHave you ever tried one of these?and it didn’t make her look wistful or heartbroken.
The answers, too, were easier and easier to give. He told her about the pain scale, even told her when he got to a six so they could stop, finding a bench in the Jardin du Palais Royal. He rubbed openly at the worst of his contracture scars, the one that tracked from below his left ass cheek all the way to the outside of his knee, while she told him about her family, or rather, her lack of one: her mother, dead in a car accident when Layla was only two, so young that Layla didn’t have a single memory of her; her father, distant and ambitious, closer in temperament and appearance to the son he’d already had from his first, failed marriage, and only truly notable as a parent for the way he’d always arranged good nannies and babysitters for Layla; a half brother, Vaughn, almost a decade older and a physician like Layla, but a neurosurgeon,relentlessly busy and obligatory in his contact with her, a brother who “probably” loved her but who never had time for her.
And the MacKenzies, the family she’d come to think of as her own.
If they ran up against a barricade—him, willing to talk about what he did for his pain but not what had caused it; and her, willing to mention her divorce but not who chose it or why—they simply bounced off it, back to safer streets, wandering again.
By dusk, they’d been together for hours, still directionless except for how they kept drifting in the direction of each other, letting those long leashes tangle, their bodies more than keeping close now. His fingers set gently on her spine as she stepped into another shop, her foot moving idly against his when they sat at another bistro, their shoulders and the backs of their hands constantly brushing as they made their way along the river again, where the bouquinistes were closing up their dark green stalls for the day.
Every small touch felt the same as shoving that pretend door he’d imagined this morning further open. Like together, they’d made it so they were both now standing on the threshold of a heaven he could not have possibly imagined three days ago, and all Griffin wanted in the world was to keep pushing through.
He thought of last night—that dark street, that other doorway—and felt the old confidence rise up in him again.
He would be able to do it this time, after this day.
Stay with her, keep kissing her, no touch too much.
He would not mess it up this time. He would not hurt her.
But then, Layla stopped.
Right along one of those gray stone walls that lined the Seine, and somehow—her posture, her eyes not meeting his—he knewnot to touch her, accidentally or otherwise. He moved to stand beside her, a slice of space between them, and stared out at the water. In his periphery, he could see those fucking bell towers again, lit up against a dark lavender sky, another place of pretend coming back to haunt him.
