I look at him.
He looks back.
The morning warms around us. We move from the café to the street without deciding when the morning becomes afternoon. Damien pays before I can reach for my bag.
I look at him. “I was going to pay for mine.”
“I know.”
“You keep saying that.”
“You keep telling me things I already know,” Damien says.
“That is not how this works.”
“How does it work?”
I open my mouth but nothing useful comes out because the answer is not simple and we both know it. This is not adate, because neither of us called it that. It is not work, because I haven’t written a single note since he appeared at the herb stall. It is not nothing, because nothing does not make a woman stand on a sidewalk in Paris with a bag of figs and an inconvenient awareness of a man’s hands.
Damien waits. He is very good at waiting when waiting will make the other person speak first. I refuse to reward that.
“It works with fewer assumptions,” I say.
He smiles. “I will try to make fewer assumptions.”
“That sounded insincere.”
“It was.”
We walk as Paris opens around us in the slow, lush sprawl of a late June afternoon. We pass bakeries with open doors, a florist carrying buckets of peonies, a bookstore with sun-faded novels stacked in the window, cafés full of people pretending not to watch one another. Damien knows small streets that avoid the worst of the crowd. He points out a cheese shop not because it is famous, but because the owner will refuse to sell a cheese before it is ready. He tells me about a bakery that changed hands three years ago and lost its soul but kept its line because tourists do not know when grief has entered the crumb.
I laugh at that.
He looks pleased.
Not smug.
Pleased.
There is a difference, and it is terribly inconvenient that I can see it.
By late afternoon, we cross the Île Saint-Louis. The light has shifted again, warmer now, sliding over the facades and turning the river gold where it catches between buildings. The island is crowded, but softly so. Couples with ice cream. Families with strollers. A musician near the corner playing something old enough that everyone thinks they have heard it in a film.
He walks beside me, close enough now that our arms brush when the pavement narrows.
The first time it happens, I tell myself it is the crowd.
The second time, I know better.
Neither of us moves away.
At a small café near the river, he holds the door open for me. His hand brushes the back of my shoulder as I pass. Barely. It’s a touch so light it could be dismissed by anyone interested in lying.
I’m not interested in lying. My body registers it with absurd precision. The warmth of his palm. The brief pressure near my shoulder blade. The way my breath catches and then returns too carefully, as if I can discipline a physical reaction by arranging my face.
Inside, the café is narrow and dim after the sun, all old mirrors, small round tables, and the smell of coffee, wine, and sugar. We sit near the open window. Damien orders something cold and sparkling for both of us, then a bottle of something simple after I say I should probably return to my hotel and do not stand up.
The bottle arrives sweating lightly in its bucket. The wine is crisp and pale. It tastes like citrus peel, stone, and the kind of afternoon that should know better.
