He chuckles at that, faintly disbelieving. “I find it extremely hard to believe that you ever weren’t careful.”
I shrug, lifting my chin up at him. “That’s because you didn’t know me then.”
Ian gazes back at me for a moment, and then he nods. “No,” he says slowly. “I guess I didn’t.”
We’re done with lunch now; Ian feeds the last of the strawberries to a mangy French squirrel, and we crumple up our garbage and toss it into the trash. “Thanks for telling me all that,” he says, wrapping his arms around me and bumping his forehead against mine. “I know itcouldn’t have been, you know. A picnic.”
That makes me smile. “I mean, you told me about Alyssa from the dance team,” I point out, tilting my head back and stamping a kiss against his mouth. “It felt like maybe I owed you one.”
“You know, I kind of like this whole emotional honesty thing,” he continues as we head for the Metro; there’s a famous English-language bookstore he wants to take me to, full of rare first editions. “It’s kind of sexy.”
“Oh, that’s what you’re into, huh?” I ask with a laugh.
“I mean, maybe,” Ian says thoughtfully. “What else you got?”
I consider that for a moment. “I’m really glad it’s just you and me today,” I confess, lacing our fingers together and squeezing. “It feels like I’ve been waiting a really long time to be alone with you.”
Ian looks down at our interlocked hands, then back up at me, and smiles. “How about that,” he replies. “Me too.”
We spend the rest of the afternoon like that, strolling hand in hand through the busy streets of Paris, browsing shops and munching macarons and telling each other stories. I feel closer to him than I have since we got here, find myself talking about things I haven’t thought of in years: sitting next to Imogen on the dock beside the lake weaving key chains out of lanyards, the cacti that grew outside the window of my dorm room back in Tempe. Ian, for his part, tells me about learning to behave himself in fancy restaurants when he wasa kid and about the parade of weird nannies they never managed to keep on account of his little sister being a holy terror.
“My mom’s an environmental consultant for big banks, so she traveled a lot,” he explains over a midafternoon snack of crepes purchased from a tiny street cart, butter and sugar dripping down the back of my hand. “We lived in Germany for six months when I was a baby. She was in Stockholm for a lot of the year when I was in middle school. One year we did Christmas in Kyoto.”
I nod. I knew this, I guess, or pieces of it. But until now he always talked about it in a different tone of voice, in between stories about family trips to the Hoover Dam and his dad mowing the lawn in a pair of short shorts and all of them getting into a fight while playing Settlers of Catan on Thanksgiving. Normal, slightly dorky stuff—that fit, I realize now, into the normal, slightly dorky narrative I’d created around Ian in my head. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that we see what we’re expecting to see when we look at other people.
“It was always really important to them that we knew not everybody was this lucky, though,” he says, offering me a bite of his crepe. “My parents, I mean. Like, not letting money make you a monster was always a really big thing for them.”
“Well, they succeeded,” I say, reaching up and wiping hazelnut spread off the corner of his mouth. “You are emphatically not a monster.”
Ian laughs. “Aw, sweetheart, that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” he teases. I drag him down for a kiss in reply.
Ian says there’s one more place he wants to show me after dinner, taking my hand as we amble through a quiet, leafy neighborhood not too far from his parents’ house. Cozy yellow lamplight spills from tall apartment windows. A young woman walks a slouchy, grumbly dog. Ian leads me down a winding lane that reminds me of Beacon Hill back in Boston, the two of us bumping across the uneven cobblestones. The sky has turned a soft, lovely navy, like you could reach up and wrap it around you like a shawl.
“Okay, are you taking me somewhere to murder me or what?” I joke as we peel off down a narrow, shoddily paved alley butted up against the backs of the grander buildings one block over; these must have been servants’ entrances, once upon a time. “Is this about the app?”
Ian grins. “We’re almost there,” he promises. “You’ll see.”
He’s as good as his word: a moment later he stops in front of a wrought-iron gate about halfway down the alley, reaching up and pulling open the thick, rust-pocked latch. He lays a gentle palm at the small of my back as he pushes it open, ushering me into a tiny courtyard surrounded by moss-covered walls on three sides and canopied by sinuous, winding grapevines. A massive fountain burbles quietly away in one far corner, a tall, elegant goddess holding court in thecenter. A waterfall of long marble hair ripples down her back.
“Holy crap,” I blurt, looking around in astonished wonder. “Ian. This isincredible.”
“Yeah?” Ian asks, following me deeper into the courtyard. He’s standing behind me, but I can hear the hopefulness in his voice. “Better than the Eiffel Tower?”
“I mean, yes,” I admit, a little embarrassed by my own dopiness. “It’s better than the Eiffel Tower.” I take a few steps closer to the fountain, drawn both by the welcoming gurgle of the water and the statue’s warm, intelligent expression.
“It’s Aphrodite,” Ian tells me.
That makes me smile. “Goddess of love?”
He makes a face. “Too on the nose?”
“Not in a bad way.” I turn in a slow circle, taking in the herringbone brick and the flowering shrubs, the recessed lights glowing softly in the basin of the fountain. “This place is public?” I ask in disbelief.
“It’s technically a city park, yeah.” Ian nods, settling himself on a wooden bench beside the fountain and stretching his long legs out in front of him. “My dad proposed to my mom here a million years ago,” he explains, wincing a little bit as he says it, like maybe he’s not sure if I’m going to rich-shame him again for having parents who do things like get engaged in France. “So when we used to come as a family they always liked to bring us by and check on it.”
“I see why they love it so much,” I tell him. “It’s romantic as all hell.”
Ian grins at me. “That was kind of the idea, yeah.”
