“Yeah,” Sadie says, and smiles like a person who knows herself down to the tiniest particle. “I think I will.”
When I get back inside I find Gabe waiting near the front door wearing a hoodie and a dubious expression, arms crossed like he’s already annoyed at me. “Hey,” he says. “You ready to go?”
“Um,” I say, standing awkwardly in place like my limbs aren’t working all of a sudden. “Sure.”
We shuffle down the front walk in tense, unfriendly silence, all the horrifying awkwardness we somehow managed to avoid last night rushing up at us like a high-speed light rail. “You know, we don’tactuallyhave to spend today together,” I point out as we make it to the sidewalk. “We could just go our separate ways now, meet up with these guys back here later.”
Gabe’s eyes narrow. “Is that what you want to do?” he asks roughly.
I wasn’t expecting an argument; I blink. “I don’t know,” I say. “I just, I figured—”
“That’s kind of depressing, isn’t it?”
I raise my eyebrows, surprised. “More depressing than walking around Paris fighting all day?” Then I realize it sounds like I’m talking about him and Sadie. “I’m just saying, you and I haven’t exactly been getting along like gangbusters this week.”
Gabe smirks at that. “Well, nobody says we’re contractually obligated to fight all day,” he points out. “It’s not, like, a written requirement.”
“Oh no?” I look at him for a moment, skeptical. In the first place, I can’t actually imagine the two of us making it through a day of sightseeing without destroying each other. And in the second, I don’t actually know if getting along is a much better option. I haven’t forgotten the other night outside the hardware-store bar—that jolt right down the center of my body, enough white heat to rend me clear in half. He said it himself: we’ve never been just friends. “You really think that’s a good idea?”
Gabe makes a face like I’m being unnecessarily stubborn. “What if we don’t talk about it?” he bargains.
I squint as the morning sunlight filters through the trees, making patterns on his arms and chest and catching the coppery brown in his hair. “About what?” I ask, suspicious.
“About anything,” Gabe says. “What if we just act like two randos who happen to be traveling together? No personal discussions whatsoever.”
“You wannarole play?” I blurt.
Gabe blushes faintly, rolls his eyes. “Not in, like, a sexy way, thanks. Just—”
“I’m teasing,” I tell him. I don’t understand why he’s pushing this so hard for someone who doesn’t actually seem to like me very much; still, I’m so tired of trying to sort through my own emotions that spending a day pretending they don’t exist sounds great. “Let’s do it.”
Now it’s Gabe’s turn to look surprised—but not, if I had to guess, disappointed. “Okay,” he says, and it sounds like a challenge. “Let’s.”
Paris without Ian is a completely different experience. Yesterday we slipped seamlessly into the fabric of the city, pulling treasures from its secret pockets and peeling back layer after hidden layer like so many raw-silk petticoats; today, we might as well be wearing tube socks with sandals and Bermuda shorts. Gabe and I fumble through as best we can, pointing to the simplest menu items at a patisserie and mangling the pronunciation ofje suis desoléover and over. We get lost on the Metro twice.
Still, there’s something weirdly relaxing about being so unsophisticated, the two of us traipsing in hopeless circles like a couple of walking, talking Chicken McNuggets. It’salmost liberating, to be so bad at this.
“I think we were supposed to turn left back there,” I report now, squinting at the map on my phone and then back in the direction we came from, trying to read the street sign we passed half a block ago. We’re looking for the Arc de Triomphe, which Ian pronounced overrated and a magnet for bird poop but Gabe promised Julia he’d visit on her behalf. “I’m almost positive we passed this café before.”
“How would you even know?” Gabe asks. “All of these cafés are identical. Like,oh, right, that’s the one with a million tiny little tables out front, my favorite.” He rubs at the back of his head. “It’s a huge fucking arch, it’s at the end of a giant street, I don’t know how we keep missing it.” He holds his hand out for my phone. “Let me see?”
I peer over his shoulder while he orients it, our heads tipped close together as we squint against the glare. He smells clean and slightly sweaty, heat from walking around all morning radiating off him; when he turns his face in my direction, suddenly he’s close enough to kiss.
“Um,” he says, swallowing audibly. I can see the muscles flex in his throat. “You’re right, I think. We need to turn around.”
“Okay,” I agree, not moving. Then I blink and come back to myself. “I—right. Yes. Let’s... do that.”
Gabe coughs. “Let’s,” he agrees, straightening up.
We head back in the direction we came from, a careful, respectful distance between us. My whole body is hummingand hot. “So who are we, then?” Gabe asks, after a seemingly endless stretch of awkward silence. “If we’re not being ourselves, I mean?”
“That’s a good question.” I think for a moment, grateful for the distraction. “A count and countess from a small but prosperous kingdom near Switzerland,” I decide. “Brother and sister, of course.”
“Of course,” Gabe echoes.
“We’re here for the summer to stay with our rich and eccentric aunt,” I continue, getting into it, “who it turns out was running an illegal pigeon-fighting ring out of the secret subbasement of her mansion, but it was raided by French police off a tip by her jilted ex-lover, so now—” I break off at the sight of Gabe’s skeptical expression. “What?” I ask, laughing a little self-consciously. “Too much?”
He shakes his head. “Notenough,” he counters, grinning. “If we’re going to go for it we should really go for it, you know?”
