“Really, Jamie,” she whispers against his sweatshirt. “I’m fine—I just need to be alone for a bit. I’ll come back in a few hours, promise.”
After a moment, his body—surprised—relaxes. His arms settle around her shoulders, holding her closer. “Just text us, okay?” he murmurs. “Whenever you want. I understand wanting to be alone, I really do. But sometimes it’s good to be alone with other people, yeah?”
Lili holds him tighter, before she lets him go.
It’s quiet in the streets, colder than yesterday. Hushed by a soft hangover, Lili walks across the river. Under gray skies, the city feels calmer, more sedate: a bit tired, a bit more like a home to people. There are light coats, upturned collars, the sheen of rain on the pavement. She twists her hair into a loose bun at the nape of her neck.
Through the narrow streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Latin Quarter, she wanders. In the rain, people are sparse. Medieval ruins, the abbot mansion of the Musée de Cluny, alongside cluttered used textbook stores, the fluorescence of halal counter serve, convenience crêpe stands, empty tourist shops bursting with trinkets. Public transit buses, dirtywhite and turquoise, drive past, skimming through rainwater in the gutters. Down residentialrues, she passes closed galleries, high-end boulangeries, street railings with well-kept bicycles. Behind the Cluny, the lush trees on its grounds rush with rain: the Sorbonne, empty from students. She’d never asked him, she realizes: where he’d gone to school, in Paris. When he was her age, in this city.
Amid on-and-off drizzles of rain, she finds a café.
She takes a table outside, under the dark green awning. Wicker chairs, with cream-and-green checkerboard patterns, waiting empty. The wane and wax of showers persists, as she orders coffee. The clean, neat tables have ashtrays, upturned glasses resting on napkins, little folded menus; tiny cubes of sugar, and she fiddles with the edge of one, as she watches the irregular pedestrian traffic.
Broken, she feels broken—but temporarily quieter, calmer, just like these streets she’s watching.
She flips open her journal. She finds a blank page.
She doesn’t want to write. Instead, resting her chin in her hand, she scratches sharp, stilted swoops of her pen, lighter scrapes into shading. Just small things, inconsequential drawings—nothing like what Amina’s capable of—but still soothing.
“Merci,” she murmurs, when the waiter leaves her coffee.
It’s burnt tasting, but acidic and grounding. It pushes back on her brewing headache. As she drinks, she glances up from her page, looks over the café.
Several tables over, a man sits down.
It’s an almost empty establishment, with a few other diners inside. Gray light, August rain.
“Un café allongé, s’il vous plaît,” she overhears him request.
The waiter leaves, and the man shakes out his newspaper, a copy ofLe Monde.
Lili watches him, continuing to glance up from her loose sketching. The fold of his newspaper, turn of the page; his nod of thanks, when the waiter deposits his coffee. He’s maybe fifteen or twenty years older than her: well-dressed but relaxed, a Sunday morning. Brown hair, a thin coat against the rain—glasses pushed up into his hair. Handsome, blandly familiar in the way that most older, good-looking men are.
“Salut!”
A woman breezes in from the street, greeting him with a big smile—and his own smile immediately grows, as she sits down beside him, her gasp of a breathless laugh as she launches into a story, his gaze tinged with affection, a tease of a smirk, as he listens to her, the flurry of her arriving. The waiter starts to approach, but the man knows her order—gestures at his own coffee, silently—and she continues speaking, unaware, unwinding her red scarf.
“T’y crois toi?” the woman exclaims. Lili just catches it, under the light traffic, the hiss of the espresso machine inside the café.“Incroyable, non?”
His smile becomes conspiratorial, sly and joking, as he makes some dry remark. The woman rolls her eyes, slapping his forearm. She leans forward, elbows on the tiny table, to steal a sip from his coffee. Her body is instantly oriented around him; comfort, presence.
She’s beautiful, the woman. Slim, sleek—light sweater, gorgeous dark hair loose, and the man watches her, happy—clear even through his teasing smile—to look at her.
His arm rests on the back of her chair; his hand brushes against her back, fingers running a soft, easy pattern, as the woman discusses some plans, train schedules, a dinner, a book she picked up, something to do with work, small pieces of the week gone and the week ahead, conversation a bit too fast and colloquial for Lili to fully comprehend; but understandable, the shape of questions from him, remarks and thoughts, the way he listens to her, nods, like he’s interested in what she’s saying, but also in how she says it. The quiet intimacy of two people who know each other well, who’ve gone through one week together, and will go through another one.
It’s cold, the sudden realization.
Other people.
He could have—he could be—he could already be seeing other people.
Lili gets up. Tucks euros under her coffee saucer, pulls her tote onto her shoulder, heads back out.
It begins pouring, while she walks. A downpour, with these big fat raindrops that splatter on the cobblestones, rush of wind through the trees. The few people that are out disappear fast off the street, heading into apartment buildings, ducking into cafés, running down the steps intothe Métro. The humid press of a summer storm bears down from the aggressive gray sky.
It becomes too much to continue through. After a moment huddled under the retracted awning of a closed restaurant, Lili glances at the intimidating church across the empty square. Heavy doors open, worn limestone steps, a couple people shaking out umbrellas before they go inside.
Sunday, Saint-Sulpice; it’s open.
