I wave broadly at the streets in front of us. “Hello? Montmartre? Place du Tertre. Elise lives near here, and when I was on my way to her home, I had a drawing done a couple months ago. I’ll take you to see the guy. It’ll be fun.”
“There you go. Done.” He mimes making a check mark.
I squint. “But I don’t understand why you didn’t do that one yet. It seems easier.”
He shrugs. “Maybe because it’s easy. I figured I’d tackle the others first. Besides, this was one I knew I could do anytime, I suppose.”
Part of me desperately wants to believe he hasn’t had his caricature done so that he’ll have a tether to Paris. I want to believe he loves Paris as wildly as I do, and when the time comes to say good-bye, he won’t be able to. The tie to this place will be too strong.
But that’s a fool’s hope.
I’ve been a fool before.
I can’t do it again.
I’ll be a rock. That’s what I know how to be. This man is teaching me a whole new language. The least I can do is be by his side as he finishes his brother’s bucket list. He needs to see this through. It’s not my place to hold him back with a heart too full for him. It’s my place to help guide him there, a gentle hand on his back, an encouraging word, and a fantastic time before he waves good-bye. Send him off in style, even if it makes my heart ache more than I would like.
So much more than I would like.
I lace my fingers through his and walk to the nearby square, where charcoal artists draw elongated faces. But it’s late, and most have gone for the night.
“We’ll come back another time,” Griffin says, and a faint kernel of hope dares to take shape inside me. The hope that there will be another time, another chance for us.
A ragtag group of musicians plucking away on violins and cellos play a French tune, the words melancholy but the melody upbeat enough. Griffin takes my hand and spins me, and we dance under the moonlight, the stars winking above us, the old-time music becoming our soundtrack.
“Now all this dancing makes me want to do one thing only,” he says as the song ends.
“What’s that?”
“Make love to you.”
Uber has never made it to my place so quickly.
In my bed, we speak less than last night. We tease less, too. But here in the dark, as he climbs over me, runs his hands down my naked body and enters me, I don’t need words to know what he’s feeling. I see it in his eyes. In the intensity of his gaze. I hear it in his sounds, his noises. He hikes up my leg, opening me more, moving in me. He doesn’t look away, and it’s almost too much.
But too much of him is what I want.
Even if it hurts.
Even if I know it’s ending.
When we’re like this, tangled together, our bodies slick and hot, our breath wild and erratic, our lips parted, it doesn’t feel as if we’re counting down.
But once we come down from our high, I’m keenly aware that I’m crossing off days on the calendar until the man I’m in love with leaves.
24
Griffin
The first time I traveled to Paris, I was three.
My mum took Ethan and me to see where she grew up, before she left to live in England. Shockingly, I don’t remember a lick of that trip. But the photos are enough to make me shudder. Mum dressed us in prissy little shirts that no child should ever wear.
We visited again when I was six and Ethan was five. Apparently, we were little shits then. The story goes that we nicked a little Eiffel Tower keychain from a young boy selling them by the carousel near the famous landmark. I’ve always suspected the story was apocryphal, told at dinner parties by my parents to entertain the guests. But there is a photo of us in front of the tower, and my dad wrote a caption on it: Little troublemakers.
We visited many times over the years, seeing Mum’s sister, who now lives in Brittany. We’d check out the sights and the famous landmarks, and go to the open-air markets. Though I did all that with my family, I also looked elsewhere on those trips. Down alleys, around corners, in the passages. Always seeking unknown treasures and odd little curiosities.
As a teenager, when I went about the city on my own, I started keeping track of all the unusual things I saw—level markers, corner guards, antique signs. I was like a surveyor conducting an inventory of Paris, recording all the things that caught my eye.
Funny that I never noticed the angels Joy keeps telling me about.
I’m still not an angel person. I don’t believe they’re watching over me, and I definitely don’t think my brother is an angel. That’s just not how I’m wired. But since Joy mentioned the very first one on the door knocker, I’ve been intrigued with their presence. Because I’d missed them. Because I failed to notice them on my journeys around Paris. That’s why over the next week I research them online, marking where to find them.
When I hop on my bike one afternoon, I ride around the city, visiting a pair in the window of a luxurious mansion, another blowing a horn on the frame of a hotel, and one more in a Japanese garden, that came from the remains of a church bombed in Japan during the Second World War. The damaged angel sculpture was sent here as a symbol of peace.
I stop at the last one, staring for a long time, as if I can find a special meaning in it. But I don’t know what to make of the angels scattered around the city, unless it’s as simple as this—each one whispers a story of how Paris came
