Anna and the French Kiss

“St. Clair?”

“Yeah?”

“Your elbow is murdering my back.”

“Bollocks. Sorry.” He shifts, and then shifts again, and then again, until we’re comfortable. One of his legs rests against mine. Despite the two layers of pants between us, I feel naked and vulnerable. He shifts again and now my entire leg, from calf to thigh, rests against his. I smell his hair. Mmm.

NO!

I swallow, and it’s so loud. He coughs again. I’m trying not to squirm. After what feels like hours but is surely only minutes, his breath slows and his body relaxes. I finally begin to relax, too. I want to memorize his scent and the touch of his skin—one of his arms, now against mine—and the solidness of his body. No matter what happens, I’ll remember this for the rest of my life.

I study his profile. His lips, his nose, his eyelashes. He’s so beautiful.

The wind rattles the panes, and the lights buzz softly in the hall. He sleeps soundly. How long has it been since he’s had a decent night’s rest? There’s another uncomfortable tug on my heart. Why do I care so much about him, and why do I wish I didn’t? How can one person make me so confused all of the time?

What is that? Is it lust? Or something else altogether? And is it even possible for me to feel this way about him without these feelings being reciprocated? He said that he liked me. He did. And even though he was drunk, he wouldn’t have said it if there wasn’t at least some truth to it. Right?

I don’t know.

Like every time I’m with him, I don’t know anything. He scoots closer to me in his sleep. His breath is warm against my neck. I don’t know anything. He’s so beautiful, so perfect. I wonder if he ... if I ...

A ray of light glares into my eyes, and I squint, disoriented. Daylight. The red numbers on my clock read 11:27. Huh. Did I mean to sleep in? What day is it? And then I see the body in bed next to me. And I nearly jump out of my skin.

So it wasn’t a dream.

His mouth is parted, and the sheets are kicked off. One of his hands rests on his stomach. His shirt has hiked up, and I can see his abdomen. My gaze is transfixed.

Holy crap. I just slept with St. Clair.

chapter twenty-one

I mean I didn’t SLEEP sleep with him. Obviously. But I slept with him.

I slept with a boy! I burrow back down into my sheets and grin. I can’t WAIT to tell Bridge. Except . . . what if she tells Toph? And I can’t tell Mer, because she’d get jealous, which means I can’t tell Rashmi or Josh either. It dawns on me that there is nobody I can tell about this. Does that mean it’s wrong?

I stay in bed for as long as possible, but eventually my bladder wins. When I come back from the bathroom, he’s looking out my window. He turns around and laughs. “Your hair. It’s sticking up in all different directions.” St. Clair pronounces it die-rections and illustrates his point by poking his fingers up around his head like antlers.

“You’re one to speak.”

“Ah, but it looks purposeful on me.Took me ages to realize the best way to get that mussed look was to ignore it completely.”

“So you’re saying it looks like crap on me?” I glance in the mirror, and I’m alarmed to discover I do resemble a horned beast.

“No. I like it.” He grins and picks his belt up off the floor. “Breakfast?”

I hand him his boots. “It’s noon.”

“Thanks. Lunch?”

“Lemme shower first.”

We part for an hour and meet back in his room. His door is propped open, and French punk rock is blaring down his hall. I’m shocked when I step inside and discover he’s straightened up. The heaps of clothing and towels have been organized for laundry purposes, and the empty bottles and chip bags have been thrown out.

He looks at me hopefully. “It’s a start.”

“It looks great.” And it does look better. I smile.

We spend the day walking around again. We catch part of a Danny Boyle film festival and take another stroll beside the Seine. I teach him how to skip stones; I can’t believe he doesn’t know how. It starts drizzling, so we pop into a bookshop across from Notre-Dame. The yellow-and-green sign reads SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY.

Inside, we’re struck by chaos. A horde of customers crowds the desk, and everywhere I turn there are books, books, and more books. But it’s not like a chain, where everything is neatly organized on shelves and tables and end caps. Here books totter in wobbly stacks, fall from the seats of chairs, and spill from sagging shelves. There are cardboard boxes overflowing with books, and a black cat naps beside a pile on the stairs. But the most astonishing thing is that all of the books are in English.

St. Clair notices my awed expression. “You’ve never been here before?”

I shake my head, and he’s surprised. “It’s quite famous. Hey, look—” He holds up a copy of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. “This is familiar, eh?”

I wander in a daze, half thrilled to be surrounded by my own language, half terrified to disturb anything. One wrong touch might break the entire store. It could collapse, and we’d be buried in an avalanche of yellowed pages.

The rain patters against the windows. I push my way through a group of tourists and examine the fiction section. I don’t know why I’m looking for him, but I can’t help it. I work backward. Christie, Cather, Caldwell, Burroughs, Brontë, Berry, Baldwin, Auster, Austen. Ashley. James Ashley.

A line of my father’s books. Six of them. I pull a hardcover copy of The Incident from the shelf, and I cringe at the familiar sunset on the cover.

“What’s that?” St. Clair asks. I startle. I didn’t realize he was standing beside me.

He takes the novel from me, and his eyes widen with recognition. He flips it over, and Dad’s author photo grins back at us. My father is overly tan, and his teeth gleam fake white. He’s wearing a lavender polo shirt, and his hair blows gently in the wind.

St. Clair raises his eyebrows. “I don’t see the relation. He’s much better looking.”

I sputter with nervousness, and he taps my arm with the book. “It’s worse than I thought.” He laughs. “Does he always look like this?”

“Yes.”

He flips it open and reads the jacket. I watch his face anxiously. His expression grows puzzled. I see him stop and go back to read something again. St. Clair looks up at me. “It’s about cancer,” he says.

Oh. My. God.

“This woman has cancer. What happens to her?”

I can’t swallow. “My father is an idiot. I’ve told you, he’s a complete jackass.”

An excruciating pause. “He sells a lot of these, does he?”

I nod.

“And people enjoy this? They find it entertaining, do they?”

“I’m sorry, St. Clair.” Tears are welling in my eyes. I’ve never hated my father as much as I do right now. How could he? How dare he make money off something so horrible? St. Clair shuts the book and shoves it back on the shelf. He picks up another, The Entrance. The leukemia novel. My father wears a dress shirt with the first few buttons casually undone. His arms are crossed, but he has that same ridiculous grin.

“He’s a freak,” I say. “A total ... goinky freak.”

St. Clair snorts. He opens his mouth to say something, but then sees me crying. “No, Anna. Anna, I’m sorry.”