Anna and the French Kiss

chapter twenty-three

A fist pounds against my door. My eyes jolt open, and my first coherent thought is this: -ai, -as, -a, -âmes, -âtes, -èrent. Why am I dreaming about past-tense -er verb endings? I’m exhausted. So tired. Sooo sle—WHAT WHAT WHAT? Another round of rapid-fire knocking jerks me awake, and I squint at my clock. Who the heck is beating down my door at four in the morning?

Wait. Four o’clock? Wasn’t there something I was supposed to—?

Oh, no. NO NO NO.

“Anna? Anna, are you there? I’ve been waiting in the lobby for fifteen minutes.” A scrambling noise, and St. Clair curses from the floorboards. “And I see your light’s off. Brilliant. Could’ve mentioned you’d decided to go on without me.”

I explode out of bed. I overslept! I can’t believe I overslept! How could this happen?

St. Clair’s boots clomp away, and his suitcase drags heavily behind him. I throw open my door. Even though they’re dimmed this time of night, the crystal sconces in the hall make me blink and shade my eyes.

St. Clair twists into focus. He’s stunned. “Anna?”

“Help,” I gasp. “Help me.”

He drops his suitcase and runs to me. “Are you all right? What happened?”

I pull him in and flick on my light. The room is illuminated in its disheveled entirety. My luggage with its zippers open and clothes piled on top like acrobats. Toiletries scattered around my sink. Bedsheets twined into ropes. And me. Belatedly, I remember that not only is my hair crazy and my face smeared with zit cream, but I’m also wearing matching flannel Batman pajamas.

“No way.” He’s gleeful. “You slept in? I woke you up?”

I fall to the floor and frantically squish clothes into my suitcase.

“You haven’t packed yet?”

“I was gonna finish this morning! WOULD YOU FREAKING HELP ALREADY?” I tug on a zipper. It catches a yellow Bat symbol, and I scream in frustration.

We’re going to miss our flight. We’re going to miss it, and it’s my fault. And who knows when the next plane will leave, and we’ll be stuck here all day, and I’ll never make it in time for Bridge and Toph’s show. And St. Clair’s mom will cry when she has to go to the hospital without him for her first round of internal radiation, because he’ll be stuck in an airport on the other side of the world, and it’s ALL. MY. FAULT.

“Okay, okay.” He takes the zipper and wiggles it from my pajama bottoms. I make a strange sound between a moan and a squeal.The suitcase finally lets go, and St. Clair rests his arms on my shoulders to steady them. “Get dressed. Wipe your face off. I’ll take care of the rest.”

Yes, one thing at a time. I can do this. I can do this.

ARRRGH!

He packs my clothes. Don’t think about him touching your underwear. Do NOT think about him touching your underwear. I grab my travel outfit—thankfully laid out the night before—and freeze. “Um.”

St. Clair looks up and sees me holding my jeans. He sputters. “I’ll, I’ll step out—”

“Turn around. Just turn around, there’s no time!”

He quickly turns, and his shoulders hunch low over my suitcase to prove by posture how hard he is Not Looking. “So what happened?”

“I don’t know.” Another glance to ensure his continued state of Not Looking, and then I rip off my clothes in one fast swoop. I am now officially stark naked in the room with the most beautiful boy I know. Funny, but this isn’t how I imagined this moment.

No. Not funny. One hundred percent the exact opposite of funny.

“I think I maybe, possibly, vaguely remember hitting the snooze button.” I jabber to cover my mortification. “Only I guess it was the off button. But I had the alarm on my phone set, too, so I don’t know what happened.”

Underwear, on.

“Did you turn the ringer back on last night?”

“What?” I hop into my jeans, a noise he seems to determinedly ignore. His ears are apple red.

“You went to see a film, right? Don’t you set your mobile to silent at the theater?”

He’s right. I’m so stupid. If I hadn’t taken Meredith to A Hard Day’s Night, a Beatles movie I know she loves, I would have never turned it off.We’d already be in a taxi to the airport. “The taxi!” I tug my sweater over my head and look up to find myself standing across from a mirror.

A mirror St. Clair is facing.

“It’s all right,” he says. “I told the driver to wait when I came up here. We’ll just have to tip him a little extra.” His head is still down. I don’t think he saw anything. I clear my throat, and he glances up. Our eyes meet in the mirror, and he jumps. “God! I didn’t . . . I mean, not until just now ...”

“Cool. Yeah, fine.” I try to shake it off by looking away, and he does the same. His cheeks are blazing. I edge past him and rinse the white crust off my face while he throws my toothbrush and deodorant and makeup into my luggage, and then we tear downstairs and into the lobby.

Thank goodness, the driver has waited, cigarette dangling from his mouth and annoyed expression on his face. He yammers angrily at us in French, and St. Clair says something bossy back, and soon we’re flying across the streets of Paris, whizzing through red lights and darting between cars. I grip the seat in terror and close my eyes.

The taxi jerks to a stop and so do we. “We’re here. You all right?” St. Clair asks.

“Yes. Great,” I lie.

He pays the driver, who speeds off without counting. I try to hand St. Clair a few bills, but he shakes his head and says the ride is on him. For once, I’m so freaked out that I don’t argue. It’s not until we’ve raced to the correct terminal, checked our luggage, passed through security, and located our gate that he says, “So. Batman, eh?”

Effing St. Clair.

I cross my arms and slouch into one of the plastic seats. I am so not in the mood for this. He takes the chair next to me and drapes a relaxed arm over the back of the empty seat on his other side. The man across from us is engrossed in his laptop, and I pretend to be engrossed in his laptop, too. Well, the back of it.

St. Clair hums under his breath. When I don’t respond, he sings quietly. “‘Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin flew away ...’”

“Yes, great, I get it. Ha ha. Stupid me.”

“What? It’s just a Christmas song.” He grins and continues a bit louder. “‘Batmobile lost a wheel, on the M1 motorway, hey!’”

“Wait.” I frown. “What?”

“What what?”

“You’re singing it wrong.”

“No, I’m not.” He pauses. “How do you sing it?”

I pat my coat, double-checking for my passport. Phew. Still there. “It’s ‘Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg’—”

St. Clair snorts. “Laid an egg? Robin didn’t lay an egg—”

“‘Batmobile lost a wheel, and the Joker got away.’”

He stares at me for a moment, and then says with perfect conviction, “No.”

“Yes. I mean, seriously, what’s up with the motorway thing?”

“M1 motorway. Connects London to Leeds.”

I smirk. “Batman is American. He doesn’t take the M1 motorway.”

“When he’s on holiday he does.”

“Who says Batman has time to vacation?”

“Why are we arguing about Batman?” He leans forward. “You’re derailing us from the real topic. The fact that you, Anna Oliphant, slept in today.”

“Thanks.”