“So you’ve been on your own?”
She looked a little confused. “Well, my mom.” She shrugged again. “Cousins.”
Célie’s mother and extended family were not exactly the rock on which a woman built a castle. “You’ve been on your own.”
She shook her head firmly. “I’ve had work. Dom.”
Dom. Joss frowned.
“Me.” She lifted her chin.
Her. Yes. He realized that his hand had reached for hers only when his palm grazed over the knuckles of a fist tightened to ward off his touch.
He shoved his hand into his pocket to get it to behave. “You.” He held her eyes. “That’s a lot to have.”
She blinked and her lips parted. She stared at him a second and then turned hastily to climb the steps of one of the footbridges arching over the canal, stopping in the middle of it to gaze at the water. As she stared down at it, not looking at him, a slow flush started to climb her cheekbones. She dashed at her eyes again.
He closed his much bigger hands around the railing, next to hers, but he made sure to leave enough space between them that she wouldn’t jerk away again.
It hurt like hell when she jerked away. Like electric shocks or something, maybe it would train him to quit reaching for her.
The dark water gave him something to focus on. Its quiet, its stillness, its ability to adapt and survive, its depth. He could gaze into it like a mirror, catch blurred glimpses of her face in it, as if he was still looking at her in his memories from the distance of another life.
“You’re mad at me,” he said finally.
She shook her head, and then shrugged, and didn’t look at him.
“Or upset.”
She shook her head, and then gave that exact same shrug. And still didn’t look at him.
He squinted over the canal, the banks to either side, the windows of the buildings, the rooftops—automatically checking everything in sight for possible trouble. But the only possible trouble he saw was the one he was already in. The one he hadn’t predicted and didn’t understand.
“I’m not very good at talking anymore,” he said at last. Most of his vocabulary these days consisted of swearwords. Not that either he or Célie had exactly had clean mouths back in their
banlieue
days, but still. Maybe he needed to take up reading Racine or something, now that he was back. Give himself a vocabulary beyond
putain de bordel de merde
and worse. “You were always the one who was good at talking.”
Laughing at him, teasing him, pushing for his attention. Saucy and amused and full of so much life that it had been all he could do not to grab her and pull her into his lap time and again as she laughed down at him while he was sitting on some graffiti-stained wall and she was bouncing around, too full of energy to sit. The number of times his palm had itched for that sassy butt as she glanced back over her shoulder, alight with mirth at some wicked, twitting comment she’d sent his way. But he’d known how a pretend swat of her butt would end. With his palm settling over that curve, taking possession of it, pulling her in.
His semi-friend’s little sister. Who deserved to have an older guy in the vicinity who looked after her, who didn’t harass her like every other damn bastard in their
cité
.
So he hadn’t harassed her. He’d looked after her. He’d looked after her so well that he’d left, so he could turn into the man who could look after her properly.
And now Célie didn’t say anything.
His hands tightened on the rail. “Are you not happy to see me?” The hurt of his own words sank deeper than any physical wound he’d ever had. No anesthesia for it, no way to get the bullet out, to stitch it up and help it heal.
Célie whipped around and launched herself so hard and fast at him that he barely caught her. He rocked back a step and seized her, and she seized
him
, this clawing embrace where her nails sank hard into his lower back, like she was going to rip his skin off. “You
bastard
,” she said into his chest.
“Ton putain de Légion étrangère, va.”
“Célie.” He tightened his arms around her. God, she felt good against him. Even angry or … or whatever she was, she felt good.
“How could you do that? Join the Foreign Fucking Legion? Just go and … be gone. Be
gone
. Nothing of you left here at all.”
He blinked. Because he had been so solidly present wherever he was, it had never occurred to him that where he
wasn’t
would leave much of a void.
She yanked away from him. His arms didn’t relax fast enough, and she started squirming before he managed to release her, just as she shoved at him, bouncing herself back. She thrust a hand through her pixie hair. “I hate you. So, yes, I’m happy to see you.”
“Ah.” He closed his hand around his wrist behind his back, bracing himself in the position with which an
engagé volontaire
stood while being yelled at by some random corporal during basic training, and gazed at her.
Those happy, kissable, supple lips twisted unhappily and she looked away over the water. Over her head, he checked all their surroundings again. Still no trouble except the one he was in.
“Sorry,” she said, low and rough. “I don’t have the right to be so mad. I just, you know … never mind.”
He waited.
She shrugged, bitterly. “I know I was just Ludo’s stupid kid sister who insisted on trailing around after you guys. I just, you know—I hero-worshiped you, I guess.” She kicked the bottom of the bridge barrier.
Hero-worshiped him? His heart crinkled funnily, this embarrassed, puzzled, awkwardly crushed pleasure, like a butterfly squeezing out of a cocoon. How could she have hero-worshiped him back then? He’d gone away to learn how to be her hero.
To come back and rescue her, build a new life for her.
Around her stretched the beautiful Canal St. Martin, the buildings and old streetlamps and shady trees of this part of Paris. A vision flashed through him of her gorgeous
salon de chocolat
, of the luminous kitchens to which she had fled when she ran away from him. She seemed to have a pretty nice life already.
One she had built herself.
Without him.
“I don’t remember treating you as a stupid kid,” he said.
She looked up at him, brown eyes solemn and searching.
“As Ludo’s sister, yes, granted. Since you were his sister. Still are, I guess.” He’d kind of been done with Ludo well before Ludo finally got arrested. Maybe his desire to not be Ludo had helped fuel his enlistment in the Foreign Legion, too.
“Last I checked,” she said dryly.
He sought words, filtering out swearing, trying to find a way he could say what he wanted to say. It was hard to tell someone something when you weren’t sure you wanted her to know. “I’m not really Ludo’s friend anymore.”
You’re nobody’s little sister now.
Fuck, that sounded alone and friendless, put like that. Unprotected. What he really wanted to say was:
I came back for you. Nothing to do with Ludo at all.
“Yeah, well, you’re not really my friend anymore either, are you?” Célie said.
Shock. This white-noise, buzzing, strange
thing
mind and body did when the hurt was too much to bear.
“If you ever were.” She shrugged, flippant and dark.
Fuck.
His heart surely couldn’t take much more pain?
“You just put up with me, I guess.” Another shrug. He wanted to lay his arm over her shoulders and forcibly block them from shrugging.
“Célie, please stop now.”
I changed my mind about you talking.
Célie glanced up at him, her lips parting to say something else, to strike again, and then her gaze caught on his face and slid over it, then slid over it again. Her expression shifted. “I just meant—”
He shook his head and held up a hand to stop her, focusing on the water. His body felt suddenly utterly heavy and tired, a tired that went deep down into the soul, that wasn’t a physical tired—it was hard to physically tire a man who had survived the paratroopers’ Corsica march—but heart-worn weariness. He wanted to slump down onto the bridge with his back against the barrier, slump like at the end of that march and close his eyes and sleep for days.
If he was ever her friend?
Meaning, he’d never been a good enough friend to her for her to know it. And he’d tried so fucking hard.
He turned suddenly and sat down on the top step of the bridge. He shouldn’t do that. His big body now blocked most of the passage across the bridge. But he did it anyway. Bracing his arms on his thighs, he let his face drop into his hands. He had killed two people in a nighttime combat mission in the Uzbin Valley, no deaths on his conscience ever and then all of a sudden two, and he felt now as he had then—not during the kill-or-die adrenaline of the moment, but afterward, the night afterward, when the adrenaline was all gone and all that was left were thoughts. Images.
God, he wanted to sleep. For years.
And then a small body shifted down on the step below his. Célie slipped her head between the bend of his arm and his torso, resting it against his leg. She wrapped one arm around his thigh, holding on to him as tightly as she could. And she started to cry again, these tremblings of her body, this slow soaking of his jeans. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” she whispered. “Damn you.”
Slowly, very slowly, he unfolded one of his arms and settled it gently around her back instead. Slowly, very slowly, his other arm abandoned support of his face and dropped to her hair. It prickled faintly, from the gel or whatever she must use to give it that tufted-fairy look. His fingers sank a little deeper, down to the back of her skull, where her hair softened, gentle against her head.
His hand looked so big there. His thumb cheated and snuck out to trace over the curve of her ear, down to the two piercings, that dramatic one and that more discreet little jewel. If he kept going, his thumb would trace the line of her jaw, down over her throat.
But he didn’t. He kept his hand on that quirky, attention-grabbing hair, on those earrings, all the ways Célie tried to assert more space in her world. Cheerful, sparkling, happy ways.
“Me, too,” he whispered. “I’m glad you’re okay, too.”
La Ferme, Castelnaudary, four years and eleven months before
Failure.
It slammed at him from every direction, boots in the ribs, driving Joss down into the mud. The
adjudant
grabbed him by the back of the head and shoved his face into that mud.
“Abandonne!”
No. I won’t give up, you fucking bastard.
He’d joined the Legion so he
wouldn’t
be a failure.
But if he failed, he could
leave
. Take back this stupid decision he had made, go back to a life in which failure now seemed by far the most comfortable option. He could go wait for Célie outside her bakery, and see her run across the street to him, with her face alight and something delicious held up in her hands. See that look on her face as she pressed her hands to his chest and said …
“
Tu es nul!
” the
adjudant-chef
shouted in his ear. Joss’s muscles had long since turned to limp spaghetti, his will crushed like an earthworm under weeks of abuse and no sleep and tasks no man could do. Somewhere in his head he knew they were just trying to break him, and he had to fight through it, but he still felt broken. “Worthless! Weak!
De la merde!
No good!”
God, the man sounded like his
mother
, whenever she exploded at his father after the job loss and the alcohol took him. The way she even, as the bitterness grew and Joss kept bringing home crappy grades, exploded at Joss.
Not good enough! What’s wrong with you? You’re just like your father! You won’t even try!
If Joss turned his head, he’d probably find that same lobster-red rage on the
adjudant
’s face.
“Give up!” the man screamed in his ear, spittle adding to mud.
“Abandonne!”
Give up. After only one month. Give in. Go back to that girl who put her hands on his chest and said …
You can do anything.
Brown eyes, rich and true in a way this mud could never be. Thank God he hadn’t told her what he was going to do. Thank God she couldn’t see him like this, ground down to nothing, already failing.
Goal. Focus on the goal.
Brown eyes, bright smile.
“Give up!” the
adjudant-chef
yelled, shoving him down again.
He could hit the instructor and then crawl home. Home to
her
.
And he could
eat
, for God’s sake. Sleep ten years.
Be a failure.
Célie wouldn’t mind.
She’d settle. After all, she’d been so desperate for a man to look up to that she’d even looked up to
him
.
She wouldn’t know how he’d failed, because he’d made sure she couldn’t see it. Only he would know.
She’d take what he could manage, as he folded in on himself. She’d take less and less, as they grew older and he never made her dreams come true, as that light faded out of her eyes, as she stopped believing and turned into every other middle-aged woman in that HLM.
You can do anything.
She’d stop saying that.
Maybe she’d even stop saying it to herself in the mirror. Dull-eyed when she looked at herself, all the light gone out.
“Non.”
He gasped it, in the first breath he could take free of mud.
“
What
did you say?” The hard grip on his neck shoved him down into the mud again.
He forced himself back up on arms that thought they had no strength left, struggling for breath. After five days with three hours sleep and one ration pack for food, he’d just finished a ten-mile race in combat gear, followed by an impossible obstacle course, and was now on his three hundredth push-up in the mud as punishment for having slid back down a mud-coated rope on a mud-slick incline before he made it to the top. He had an infection crawling up his right arm from a scratch that made even slight movements flame like fire and something wrenching his stomach inside out because he’d cracked and drunk water from a creek on yesterday’s twenty-mile march. He hated this bastard with everything in him—but he didn’t have much left.
Why the hell am I doing this? I could quit. I could give up. I could go back.