“Here.” He pulled her very carefully into his arms, lifting her easily and settling her between his legs, as he leaned back against the wall of the quay. “Does this help?”
She bent her head, defeated, into this, her very favorite fantasy. His warm body. His hold. “You left me with nothing,” she whispered. “For five years. Nothing but me.”
His arms tightened gently on her. “That wasn’t leaving you with nothing. That was leaving you with everything.”
Yes, clearly. She’d made herself from that point. Everything she’d become had come from inside her, and her
everything
was a good
everything
. It was a proud, happy everything.
“I thought leaving you with only me was leaving you with nothing.” That deep steady voice, coming from inside his chest under her ear, rasping over her head. “Back then.”
He
had been her everything. The only reason she didn’t already have a concrete plan for getting out of that
cité
the day she turned eighteen. The person who made it bearable, on whom she could put all her focus. The dream she rode with out of there.
“I could
bite
you,” she said.
Nothing.
Him!
“You can do anything you want to me. I’m sorry that I hurt you, and I can take pretty much any punishment.”
Her eyes filled again, and her head collapsed back against his chest in defeat, her hand rising to stroke right where she had been so tempted to bite.
I’m sorry. Why did you have to go join the goddamn Legion?
Oh, God, the heat and scent of his body. In
real
. She hadn’t even known he smelled like that—this rough, sweet, piquant scent of him, as if he’d absorbed all the odors of the pine and wild-herb-clad hills of Corsica and baked in them. Which, God, he probably had—crawling through brush, doing those two hundred-kilometer, four-day marches in full gear in the hot sun. And that was just the training. That was before he must have been sent to Afghanistan to march right into explosives or an ambush of bullets while he was doing them.
“You were never
nothing
,” she said flatly. “You made it worth getting out of bed every morning and braving the damn walk past those gangs of assholes, just knowing I’d get to see you. You were everything to me back then, Joss.” She lifted her chin, sat away from the warmth of his body. “But these days—I’ve got all this.” She gestured to the whole beautiful stretch of Paris in the setting sun and back to herself, finishing with a flick of her hand up and down her body. She had herself, too.
Joss gazed down at her. The sunset glimmered rose across his face. “Good,” he said finally. “I’m sorry that I hurt you, Célie, but I’m glad you ended up with all this”—a copy of her gesture, to include the whole Seine and all its palaces and bridges and Eiffel Tower, and then a slower, gentler shift of his hand up and down, to include her—“instead of just me.”
Oh.
Now what was she supposed to think or feel about that?
“I would have been happy with just you,” she muttered.
Just.
How could he even say that about his strength and kindness and steadiness, all those things he had shown her back then, in a world where everyone else’s strength always seemed to be primed to cause harm?
“In Tarterets?”
“It never crossed your mind that we could make something of ourselves
together
? Drive south, me hire on with a baker, you with a mechanic in some likely town, and we make just a … I don’t know … a stupid, happy life together?”
He stared at her.
Yeah. It obviously hadn’t occurred to him.
“I wanted to be bigger,” he said stubbornly.
“Yeah, well … forgive me for ever imagining you could become a bigger person with me there to help. I didn’t realize I would have kept you small.”
Fine. That choice would have kept him smaller than he was now, true. Some small-town mechanic, while she was a small-town baker.
She sure did love being the best chocolatier in Paris. Even if Dom did get all the credit.
Okay, fine, maybe Dom deserved a smidgen of the credit. But still …
“You wouldn’t have kept me small.” Joss was gaining that obdurate tone he got, when he had to keep forcing the same words out because he couldn’t find the perfect ones. “But I had to get bigger.”
“Congratulations.” Still in his hold, Célie brought both hands up so that she could bury her head in them instead of his shoulder. “You clearly succeeded in your goal.”
“It was my first step.” As always, Joss’s words were simple, his gaze direct. “You’re the goal.”
Célie’s heart clenched when the door into her building swung shut with Joss on the other side of it. The darkness tightened her lungs as she set her foot on the first stair. Every breath grew more panicked, that she would never see him again, that closing that door on him had shut out his existence. She couldn’t do this, walking away from him, climbing and climbing up a dark stairwell by herself while she left him behind.
She had to, though. Because he had done the same thing to her, left her behind while he disappeared up a dark climb where she could not follow. And she couldn’t be the person left behind again.
She was as unable to let him back in as she was to send him away.
She smacked on the timed lights at every landing, but the one flight lit above her seemed like some wimpy candle against a grief or a fear, and the darkness pursued her from below, as the lights went out behind her with each flight she cleared.
In her apartment, at least, she could leave the lights on. Her home in expensive Paris was essentially a bed with a tiny amount of space on either side of it to move around. Joss couldn’t come up here. If he came up there, she would …
He would …
They would …
How did Joss make love? She had no idea. Urgent and hungry, pushing her down onto that bed as soon as they bumped into it for lack of other space to move?
Quietly, slow and easy, letting her lead?
Tantalizing, starting at that knuckle he had tasted and slowly drawing her finger into his mouth as he massaged her hand and let his palm rub down her wrist, calluses over her skin as he worked his way into greater and greater intimacies, not one of which she could deny?
Why did he have to have such a hot body? That wasn’t fair. All muscled and perfect and stubborn and those beautiful eyes focused on her, as if he’d hike two hundred kilometers for her with a fifty-kilo pack on his back any day of the year.
You’re the goal.
She wanted to
smack
him when he said that. She wasn’t any damn freaking goal, she was a
person
. She’d rather they have been walking hand in hand toward any goals.
She’d rather have come home, the first time she succeeded in making a perfect chocolate for Dom, and crawled onto their bed in their tiny apartment because it was the only space they had, to show it off to Joss excitedly and watch him eat it. Maybe even bring it to his lips with her own fingers, because he hadn’t yet had time to wash the grease off his hands from working on some car.
That was what she would have rather.
They would have been
happy
.
He couldn’t take back all those nights she’d had to curl up between her bed and the wall, in those black hours when she went into panic attacks over what he might be going through.
It had been bad enough when she thought he just didn’t care about her that way.
But
to have done it for her?
To have
liked
her and still left her that way?
It made her want to rip him to shreds.
Only, she was afraid if she touched him, she might just rip his clothes off instead. That when her fingers tried to sink into his actual body, they would end up doing something else.
She washed her face in lieu of being able to clean up her mind and went to the window, hugging herself, looking out at all the other lights that used to console her a little during those black moments. She was alone, but she wasn’t. Millions of other people were out there being alone, too.
Or finding someone.
But Joss had never been part of those millions. Always before, Joss had been somewhere off with the Foreign Legion, and even thinking about him had made her brain shy away from all the imagined nightmares of who might be shooting at him or what he might be doing.
She leaned on her little window railing, like a princess whose Prince Charming never did remember to stop by and serenade her, and blinked at what she saw below.
What in the world was Joss doing now?
***
Joss punched his jacket into a comfortable shape under his head and settled back on the bench, gazing up at the light in Célie’s window. Six floors up. He’d picked it out by the timing of when the light went on, after she left him at the door, and confirmed it by the shape of her silhouette.
It would be easy to climb the face of that building. Really easy. Just his own body weight to carry, and there were balconies and ledges every floor and even some grimacing old stone faces for handholds. It would feel like strolling in the park, to climb the face of that building.
So climbing up the stairs inside with her would have felt like … floating. Magically rising above the earth just by the wish of it.
Maybe she knew that. Maybe she didn’t think he deserved anything that easy.
She’d worked hard, too, after all. He pulled out his little metal box and gazed at the three chocolates he had saved for later. His thumbnail traced carefully around the edge of the one with delicate green twining across it, the mint one. She must have worked her butt off, to get this good.
Célie. He smiled. She’d never been afraid of work, or at least not work per se. She’d been afraid of ending up in a mind-numbing job in a factory, but that was why she’d focused hard on her pastry apprenticeship, because it made her happy and proud. Some people would consider pastry work mind-numbing, too, but not Célie. His mind flashed to all those memories of her face when she ran out of her bakery with a box full of something she was so proud to offer him.
Célie. With her burgundy braid and her bright eyes, always so happy and vibrant and bouncy. Sometimes she’d twitch that saucy butt at him on purpose and stick her tongue out at some excuse she’d found to tease him, when she met him leaving his work or he met her leaving hers, and his fingers would itch and he’d shove his hands in his pockets, to save her butt from them.
To make sure that first he became the man she’d really dreamed he would be. Her hero.
He clasped his hands behind his head to get comfortable, gazing in some awe at the wide open sky, the lights sparkling in windows on the buildings rising around him—people changing, eating, arguing, gazing out the windows at the night. He supposed he should go to a hotel until he found an apartment, but he hated to waste money on something stupid like that. He had plans for that money.
Besides, it had been a year since his last leave. And right now, being outside like this, under the non-starry sky of bright Paris, with people of both sexes all around just
living their lives
, no real menace to him anywhere, instead of in barracks surrounded by the solidarity and snores and problematic temperaments of other fighting men or outside where he had to keep an eye out for snipers or someone smiling coming up to him with a basket of flowers that hid a bomb … it felt so free, it was almost like flying. He didn’t even know if he’d be able to sleep. He might want to pace Paris, see it with all its lights and cynicism and the profound romantic innocence of its sleep.
He turned his head toward Célie’s window again, wondering what she looked like when she slept. Romantic? Innocent? Cynical? Cute. He was pretty sure about the cute part.
He couldn’t see her moving in her apartment anymore. A sigh of wistful arousal ran through him at the thought of her, either in the shower or already tucking herself into her pillow.
“Joss.”
His head twisted at her voice coming from across the street. What was she doing back down here and not in bed? Oh, hey, had she missed him? Maybe even … started thinking about inviting him up?
She crossed the street determinedly as he stood and stopped in front of him, her hands on her hips. “What are you doing?” she demanded.
He looked from her to his jacket in a pillow position on the bench, not quite grasping the question when the answer seemed pretty obvious. “Nothing much,” he admitted. “Just going to take a break for a while.” He’d been up a lot longer than twenty hours at a stretch before. Sleep deprivation to push a man past his breaking point was a key component of Legion training, a well-founded component it turned out later, given what they had to deal with in actual combat situations. But that sleep deprivation was also how a man learned to catch sleep when he could, too.
“Are you
sleeping
on that bench? Joss—don’t you have anywhere to stay?”
“I hadn’t gotten around to it. I just got into town this morning, and … I’ve been busy.” Besides, originally, he hadn’t intended to stay. He’d thought he’d sweep Célie off to some place like Tahiti, and they’d spend the rest of their lives in some dreamy paradise. Now … well, she seemed happy here.
“Do you want to help me find a place?” he asked hopefully. That way, even if she tried to be noncommittal, he’d know exactly how much or little she liked his options. He could read Célie like an open book.
Actually better. He could focus on her longer, without the sense of her swimming away from him. She … rested his eyes. His brain. Made him feel as if everything was clear now, beautifully so, as if all that energy and tough-hearted optimism in her washed the world around her clean and made it sparkle.
Every time he thought of her insane little chocolates, that so-easily-melted, delicate perfection held out to the world with all her heart, it made him smile. Maybe the smile didn’t show, because he’d spent the last five years in situations where you didn’t want to give anyone a weapon against you, but it curled up there, deep in his middle.
God, I want to kiss you.
“Joss.” She put both hands to her head. He loved it when she did that, the way it showed off her whole body—energy and curves and gracefully determined muscle—in some dramatic chiding. He liked being the focus of her chiding. He got off on it a little bit, to tell the truth. “People already want to arrest you as a crazy stalker.”