He threw her one dark, dangerous glance over his shoulder, like the throw of a knife blade, and abruptly jumped onto her balcony railing.
It was so sudden that she drew her breath to scream
Don’t jump!
But she didn’t have time to make a sound. His feet touched the railing just long enough to launch him upwards.
She ran forward, in a desperate urge to catch him back to safety, even as his body pulled upwards out of her sight. She got to the window and leaned out.
He was hauling himself over the edge of the roof.
“Joss!”
He paused to look down, leaning back over the edge of the roof. “I need a few minutes.” It was flat and final.
“You have no right to be upset!”
“I know.” His body disappeared.
“Joss!”
Just his head reappeared. He waited.
She sought for words. “Don’t fall!”
He gave a brief nod and was gone.
Joss sat on the zinc sheets of the rooftop, by a line of ceramic chimney tops, gazing down over Paris. Apparently this area where Célie lived had been built on higher land than the older, more central part of Paris, and from the rooftop, he had a clear view over those endless zinc-roofed mansards and chimney tops all the way to the Eiffel Tower. A pigeon came and pecked beside him, in the optimistic conviction that Joss must have climbed up here just to give it leftover baguette crumbs.
Grief tried to seize him in this gray, grim wave, that grief a man had to fight off in the Legion, because if you yielded to it, it was all over. You couldn’t let yourself think about all you had given up, all you were missing out on, all the ways you might have screwed up by making this stupid, over-romantic choice to join the Legion because it sounded good from a distance. Heroic. So much better than being a barely adult mechanic who couldn’t get another job because he’d lost the last one when his boss started thinking he must be in on the drug dealing, too, given the company he kept.
You couldn’t think about how stupid you had been, once the choice was made, how much you wished you could undo that choice and just go home. You couldn’t think about how the girl you wanted was probably dating other men, maybe even getting married, having babies. Legionnaires who let their thoughts go down those roads ended up killing themselves or deserting.
And a man who joined the Legion to make something of himself and then deserted halfway through because he couldn’t handle it had nothing left of himself to hold on to, to believe in, at all.
So after that grim, bleak year two, Joss had learned mostly how not to think of anything but success, strength, getting through. When he imagined Célie, she was delighted to see him, she threw her arms around him, she kissed him, he kissed her, he nestled himself in those beautiful moments of her and never, ever let himself think about what the reality might be.
A half-f box of condoms.
None of his business.
Just his loss.
And that great, gray grief that he’d fought off for five years slumped down on him out of the gray-dark sky of Paris, pressing all its weight down on him until even his shoulders didn’t want to bear up under it. And he’d formed those shoulders to bear up under anything.
***
Calvi, Corsica, three years before
Women were everywhere. Leaning against the bar, luring men into corners, glancing his way. Short-skirted, sweet-smelling, eager for fun.
Joss rubbed his thumb over the battered edge of the folded postcard in his wallet. Most of those cheerful postcards Célie had sent him the first six months he kept safe above his bunk, but he’d had to carry one with him. He’d chosen this one:
We miss you here, but I know you can do it! You can do anything. Bisous. Célie.
With a heart over the
I
in her name.
Uniforms mixed with all the scantily clad tourists in the bar around him. Back from Opération Serval and a successful nighttime drop over Timbuktu, the 2e REP was pretty full of itself. Back, covered in glory, by blue seas, where women wore bikinis, and no one was shooting at them.
Oh, yeah, those bikinis. Even in the bar, some of the women had only put on skirts with their bikini tops. They’d come to Calvi for one reason, those women, and the bar was full of exactly what they wanted: Legionnaires.
Joss pressed down harder on the edge of his postcard.
“That one’s for you.” Jefe shoved him in the ribs with his elbow. “She can’t take her eyes off you.”
Joss flicked a glance at the pretty blonde in a tight white skirt and lace-edged cami. No. That lace was the edge of her bra peeking over.
Hell.
“I’ve got a girl,” he said flatly. Even if she’d stopped sending him postcards a year ago. He still had her. He did.
Jefe snorted. “Trust me, she’s found some other guy by now. Come on. I’ll take the redhead.”
Joss’s glance flicked to the redhead, and his heart stopped. Curves and athleticism, perky nose, braid down her back … she turned her head.
He flattened. Not Célie. Of course not. What would she be doing in Corsica? Chasing him?
Ruthlessly, he crushed down that wish.
First
, he proved himself, that he could, indeed,
do anything
.
Then
he got to go after his next goal, Célie. One goal at a time.
Like a horse with blinders on
, one of his instructors had told them during the six weeks in the green hell of jungle warfare training.
Keep focused on your one objective. Nothing else counts. Certainly not how much it hurts.
But when morale was at its lowest, when a man was exhausted and bloodied and almost beaten, he always needed a thought, a dream, to save him. And Célie—she was such a bright, glowing dream. She shone through
everything
.
As long as he didn’t, himself, tarnish her.
“I’ve got a girl,” Joss said again.
The other men lounging at the table groaned. “Not that again.” They all agreed with Jefe on this one. From Noah, with that geeky face of his and angular body that made him look like a surprisingly tanned hacker until he started moving, to Michael, whose altar boy eyes made him look as if he’d accidentally woken up in the wrong story, to Victor, the Ukrainian with whom Joss butted heads constantly—all of them thought he was crazy.
Beside him, Victor snorted. Victor had saved his life more than once, and Joss had saved his, but he still had a hard time not hitting the Ukrainian most days. “That girl you never go see on leave?”
“Fuck you.” No sense wasting syllables on
it’s none of your business
when two would do. Not with Victor.
Victor laughed. “The real question is who’s fucking
her
?”
Joss shoved his chair back and shot to his feet. But before he could start a fight, their
adjudant
, Valdez, was there, gripping Joss’s shoulder, making a
calm-down-boy
gesture of his hand toward Victor. Valdez tended to treat them all like cute and poorly behaved puppies—an attitude that worked surprisingly well on a band of ferocious wolves—and tonight was his send-off. Fifteen years and now he was done. He’d even told them his real name out there in the world, so they could look him up: Delesvaux. He’d promised to cook them meals that would make them cry, if they came to see him. Joss believed it. The man always cooked them a Christmas dinner that really had made some of the men cry.
A shift in the atmosphere, and Captain Fontaine was suddenly there. He’d been sitting at the bar, fending off or encouraging a pretty brunette—hard to tell sometimes with Captain Fontaine—but whatever else he might be doing, Captain Fontaine always looked after his men. He had the scars to prove it, too, and the fine lines of fatigue around his eyes despite the energy in his body even in repose. Scoured by sand and sun, until all of him, sand and skin, were that same faded brown. You could always tell a Legionnaire by the way he carried himself, tough as nylon rope but rough around the edges like hemp.
“Bar full of tourists, mostly women,” Delesvaux told Joss, in that lazy,
easy-boy
tone he did so well, even in the midst of a firefight. “Not the send-off I’m looking for. Come on, guys, reassure me that you’re going to survive without me.”
“Cool it,” Fontaine told Victor flatly. He, too, knew better than to waste syllables with Victor.
Victor subsided. One thing they had all learned fast was not to mess with Captain Fontaine. Unlike some of those namby pants they sent over as officers from the regular Army or fresh out of Saint-Cyr, Fontaine had worked his way up to captain from that same bare room of
what-the-hell-did-I-just-do
engagés volontaires
that Joss and Victor and all the others had passed through. Joss knew almost nothing about Fontaine’s past before that or his real name, per the usual Legionnaire silence on that subject, but he did know that the man who called himself Fontaine came from the south of France—that bouncing, drawling accent, strong on the
N
’s, made it obvious—that he had a lot of cousins in a family who worked in some kind of agriculture, and that once, after a nasty week in the Uzbin Valley, when they’d lost two of their men to fucking friendly fire because of a radio malfunction, Fontaine had actually gotten drunk, and drunk enough he’d gone along with the rest of them to get a tattoo. Exactly the kind of thing Legionnaires liked to do to assert themselves in a country where both alcohol and tattoos were illegal, at least for locals. Only instead of “Legio Patria Nostra” or “Honneur, Fidélité” or “March ou crève” or even the names of the dead, like most men got in those circumstances, Fontaine had gotten, of all things, a small rose.
He’d been pissed as hell the next day when he realized what he’d done, too. But he’d never had it removed. From time to time, when he was in a T-shirt, that olive green would slide up hard biceps and the rose would peek out again, surreal in that tough, harsh world of fighting men.
Maybe that rose was his own postcard, his own dream of another life. A woman he wished upon, like a star.
Joss had gotten “Honneur, Fidélité.”
“I’ve got a girl,” Joss told them all for the third time. “And just because you don’t doesn’t mean you get to fuck with me about mine.”
Because when it came down to it, that was why they messed with him about this: jealousy. Because Joss had a girl he could carry with him back into whatever hell they got sent to. In dust and mud and falling mortar shells, she smiled at him, she told him he could do anything.
And all the others had to carry them through the same thing was the memory of their last fuck above a bar.
***
The pigeon gave Joss a disgusted look at his paucity with crumbs and flew off to find a park. The Eiffel Tower started to sparkle.
He lifted his head and looked at it. That was kind of annoying. Why did it do that? Sparkle like that. He’d heard about it, of course, but he couldn’t remember ever seeing it before that evening on the bridge with Célie. Oh, yeah, once, he and Ludo and some other guys had hung out at Trocadéro getting drunk and pretending Paris was theirs until they missed the last RER home. It had been a long, cold night, waiting for the line to start running again at dawn, and the Eiffel Tower had gone black at one a.m., leaving them to endure those five bleak hours with no sparkles. Luring them in and leaving them out in the cold.
Suckers.
But now, at a distance, the sparkling was much smaller.
It kind of reminded him of Célie, actually. That vibrancy she had, that resilient energy, that sparkle of toughness she let nothing extinguish. Not rain or cold or … anything really.
God damn it, he wanted to kill somebody. Anybody who had ever gotten his hands on that sparkle of hers.
He supposed he should be grateful that the jerks hadn’t been worth her—if anyone had, she’d still be with him and not letting Joss up to her apartment instead—but it just enraged him further, to imagine some bastard who didn’t deserve her getting his hands on her. Some lazy jerk who didn’t even take her walking on the Seine.
Joss had done five years in the Foreign Legion, damn it, to deserve her, and meanwhile there were pieces of shit who thought they deserved to touch her just because, what, they existed? Assholes.
Fucking bastards.
It’s your own fault.
Yeah, but that was what you couldn’t start doing, as a paratrooper in the Foreign Legion: you couldn’t start calling all you were killing yourself to accomplish a
fault
, a
mistake
, a decision that would
ruin your life
. You had to have all your courage, all your strength, all your belief in your goals, all the time.
It was a funny thing. He could climb a cliff barehanded with fifty kilos on his back. He could march two hundred kilometers over steep, mountainous terrain in four days or run thirty kilometers in under three hours, with a similar weight. Drop him off with only a handful of men in enemy territory, and it was the enemy who should be afraid.
Yes, he could take hurt.
Yes, he could persist.
Yes, he could crawl through a field of barbed wire for her.
But she wasn’t hitting him, no matter how much she said she wanted to.
She wasn’t asking him to crawl.
So he had to learn new skills.
He started to make his way down the steep slant of the zinc roof to her window and then remembered—he still needed to get some damn condoms. He wasn’t using that other bastard’s. The trapdoor onto the roof was locked, so he climbed down the inside, courtyard walls—helped drain some energy off—and let himself back out onto the street, walking down it until he came to the nearest white dispenser on the wall of a building and buying several. Then he realized he hadn’t paid enough attention to her damn code, so he couldn’t get back inside to the stairs or the courtyard. He checked the street. Kind of occupied but no police. Passersby probably wouldn’t assume he was a thief at least, with this many people around.
He waved to a few people to make them believe he was doing some authorized stunt, and then just climbed back up the building to her little railing. At least it was entertainment. The lack of physical challenge in this city was making all his muscles frantic under his skin.