She tried to hold very still, so as not to shake any possibility of a birth of interest away.
“Célie.” He closed his eyes a moment. “The way you look at me.”
What was wrong with the way she looked at him? Heat climbed into her cheeks. Damn it, if he knew about those wiggles …
He opened his eyes, holding hers with that beautiful, beautiful hazel green. “Célie. You know I’m just a man, right?”
“No!” she said indignantly. She did not know that at all.
“Made of clay,” Joss said, his mouth turning down. “I’m not good enough for the way you look at me.”
Okay, now he was talking crazy. She put both hands on his chest. “You’re
Joss
. You can do anything!” She shouldn’t have to keep repeating that last part. It was so inherently true to who he was that she wanted to
kick
the world, kick her own brother, for vandalizing Joss’s belief in himself. People around here got their graffiti on everything else, but they could damn well keep their grimy, destructive hands off Joss Castel.
He stared down at her a long moment. Then strength seemed to infuse him, even more strength than he always held, as if he grew three centimeters in every direction just from her belief in him.
Well,
good
. She willed more of it into him, trying to pour it through her eyes into his heart.
You are the biggest, best, most wonderful guy in the world. Don’t let this get you down. You can do anything!
“Right,” Joss said. He took a deep breath that seemed to expand his chest to superhero size. He squeezed her chin one last time. “I
can
be good enough,” he said like a vow. “Way the hell better than this.”
Exactly. You can do it! Don’t let this place get you down!
She pushed the thoughts into him until her forehead hurt from the effort.
His hand left her chin—but then it was as if he couldn’t stop touching her, because he stroked a wisp of hair back off her face, tucking it behind her ear. His fingers lingered over the curve of her ear and then, far too soon, fell away.
Célie flushed all through her, this rosy, starstruck hope.
“
Bonne nuit
, Célie.” He started to turn away, then stopped, and looked back, gazing down at her as if he had to memorize her for a test. “You really are the best part of my day.”
So Célie was
radiant
when she curled up in her bed that night. She glowed so much she could have been her own night-light. Tomorrow—tomorrow she was going to wear her sexiest shirt, the one with the deep V-neck, and the jeans that really hugged her butt, and, and … she lost herself in dreams of what he would do, of how she might just
trip
a little when he kissed her cheeks, see if she might get their lips to meet for real tomorrow, because maybe he would
like it
. She dreamed it until those dreams blurred into sleep.
So it was a complete shock to her when his mother showed up at the bakery the next day in a hysterical rage, blaming Célie because the evening before, her son had caught a train south and joined the Foreign Legion.
When Célie finally came out of the ganache room so people could work, keeping her head down, trying to get to the bathroom first to wash her face before she had to make eye contact, Jaime was sitting on a stool beside Dom, leaning back on one elbow on the counter, talking to him, passion fruit caramel hair angling against her cheek. Her blue eyes locked on Célie immediately. “Hey, Célie.”
Oh, crap. Dom had called for female intervention. His über-freckled fiancée was exactly the perfect person to doggedly pursue the issue until she got to the bottom of some suspected abuse of the sisterhood. Célie scowled at her boss, for being so damn
bossy
, as if he had the right to interfere in his employees’ personal lives or something, and went on to the bathroom.
Cold water on her face did not really do a whole hell of a lot of good. She turned her back on the mirror and sank against the sink behind her, holding on to it with both hands, and just—holding, there, for a moment. Holding everything. She drew yet another deep breath and sighed it out and finally went out to deal with things.
“So.” Jaime scooped her arm up, elbow to elbow, as if they were best sisters about to go out for a walk.
Célie liked Jaime, so astonishingly different from all the women with whom she had been convinced Dom would screw himself over. In a good mood, she liked teasing Jaime, and even hanging out over a cup of tea or hot chocolate during a pause in the day. She’d been teaching the other woman how to inline skate, even. But still. They weren’t actual sisters. Jaime had one of those already.
“Why don’t we go for a walk?” Jaime said.
“He’s still out there.” Dom gave a greedy show of sharp teeth. “Why don’t I go send him on his way first?”
“I believe we’ll call the police if we need that,” Jaime said very firmly. “Dominique. Let’s keep you out of jail.”
Dom brooded like a cigarette addict trying to make do with patches while somebody smoked right beside him. Célie thought it was so cute the way his fiancée called him by his full name all the time,
Dominique
, with that little careful accent of hers around all the French vowels. It was probably no wonder Dom was always kissing her. Célie practically wanted to kiss her herself, and she was
not
the type to go for small women who looked like they needed protection. She’d always kind of wanted to be the small woman who got protected herself.
It just hadn’t worked out for her.
Well, Dom, but he was kind of on loan, really. He was her boss. He wasn’t supposed to have to act like her big brother, too. Or in any other capacity, although she couldn’t say that a few fantasies hadn’t managed to slip past her guard on bad days, especially after she’d finally forced herself to quit fantasizing about Joss.
Well. Mostly quit.
“He’s still out there?” Célie said, and repeating the words out loud made them true, made her heart beat harder, as if she was going to be sick.
He didn’t just leave? Again.
“Dom, don’t go get in a fight.”
Joss had left her to go join the Foreign Fucking Legion, so by now, he was probably one of those people who knew how to kill others with his left pinky finger.
She didn’t want either one of them to get hurt.
“I’ll go talk to him,” she said sullenly. She’d been so happy. And here,
bam
, let’s just shatter that like crystal.
“Why don’t you tell me a little bit more about what’s going on with this guy, first?” Jaime asked, pulling her outside the glass doors to the top of the steps so they could tuck themselves into some illusion of auditory privacy, if they kept their voices low, even if they were pretty visible. “Was it a bad relationship?”
“No! It’s not—it wasn’t even a relationship. I just, I don’t know—I just trailed around after him, I guess.”
Jaime narrowed her eyes. “He had other girlfriends, too?”
“I wasn’t his girlfriend, Jaime. That’s what I’m saying. We just—we lived in the same HLM, and he was friends with my brother. Then he decided to make a better life for himself, and I haven’t seen him in five years.”
“Oh.” Jaime sat still on the steps, trying to digest this. Since in normal times people ran up and down those steps between the
laboratoire
and the
salon
below constantly, they were really getting in the way, but no one pushed by them.
That was Dom for you. He’d be more willing to piss off any number of customers than shortchange one of “his” people.
“So,” Jaime said slowly. “He never hurt you, and he didn’t betray you?”
Célie’s eyes filled again. “No,” she said. No, it had all been her wanting, her hurting, her needing. He’d never deliberately fed it. And he’d left her with all of it, having better things to do with his life.
“Oh.” Jaime eyed Célie doubtfully. Célie scrubbed at her tears again. Jaime sat waiting. The glass door nudged gently against their backs, and they scooted over to the far side of the top step, so that Thierry could squeeze out with a tray with a
mille-feuille
and a cup and pot for hot chocolate on it.
Sorry
, Thierry mouthed, face scrunching with the force of his apology, as he snuck past them and hurried down the stairs. They must be getting desperately backed up, behind that glass door. Célie wouldn’t turn around to see if anyone was watching them, or if they were all trying very hard to work—as long as that work kept them in full view of the glass doors.
Right now, she almost didn’t care.
“Maybe
I
should go talk to him,” Jaime said. “Do you want me to ask him to leave?”
Célie’s heart seized. Leave? Again? Just disappear into that dark void again, and this time maybe she would
never
see him again. Never know what became of him.
She sprang to her feet. “No. No. No. I’ll talk to him.”
Jaime stayed seated, arms wrapped around her knees, watching Célie a long moment. Then she nodded and stood. “I’ll make sure Dom stays upstairs. You promise nothing is going to happen that will make him jump through the window and break an ankle in his rush to go smash that guy’s face in?”
Célie shook her head. “Joss would never hurt me.” She hesitated, one step lower. “
Enfin
… not like that.”
Joss waited.
He’d gotten good at it in the Foreign Legion, waiting. That grim, stubborn, determined waiting for someone to move, for a chance to kill or be killed to open up. For backup to arrive, for their unit to move on, for mail.
(That throat-tightening effort not to wait for mail, not to hope for anything.)
He could wait with purpose, as long as he needed to, for his opportunity to live to fight another day to open up.
This waiting didn’t feel like any of those waits. It hurt his throat, this waiting. Struck in his chest over and over, this hard battering in time to his heart. Made him want to bow his head.
He tried to press his shoulders back against the wall, tried to make himself look slouching, because he was much less obtrusive that way, but he couldn’t. His hands felt funny tucked in his pockets, chained, the hands of an idiot, and they kept slipping out again, where they could be ready for trouble.
He’d stuff them back in. Then a few minutes later, he’d realized they had pulled themselves right back out.
He missed the weight of a FAMAS across his chest while he waited—it would give his hands something useful to do at least—but an assault rifle would do no good here.
He only had a few skills transferrable to this situation. He couldn’t fight that guy up there, her boss presumably, and mess up her life and her work situation. And get himself arrested, just as if he was still another loser from the
banlieue
.
But he could wait. He could persist. He could take hurt and keep going.
Sometime she would have to leave her hidey-hole. Have to go home.
Sometime … maybe she would want to see him.
Célie used to like him, or she seemed to, anyway. She used to make him feel he could be the greatest man in the world. That he
had
to become a better man, to be worth the opinion she had of him.
He couldn’t let that trust and pride she showed in him be misplaced, wither and die as he dwindled into yet another aging loser, still stuck in an HLM where he couldn’t even make sure his own wife and kids were safe taking the elevator.
He’d had to do better by himself for her sake. Better by her.
But those postcards she sent him, there at the beginning, with the heart over the
I
in her name the way she always wrote it, revealing how young she was, how much of a teenager he shouldn’t be hitting on … those postcards had trickled and died from lack of response. From all the times he stroked them and twisted a pen in his hands and didn’t find the words to write back.
They’d died quickly, within the first six months. And he never did find the words that paper could hold.
So now he waited.
Outside this fancy chocolate place Célie had found for herself, in
Paris
of all places. Not in its rejected fringe, where the idea of the romantic, glamorous city only a subway ride away left people bitter and desperate, but
here
. In its glittering heart. Instead of fleeing Paris as he had, for a better chance, she had marched right into the city’s heart and made it accept her. His mouth softened. Wasn’t that, when he thought about it, just exactly like Célie?
The beautiful glass doors—the kind of doors you could have in a country where bombs and guns didn’t go off regularly—slid open. A small, curvy woman in a short-sleeved black chef’s jacket stepped out, Célie, her eyes holding his even before the doors slid aside.
She flexed her fists uneasily by her thighs and then crossed the street to him. It was all Joss could do not to jump forward to cover her body with his, her crossing the street so recklessly, but he caught himself before he could act like an idiot. No snipers ever on rooftops here.
As she came up to him, she got smaller and smaller, until she was just the size she used to be back when she trailed around after her brother—small enough to fit under his arm if he ever forgot himself and draped it around her shoulders. Small enough to tuck up against his chest while his hand slipped down to cup her butt, if he ever let himself do that. Small enough he’d have to pick her up to get their bodies to fit right together. He still sometimes, at odd moments, remembered how easy it had been to pick her up to boost her over a wall in some of their escapades back then. At very odd moments, lying plastered on his belly in low cover, for example, that memory would ghost back across the muscles in his arms, as if they craved that lightness.
That spunky, stubborn cheer.
Her eyes and nose were red, this raw, swollen red, and his throat closed all the words out of him again. Deprived of words, his hand—which had known it needed to be free and ready for action, after all—lifted of its own accord toward her face.
She knocked his arm away before his hand could touch. Her mouth set hard, as she looked up at him, and her eyes shimmered again. “
Fuck you
,” she said bitterly.