Jaime grabbed Dom’s hand and pulled him toward the door of the ganache room. When he stopped at the doorway itself, she shifted behind him, put both hands on his butt, and shoved him. It was a considerable tribute to Dom’s utter adoration of Jaime that he actually let that move him.
“Good chocolate,” Joss said meditatively, rubbing his fingers across his chocolate-smeared mouth. “You want to tell me what the hell, Célie?”
“I’m—going—to—
kill you
!” Célie gripped her chef’s jacket to give her hands something to strangle. He couldn’t even
guess
what the hell?
Joss came away from the window in one easy, lethal move and caught her, lifting her up and pressing his face right between her breasts, holding her there while he rubbed his face clean against her chef’s jacket.
More or less clean. When he lifted it—still holding her off the ground—liberal smears still decorated it and his military short hair, but at least half his skin was visible in random streaks and stripes of chocolate.
He looked kind of yummy that way, actually. He made her mouth tingle.
And if his hair had been even a centimeter longer, she probably would have yanked
his
instead of her own.
“You—you—you—I can’t believe you
haven’t learned one damn thing
!”
“I’ve learned plenty. But apparently not about you.”
“You’re still acting as if I
don’t even have anything to do with your life
! You don’t even tell me! And you just go off—” Her voice choked her. She struggled to get her breathing to calm down but it kept coming more and more hysterically. “You’re
leaving me
again. And you said—you said—you—” An onslaught of ugly sobs bottled up in her, and she fought to keep them contained.
He pushed her back against the wall, between two shelving sets of chocolates, capturing her inside a cage made of her own rich-scented work and him, still half covered in chocolate.
“I had a plan.” He pushed the words through her incipient hysteria. “Calm down.”
Her breath hitched at the command … and then came in with one long, deep pull and held a second, and then slowly released. The threat of raging sobs eased at that long breath. She stared up at him. God, he looked hot like that. She wanted to lick that chocolate off him so bad. And she was so mad at him.
“I’ve got something for you.” Those hazel eyes held hers.
Behave, Célie
. And,
Listen to me.
She hiccupped a little, staring up at him, taking another deep breath. He smelled so good, too, the chocolate and that scent of sand and sun and wild herbs. She needed to make a chocolate that captured sand and sun and wild herbs … “It’s in my pocket.”
But his arms stayed braced on either side of her to keep her captured.
She looked at his shirt. He was wearing, actually, what was a pretty nice shirt for Joss, a dress shirt, pressed, unbuttoned at the collar, rolled up at the sleeves, and now thoroughly stained in chocolate. And there was a small square box in the front pocket.
Her breath hitched in again. She stared at him until his stubborn, beautiful eyes seemed to fill her whole world.
“You want to get it out?” he asked.
Her lips pressed together vulnerably. She shook her head.
His eyebrows drew together faintly. He didn’t release her, but he pushed his body a little farther back from hers. “You don’t want it?”
“Not … not like this. This isn’t a good idea. You’ll—this is really not a good idea right now, Joss.”
“I had a
plan
,” he insisted, adamantly, pressing the words into her.
Oh, God, of course he had. That he’d decided on all by himself.
“Remember that night I said good-bye to you? And you didn’t know you wouldn’t see me again, and I didn’t tell you? I didn’t offer you that ring?”
She nodded, struggling not to cry.
The hardness in his body gentled. His hand framed her face, and his thumb grazed gently under her damp eyes. “I wanted to undo that. I wanted to do that night exactly the opposite way.”
Oh.
A tear spilled out. He caught it, rubbing it carefully against her cheek.
“I wanted to tell you,” he said quietly, full of all that intensity that Joss packed into him, “that I had to leave for a few days, but that I was going to be back. I wanted to talk to you about this job I’d taken and reassure you, if you had worries about it.”
He couldn’t have talked to her
about the decision
? Like,
before
he made it? As if she was part of it? Was he still so convinced that she would hold him back?
“And I wanted to ask you”—he reached into his pocket—“if you would wear this.”
He opened the box. Light sparkled off the diamond ring, like sunlight off a glass mountain. She had never thought she liked diamonds, had never been the girl who fantasized about receiving one. But this one sparkled like joy.
Célie covered her face with her hands. But she kept her fingers parted, so she could see that ring, and how utterly beautiful it looked when held in that callused hand. She’d never even
noticed
diamond rings before. It was the frame of that strong, male hand that set it off. Made it beautiful.
“Because it would make me so proud,” Joss said. “Incandescent with happiness. People would think I was running around in sequins, if you were wearing my ring.”
The utter wonder of Joss sparkling … over her. Tears streamed down her cheeks.
“I’d probably look ridiculous, I’d glow so much,” Joss said. “But I wouldn’t care. If you were wearing my ring.”
Célie couldn’t stop crying.
“Maybe everyone would know we went together,” Joss said. “If you were sparkling that much, too. We’d match.”
She pressed her fingers against her tears, but they wouldn’t stop.
“And you say I’m terrible at communicating,” Joss muttered. “What does that mean, Célie?” He touched her tears through her fingers. “Is that a … yes?” This pause and hush on the last word, as if it held worlds of wonder.
Oh, God, this was so hard. This was killing her, it was so hard. As if great giant claws had sunk into her body and were ripping her asunder. “No,” she whispered.
“What?” He bent deep to hear her, his face close to hers, his eyes so pure and true and intent.
“No.” The word was so soft it was almost no more than a shape of her lips, all the sound choked out of it.
“What?” He gave his head a tiny shake and pulled back, staring at her lips as if they didn’t make sense, and then into her eyes.
She swallowed, like swallowing a mountain, cramming all of it down her too small throat. And shook her head. “I can’t, Joss.”
From the vicinity of the doorway past him came a sharp sound of protest. Everyone in the
laboratoire
must be jammed into the door of the ganache room, watching this show.
Oh, God, she was rejecting him before all of them. Shaming him.
“But—” Joss looked down at the ring and then back up at her. “I thought that was what you said you wanted. I thought you said you would have been incandescent with joy.”
“I
would have
, Joss. When I was eighteen. God, I would have been so happy. But now … now I know how crappy it is to be the princess in a tower. Now I want someone who will include me. I’m not very good at waiting up in my tower for the prince to get back. I want to be part of the life I live. And of the life you live, too. I want us to live
together
.”
“I’m
working
on that, Célie,” he said in a rush. “I’ve got an apartment for us and everything. I just—it’s not ready for you yet.”
“You
got us an apartment
?”
He drew back, dumbfounded, alarm flaring. “Célie—”
“Without even—without even—” She pressed her hands to either side of her skull, hard, trying to hold it in.
“Without even talking to me about it?”
“It’s not
ready
. I want it to be perfect first.”
She stared at him. Her fingers dug into her hair and slowly started to pull. “Good enough for me?”
“Exactly,” Joss said, relieved. “You really don’t want to see it in the state it’s in now. It—”
“And you figured that out all by yourself? What I needed? What would be good enough for me?”
He hesitated. And then he fell silent, staring at her.
“For us?”
His lips pressed together. That look, that dive-deep neutral look he got when he knew things were going to get really bad.
“There are two people in an
us
, Joss. One of them is me.”
“It’s
for
you, Célie. It’s all—”
“No.” Célie’s hands fell slowly from her hair. She straightened from the wall.
Joss’s hand shot out and covered her mouth. “Célie, don’t—”
She jerked her head away. “
No
, Joss. The answer is
no
. I’m not who you think I am, and I can’t and I won’t ever be that person again. But you—you’re
still
the man who would walk off on me because you thought I deserved better and
never think to ask me what I really wanted
. In case it obliged you to change your mind. Or bend your pride.”
He stood stock-still, staring at her.
“No,” she said again, even though he had chocolate smeared across his face and mouth and across his shirt and she wanted to take him home and
lick
him, even though his eyes were so beautiful and stubborn and true, even though he had the hottest body a woman could ever dream of. And even though he’d done it all for her. “No, Joss. You’re destroying all the happiness I ever built for myself. Please go away and leave me alone.”
Joss stood dully in the middle of the apartment. God, he felt tired. As if he’d been through one of those training weeks with only an hour of sleep a night, and gotten nearly all the way to the end of the White Képi March, and then just sat down and given up, without ever earning the
képi
. Utter exhaustion. All coated and weighed down with unforgivable failure.
Finally he just lay down on the stained and rotting floorboards, half of which needed to be replaced and all of which needed to be sanded down and refinished. Hell, he’d probably best just rip out the whole thing, get some proper hardwoods in here.
Except who cared?
None of it mattered now.
Not the view on Célie’s favorite park.
Not the shower that sat there, delivered and uninstalled, where she was supposed to have stood caught in sprays at the end of the day, washing the chocolate scent off her and maybe smiling at him through the glass or even wiggling her naked butt saucily, when he came in pretending he needed to brush his teeth, just so he could eye her.
Not the measurements for the marble counters, so that her own home kitchen could be a place that gave her as much pleasure to work in as that beautiful
laboratoire
. So that it became a place where they could maybe make supper … what was that word of hers? …
together
.
Not the wall-to-wall closet that he had been going to set into one bedroom wall, to maximize the space, so that her clothes and his clothes both fit in the bedroom. Together.
Definitely not the damn bed.
He slowly pulled out the little box. God, he’d loved the fancy jeweler’s name on it. Loved standing in front of the shop on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and thinking,
Yeah. Now I can get her
this
.
His chest ached.
His throat resisted all his efforts to swallow.
He rolled over and pulled his old battered duffle to him from the corner of the room, unzipping and unzipping, until he found what he wanted.
He pulled it out.
A cheap, slim ring with a stone so big because it was fake, cubic zirconium. The kind of ring a man bought when the words swam in front of him all the time at school, and the teachers thought he was stupid, and he had to take the mechanic track instead of anything that would let him go to university. When he was a
good
mechanic, he was good at it, he liked it, and he thought that was worth something, but then he got fired from his job because his closest friends were fucking drug dealers. When his father was a bumbling alcoholic who once, long ago, had seemed like a decent dad, and his mother was a bitter woman whose every word focused on how her husband or her son was failing or going to fail.
When the only bright spot in his whole world was the girl who ran out of her bakery apprenticeship with her eyes lighting up at the sight of him and some box held up filled with some precious pastry she had made and saved because she wanted to see his eyes light up, too.
When he would do anything, anything in the world, rather than become her failure. The man who didn’t live up to that bright hope in her eyes.
Anything, rather than become the man who sank into grimy nothingness and weighed down all her hope and let his kids grow up to the same gray, dull lack of future.
It was the kind of ring a man bought just before he said:
No. No. I can’t give her this crap. I have to be more.
And if he was just turned twenty-one, and at heart desperately wanted to be the great romantic hero, went off and joined the Foreign Legion.
His throat hurt so bad. His hand fisted around the ring, and the damn thing was so cheap, he bent the setting of the fake diamond.
Anybody could see the other was better, right?
Anybody in the world could see that he’d done the right thing.
Except Célie.
And she was the only one who mattered.
He closed his eyes.
Five years of brutal effort and unstoppableness seemed to crash down on him all at once, and he turned his head into his arm, with the rings still clutched in either hand, there on the rotting, stained floor, and fell so solidly asleep it was like crashing into dark water.
“I’ll never have the cuddle now,” Célie told the water dully. Not crying. She’d cried more the past week in public than in the past twenty-three years combined. Now grief weighed so heavy it had crushed even her tear ducts closed.
“I’m really sorry.” Jaime sat astride the wall of the canal, one foot dangling just above the water next to Célie’s. “I didn’t mean to create problems.”