She looked at him without turning her head. His right thumb slayed his left one, and then the left one popped back from the grave and wrestled his right one down.
“It’s important to you?” she said finally. “That I see it?”
He nodded, staring at his thumbs.
“All right,” Célie said slowly, straightening from the railing.
He didn’t ask about the motorcycle, when she led the way back to her moped. He didn’t knead her hips when he rode behind her. He just balanced with the grip of his thighs.
Sickness grew in his stomach as he entered the code for the building, and he entered it wrong twice, a last-ditch subconscious effort to stop this self-humiliation. He swallowed the sickness down, but the bones of it lodged in his throat and even poked through in odd places in his chest, spiny shame.
That shame grew bigger as he opened the door, this acute, puncturing pressure from his belly out all through him. He stepped to the side and pressed his back to the wall, bracing himself so that he didn’t leap forward and start blocking her way to the worst rooms.
The rotten floorboards were right there for her to see. The stains from God-knew-what on the walls. The half-ripped-out bathroom. The old, cheap, yellowed linoleum counters in the kitchen, and the ugly, rusty, chipped white sink. He drove himself back against the wall with all the strength of his legs and closed his eyes, listening to her move around the place. God, he didn’t want to see her expression.
“It, ah, needs a lot of work,” she said finally, coming back from her solitary exploration of the rooms.
“I know,” he said between his teeth, staring at the floor.
She stopped in front of the windows. “Oh, wow. What a view.”
He lifted his head a little.
She opened one of the windows and leaned out. “You can see most of the park! And the Eiffel Tower!”
He watched her silhouette against the light outside. “And you, ah, like the neighborhood, right?”
“It’s funky. Diverse. Not so—” She did a snobby thing with her nose and waved toward the horizon, apparently indicating other possible quarters in Paris. “Wow,” she said after a moment. “I can’t believe you found a place right on the park.” She snuck a quick glance at him. “No wonder you grabbed it.”
He opened his hands, palm up.
See? I thought I was doing the best thing.
She pulled her phone out of her jacket pocket and showed it to him. “Maybe you could have texted me. Sent me a photo. Called and said, ‘Célie, I found this awesome place, but I have to grab it fast. What do you think?’”
“I had a plan.” He rested his head against the wall behind him.
Go all out for your goals.
He’d already waited at least eight years for Célie, which seemed a long courtship. And he’d forgotten what she told him, that she hadn’t been waiting for him.
Because he’d been too proud to ask her to.
She turned away from the window to look at him. “What was your plan, Joss?” she asked, her tone so much gentler than it had been last time this came up.
“To turn it into something beautiful before you saw it. So that your face would light up, you’d think it was so wonderful, and you’d, you know … cover me in kisses.” His cheeks heated. That same old stupid dream. “I didn’t want you to see it like
this
.”
“Joss.” She came toward him. A little shock ran through him when she slipped her hands around his waist and leaned back to look into his face. His cheeks grew hotter under her look, but he stared down at her, caught by the fact that she had touched him again. “I’m never going to think of you as a failure. You know that, don’t you?”
He swallowed, and then tried to harden his jaw. He’d learned young to shut out shame and blame—his teachers’, and later his mother’s. A psychopathic corporal on a power trip could dress him down during training and try to shame him and his fellow
engagés
into giving up and quitting, and he just let it wash off him, water off a duck’s back.
But Célie … she mattered.
“Never.” She lifted her hands to rest them on his shoulders. “Not then and not now. That’s not who you
are.
”
It was who he had been refusing to be since … maybe since he was twelve. When his dad lost his job and everything started to go so wrong.
Maybe he’d been drawn to the military because he, too, needed a strong big brother or father figure. To help him figure out how to be the man he was trying to be.
Célie gave his shoulders a gentle squeeze. “You’ve always sparkled to me, Joss.”
His blush swept up so deep he could feel it burning in his forehead.
She stroked it, from his forehead down to his cheeks, which she framed.
He took a deep breath, trying to absorb the coolness of her hands.
“
Sparkle
is maybe not the right word,” she admitted. “You’re so steady and deep and true. And you try so hard. Joss, I just … you have to trust me with you enough to let me in. Because otherwise it’s always you going off on your own to make sure everything’s good enough, and leaving me alone.”
“I’m trying,” he said.
She looked around, at the wreck of an apartment in its perfect location. “Joss. Maybe there are men who were born perfect, born rich, born princes. But I don’t give a crap about them. I like the …
work
of you. The heart. The effort. I like that if you walk into a dump like this, you immediately see that all it will take to make it magnificent is you.” She ran her palms down his arms to take his hands and lift them. “Your own hands.”
His cheeks just refused to cool. His fingers wanted to link with hers and clutch, like a drowning man. And he was supposed to be stronger than all this.
He
was supposed to be saving
her
.
“But I like to work, too, Joss. I like to build, and make things better, and put my stamp on the world. If this is supposed to be
our
home, I’d like to be right in here with you, from the very beginning, scraping plaster off brick and painting walls and doing whatever else needs doing, to make it a perfect place for us.”
“It’s filthy work, Célie.”
She shook her head. “I’d way rather crawl through the mud beside you to get to a goal than sit somewhere in a tower wondering what you’re doing and if you’ll succeed.”
“I’ll succeed,” he said immediately. “I won’t fa—”
She put her hand over his lips. “Maybe you will fail, sometime, Joss. Maybe you’ll screw up again. Most of us
do
, don’t you get that? It’s what we do with our failures, and how we pick ourselves back up and grow, that shows our worth. Just because something might not succeed as well as you want it doesn’t make
you
a failure, as if that one effort defines your whole worth.”
His breathing grew slower and deeper at her steady, firm voice, that sickness starting to calm. That warmth she brought him was growing in his middle, quieting the rest. “I should … talk with you about this more,” he said.
She smiled wryly, but her eyes were such a rich, welcoming brown.
“You—make sense.” He rested his hands on her shoulders. God, they felt good under his hands. Small and strong. Her own kind of strength.
“See? If you help make sense of me, and I help make sense of you … you see how that works? But for it to work properly, you have to let me know when you feel weak or wrong. So I can, you know, help get your head back on straight.”
“Center me.”
A surprised smile kicked across her face. “That’s what you do for me,” she protested.
He ran his hands down from her shoulders, squeezing her upper arms gently. “I guess you’re saying that we can do it for each other.”
The surprise faded from her smile, and she looked so happy. But she grew solemn again. “And if you’re doing something hard that I can’t help you with, that I can’t do, too, I’d like to be around to support you. I would have done that, you know. Finished up my baker’s apprenticeship and come to join you in Corsica, maybe opened up my own little bakery there. I bet I could have made a killing off all those hungry soldiers. But you would have had to trust me enough to risk letting me see you fail.”
Trust her not to think of him as a failure, not to
make
him a failure by that very loss of belief in him, if she saw him struggle with or even fail at one of the thousands of impossible challenges thrown at men who wanted to become paratroopers in the Foreign Legion.
“I’m not your mother,” Célie said.
He stiffened. “I know that, Célie.” For God’s sake, he was twenty-six years old, a paratrooper in the Foreign Legion, and she assumed he was still confusing his girlfriend with his mother? What the hell did a man have to do to prove himself as strong, free of his parents, above all that?
Besides, Célie wasn’t anything like his mother.
Not … anything.
No matter how mad she got, she never shamed, she never reduced, she never called a man a failure.
You’re amazing.
Actually, half the time when she got mad at him, it seemed to be because he didn’t think he was amazing
enough
. The very opposite of shame.
Célie smiled ruefully. “I know you know that here.” She rested her hand on his heart. “But sometimes you forget it here.” She touched her other hand to the back of his head.
He raised his eyebrows at her.
“Is that where the subconscious part of the brain is?” she whispered. “The back of the mind?”
So he had to laugh a little. Damn, he loved her. He pulled her in closer.
She held his gaze. “I won’t ever try to make you smaller. I won’t ever look down at you for not being good enough.”
She was so fierce, as if the princess in the tower had always really been a dragon who happened to have long, curly eyelashes. No wonder that, eight years in, he still hadn’t managed to win her. He’d been trying to court the wrong damn species.
“I think I always knew that here.” He covered her hand on his heart. “But maybe I sometimes forgot it here.” He covered her hand on the back of his head. “Or wherever that idiot part of the brain is.”
She smiled a little. “And you know,” she said quietly. “
I
might do something hard. I might like to have you around to support
me
, too, in
my
quests. When I’m, I don’t know … working forty-eight hours straight the week before Valentine’s and would maybe, when I can finally stop, like someone who can just pick me up and take me home and feed me something besides chocolate and put me to bed, instead of having to make it home on my own.”
Oh,
yeah
, he could do that. He liked the thought of it so much. Carrying her home—in his head, it was literally in his arms, through the streets, up the stairs—putting her to bed, giving her that cuddle. He wanted to be her source of cuddles more than anything in the world.
He took another slow breath, long and clean, relaxing tension. “I like this communication of yours. Just talking it out. I like it this way, kind of … calm, you know? When you’re not angry or accusing or blaming, I can … hear you better.” Instead of his whole being bracing against it.
She squeezed his face very gently. “I could maybe improve my communication style, too.”
That made him smile. “I don’t know. The chocolate take on boiling oil from the castle walls had a certain flair.” Or maybe that had been a chocolatier-dragon’s version of fire-breathing.
She laughed a bit and rose on her tiptoes suddenly to wrap her arms around his shoulders. “I can cover you in chocolate again sometime,” she murmured teasingly into his neck. “It’s a cute look on you.”
Laughter.
His arms closed around her. If she could tease him, then she had let him back in.
“Trust me, I’ve been covered in worse.” He boosted her up, urging her thighs around his hips so he could fit them better together. That brought her face nearly level with his, and he kissed her quickly, unable to help himself.
She kissed him back. It was supposed to be a quick, stolen kiss, but it turned into something else—slow and careful on both sides, tender and gentle, checking out all the angles.
Are you still here? I can still do this? This way, too? And this way? Are we going to be okay?
She leaned back to take a breath, her eyes a little shy.
“Do you, ah … think we could go back to dating?” he asked. “Like girlfriend and boyfriend?”
Her smile lit her whole face. “I would like that.”
“And … would you consider taking on this dump of an apartment with me? Maybe we could beat it into shape?”
She squeezed him in happiness and tucked her face into the side of his neck again, kissing his jaw.
So that was what it felt like to get covered in kisses.
Not quite how he had imagined it, but definitely good enough for him.
“You
don’t
make any sense, though,” he mentioned, involuntarily. “I mean—you’d rather break your back and rub your fingers raw on this dump than have the apartment handed to you shiny and beautiful, with nothing for you to do?”
“I don’t know, Joss. How would you feel if you found out I was working my butt off by myself trying to beat an apartment into shape to hand to
you
?”
He hesitated a very long moment. His eyebrows drew together suspiciously. “That can’t be the same thing.”
She nipped his neck very delicately. “Just chalk me up as weird, then.” She jumped down and spun around to look at the place and stopped before the wall covered with peeling, stained old wallpaper, her eyes narrowing. “What do you want to bet there’s a brick wall under there? It’s going to be a
bitch
to get off all the plaster and reveal it, though.”
“Did you see the fireplace?”
She looked back over her shoulder to give him a slow smile. “Nice, cozy rug right here?” She gestured to the space in front of the fireplace. “Couch here?” Another gesture.
And she was right. It
was
so much nicer to work on it together.
***
“I really do like this apartment that’s
all bed
,” Joss said that night, with that low, deep vibration of his voice through her back. His breath tickled her hair, his arm heavy and warm over her, that callused palm gently stroking her forearm. She smiled into the fold of white sheets that half blocked her view of the window. “I’m glad it’s going to take us six months to get that other apartment into shape. I’m sorry I take up so much of your space here, though.”