You can do anything.
Chin in the air, heart in her eyes.
“No.” Joss spat mud out of his mouth.
“Non?”
You can do anything.
He braced himself out of the mud. Fire lanced through his arms. His stomach heaved again. Mud coated his face.
“Non, mon chef.”
“Tu es sûr?”
Oh, fuck, here came more. It always did, when they asked if a recruit was sure. But …
I can do anything. I am
not
a failure. I will do this. “Oui, mon chef.”
“You think you can take it?” the man asked contemptuously.
Joss gritted his teeth. “I can take it.” Here it came. A blow, a kick, a shove into the mud. The order to climb to the top of a mountain barefoot. Anything.
The hard hand released his nape. The fifty-year-old career bastard who was their instructor stepped back, with a small moue on that merciless face. A
maybe you’ll pass muster
moue. “Then you’d better get up and get back in line.”
***
Well, she’d certainly made a fool of herself today, hadn’t she? Célie thought, her face pressed into Joss’s leg. Probably so traumatized him he’d abandon any plans of looking up any other old friends.
His thigh felt so good under her cheek, though. His arm over her back, his hand curving over her head. Warmth and strength and so much himness that it was all she could do not to turn her head toward his crotch, not to open her mouth there and shock-destroy all his defenses so that she could crawl into him, bury herself in his arms, get held close and hard.
She wrapped her arm even more tightly around his thigh to keep herself there and not twisting to kneel between his thighs and force her hands up under his shirt to just feel his damn skin,
warm
and
alive
, not grabbing his head in two tight, angry hands that held him still by the roots of his hair while she kissed him because she was so angry with him she wanted to kiss him to death, kiss him until he begged for mercy and said he was sorry, so sorry, and he would never, ever, ever—
Joss winced, under her cheek, and she realized she had dug her nails into the underside of his thigh, near the knee. She loosed them slowly, reluctantly, because the next and far more tempting target would be to dig that same hand into a fistful of everything she could manage to grab through the crotch of his jeans.
Yeah, I bet you wouldn’t run away
then
, would you, you bastard? Not if I’ve got hold of your privates. Men never leave that part of them behind.
Priorities, after all.
She finally had to push herself away rather than do any of that. Scrubbing her hands over her face, she tried to figure out any way to redeem her behavior.
Yeah, there wasn’t one.
“Sorry,” she muttered. “I guess I just—I—you know—”
“PMS?” Joss suggested.
PMS?
“Joss, you were already an idiot about women
before
you joined a military service that doesn’t allow females in the ranks. Don’t aggravate your situation.”
Joss rested both his forearms flat on his thighs again and closed his hands over his knees. His body moved in one big sigh.
She studied his face. “Wait. Was that supposed to be a
joke
?” As in, that old thing friends did for each other, to try to ease a badly behaving friend back into the embrace of friendship, to show that it was okay, that was what friends were for?
Joss opened his mouth as if to speak, but then just took another of those deep breaths that shifted his whole body. Maybe he really had been joking, or trying to. He seemed so—tired suddenly. Flattened out. It was strange on such a big guy.
He’d already been a big, strong guy before he left. Working out, boxing, playing rugby, keeping himself big enough and tough enough to scare off most people who would mess with him
.
She’d loved it when she could walk through their
cité
by his side. Nobody ever messed with her when he was there. She felt entirely safe.
But now he was even bigger, stronger. He looked so tough, people probably crossed the street when they saw him coming.
The only person who would mess with him now was a man like Dom, someone who saw another big, strong male and went straight at him to confront him and get him the hell out of his territory. The kind of man who would rather kill or be killed than trust another strong man near anything his.
“Wait,” Joss said suddenly, sitting up a little straighter. “How was I already an idiot about women? I did just fine with women, I’ll have you know.”
Célie stood up as fast as if he’d just touched a live wire to her and started striding away. But she didn’t head back toward work. She strode farther north up the canal.
He swore under his breath and caught up.
Her phone burped. She pulled it out. Dom:
OK?
Oui
, she typed.
Laisse-moi tranquille.
Leave me alone.
Bossy idiot.
Her heart warmed, though. It was good, really good, to have someone strong and with a good heart looking after her.
She glanced up at Joss, who had been that person when she was a teenager. He had angled his head enough to read the screen of her phone, and his mouth tightened.
She hit send and shoved the phone back in her pocket. “Sorry. I should get back to work.”
But she kept walking the wrong way.
“This isn’t going at all like I expected,” Joss said.
Her eyebrows scrunched together. She looked up at his profile, that stubborn jaw, those straight lashes, and a glimpse of those hazel eyes. “So what did you expect?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged, an odd movement on those big, square, military-straight shoulders, and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I guess I thought you’d still be in Tarterets, in your apartment with your mom, and that you’d look up at me, and your face would just
light
, and you’d throw yourself into my arms and not be able to stop kissing me from how happy you were.”
She stared at him so hard she tripped over a cobblestone. His hands came out of his pockets, but she had already righted herself.
“I mean, kiss on my cheeks, of course.” He touched one cheek and then the other, where
bises
would fall. Was that a tinge of color on his face? Impossible to tell, given how much the sun had darkened his already Mediterranean skin.
“I was just supposed to be sitting in my mom’s apartment in the projects in Tarterets? Waiting for you? For five years? Not growing up, or accomplishing anything, or making anything of myself? Thanks a lot.”
A faint frown. His hands went back into his pockets. “You could have kept writing,” he said suddenly, low and rough. “Let me know what you were doing, what you were becoming. Sent a few pictures whenever you changed hair color, that kind of thing. I hear selfies are hot these days.”
She glared at him. “Yeah. You could have written, too.”
The strangest wistfulness crossed his face. “I thought about it,” he said, the same way a man might say he used to dream of flying to the moon. “Once those first four months were up, and we had the right to send letters. I read once in a book about World War II how often soldiers would just make something up.”
Kind of weird to think of Joss reading. But all at once she could imagine him, slow and painstaking, focusing on a book to pass all the dead downtime in some place like Afghanistan. Maybe books, which had always been his enemies in school where they were things he always failed at, had become friends when his real enemies fired bullets. She flinched away from the thought of those bullets.
“You would have letters dated from days of brutal bombardment and confrontation, written from the front lines, and the men would say, ‘Everything’s going well. Spending all my days playing poker with the guys. Miss you. Tell me more about you and the girls.’ I thought about just making things up, pretending I was just a traveler enjoying the sights.” His eyes closed for the briefest instant and opened again, immediately scanning the area for anything he might have missed during that second of weakness. “But my imagination has always been terrible. Even—” His mouth twisted with a wry wistfulness, and he broke off a second. Then resumed: “Even my best fantasies have always been … well, at the time I thought they were … realistic. Possible.” A bleakness slid across his face and was stoically pushed back. He squared his shoulders.
Which was kind of a funny movement on him, given that his shoulders had never once lost that straight line. It spoke of a pretty rigid self-control, that he had to double-check that squaring of his shoulders no matter how automatically they were already squared. Maybe five years in the military did that to a man.
“What were your best fantasies?” Célie asked curiously. She’d always wanted to know what Joss dreamed. When he’d gone off and joined the Foreign Legion it had been a total shock to her. Never once had he mentioned military service as a possible ambition. In school, he’d trained as a mechanic, a career
she’d
certainly admired—all those things he could make work, all those motors he could soup up and get running, machines to take a girl out of there, take her anywhere she wanted. He’d been such an essential part of her life that she’d just assumed he would always be there keeping an eye out for her, providing her that strong body to walk beside through a tough neighborhood. That maybe they’d even speed out of their
banlieue
one day on the back of his motorcycle, with her holding on tight to that hard body.
Instead, she’d had to crush on a boss who drove a motorcycle and buy herself a moped.
Joss’s lashes lowered, and now definite color burnished those stubborn, proud cheekbones of his. He pressed his lips together and shook his head.
Fine. Don’t tell her. Célie stomped extra hard on the next cobblestone. That was just like him—bottle up everything that was fragile and beautiful and fanciful and then take it off to the Foreign Fucking Legion, never share it with
her
. Her and those stupid hearts she used to sneak in over the
I
in her name whenever she put her name on anything she was going to give to him.
Like he’d gotten
that
message. Or cared about it, if he had gotten it.
She cringed inside at the memory of her sappy, puppy-crush teenage self and gave herself a shake. “So how long have you been back?” she forced herself to ask briskly, as if they were just old semi-friends chatting now, catching up.
“My train got in to Paris this morning,” Joss said.
Célie stumbled and looked back up at him. What? “Who—who else are you looking up?” Her voice sounded funny, not as casual as she kept trying to make it. “Your old girlfriend?”
His eyebrows drew slowly together as he searched her face. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Sophie.”
“Who the hell is Sophie?”
“
Sophie
,” Célie said incredulously. “Your
girlfriend
.”
“The only girl named Sophie that I remember is the girl your brother was sleeping with before he got arrested. Not that he ever gave her the respect of calling her his girlfriend. Your brother was kind of a bastard.”
Célie blinked over that a moment. “She told everybody she was with you. Her boyfriend in the Foreign Legion.”
Joss was silent for the distance between two bridges. “I guess that must have been better status for her than to be the ex-bootie call of someone in prison for dealing drugs,” he said finally, with a quiet pity. “It’s—not a good area to be a woman on your own with no protection, I guess.”
“I managed,” Célie said dryly.
Joss’s face went blank.
“When she had the abortion, she said it was because you thought it would be better if the two of you waited until you were out to start a family,” Célie said. It had made her throw up, when that happened—everything about it. That another woman should be pregnant with Joss’s baby, and that Joss, the man she looked up to more than anyone else in the world, should say he didn’t want his child. It made a woman never want to trust herself, her body, her chance at a happy life, to any man again.
Joss winced. “
Merde
,” he said under his breath. “
Bordel de …
Célie. That must have been your brother’s kid. Or someone else’s. But—but I can see why she would have wanted to tell that story instead of one where she was pregnant and alone and the dad was either worthless or didn’t give a damn.”
Yeah. Célie wondered if she would have told that kind of story about Joss, too, if she’d ended up pregnant in an area where a young woman was considered to be asking for it if she even wore a shirt with no sleeves, let alone a knee-length skirt. But there’d been no chance of her getting pregnant in those days. Joss had never picked up on any of her embarrassing attempts to sometimes get him to slide their friendship sideways into something a lot cuddlier.
She would have loved so much to cuddle with Joss back then.
Actually—she snuck a sideways glance at that big, hard, confident body—she would probably still love to … she cut her thoughts off.
“What did you do?” Joss asked. “When she said that?”
“I cried. And I ripped up the postcard I was writing to you. And I ripped up your photos.” And boy had she regretted that one. “And I took a train into Paris, and I knocked on Dominique Richard’s door and told him I would work my butt off, if he would only hire me. That I’d work for almost nothing, if it was enough to be able to afford the rent on a nine-meter apartment in Paris itself and not the
banlieue
, that I’d live off chocolate and water if I had to.”
Joss’s hands curled into big fists. He glanced down at them and thrust them in his pockets. “And what did he do?”
“He said he’d better pay me enough that I wasn’t forced to sneak all his chocolate for meals. That it would turn out cheaper for him in the long run.”
Joss’s hands shoved against his pockets. “So he was your hero. He saved you.”
Célie considered that a moment. “Well, I mean …
I
kind of thought I saved myself.”
The expressions on Joss’s face were so complicated and impossible to read. Not helped by the fact that he tried to keep all of them contained.