The Art of French Kissing (23 page)

“You want to
waitress
?” Jeannie asked, her voice rising incredulously on the last word.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not like I can go back to Boy Bandz. And there’s not really a music industry here, you know? I can start applying for PR jobs, but who knows if that will work out?”

“But waitressing?” Jeannie looked at me with what appeared to be disgust. “At the age of twenty-nine?”

I bit my lip. I was determined not be drawn into an argument.

“Well,” Jeannie said after a moment. “I suppose it’s a good way to meet rich guys. Just make sure to flirt. A lot.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m planning to waitress, not husband-hunt,” I said. “Besides,” I muttered under my breath, “I think I’m in love with a French guy who hates my guts.”

“What?” asked Jeannie distractedly. She had turned her attention back to Odysseus, who had finished his Cocoa Puffs and was now flinging chocolate-colored milk around the kitchen.

“Nothing,” I said with a sigh.

“Huband-hut! Huband-hut! Huband-hut!” repeated Odysseus, who had apparently been listening more closely than his mother.

By the end of the week, I had landed a lunch-shift job at Frenchy’s, a French-American fusion restaurant on Park Avenue. The owner, Pierre, had been fascinated that I’d just returned from Paris and had given me a job on the spot.

“You know Guillaume Riche?” he asked once he looked at my résumé.

I nodded, wondering why I’d even bothered to put the miserably short-lived job on there.

“Merveilleux!”
he exclaimed, clearly excited. “He is a huge star! You have heard his new single,
non
?”

Indeed I had. “Beautiful Girl,” the second single off his album, had just been released and was heating up the airwaves. The Internet buzz was that Guillaume could have two songs—“City of Light” and “Beautiful Girl”—in this week’s
Billboard
Top Ten. It was incredible.

I talked to Poppy every few days; it was the only thing that kept me mentally afloat. Despite the fact that I had spent a small fortune on international phone cards at CVS to call her, it made me feel infinitely better to talk to someone I knew was a true friend. And hearing her talk about her blossoming relationship with Darren and her increasingly infrequent crazy dates with unsuspecting Frenchmen made me laugh and forget for a moment that I was a lonely boarder in my sister’s house, working at a job that just didn’t fulfill me the way working with Poppy had.

Poppy attempted a few times to mention Gabe; she had seen him several times since the junket, and she said he always looked dejected. But I suspected she was just saying that to try to cheer me up.

“I can’t talk about him,” I finally told her. “I need to move on. I need to stop thinking about him.”

Of course that was easier said than done, because everything seemed to remind me of him. Every time I turned on the radio, I heard “City of Light” or “Beautiful Girl.” The second song in particular always made me feel empty inside, because the last time I’d heard it was at the junket, where everything had fallen apart.

Poppy kept me informed of Guillaume’s progress, and the week after I got the new job, I was at Jeannie’s one night watching the eleven o’clock news when I saw a clip of Guillaume waterskiing down the Seine with three police boats chasing him. He was, of course, wearing only his top hat and a pair of SpongeBob SquarePants boxers. I giggled a bit to myself and then groaned in empathy with poor Poppy. I thought I’d be glad that I wasn’t there to clean up yet another Guillaume Riche mess. But in a way, seeing him grinning and waving at the cameras as he glided illegally down the Seine just made me miss him—and the job—even more.

“I have no idea how to get him out of this one,” Poppy had confided to me when she called in a panic from her cell phone.

“Just say he was out for some exercise and the boat took a wrong turn,” I advised.

“What about his underwear?”

I thought for a moment. “Say that he thought it was a bathing suit and apologizes for his error.”

“Emma.” Poppy laughed. “You’re a genius.”

“I don’t think that’s the word for it,” I muttered.

Chapter Nineteen

T
wo weeks after I’d gotten back from Paris, I was sitting in the family room with Odysseus, watching Saturday-morning cartoons and trying to keep him from licking the carpet (which I suspected he did because Jeannie had started using a chocolate-scented vacuum powder to make the house smell like she’d been baking all day). He was babbling to himself in nonsense talk—a habit I thought was sort of worrisome at the age of three, but Jeannie encouraged it by babbling in baby talk right back to him.

“Use your words, Odysseus,” I said, keeping my voice quiet so Jeannie wouldn’t hear. She always said that criticism would wound a child’s fragile sense of self-esteem. Not that it was my business, but I figured that Odysseus’s precious self-esteem would be in grave danger anyhow the moment he began goo-gooing and gagaing to kids on the playground who’d left infant babble behind in their infancy.

“Goo goo blah goo ga blah,” he said defiantly, then went back to licking the carpet.

Just then, the doorbell rang.

“Emma, can you get it?” Jeannie’s voice rang out from upstairs. “I’m a bit busy at the moment!”

“No problem!” I shouted back, relieved that I wouldn’t have to worry about Odysseus’s vacuum powder consumption or lack of language mastery for at least the next few minutes. Not that it was
really
my problem anyhow. But as his aunt and his godmother—not to mention someone who loved him—I was concerned about a lot of things.

Straightening my wrinkled T-shirt and combing my fingers through my hair (when had I last washed it anyhow?—somehow I had stopped caring), I walked down the front hallway and pulled open the front door. My jaw dropped when I saw who was standing there in khakis and a button-down shirt, his brown hair neatly combed, his square-jawed face freshly shaved, and a bouquet of red roses in his hand.

“Hi, Emma,” Brett said. He looked me up and down for a moment, vaguely confused. I guessed he hadn’t expected a rumpled, unwashed, disheveled version of the previous me.

“What are you doing here?” I blurted out.

Granted, it wasn’t the most tactfully phrased query. But really. What
was
he doing on my sister’s doorstep?

“I heard you were back in town,” he said. He appeared to be studying the wrinkles in my shirt with some consternation.

“You
heard
?” I repeated. I stared at him for a moment and sighed. “Let me guess. Jeannie called you.”

Brett shrugged. “Yeah, well,” he said. “She thought I might want to see you.”

“How nice of her.”

Brett paused. “I, uh, brought you flowers,” he said, holding out the roses.

I stared at them. “I can see that,” I said flatly. I made no move to take them. Eventually, he lowered them to his side.

“You weren’t going to call?” Brett shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

“I didn’t think we had much to talk about.”

Brett tried one of his charming smiles, the ones that used to win me over. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think we have a lot to talk about. Can I come in?”

I sighed and thought about it for a moment. “Fine.” I turned away and let him follow me down the hallway into Jeannie’s living room. Not surprisingly, she was already standing there.

“Oh, Brett!” she cooed, shooting me a look. “How very nice to see you!”

“You, too, Jeannie,” Brett said. They gave each other European-style pecks on the cheeks, which made me want to laugh. What looked so natural a greeting in Paris seemed pretentious and awkward on the two of them. And they had no idea.

“Well, I’ll leave the two of you alone,” Jeannie chirped after a moment. “I’m sure you have a lot to talk about!” She shot me another meaningful glance and added, “I’d forgotten how perfect you look together!” She clapped her hands together gleefully and flounced out of the room, yelling “Odysseus! Odysseus! Mommy’s coming!” in her ridiculous baby-talk voice.

I rolled my eyes. I needed to get out of here.

I sat down on the living room couch and gestured vaguely and unenthusiastically for Brett to sit on the love seat opposite me. Instead he sat down beside me and looked at me with baleful eyes. “I’m so glad you’ve come back, baby,” he said. My stomach turned, and I scooted away from him. Brett looked insulted. “Emma, I’ve never stopped loving you. You know that.”

“Really?” I asked sweetly. “Were you loving me when you were screwing Amanda?”

Brett’s eyes widened and he coughed. “I was just trying to get over you, you know,” he said. “It didn’t mean anything.”

“Ah. Of course not. How silly of me to be upset that you were screwing my best friend.”

Brett looked annoyed. Evidently, this isn’t the way he had expected things to go. I suspected that Jeannie had implied to him that I thought, as she evidently did, that he was the answer to all my prayers. And Brett had been dumb enough to believe that he could dump me, hook up with my friend, and come back to a blanket of full forgiveness.

“So I guess Paris didn’t work out,” Brett said after a moment. He looked a little smug. “You must have been unhappy there.”

“Actually,” I said, “it was the happiest I’ve been in my life.”

Brett looked surprised. “What about when you were with me?”

“As I said,” I repeated calmly, “being in Paris was the happiest I’ve been in my life.”

He looked completely baffled, as if the thought that the world didn’t revolve around him had never before crossed his mind. He stared for a long moment and then cleared his throat. “Look,” he said. “We’ve both made some mistakes here. But don’t you think it’s time to put that all behind us?”

I was about to respond when Jeannie whisked into the room, balancing Odysseus on her hip. He was waving some sort of little plastic truck around, making
vroom-vroom
noises and smacking the back of Jeannie’s head every few seconds. She didn’t seem to notice.

“Oh, look at you two, sitting side by side!” she cooed. She bounced Odysseus a few times on her hip. “Look at Auntie Emma and Uncle Brett!” she said in her baby-talk voice, widening her eyes at her son. “Aren’t they
so
cute together!”

Odysseus glanced at us and then went back to whacking his mother in the head with his truck. “Screw, screw, screw!” he yelled in delight, evidently recalling his breakfast-hour language lesson.

Jeannie reddened. “Odysseus!” she said. “We don’t say
screw
in this family!” She shot me an evil look, and I shrugged.

“Screw, screw, screw!” Odysseus insisted.

Brett looked embarrassed. How strange, considering that he’d been more than willing to partake in the activity with Amanda.

Jeannie put a hand over Odysseus’s mouth so that his babbling was muffled. “You’ll have to excuse him,” she said to Brett. “He hasn’t been himself since Emma got here.”

“No problem,” Brett said uncertainly.

“Anyhow,” Jeannie said smoothly, “have you asked her yet?” She looked at me and raised an eyebrow.

“Asked me what?” I said apprehensively.

Brett nodded at Jeannie and turned to me. “I wanted to ask you to consider moving back in with me, Emma,” he said. He glanced at Jeannie, who nodded encouragingly. I felt like I was being ganged up on. “After all, we were perfect together, don’t you think?”

“I used to think so,” I muttered after a moment. “But that was a very long time ago.”

“Please, Emma,” Brett said. He sidled off the couch and awkwardly knelt beside me on one knee, holding the red roses up like a peace offering. I considered again the joy I would derive from beating him over the head with them. But being that I had obviously already begun to corrupt poor, innocent Odysseus with my lack of vocabulary control, I figured that attacking a man with flowers wouldn’t exactly be the most responsible thing to do in front of him.

“Please what?” I asked wearily.

“Please consider getting back together with me,” Brett said. “Please consider moving back in.”

I stared at him with pursed lips.

He shifted uncomfortably and lowered the roses. “At least have dinner with me tonight, Emma,” he pleaded. “So that I can have a chance to explain.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but as usual Jeannie was way ahead of me.

“She’d love to,” she said firmly. I started to protest, but she shushed me. “Why don’t you pick her up at seven? I’ll make sure she’s ready.”

“Perfect,” Brett said, scrambling to his feet. He laid the roses on the coffee table and made a beeline for the door before I could protest. “ ’Bye, Odysseus!” he said cheerfully, stopping to give my nephew a little peck on the top of the head.

Odysseus responded by whacking Brett with his toy truck.

“Huband-hut! Huband-hut! Huband-hut!” he screamed as Brett rubbed the back of his head in surprise. “Screw, screw, screw!”

True to his word, Brett was at Jeannie’s door at seven that evening, bearing a brand-new bouquet of red roses and dressed in charcoal pants, a pale blue button-down shirt, and a dark gray tie.

“You look beautiful, Emma,” he said softly. Clearly a lie, as I was wearing a T-shirt, holey jeans, and flip-flops. And I hadn’t bothered to brush my hair.

I smiled tightly. “Thank you.” I had to admit, he looked good. He always had. But I couldn’t say that to him.

“This restaurant we’re going to in Thornton Park just opened,” he explained, breaking an uncomfortable silence as he drove. “I think you’ll like it. It’s like Ruth’s Chris, but nicer.”

I bristled at the mention of the upscale steak restaurant where we’d had our first date three years ago. Unexpected tears pricked the outside corners of my eyes, and I blinked them back quickly.

-Forty-five minutes later, we had ordered—medium-well filet mignon for him and medium-rare for me, with asparagus, garlic mashed potatoes, and creamed spinach to share—and the waiter had uncorked and poured a bottle of Pinot Noir for us before disappearing into the kitchen.

Brett raised his glass in a toast. “To us,” he said, looking straight into my eyes.

I hesitated and lowered my glass. “I can’t toast to that.”

Brett stared for a moment, took a long sip of his wine, and then set his glass on the table, too. “Why not?” he asked carefully.

“Are you kidding?” I asked. “Do you seriously not have any idea why I’d basically hate your guts?”

Brett sighed. “Emma. You don’t
hate
me. Do you?” His eyes were sad, and his regret looked almost genuine. He took another sip of his wine. “Look, I know how much I hurt you. I know I will always regret it. More than I could ever tell you.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think you regret it at all.”

Brett looked upset. “That’s not true, Emma,” he said. He stared at me. “Look, it was the biggest mistake I’ve made in my life.”

“Yeah, well, maybe it was for the best,” I muttered. I took a long sip of my wine and wished I was anywhere but here. Why had I agreed to this?

“Please, Emma, you need to listen to me,” Brett said. He reached across the table and put a hand on my arm. “I am so sorry. More sorry than you can possibly imagine. I love you, Emma. I do. I always have. I just got scared, that’s all.”

I considered his words. It was the same explanation Jeannie had given me, and in a way, it made sense. “But if you were scared,” I said slowly, “why didn’t you talk to me? Why didn’t you ask to postpone the wedding or something? Why did you dump me and throw me out of our house?”

Brett looked miserable. “Geez, Emma, I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve been through this a thousand times in my head. There’s just no excuse. All I can say is that I’ve regretted it every day since. I didn’t think I was ready to get married yet, but I am, Emma. I am. Losing you made me realize that.”

I could feel the ice beginning to melt on the outside of my heart. I couldn’t forgive him—how could I?—but maybe I could find a way to accept his apology and move on. After all, this was my life now, wasn’t it? It wasn’t like Gabe Francoeur was going to come walking through the door to sweep me off my feet. I was stuck living in my condescending sister’s guest room, estranged from every friend I’d made in this city. That was no way to live.

Our food arrived, and we ate in silence for a few minutes. I could feel Brett watching me between bites.

“Why Amanda?” I asked softly after a while.

Brett swallowed hard but didn’t look surprised. He had to have known the question was coming.

“I can’t tell you how much I regret that,” he said carefully, his voice soft. He looked straight into my eyes. “There is no excuse, Emma. I freaked out, and she was right there, and I fell into something I shouldn’t have. It was all my fault, and it was a huge, huge mistake.”

“It wasn’t
all
your fault,” I mumbled, thinking that it takes two to tango, as the saying goes.

“Well, I should have known better,” Brett said. “Especially with one of your best friends. I’m so ashamed.”

I took another sip of wine and considered his words. Despite the fact that I’d only taken three bites of my steak, I wasn’t hungry anymore.

“I’d like to go now,” I said.

Brett looked up in surprise. “But we’re not done eating,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I just don’t want to be here anymore.”

He studied my face, then nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I know this is hard for you. I appreciate you even giving me the opportunity to explain myself.”

I nodded. I was surprised by how genuine he seemed, and the hatred and anger I’d been clinging to for the past two months were beginning to seem pointless. Yes, he’d hurt me more deeply than I ever would have imagined. But he seemed genuinely sorry and repentant. And it wasn’t like
I’d
never made a mistake. If I didn’t at least consider his explanation and his apology, wasn’t I being just as blind as Gabe?

Thinking of the French reporter—and his refusal to take my calls after the whole incident with Guillaume—made me feel suddenly ill. I excused myself and made it to the restaurant bathroom just in time to throw up what little I had eaten.