Chapter 16
In the dark of the theater after intermission, Sarah was the one who took Patrick’s hand this time, who threaded her fingers through his and studied his knuckles with the trace of her thumb. She didn’t understand him at all.
If she wasn’t his excuse, then what was she? Did he not
realize
what he was doing to her, so easily, intensely romantic? He had never realized. Never. It had always been so easy for him.
Except – he had said she mattered. That all this time she had mattered.
While he was flirting with Summer Corey. Her forehead pinched her. Flirting with receptionists. Teasing her.
She ran her thumb over and over his knuckles. In the dark, she sank into his texture, feeling every fine hair on the back of his hands. There, a faint bit of roughness from the knuckles that were still skinned from his fight. There, a burn scar. There, another. She brought his hand to her face, their fingers still entwined, and rested her cheek against it.
Closing her eyes, she let the performance keep playing in her head, the white
corps de ballet
of dancing swans, the black, passionate Odile. She liked Odile. She wished the dark swan could dance her way into a prince’s heart, too.
In the dimness of the theater, in this beautiful, romantic place, escorted by someone so handsome and golden, with her eyes closed, it was easy to turn her cheek, to press a kiss to his hand.
He’s courting me. He has to be.
But…he’s a prince. I’m a mortal.
I can’t matter to him. He acts all the time as if I don’t really matter.
He acts all the time as if I do.
His hand felt so good against her face. She kissed it again, and desire swamped her – to keep this right to touch him, keep this hand, oh, wow, that didn’t sound possible. But it sounded so beautiful.
She never managed to succeed at beautiful, impossible things.
In the dark, his head angled toward her. He dipped it and kissed the back of her hand, just below his fingers. His eyes closed, and he kept his mouth pressed there a long moment.
Then he relaxed back in his seat, slouching, like a man about to slug a beer. Her smile deepened, grew more secret and more possessive with it. He was so funny. She wished he was hers. To keep forever, to figure out. To trust, maybe. To get right.
She nestled her cheek against his hand again, stroking her skin infinitesimally back and forth against his knuckles, while she watched Siegfried and Odette dance their immortal love, throw themselves into a raging lake, rise up to heaven.
***
Patrick was such a perfect escort, negotiating the crowds on those double marble stairs so easily, with the skill of a man who had spent his life in tight spaces with manic people wielding knives and pots of boiling caramel, and who had the self-confidence to make himself the man responsible for preventing these manic people from killing each other. His hand on the small of her back made Sarah feel secure, sheltered from the bustle of suits and beautiful gowns that brushed by them on every side. “You’re the most handsome man here,” she said, in some wonder.
His eyebrows rose, but then he must have decided he would much rather accept the compliment than doubt it, because he grinned. “Good, I deserve my date, then.”
Since she was just noticing how scuffed her shoes looked under their polish, compared to the other shoes passing them on the marble stairs, she glanced up at him in pleasure. And a tiny niggle of doubt. He said that so easily. But her shoes really were scuffed, her dress simple compared to all the beautiful shoes and gowns around her. How many other things had he said just to be gallant?
He swept them on down the stairway and across the
place
outside the theater, and as soon as they were a little removed from the crowd, pressed her against a streetlamp and kissed her.
And kissed her.
And kissed her.
Hungry and intense and deep, a need she rose to, that she wanted to fill, more and more and more, until several couples passing called teasing compliments to them, and Patrick at last lifted his head.
That aristocratic poet’s mouth of his looked softer and sensual, as if he might not quite be able to pronounce a tight vowel right that second, as he put his arm around her again. “Do you want a drink? Coffee? There’s the Café de la Paix.” Elegant crowds from the theater were already starting to fill its expensive tables.
“Not really.” She looked from the crowds back up at him. The streetlamp glimmered in his hair, brightening that hair to a golden aurora while it shadowed his face. She felt shyer even than usual, like maybe she shouldn’t have been so…
intimate
with his hand in the dark, magical theater. “I just don’t want the evening to end,” she admitted.
He smiled and took her hand. “It’s your day off tomorrow. We’re in no hurry.”
“You have to work tomorrow, don’t you?”
“It doesn’t matter.” He led them off up the edge of her own quarter toward Montmartre.
As with the evening before, her whole experience of night streets changed in his company: no need to be wary, when passing groups of men, no need to keep dodging out of everyone else’s way, no need even to watch her feet, as he guided her away from obstacles without ever seeming to look for them himself. The lights from restaurants and bars they passed flickered over him, his presence making her not a passerby through this night but a happy part of it. He took them on a wandering path, for no other purpose than each other’s company.
She would never have gone through Pigalle at night on her own, but his presence made the gaudy neon lights of sex shops and cabarets fun. When they passed the window of the
Musée de l’érotisme
, he pretended to cover her eyes at the items in the window, such as a century-old wooden chair with a great rubber tongue on a wheel the person sitting in the chair could turn so that the tongue would pass over…well, presumably a certain area, although it looked like it might work better in theory than practice. Sarah’s hand flew to her mouth as she processed it. Then she slanted a glance up sideways at Patrick, who immediately cocked his head and looked thoughtfully, exaggeratedly intrigued.
Laughter burbled up in her. It snuck out in little spurts of giggles that didn’t quite know what to do with themselves. But more of them came, and more, stinging her nose.
“I’m getting a picture,” she confessed, and Patrick laughed out loud, a great laugh that rang to the night sky, his head thrown back.
The joy of being with him washed through her. He was so amazing. So vivid and so much larger than her life and so perfect. He curled her into him, bending down to murmur, “I promise, you would like my tongue much better.”
Sarah gave another burst of startled giggles and slapped a second hand over her mouth, staring at him over her palms.
He laughed out loud again and caught her chin. “Sarah, I–” He stopped himself abruptly, and his eyes blazed with whatever he had been about to say. Catching her suddenly, he lifted her high, whirling her around once, his fingers digging too hard into her hips. His kiss, as he slid her back to her feet, was deep and possessive, his hand curling too firmly against her nape, as if she had tried to get away from him.
He let their path wander sideways through neon lights as far as the Moulin Rouge, when he learned she had never seen it at night, and stood looking down at her in its spinning garish red light, such a warmth and tenderness in his eyes she didn’t know what to make of him. “Do you want to go there, too?” he asked, lazy and amused.
“Kind of,” she admitted, casting him a sidelong glance. “I know it’s touristy, but–”
He laid an arm over her shoulders. “We’ll do it.” He laughed. “I’ve never actually been. Will you wear something feathery and curl up on my lap and let me feed you wine while you whisper in my ear how many more things your legs can do than those cabaret dancers’? Mmm, and wear a garter belt? Or can we not get away with that anymore?”
It should have been a funny, teasing little fantasy, and yet her smile faded. Because a fun fantasy between equals became something entirely different when she
was
the powerless plaything curled up in the powerful male’s lap, hoping he wouldn’t dump her off it.
Her happiness drooped. For the millionth time, she wondered how stupid she might have been to leave engineering.
I could get another job; I might have to convince the new company that I wasn’t likely to dump it and flit off back to Paris, but I could find somewhere to hire me again.
But even if they had both been competent, evenly salaried engineers, Patrick would still be the glorious one. He just had that aura about him, golden, warm, confident, lazily in control.
“No,” she said, feeling a little sick. “No, we can’t do that.”
Patrick sent her a searching glance, guiding her away from the Moulin Rouge and up into Montmartre. “Allergic to feathers?” he asked lightly, as they moved into quieter streets. “I sure as hell hope it’s not garter belts, because that one is kind of taking hold of me right now. I probably shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“I’m not your plaything,” she said, low and firm.
His face blanked a bit. A short silence as the streets grew steeper. “Is there something I’ve done that makes you feel I don’t respect you?”
Well…no, actually. Not if he was genuinely interested in her and always had been. It came from her, that constant conviction of not measuring up. Well, and from the fact that she
didn’t
measure up
.
She would finish a plate that looked absolutely perfect and gorgeous to her, and Luc or Patrick would flinch and throw it out. It was like when she was three and trying and trying to get her letters right, and every time her mother made her do them over again, when she
just couldn’t see it.
She couldn’t
do
it. Funny, she used to cry back then, weeping and weeping with shame and frustration, kicking her heels against the chair she longed to leap up from, her mother trying to calm her, petting her hair,
You can do it, yeobo, my sweetheart, you can do it.
It was before she was old enough to know, really, why she had to get things right. Once she knew, she’d stopped kicking and crying like a spoiled child.
“I should never have recommended you for this job,” Patrick said. “But…you did deserve it. And I had only met you for the length of one workshop, when I was pretty busy helping all kinds of students besides just you. I knew I was attracted to you, but I had no idea what working in close quarters with you was going to be like.”
“What has it been like?” she asked, puzzled.
A rough laugh. “You can’t even imagine it. You can pull into yourself and shut me out, and I can’t do that, Sarah. You drive me crazy every single second of every day.”
Her lips parted.
His compressed, as if he regretted having said that. But he looked down at her and gave his head a slight shake, her mythical surfer dude tossing the water off his overlong hair, and continued. “I should have let you go work somewhere else, not tried to take you under my wing. It seems crazy now that I thought I could do that in just a friendly way for six months. Six months didn’t seem so long then. There’s probably a reason that workplace lovers happen all the time and are never a good idea. But I wanted you to have your chance at the very best, and I wanted to help you. I thought I was
giving
you something, Sarah, I didn’t–” His lips tightened again. “Sometimes I can trick myself pretty well about my intentions, to get what I want.” And he looked as if he regretted admitting that, too.
He stopped a moment and gripped the bars of a park gate, across from an old church of brick, peering ferociously into the darkness of the park, as if he was waiting for a leopard to spring out of it. She’d been here before, though. All that really lurked in the depths of that darkness was the famous wall of
Je t’aime
.
I love you
, written in every language of the world.
She pressed a hand against her stomach, trying to quell this – sensation, this strange, fluttering, painful tightness as Patrick stood there at those bars, staring into the park like a zoo animal staring at freedom. The fierceness calmed slowly off his face. After a second, he turned and took her hand again, with a wink and a shrug.
“Do you
like
me?” she asked suddenly, considerably astonished.
Patrick began to laugh, the rough, low laugh of a man who wanted to beat his head against a wall. “I don’t think that’s the word I would use.”
“So what word would you use?”
Patrick closed his eyes, his face just for a second wild, and then the look was gone. “But, yes, I do like you, Sarah.”
She felt her mouth soften, absurdly flattered and warmed.
They were winding their way through the streets to approach the great hill of Montmartre from below the Sacré-Coeur, glowing so ghostly white and dominant above them that it made goose bumps break out on her arms. At close to eleven o’clock on a Saturday night, people still spilled out of bars and restaurants in all the streets of this active, artsy quarter, despite the cold.
They came out below the terraces that led up to the Sacré-Coeur, the gates to them shut. Patrick leaned back against the gate and pulled her to him, so that the Sacré-Coeur’s white glow left him in silhouette, making it hard to see subtle expressions. “Especially right here.” He pressed a thumb between her eyebrows. An unrealized band of tension relaxed under his touch. “And right here.” He touched the full center of her lower lip. “And – oh – here.” He slipped a hand under the collar of her coat and drew a circle around her nape that shivered straight through her. His mouth curved. “Yes, definitely there. I could do just about anything to you, if I touched the nape of your neck while I did it, couldn’t I?”
But wait, these things he liked, these were just sexual things. Just playthings.
He drew the circle again. She tightened her lips against the urge to just moan and lean her head against his chest and beg him to keep touching that ultra-sensitive spot until she was melted to a puddle.
Patrick laughed. “Shall I sweep you to the stars in the
funiculaire
, Sarabelle, or do you want to climb the stairs?”