All for You (Paris Nights #1)(15)
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.