All for You (Paris Nights #1)(8)

He couldn’t let that trust and pride she showed in him be misplaced, wither and die as he dwindled into yet another aging loser, still stuck in an HLM where he couldn’t even make sure his own wife and kids were safe taking the elevator.


He’d had to do better by himself for her sake. Better by her.

But those postcards she sent him, there at the beginning, with the heart over the I in her name the way she always wrote it, revealing how young she was, how much of a teenager he shouldn’t be hitting on … those postcards had trickled and died from lack of response. From all the times he stroked them and twisted a pen in his hands and didn’t find the words to write back.

They’d died quickly, within the first six months. And he never did find the words that paper could hold.

So now he waited.

Outside this fancy chocolate place Célie had found for herself, in Paris of all places. Not in its rejected fringe, where the idea of the romantic, glamorous city only a subway ride away left people bitter and desperate, but here. In its glittering heart. Instead of fleeing Paris as he had, for a better chance, she had marched right into the city’s heart and made it accept her. His mouth softened. Wasn’t that, when he thought about it, just exactly like Célie?

The beautiful glass doors—the kind of doors you could have in a country where bombs and guns didn’t go off regularly—slid open. A small, curvy woman in a short-sleeved black chef’s jacket stepped out, Célie, her eyes holding his even before the doors slid aside.

She flexed her fists uneasily by her thighs and then crossed the street to him. It was all Joss could do not to jump forward to cover her body with his, her crossing the street so recklessly, but he caught himself before he could act like an idiot. No snipers ever on rooftops here.

As she came up to him, she got smaller and smaller, until she was just the size she used to be back when she trailed around after her brother—small enough to fit under his arm if he ever forgot himself and draped it around her shoulders. Small enough to tuck up against his chest while his hand slipped down to cup her butt, if he ever let himself do that. Small enough he’d have to pick her up to get their bodies to fit right together. He still sometimes, at odd moments, remembered how easy it had been to pick her up to boost her over a wall in some of their escapades back then. At very odd moments, lying plastered on his belly in low cover, for example, that memory would ghost back across the muscles in his arms, as if they craved that lightness.

That spunky, stubborn cheer.

Her eyes and nose were red, this raw, swollen red, and his throat closed all the words out of him again. Deprived of words, his hand—which had known it needed to be free and ready for action, after all—lifted of its own accord toward her face.

She knocked his arm away before his hand could touch. Her mouth set hard, as she looked up at him, and her eyes shimmered again. “Fuck you,” she said bitterly.

The scent of chocolate came off her, strange and enticing, making him feel like one of his grandparents after four years of war and occupation, when the American soldiers started sharing their chocolate ration bars. She’d cut off all her hair and dyed it a vibrant red. His palm tickled with the urge to test what that winged, impudent hair of hers felt like now, compared to the long braid she’d self-streaked burgundy that last year in high school.

Of course, he hadn’t touched it when she was in high school either.

His fingers closed slowly back into his palm, and his hand lowered to his side. He had no words, and no actions, and no idea what to say or do. He swallowed, trying to get her name out at least. “Célie.”

His voice sounded rough, as if it’d been scraped too much in desert sands.

“You bastard,” she said, and started crying again.

His hands closed into tight fists by his thighs. Utter paralysis of word and action. He wasn’t even sure if he could have uttered his name, rank, and serial number.

She dashed her tears away again, and then again, until the water on her face was a damp smear rather than a flow, and glared sullenly at him. “What do you want?”

He tried to reach for her, to give her one of those dangerous hugs he’d twice or thrice given her at bad moments when she was eighteen and he was twenty-one.

She shoved both hands flat against his chest, pushing herself away since he himself wasn’t very pushable. Anyway, his back was already up against a wall.

“What do you want?” she repeated, furiously.

That fist around his throat tightened and widened its grip, until it was squeezing all the way down his esophagus into his stomach. He had too much room in his chest, with so many things squeezed so tight. It hurt. And yet, like so many of the words he couldn’t say now that he was back in polite society—even Paris was less riddled with swearing than a Foreign Legion unit—he also couldn’t let himself say the one word, that one syllable that was the only one that could communicate the answer. You.


I’m bigger now. I’m stronger. I’m genuinely tough enough to handle any * you might ever encounter. So—I’m ready. Can’t you see that?

Didn’t it show in his arms, the width of his chest? Should he have worn a tighter T-shirt? You told me I could do anything, Célie. Well … I did it. See?

She was so full of so many temptations to touch, like something multifaceted and shiny being twitched in front of a cat. That perky nose, those flashing earrings. The second set of earrings were studs, but the first were more dramatic, and he reached again before he realized, this time aiming for the dangly part of the earring, to twist it just enough to see what it was.