Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2)(51)
“Wow,” Célie said five days later. “Wow. I never would have pegged him for someone who would just disappear like that.”
“Well, you know how guys are.” Vi kicked the pavement. They were waiting in line to get into a favorite comedian’s show. Vi could only scout new restaurant locations and fight with bureaucrats so long during the day, and while Au-dessus remained closed, she’d decided to take advantage of the miracle of having evenings free. She’d far rather be going out with friends than waiting in her apartment wondering if Chase would finally show up again. “They say I love you, I want to marry you when they want hot sex, but then they scare themselves and run off. Or I scare them,” she said sullenly.
“You do scare most men, Vi,” Lina agreed. “But…he didn’t seem that easy to scare.”
Vi shrugged, trying not to think about it. This comedian had better by really funny.
“I think you’re choosing the wrong men,” Célie’s boyfriend Joss said. “Maybe you need to select the good guys. Or at least someone with guts.”
Vi glared at him. Tall, hot, strong, quiet Joss Castel had come back from five years in the Foreign Legion only a month ago, apparently having been in love with and faithful to Célie all that time. He was pure salt in the wounds of every other woman trying to handle the dating scene. “Maybe the good guys are all gone.”
Joss just looked at her with steady, faintly challenging, hazel eyes. “Since you attract essentially every man alive, just by walking by, I’m going to go ahead and insist it’s a selection issue.”
Vi scowled at him.
“Are you sure nothing is wrong?” Célie asked. “Did you call him?”
Vi’s stomach clenched around that worry, that had woken so small and innocent in her only five days before but had long since stretched its cute little tentacles out in her belly, planted them, and started to feed. It was a monster worry now.
She infinitely preferred to believe that she’d been dumped by an emotional coward than to focus on that worry.
If she concentrated really hard on all her past history with men and not Chase himself, that dumped-by-a-coward scenario almost seemed likely.
“I don’t have his number,” she said.
Célie’s lips rounded.
Vi flushed. Yes. That made her seem like nothing but a booty call.
“Does he have yours?” Lina asked. With her glossy, loose curls and pretty face, Lina looked as sweet and delicate as her desserts, and she’d learned from childhood to have a sure, tough inner core, therefore. Perception, balance, and sense, to Vi’s energy and flamboyance. They worked well together at Au-dessus.
“I threw my phone into the river.” Vi had ended up getting a disposable phone so she could argue with health inspectors and harass them every hour for results, but she was trying to put off having a new smartphone until the ugliest chatter about her had died down on Twitter.
Chase didn’t have the disposable phone’s number, though. She’d bought it after he disappeared. She’d called that embassy number yesterday, but they’d acted as if they’d never even heard of a Chase Smith.
She slanted a glance at Lina. “Your cousin hasn’t been doing anything weird, has he? Receiving strange guests from Belgium?”
Lina glanced around to make sure no one else in line could overhear them and shook her head. Lina had a cousin who was the despair of their mutual grandparents, a weaselly jerk who had grown more and more weaselly through high school—at seventeen, he’d once grabbed sixteen-year-old Vi’s breasts in the stairwell of Lina’s building and tried to trap her against the wall, and she’d kneed him and shoved him down the stairs—and who had ended up in gangs, then fallen under the sway of some weirdo imam and started spouting pseudo-religious nonsense that sure as hell didn’t correspond to anything Lina or her parents believed, and then run off to Syria and come back fairly soon after, with his tail between his legs.
Everybody in the family worried about him, and Lina personally hated him, but the police did nothing at all. So apparently he was just a misogynist jerk who liked to fantasize about killing people.
Right.
Vi gave her shoulders a flick as if to rid herself of uncleanness just thinking about him and focused on the shrinking line. She would really like to be in a dark theater with a very funny comedian making her laugh, already.
Lina’s weaselly wannabe cousin is the very last person who would actually know if something was going down right now. Something big enough that American special ops would be involved, inside France.
She couldn’t even imagine anything big enough that the French would allow Americans a hand in it, on their soil. The guy responsible for the Christmas flight, maybe. Al-Mofti. She really had no idea whatsoever how countries cooperated on this kind of thing, but she could see them wanting that to be a joint operation. Maybe the Americans would say, We’ve got some information, but we want to be in on the kill.
A vision of Chase, big and easy and grinning and doing his puppy eyes, flashed through her, and all the hair on her arms lifted. She shivered, rubbing her arms.
The wounds of the last attacks in Paris had been immediate. She’d seen with her own eyes the blood on the street only a couple of blocks away, the bullet holes in the walls, she’d laid flowers in memorial. She’d opened her doors to people stranded, fed them in her restaurant for free that night, gone out the next night when so many people were huddling inside, and, along with Célie and Lina and her team and Célie’s boyfriend Joss and her boss Dom and his wife and just so many, many people, been part of those Parisians who surged onto the terraces again, saying, Fuck you. We might be afraid, and we might be wounded, but we won’t hide and we won’t give in. We’re still Paris.