Just One Day(28)

But Willem keeps going. He pulls me through the tiny jigsaw streets until they open up onto a large boulevard. We dash across as the light changes, running by a police car. It’s crowded now. I’m pretty sure we aren’t being chased. We are safe. But still, Willem carries on running, yanking me this way and that down a series of smaller, quieter streets until, like a bookcase revealing a secret door, a gap in the streetscape emerges. It’s the keypadded opening to one of those grand apartment houses. An old man with a wheeled cart leaves the inner courtyard just as Willem skids us into the entryway. Our momentum crashes from sixty to zero as we slam together against a stone wall just as the door clicks shut behind us.
We stand there, our bodies pressed together, barely an inch of space separating us. I can feel the fast, steady thud of his heart, the sharp in-out of his breath. I can see the rivulet of perspiration trickling down his neck. I feel my blood, thrumming, like a river about to spill over its banks. It’s as if my body can no longer contain me. I have become too big for it somehow.
“Willem,” I begin. There is so much I need to say to him.
He puts a finger up to my neck, and I fall silent, his touch at once calming and electrifying. But then he removes his finger and it’s red with blood. I reach up to touch my neck. My blood.
“Godverdomme!” he swears under his breath. With one hand, he reaches into his backpack for a bandanna, and with the other, he licks the blood on his finger clean.
He holds the bandanna against the side of my neck. I’m definitely bleeding, but not badly. I’m not even sure what happened.
“They threw a broken bottle at you.” Willem’s voice is pure fury.
But it doesn’t hurt. I’m not hurt. Not really. It’s just a little nick.
He’s standing so close to me now, gently pressing the bandanna against my neck. And then the cut on my neck is not the point of exit for blood, but the point of entry for this weird line of electricity that is surging between us.
I want him, all of him. I want to taste his mouth, his mouth that just tasted my blood. I lean into him.
But he pushes me away, pulls himself back. His hand drops from my neck. The bandanna, now clotted with blood, hangs there limply.
I look up then, into his eyes. All the color has drained out of them, so they just seem black. But more disconcerting is what I see in them, something instantly recognizable: fear. And more than anything, I want to do something, to take that away. Because I should be scared. But today, I’m not.
“It’s okay,” I begin. “I’m okay.”
“What were you thinking?” he interrupts, his voice icy as a stranger’s. And maybe it’s that or maybe it’s just relief, but now I feel like I might cry.
“They were going to hurt you,” I say. My voice breaks. I look at him, to see if he understands, but his expression has only hardened, fear having been joined by its twin brother, anger. “And I promised.”
“Promised what?”
An instant replay runs through my head: No punches had been exchanged. I hadn’t even been able to understand what they’d been saying. But they were going to hurt him. I could feel it in my bones.
“That I’d take care of you.” My voice goes quiet as the certainty drains out of me.
“Take care of me? How does this take care of me?” He opens his hand, which is stained with my blood.
He takes a step away from me, and with the twilight blinking between us now, it hits me how utterly wrong I have gotten this. I haven’t just skied onto the diamond run; I’ve flown off the face of the cliff. It was a joke, this request to take care of him. When have I ever taken care of anybody? And he certainly never said he needed taking care of.
We stand there, the silence curdling around us. The last of the sunlight slips away, and then, almost as if waiting for cover of darkness to sneak in, the rain starts to fall. Willem looks at the sky and then looks at his watch—my watch—still snug around his wrist.
I think of those forty pounds I have left. I imagine a quiet, clean hotel room. I think of us in it, not as I imagined it an hour before in that Paris park, but just quiet, listening to the rain. Please, I silently implore. Let’s just go somewhere and make this better.
But then Willem is reaching into his bag for the Eurostar schedule. And then he’s unclasping my watch. And then I realize, he’s giving time back to me. Which really means he’s taking it away.

Eleven
There are two more trains back to London tonight. Willem tells me it’s after nine, so there’s probably not enough time for me to exchange my ticket and get on the next one, but I can definitely catch the last train. Because I gain an hour back going to England, I should get to London just before the Tube stops running. Willem tells me all this in a friendly helpful way, like I’m a stranger on the street who stopped him for directions. And I nod along, like I’m the kind of person who actually takes the Tube alone, day or night.
He is oddly formal as he opens the door to the apartment courtyard for me, like he’s letting the dog out for its nightly pee. It’s late, the night edge of the long summer twilight, and the Paris I walk out into seems wholly changed from the one I left a half hour ago, though once again, I know that it’s not the rain or all the lights that have come on. Something has shifted. Or maybe shifted back. Or maybe it never shifted in the first place and I was just fooling myself.
Still, seeing this new Paris, it brings tears to my eyes that turn all the lights into a big red scar. I wipe my face with my dampening cardigan, my returned watch still grasped in my hand. Somehow I cannot bear to put it back on. It feels like it would hurt me, far more than the cut on my neck. I attempt to walk ahead of Willem, to put space between us.