Just One Day(30)

“Just try.” He holds the bread and paté up to my mouth. I snatch it from his hands, take a tiny sample. The flavor is both delicate and intense, like meat butter. But I refuse to give him the satisfaction of seeing me enjoy it. I nibble a bite and make a face. Then I put the bread back down again.
The waiter returns, sees our emptying wine carafe, gestures to it. Willem nods. He returns with a full one. “The sole is . . . it is finis,” he says in English, wiping the entry off the chalkboard. He looks at me. “You are cold and have lost blood,” he says, as if I hemorrhaged or something. “I recommend something with force.” He makes a fist. “The beef bourguignon is excellent. We also have a fish pot au feu, very good.”
“Just keep it coming,” I say, gesturing to the wine.
The waiter frowns slightly and looks to me, then Willem, like I am somehow their joint responsibility. “May I suggest to start, a salad with some asparagus and smoked salmon.”
My traitorous stomach gurgles. Willem nods, then orders for both of us, the two things that the waiter recommended. He doesn’t even bother to ask me what I want. Which is fine, because right now all I want is wine. I reach out for another glass, but Willem puts his hand on top of the opening of the carafe. “You have to eat something first,” he says. “It’s from duck, not pig.”
“So?” I shove a whole piece of baguette and paté into my mouth, defiantly and noisily chomping on it, hiding any satisfaction I’m actually taking from it. Then I hold out my glass.
Willem looks at me for a long moment. But he does oblige with a refill and then that lazy half smile. In one day, I’ve come to love that smile. And now I want to murder it.
We sit in silence until the waiter returns to deliver the salad with a flourish befitting the beautiful dish: a still life of pink salmon, green asparagus, yellow mustard sauce, and toast points scattered around the side of the plate like blossoms. My mouth waters, and it’s like my body is waving the white flag, telling me to just give in, to quit while I’m ahead, to accept the nice day I had, which really, is far more than I had any right to hope for. But there’s another part of me that is still hungry, hungry not just for food, but for everything that’s been laid out in front of me today. On behalf of that hungry girl, I refuse the salad.
“You’re still upset,” he says. “It’s not so bad as I thought. It won’t even scar.”
Yes, it will. Even if it heals up next week, it’ll scar, although maybe not in the way he means. “You think I’m upset about this?” I touch the bandage on my neck.
He won’t look at me. He knows damn well I’m not upset about that. “Let’s just eat something, okay?”
“You’re sending me back. Do what you have to do, but don’t ask me to be happy about it.”
Over the dancing candlelight, I see his expressions pass by like fast clouds: surprise, amusement, frustration, and tenderness—or maybe it’s pity. “You were going to leave tomorrow, so what’s the difference?” He brushes some bread crumbs off the tablecloth.
The difference, Willem? The difference is the night.
“Whatever,” is my stellar reply.
“Whatever?” Willem asks. He runs his finger along the rim of his glass; it makes a low sound, like a foghorn. “Did you think about what would happen?”
It’s all I’ve been thinking about, and all I’ve been trying not to think about: What would happen tonight.
But again, I’ve misunderstood him. “Did you think about what would happen if they caught us?” he continues.
I could feel what they wanted to do to him. I could taste their violence in my own mouth. “That’s why I threw the book at them; they wanted to hurt you,” I say. “What did you say to them to get them so angry?”
“They were already angry,” he says, evading my question. “I just gave them a different reason.” But by his answer and the look on his face, I can tell that I’m not wrong. That they were going to hurt him. What I felt about that, at least, was real.
“Can you imagine if they’d caught us? You?” Willem voice is so quiet I have to lean in to hear him. “Look what they did.” He reaches over as if to touch my neck, but then pulls back.
In the adrenaline of the chase and the weird euphoria that followed, I hadn’t thought about them catching me. Maybe because it hadn’t seemed possible. We had wings on our feet; they had leaden boots. But now, here, with Willem sitting across from me, wearing this strange, somber expression, with his bloody bandanna crumpled into a ball on the side of the table, I can hear those boots getting closer, can hear them stomping, can hear bones cracking.
“But they didn’t catch us.” I swallow the tremble in my voice with another gulp of wine.
He finishes his wine and stares at the empty glass for a moment. “This is not what I brought you here for.”
“What did you bring me here for?” Because he never answered that. Never said why he asked me to come to Paris with him for the day.
He rubs his eyes with the heel of his hands. When he removes his hands, he looks different somehow. Stripped bare of all the masks. “Not for things to get out of control.”
“Well, a little late for that.” I’m trying to be flip, to summon whatever dregs of Lulu I have left. But when I say it, the truth of it wallops me in the stomach. We, or at least, I, have long since passed the point of no return.
I look back at him. His eyes lock on mine. The current clicks back on.