He begins to rock inside me, slowly, lips moving across my neck and up to my ear. My body responds, tensing and thrilled, waiting for the pleasure I know will make me explode. Like I’m made of a thousand tiny beating wings.
“Tonight, Cerise . . . thank you for wanting to save me.” He puts a tiny inflection on the last word.
It takes a beat for my brain to process the inflection but then adrenaline courses through me so fast my fingertips flush, my pulse thunders.
Come to France for the summer.
He knew his life didn’t have space for this but it didn’t matter. He was trying to save me first.
Chapter SIXTEEN
SOMEWHERE IN MY subconscious I sense Ansel crawling on the bed and hovering over me beneath a sun-warmed blanket cave. He wakes me up with the pressure of his stare.
I stretch, frowning up at his neatly pressed dress shirt, white with small purple geometric shapes.
“You’re going in to work?” I ask, my voice still thick with sleep. “Wait,” I add, once consciousness forces its way to the surface. “It’s Tuesday. Of course you’re going in to work.”
He kisses my nose, running a warm palm from my shoulder, down over my breast, to my waist. “I only have a few weeks left of this craziness,” he says.
“Me, too,” I say, laughing. And then my smile drops like a hammer out of the sky and I pout. “Ugh. Why did I even say that? Now I want to eat my feelings in the form of an enormous chocolate croissant.”
“Croissant,” he repeats, kissing me before whispering, “Better this time, Cerise. But we call it pain au chocolat.”
He touches my lip with his index finger. I smile and bite his fingertip. I don’t want him to be frustrated with my impending departure, either. We’re both so much happier when we’re pretending it doesn’t exist.
He pulls his hand back and runs it over my breast again. “I’m pretty sure Capitaux will settle eventually.”
“I wish you didn’t have to go.”
“Me, too.” He kisses me, so softly, so earnestly that something swells painfully inside my chest. It can’t just be my heart because it sucks the air from my body, too. It can’t be only my lungs because it causes my pulse to race. It’s as if Ansel has taken up residence inside my rib cage, making
everything go haywire.
“Do you have very important plans for an adventure today?” he asks.
I shake my head.
“Then today you practice speaking French,” he says, resolute.
“With who?”
“With Madame Allard downstairs. She loves you and thinks we’re going to have a baby soon.”
My eyes go wide and I press both hands to my stomach. “I have not gained that much weight.” I look down at my hands and ask, “Have I?”
He laughs, and bends to kiss me. “You don’t look very different from when you arrived. Tell me how you say ‘I’m not pregnant’ en fran?ais. You can go downstairs and tell her yourself.”
I close my eyes, thinking. “Je ne . . . suis pas . . . uh”—I look up at him—“pregnant.”
“Enceinte,” he says. His eyes move over my body, and I stretch under his gaze, wondering what the chances are that he will take off his clothes and make love to me before he goes to work.
He pushes away, but I can see the tight bunching of his dress pants where he’s hard beneath his zipper.
I palm him, arching my back. “Ten minutes.”
I mean it to sound playful, but his eyes grow a little pained. “I can’t.”
“I know.”
“I’m so sorry, Mia.” His eyes search mine. “I knew I would be busy, what was I thinking? But you’re here and I’m wild for you. How can I regret it?”
“Stop,” I tell him, curling my hand around the shape of him. “It’s the best decision I made in a long time.” His eyes flutter closed when I say this, and he pushes into my palm before lowering himself over my naked body.
“It is strange, isn’t it?” he asks quietly, pressing his face to my neck. “But it isn’t fake. It’s never really been pretend.”
In a wild burst of color, images from the past several weeks pop through my vision, each one bringing such a surge of nostalgia, so much emotion. The disorienting first two weeks with him gone nearly every waking minute. The awkwardness of the first time we made love after we arrived. The renewed heat between us the night I dressed up as his maid. I would no more be able to serve Ansel with an annulment than I would be able to swim all the way home in a few weeks.
“What are we going to do?” I ask, my voice disappearing on the last word.
My sunshine Ansel returns as he pulls back with a smile, as if he knows only one of us at a time is allowed to consider the darker side to our impulsive—and wonderful—adventure.
“We’re going to have a lot of sex when I get home from work.” This time, when he pushes away, I can tell he’s determined to get moving. “Let me see the naughty side again.”
The comforter flaps over me with a burst of air, and when it settles, he’s gone, and all I hear is the heavy click of the front door.