“Does he know you called him a dead elephant?”
He frowned. “I don’t know. I slipped out before he saw me.”
I threw my hands up in anger. “Are you kidding?”
“No,” he said. “Alice was giving me the feud eyes, and he was telling her he was hungry and she was telling him he was going to have to start getting a whole lot more hungry, and it seemed to be turning into a massive family fallout within about two minutes of him regaining consciousness, and I realized why I kept out of their way in the first place.”
He paused. “I’ll see him tomorrow, I promise. Stop looking at me like I’m the big bad wolf.”
He did look a bit like the big bad wolf when I thought about it, with his dark hair and thick brows and bright white teeth.
“You promise,” I said gravely.
He nodded and looked around.
“Also,” he said. “I wanted to come down here before everyone had left…I felt bad about the other day.”
“Good,” I said, then, using a word I really enjoyed using in French, “you were unconscionable.”
“I know, I know. That’s why I’m here. I just…everything was just getting on top of me, you know? I’d been spending all my nights there…I was tired.”
“So you came down to apologize?”
“God, no. I came down to show you how to make something.”
“Well, maybe I can already make something,” I said.
He grimaced. “Alice brought some of that mint stuff you did the other day into the hospital. She thought it was all right, foreigner. It was filthy. None of the staff could believe it.”
That was my first day’s efforts.
“You are so rude,” I said.
“No,” said Laurent. “I just don’t think you realize how bad it was. So, now I am here.”
“Well, you’re too late,” I said.
He waggled his eyebrows at me. “I doubt it.”
I sighed. Even though I was exhausted and had spent the last nineteen hours dreaming of a bath and what I’d do to Sami if he’d used all the hot water again to take his makeup off, I took the keys out of my apron pocket.
“Come on then,” I said wearily.
Inside, everything was gloomy in the dusk. Laurent looked around with a practiced eye as I fumbled my way through to the greenhouse to switch the lights on there. We couldn’t put the lights on at the front of the shop; everyone would think we were open and start hammering on the shutters like chocolate-starved zombies.
Laurent wasn’t following me. I turned back to look at him. He was running one of his hands through his thick curly hair.
“I haven’t…I haven’t been in here for…”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Well. A long time,” he said. “Years. Maybe ten.”
Even I was shocked at that. “You haven’t spoken to your dad in ten years?”
Laurent suddenly looked very unhappy. “The smell in here,” he said. “It hasn’t changed a bit.” He ran his hand along the long wooden countertop, worn smooth over the years. “It hasn’t changed a bit,” he repeated wonderingly, shaking his head.
“You know, sometimes down the street, I pass someone eating some. I can smell it a mile off. It doesn’t smell like the chocolate you get everywhere else. Every time I smell it, or see the bag…it’s like being punched in the gut.”
I shook my head and put the coffee machine on. “You know,” I said, “I know families fall out for all sorts of reasons. Cath’s mother didn’t speak to her sister for sixteen years over a purloined silver jubilee scarf. But fighting over whether or not you can add spice to chocolate?”
I thought about it. “Maybe all family feuds are totally stupid,” I said, thinking of when James and Joe wouldn’t speak to each other while sharing a bedroom for two years, on account of some unauthorized hogging of the top bunk.
Laurent looked as if he was going to disagree again, but instead followed me through to the back. He made an involuntary “oh” of nostalgia; it was easy to see that the greenhouse hadn’t changed in decades, even to me.
“I used to come here sometimes when I was a little boy,” he said, breathing in that wonderful warm scent of plants and cocoa, like a deep chocolate rainforest. “Benoît used to chase me around the vats.”
“He’s still here.”
“No, not him, his dad. My dad is very loyal to employees who never answer him back.”
He came over to one of the work benches and easily swung himself up on it.
“Come on then,” he said in a challenging way and I was so tired, so sleepy and woozy with everything that had gone on that I thought, just for a tiny instant, that it was me he was asking to go over there. He looked so comfortable and at ease now, his long legs splayed as he surveyed the place he’d once called home that, to my surprise, I nearly found myself walking across the room, letting him haul me up onto his lap. And after that…
Then I realized he was asking me to bring him some of the chocolate I’d made. I flushed bright red immediately, flustered, sure my face immediately betrayed me, but he wasn’t paying attention. I found some squares that had been badly wrapped earlier and put to one side. Laurent looked at me and smiled.
“Come on, don’t look so nervous. Where’s your new stuff? You tried your best, and then I’ll give you a helping hand, okay?”
He thought I was nervous about the chocolate. I’d almost forgotten about it.
I extended some on a plate. He started to chew. I’d gotten past Frédéric but there was no way Laurent was going to be satisfied. Still, I was having a shot.
Laurent closed his eyes. There was total silence in the room, with only the tick of the wall clock and the faint rumble of the Metro far below the cobbled streets. After what seemed like an age (that I used to study him—his long eyelashes casting a shadow on his cheek, his unruly curls, the five o’clock shadow climbing up his long jaw line, his lips unusually pronounced for a man), he finally opened his eyes again and looked straight at me. There was something different there from his usual mix of annoyance or amusement. It looked perilously close to respect.
“You did this?”
I nodded.
“Alone?”
I nodded again.