I jumped, guilty at being away.
“She is,” I said. “I’d better go check on her.”
Gently Laurent ran his hand down my face. “You like to fix things?” he said softly. “Can you fix me, AnNA Tron?”
I would have put us up for the night, but Thierry had promised to come home, and Laurent was anxious to be off. I was more concerned about Claire. Her breath sounded thready and ragged, and she had had a very long day. Thierry was exhausted too. Laurent and I exchanged worried glances as we got into the van, propping them up as best we could against each other. Claire helped herself to another dose of the morphine, which I watched surreptitiously, trying to figure out how much was too much, before shaking my head at the craziness of it all. As Laurent barreled down the road at top speed, Thierry and Claire leaned against one another, lolling against their seat belts, her head nestling under his arm as if they’d slept that way every night for forty years.
We didn’t speak. I felt as if anything I might say would be wrong. Laurent drove furiously fast, all his concentration on the road. I looked at him, wondering why he still couldn’t talk to his father. But I put that out of my head.
Instead, I would just try to enjoy the very fact that they came for us; Claire’s look on the dockside; the kiss we had shared once more. I touched my mouth briefly. He was a very good kisser. Those lips. But why hadn’t I noticed…he probably, I realized, had a strange accent I simply hadn’t picked up on because my French wasn’t good enough, like Americans being completely unable to distinguish between Scottish people and Irish people. Sami, now I came to think of it, probably spoke very differently too. How odd I had simply never noticed, lumping everything I had come across in Paris as simply terribly foreign, without considering how foreign, exactly.
I watched his head of shining black curls in the dim light from the dashboard as we sped along the dark motorway, incredibly fast. He was focusing entirely on driving and I felt myself in such safe hands that I, too, must have drifted off to sleep.
The suburban lights of Paris woke me up as they flitted against the windscreen and I stretched uncomfortably. I had put Claire up in a very nice hotel not far from the apartment, and we practically lifted her into it. I made sure she was settled and breathing but she barely stirred. I would have to stay. The room was small, and I sat down on a chair by her side. She tilted her head.
“It’s all right,” she breathed.
I patted her hand. “It is,” I said. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
With difficulty, she shook her head. “No,” she said, “you don’t have to stay. You’ve done enough. Go get some sleep.”
“No chance,” I said.
She smiled. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Anna. I promise not to die tonight. Is that enough? Now do what your teacher says and go and get some rest. I have a lot I want to do in the next few days, and it won’t help if you’re buzzing over me like an annoying bee.”
“I’m not an annoying bee,” I said.
“Shoo!”
I stood, hovering, not quite sure what to do, until I heard her breathing slow into sleep, and it sounded better, like normal sleep. I looked at her for a while until I heard the faintest of voices say, “Stop staring at me,” and then I backed out of the room. I’d come back first thing.
- - -
Outside the shop, in the middle of the road, Alice was waiting, looking absolutely and completely furious, and Laurent and I hopped out of the van, both bone-tired, and she strode in without a word to either of us, fired up the engine, and disappeared.
“She’ll get over it,” muttered Laurent.
“Did you steal the van?”
“I sent her a text.”
“Hmm.”
I wandered over the deserted cobbles around the corner. Up in our tiny apartment, I could see lights flashing. Oh God, Sami must be having a party. Of all the things I didn’t feel like, that was definitely right at the top of my list. My face fell.
“Well, good night then,” I said to Laurent, wondering if I might manage to sleep through it anyway.
“Good night,” he said, made to walk away, then suddenly stopped himself. The street was in total silence, apart from some calypso music I guessed was coming from the flat.
“No,” he said, almost to himself, then strode back toward me. “No, no, no, no, no.” He took me in his arms and kissed me again, deeply and thoroughly, until I felt, like magic, my tiredness evaporate and a heady, sensual longing overtake my limbs.
“Come back with me,” he said. “Please. I don’t want to be alone tonight. Come with me.”
“I have to be back,” I said, half laughing. It was stupidly late. “I have to check on Claire, and I have to open up tomorrow.”
“Well, there’s no point sleeping now,” he teased in a challenging tone. This was more like the Laurent I knew. I found myself blushing.
- - -
I couldn’t help thinking the last people to see me naked had been about one hundred and fifty student doctors, a score of agency nurses, my mum and, on one awkward occasion during my convalescence, my dad. But it had been a long time for me.
“Hop on,” said Laurent, firing up the scooter.
- - -
This journey felt different from the first time he had taken me home, when I had been so lost and confused. It went quickly, as we flashed past the holidaymakers drinking in the Place des Vosges, the lights of the great hotels on the Place de la Concorde making them as brilliant as ocean liners in the night, snatches of orchestral music issuing from their windows open against the warmth of an evening. I snuggled in close to him and smelled him through his heavy shirt, the warm heavy scent of him. It was better than any perfume I’d ever known. We headed north, once more, back to Montmartre where we’d first met, the great thoroughfares thinning out as the road became quieter and narrower until finally the scooter was bumping over cobbles and I had to hold on just to avoid losing my balance on the corners I now knew to lean over for.
My heart now was thumping hard, and the feel of him filled all my senses as we charged on through the night. Occasionally he would take his hands off the handlebars to caress my knee in a reassuring way, and each time he did so, I felt a thrill go through me. I tried not to panic. It was only sex. I used to do it all the time. Okay, I used to do it after I’d drunk a few shandies and pulled Darr again, but that was different. Now, although we’d had a couple of glasses of wine, I was stone-cold sober, certainly more sober than I’d ever wanted to be before I slept with someone for the first time, especially someone I fancied as much as Laurent. My brain was in a turmoil; I barely saw the fun fair we passed, lit up still, and the rows of hanging lights between the old-fashioned lampposts.