This time with a laughing face.
Dominic:
I made you look, didn’t I?
I huffed a laugh and shook my head, heat crawling up my neck. I typed before I could talk myself out of it.
Me:
You’re such a dick.
The response came immediately.
Of course it did.
Dominic:
Only for you.
I stared at the screen longer than I meant to.
That was the thing with Dominic. He never demanded anything outright. He just… lingered. Like a familiar song you didn’t remember putting on but somehow knew all the words to anyway.
I locked my phone and slid it back into my bag, heart doing something inconvenient and loud.
Paris kept moving. Faces kept passing. The light shifted.
And somewhere between the click of my camera and the echo of his words, I knew this week—this city—wasn’t going to let me pretend the past stayed neatly behind me.
Not when it knew exactly how to find me.
Two weeks slippedby without asking my permission.
Paris stopped feeling like a dare and started feeling like a rhythm. I learned which bakeries were worth the line and which weren’t. I stopped getting lost on purpose. I figured out the métro well enough to only end up going the wrong direction once a day, which felt like progress. I started recognizing faces—baristas, vendors, the woman who walked her dog like it was an Olympic sport.
I was still carrying my camera everywhere. That part wasn’t changing.
What did change was the quiet certainty that this wasn’t a vacation anymore.
This was work.
Paris Daily occupied a narrow building wedged between a bookstore and a café that smelled aggressively like burnt espresso. The lobby was unimpressive in the way serious places often are—no glossy displays, no dramatic lighting, just a name on the wall and a buzz that suggested people here were too busy to care if you were impressed.
I gave my name at the desk. The woman barely looked up before pointing me down the hall.
“Deuxième porte à gauche.”
I thanked her and walked on, bottling everything—nerves, awe, the sudden urge to turn around and flee the country.
Imposter syndrome was a hell of a drug.
The shouting hit before I reached the door.
Not raised voices. Not tension.
Full-on, unrestrained fury.
“—do you have any idea how lazy this is?” a man bellowed in French, his accent sharp and precise, like every syllable had been honed into a weapon. “This is not vision, this is fear. You hide behind technique because you have nothing to say!”
