The Eiffel Tower? Closed, thanks to the blizzard. The Seine? Cold and grey. And walking the Champs-Élysées? More like a full-body workout, every step heavier as we trudged through untouched snow.
“You can’t visit Paris and not have croissants,” Tom insisted.
Well, croissants usually aren’t dairy-free, and changing the recipe? I’m fairly sure that counts as treason in France.
So we went on what felt like an impossible hunt. Every boulangerie we passed had golden, buttery pastries in the window, and each time I told Tom to go in and grab one for the way, he refused.
“We’ll eat together,” he kept saying, refusing to cave no matter how good they smelled.
Three hours, twelve stops, and a couple of near face-plants on the pavement later, we finally found a tiny boulangerie hidden away in an alley.
We danced and cheered in the petit café when the owner told Tom they had dairy-free croissants. I had almost given up hopeby then, but Tom hadn’t. And somehow… that says everything about him, doesn’t it?
After brunch, we made our way back to the penthouse suite. The cold was biting, and after that whole frozen-to-the-bone experience in the car, neither of us was eager to go through it again.
So Tom came up with a plan.
Conveniently, we came across an art supply shop when Tom suggested a “more scenic route.” He picked up a sketchbook and a set of black-lead pencils, and the look he gave me when I joined him at the counter was a mix of knowingness and pure filth.
“I want you to model for me,” he said.
And so I did.
A solid fifteen minutes later, I was lying on my stomach on the bed, looking out at Paris in snowy December through the wide glass windows. Yes, I was naked, but the sheets beneath me were warm and comfortable. Tom sat against the headboard with his sketchbook resting on his legs. The soft scratch of pencil on paper soothed me so deeply it drew me into the best meditation I’d had in weeks.
And just like that, hours passed without words.
I got lost in the view, and in the feeling of being seen but not exposed, studied but not judged. It was intimate in ways I couldn’t explain.
Was that what safety truly felt like?
I cried in silence.
No one ever told me that feeling safe could be this overwhelming.
Tom didn’t talk when he finally set the pencil down. He took a bit of distance from the paper and tilted his head to decide whether it was finished. Curiosity got the better of me, so I crawled over to peek over his shoulder.
It felt strange seeing myself like that, through his eyes. He had shown me his artwork before, mostly landscapes, but this was different. This was me with the Parisian skyline in front of me.
The city’s contours, the lines and curves of my body. My serpent tattoo seemed alive, rising up from my back and curling over my shoulder as if it were looking at the city the same way I did.
I got the serpent when I thought I’d found my family on the open road, but it had always stood for me, for the way I’d always been able to shed my skin and leave the old behind.
Seeing this was fucking beautiful.
My fingers followed the twists and turns of the dark scales on the paper.
The style he sketched, I recognized from Effy’s work in the West House.
Surreal, and realistic at the same time.
“What do you think?” Tom asked.
It took me a while to answer that question, because what I saw left me speechless.
“It’s… different, seeing myself like this. Through you.”
I swallowed the lump forming in my throat. “But it’s beautiful. I’ve never felt…”
