Anaïs was standing on the threshold, mouth forming a wide O. A cigarette with a red lipstick mark around its filter was burning not far from where she stood.
Suddenly, she blinked off her stupor, her expression furrowing into the one she always had on whenever she stumbled upon a particularly juicy rumour. “Oh, la vache!” she screeched. “You and Bastien are having an affai—”
Celine clamped a hand over Anaïs’s mouth before she could scream the rest of the words to the entire neighbourhood, and pushed her backwards into the house.
Chapter 24
Love-struck Girl
Violent tremors were going through Anaïs’s shoulders as Celine dragged her up the stairs, into her room. But she had to let go of her friend to lock the door, and the second she did, Anaïs began pacing the length of the room, muttering a string of shocked and excited, “Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!”
“Don’t be so loud, please!” Celine begged.
“Mon Dieu!” Anaïs shouted defiantly. “What did I just see out there? Please tell me I’m severely hallucinating.Please!”
Celine started chewing on her nails. Anaïs chancing upon them was bad enough. But Anaïs chancing upon them while kissing? It was disastrous! “You are. That’s it, you were hallucinating.”
“Celine!”
“Let me explain,” she shot back. “Just sit down and I will explain.”
Anaïs moved to the bed distractedly, then shot to her feet again. “I can’t sit down.” She smoothed her hair behind her ears in one forceful movement. “This isn’t asitting downtalk! You and Bastien—I don’t—” Suddenly, she snatched a pillow from Celine’s array, brought it to her face and let out a sharp shriek into it. “How long has this been going on?”
“Nothing is going on,” Celine said, breathing hard. She was starting to hyperventilate now, too.
“You call that nothing?” Anaïs chucked the pillow on the floor. “What about Jacques? I thought you loved him. He will be proposing to you in a week for God’s sake!”
“You don’t think I know?”
“It doesn’t look like you do.”
A desperate wish to crawl under the covers and die overcame Celine. “I—” Closing her eyes, she sat on the foot of the bed. Anaïs deserved an explanation. For Celine to hide something like this from her…it was unforgivable.
“I…I don’t love Jacques,” she finally admitted.
Four simple words. She had been holding them inside for so long—too long—that shivers crawled down her spine at the relief of letting the words take form outside of her.
Anaïs stopped her fidgeting and slowly eased closer, but she didn’t sit on the bed.
“You don’t?” she asked faintly.
Celine shook her head, tears burning behind her eyes. She brought her palm to her chest, massaging the strain there. Her heart was pounding hard, as though it wanted to break out of her chest and escape from all the guilt and the lies she had stuffed it with. “And…” She sighed. “I don’t want to marry him, either.”
“But—” Anaïs frowned. “I thought you two were getting engaged so young because you were foolishly in love.”
“It was an arranged affair,” Celine confessed, her voice no louder than a hum. “My father and your grandfather decided on it last year. I wanted to tell you. I just—I didn’t have a choice. I thought I could turn the lie we were telling everyone into the truth. I really wanted to love Jacques, so I figured that if no one else knew about it, then all was left to do was convince myself.”
Anaïs’s expression yielded nothing. “And Jacques doesn’t love you either?”
Celine couldn’t meet her gaze. “I think he does.” That ache in the back of her throat intensified until it formed a hard lump.“I don’t know whyIcan’t love him back. I never meant to lie to him about it…I just didn’t want to hurt him. He would put on a smile for me during those first dates, but then I would catch him off-guard, staring into the distance, and I couldseethe pain he was in because of Emilie. I didn’t want to add to that.”
Had she been a little more headstrong against her mother’s demands, she might have avoided worrying about heartbreaks altogether. If she had told Jacques no earlier… But back then Celine hadn’t had a choice. She had let her mother push her into this relationship because she didn’t have the competition to look forward to, nor Adalene’s studio. She didn’t have someone else in her heart and had assumed Jacques would be able to enter it easily.
“Anaïs?” She chewed on her lip when Anaïs didn’t respond. “Please, say something. Are you upset?”
“Yes, I’m upset. At myself for not finding out sooner,” she tsked, and in one swift, irritated motion crossed her hands over her chest. “I have a reputation to upkeep, you know.Paris’ Gossipmongerand all that. I should have listened to those maids whispering about, but I thoughtmaids whisper all the time, what could they possibly know about my brother that I don’t?Ugh, plenty of stuff, apparently.”
Celine flitted her eyes to her. “You are not angry with me?”
