“I’m in New York.”
“Ah,” she says, soft. “I’m in Paris. I couldn’t sleep.” And then, after a prolonged moment. “What were the boys’ names again?”
“The boys?”
“The models, from the shoot in Cabo.”
I sit up then. Awake. My eyes adjusting in the dark. The chocolate-brown curtains, the plush throw pillows, the oversized art books on the nesting coffee tables. I’d become accustomed to this, the faux intimacy of boutique hotels.
“Elliot. Elliot Lyons-Thorpe,” I say. “And Bas van den Broeck.”
“Bas. He was the blond one?”
“Yes.”
For a moment Anouk says nothing, but I can hear her breathing. As closely as if she were here, beside me in the bed, and not some four thousand miles away. In a restoredhôtel particulier, I imagine. Somewhere in the Faubourg Saint-Germain or Chaillot. Views of the Eiffel Tower, a marble entry, a sweeping staircase, an indoor pool. And her. Wrapped in Sferra sheets. I wonder what she wears to bed. If she wears anything at all. I wonder if she runs hot and cold.
“Was he nice to you?” she asks, finally.
“Mostly.”
“Was I nice to you?”
“Very.”
She is quiet again, and this time I can hear myself breathing. Anticipating what comes next. Wanting to ask her a million questions about our shared week in Cabo San Lucas. Wanting to answer none. Does she remember that night at the ocean? The dinner that got out of hand. The incident in her hotel room. The shots we took in the surf. The line that was crossed. Again and again and again. We called it art.
“I’ll be in Paris on Monday,” I say then, taking the reins.
“Vraiment?”
“Yes, I’ll be there for the week. I have work. If you’re available, I’d love to see you again.”
It sounds like a date. Maybe that is my intention. Maybe I want to know what she remembers. Compare it to my own recollections. Maybe I just want to pick up where we left off. All those years ago. But maybe it’s retribution.
What the hell am I doing?
“Call me,” she says. And across an ocean, I am certain I can hear her smile. “When you get here. Call me.”
“I will.”
This time, I will not flee.
VII.BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS.
CABO SAN LUCAS. 1996.
TUESDAY.
Cecilia was distracted.
The letter Lorry had handed her three nights prior was tucked neatly into her diary and stashed in the drawer of the nightstand back in her small hotel room on the beach. She’d read it fourteen times since the flight in on Sunday. He had given it to her after their dinner that night at Kelley and Ping, the pan-Asian restaurant on Greene Street, and told her not to open it until she was airborne. A bizarre request, to be sure. But Lorry was often full of surprises. Romantic gestures that far outmeasured his almost twenty-two years. Hand-engraved cuff bracelets, homemade journals, sonnets. Once he’d written and recorded a love song. Just him, singing into a tape recorder, strumming on his acoustic guitar, professing his eternal adoration. Or something like it.
And so she imagined this secreted letter would fall within the same gentle vein.
She was wrong.
In his signature tiny all-caps and the most cryptic and elaborate language, he’d penned eleven pages musing about how he could love someone so profusely and yet be utterly convinced they were not well matched. It was not so much an epistolary breakup as itwas a manifesto. Lorry’s big brain and young heart and soul writ large. A literary stream of consciousness that said everything she’d wanted to hear, and everything she did not. It was not like Lorry to be so abstruse. Was he ending it? Asking for a break? Professing his commitment to see the relationship through? It was not entirely clear.
