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“Can I go kiss Salena now? On the mouth?”
“Can I watch?” Julien asked.
“Of course.”
“I love Salena,” Julien said with a wide-eyed exhalation. “She’s my hero and my best friend. She rescued me from my own house, makes me go out, have a life, try new things.”
“Like moving to Paris?”
“Once I was cleared for ‘adult activities’ as Salena calls them, she staged an intervention with my parents and told them they were making things worse by keeping me cooped up and treating me like I was on death’s doorstep. My parents worship doctors so they took her seriously and let me go. I just had to take Salena with me so she could monitor my medical condition.”
“So you ran off to Paris?”
“I said Paris. They assumed Paris, Kentucky. I didn’t exactly correct them.”
“Did they freak out?” Remi asked.
“They did at first. But Salena talked sense into them. France has the best health care system in the world. Much better than the U.S. And I’m healthy as a horse now. Salena makes sure of that.”
“I’m happy to hear that.” Remi realized she might have made the understatement of the century with that statement. Ecstatic would have been more accurate.
“My parents are calmer now about the Paris thing. Salena loves it here. I love it here. Been learning the language, trying to meet people.”
“Meet women?”
Julien shrugged. “Been on a few dates.”
“Only a few?”
Julien gave her a crooked smile and a half-hearted chuckle.
“Did you knowcanceris the same word in English and in French? No matter what language, the word sends girls running. It’s not that it’s in the past. That’s not what scares people. It’s that it can come back. It might come back. Anytime I get a headache, a cold, anything, my family freaks out. Anybody who is in my life will share in that fear. Hard to ask that much courage from someone you just met, right? No wonder the girls go running when I tell them the truth.”
Remi rose up and looked down at Julien still lying on his back on the bed.
“I’m not running,” she said.
“Why not?” Julien asked.
“I am the least romantic person I’ve ever known,” she confessed. “But for some reason…”
She said no more because she knew she didn’t have to.
“I know,” Julien said in a low voice, almost scared.
“I’ve never forgotten you. I should have. You were seventeen. I was a senior in college. I should have gotten over you a long time ago. I never did. And now that I’m here with you, I feel like this is exactly where I’m supposed to be.”
“Although it ended badly, I was so grateful we had that night at the Christmas party. Those nights I was alone in the hospital with nothing but my fears and my exhaustion, and I thought maybe I would just stop fighting, go to sleep and never wake up again, I would remember that night with you. I remembered kissing you, touching you, being touched by you…and it helped me remember what I was fighting for. A future where I was healthy again and wasn’t alone. You were with me the whole time, Remi.”
Remi blinked back tears. Neither of them spoke. A heavy, meaningful silence descended. She didn’t want to rush things, didn’t want to push him. But for all her noble intentions, she also wanted to kiss him again, touch every inch of him, and spend all night with him in this bed helping him make up for lost time and show him exactly what he’d been fighting for.
“This is going to sound like a line,” Julien finally said, “but I swear it isn’t. The thing is…when you spend age seventeen to nineteen thinking you might die, it changes the way you look at your life. I decided I wanted to move to Paris on a Thursday. Salena and I were on a plane Monday. When you want to do something, you do it. You don’t wait a week, a year. Because you know you might not be around next year, next week.”
“Carpe diem?” Remi asked.
“That means ‘seize the day,’” Julien said. “It’s night.”
“Carpe…Hold on a second. Merrick?” she called out loudly, loud enough she knew her voice carried throughout the entire apartment.
