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Especially her parents.
Her mother had sighed and reached for her wine, then headed back to the kitchen to direct the staff. Her cousins had either laughed, sat forward to watch the show, or both. Her aunt Melinda had invoked the Good Book, and none of her uncles had ever met her gaze directly again.
But Marty Morton had stared at her over the turkey he was carving with a studiously blank look on his face and his signature Santa hat slightly askew.
Darlin’,he’d said, in his usual booming way,do you want me to stand here with my hands in the Christmas turkey and talk to you about what I do with my drawers down?
Ew, Dad.She’d been horrified. No.
Then why don’t you concentrate on the gotdamn baby Jesus in Bethlehem and not whatever the hell you just said about Wonder Woman. Everybody thinks that woman is attractive, darlin’. That’s her gotdamn job.
She’d posted a selfie from the bathroom five minutes later to detail how her father had silenced her truth.
But here, now, it occurred to her for the first time that finding people attractive wasn’t the same thing as wanting to have sex with them. It had always appealed to her, deeply, that she be seen as carefree, sexually. That anyone who followed her online might think that they had a chance with her. She’d always loved the notion that sex could be anything, and if it was anything, than anyone was an appropriate partner.
Just as she’d always imagined that, if given the opportunity, she would love nothing more than to dance down mountainsides in the moon.
But loving the image of a flower child on a mountain beneath the stars didn’t mean she wanted to take up hiking. And loving pretty images of pretty people didn’t mean she wanted to have sex with all of them. In both cases, it just meant she liked pretty things.
Because actually having sex with people—in her case, only and ever men, no matter who she claimed she was attracted to—was a remarkably low impact, mechanical sort of thing. For her. So much so that she’d come to the conclusion that she maybe wasn’t the sort of person who felt a lot of things deeply. Sexually, anyway. And she’d been starting to think if there were words she should use to describe that part of herself, too. Because all of those things—attractions, erotic moments, sex—operated on that same low frequency in her. Like soft notes she could play or not play, when what she thought she really liked about the whole thing was the attention.
She liked a curated picture of a thing, she realized now. Not the thing itself.
Because curation was comforting. It kept her safe. It let her stay in control, always.
Except then she’d met Conrad.
And literally none of the words she’d ever use to describe herself seem to be remotely true anymore. None of them fit.
She barely fit in her own skin.
Rory still couldn’t decide if she wanted to cry about that, punch something, or just find him and beg him to show her more of the intensity she hadn’t known was out there. Or in her. To show her parts of herself that either thrilled her or scared her—she couldn’t decide.
But whichever it was, she wanted more.
She blew out a breath and told herself to walk away again. The church was dark, the way it always was. What was the point of creeping about like a stalker if she couldn’t actuallyseehim? She would go back to her little flat, look at more things that should have disgusted her, and pretend her own fingers in her panties were his.
But before she could do any of that, she saw headlights dance across the facade of the church. And then a sleek, low-slung sports car coming down the little alley. It had a low, authoritative rumble that made her think of his voice, and she knew it was him even before it turned in to the church and remotely opened the gate.
All the other nights she’d stood here, hating herself, she’d never seen him. Not even a whisper of him. She’d imagined Conrad off in some sex club—and if it hadn’t been Paris, literally brimming with such places, she might have gone and tried to find him in one of them.
She was gripping herself, hugging her arms across her abdomen in a way that only hurt, but she didn’t stop. The gate closed behind the car that then slid into the garage that waited. The garage door closed, too. And for moment, Rory was simply alone on a cobbled Parisian street, spying on a man who had already threatened to call the police on her once.
When she was usually the one who had to roll her eyes and shoo away boys who didn’t get the picture and leave when she told them to.
She watched the lights go on inside. And the church stood, bright and beautiful and compelling, claiming its own little plaza the way it must have done for centuries.
But all she could think about was the man who lived there.
Rory made herself a promise, there and then. If she actually did what she wanted to do—cross the street, knock on his door, and beg him for...anything, really—
If she actuallybegged—
No matter what happened, if she did these things, it would be the last time. She made a vow to herself as she stood there, the summer night close around her. If he said no, as she expected he would, and then demanded she leave and never come back, that was what she would do.
Even if she had to leave Paris just to keep herself from ending up in his street no matter her intentions, she would.
But first, tonight, she would try.
