AllFreeNovel
Share Us
We ended the call and I retraced my steps, back along the canal in the direction of the Lux, looking for a street called something beginning with ‘H’ which should lead to the B & B we’d booked. There was music coming from somewhere, a live band, and it got louder and quieter and louder and quieter as the door to the venue opened and closed. I spotted the street I was looking for over the other side of the canal, a quaint, curving cobbled lane lined with bikes propped in racks and with a cosy little restaurant on the corner that had candles flickering in the window. I swallowed hard. I’d been high on adrenaline, buoyed by being in Paris, and meeting Léo and the shock of finding out what Si had been up to. But now it was just me again, alone in the world. I waited for the familiar, empty, thudding feeling I’d had a million times before, but it didn’t come. Perhaps it hadn’t quite sunk in.
Running my hand across the railings, I’d just started out across the bridge when I heard somebody calling my name.
‘Hannah!’
I turned round. For a second I let myself imagine it could be Léo, but how could it, when he wouldn’t know how to find me?
I squinted into the half-light. At first I couldn’t see him, there was just a shadow, but then he came into view with his perfect face and his leather jacket, the jeans that were slung too low on his hips. That smile.
‘It is you,’ he said, panting.
I laughed. ‘Are you all right there?’
‘No,’ he said, clutching his chest, laughing.
‘Did you run all the way here, or something?’
He nodded. ‘I only have a few minutes before the concert, starts,’ he said, trying to catch his breath.
‘Short on time, eh? The story of our lives,’ I said.
A group of girls tottered past, off their heads, singing loudly. They were eating some sort of kebab, scooping up handfuls of meat from oily paper bags clutched in their hands.
‘How did you know where I was?’ I asked.
‘I heard what you said when you got into the taxi, so I went to the Lux. I could not see you amongst the wedding party, so I asked the doorman at the hotel. He thought you might have gone in this direction.’
‘What are you doing here, anyway?’
‘I came to see whether you are all right,’ he said, leaning his back against the railings, crossing one foot over the other. ‘That you have not tripped over the bride’s dress and twisted your other ankle.’
I smiled. ‘You know, I don’t think I deserve the clumsy rep.’
Léo looked down at the floor, then back at me. ‘What happened with your boyfriend? Why are you not at the wedding?’
I pulled his hoodie tighter around my body. ‘I was right, he’d been lying to me.’
‘You knew that, non?’
‘Sort of, I suppose. But it wasn’t what I thought it was. He wasn’t having an affair,’ I said.
‘No?’
‘He got fired from his job and then covered it up by pretending to go to work every day when he had no actual job to go to.’
‘He is an idiot,’ said Léo, tutting. ‘I knew that, without ever meeting him.’
A nearby door opened, flooding the cobbles with white light, sending jazz music blasting out into the night.
‘Don’t you need to go?’ I asked.
He glanced at his watch. ‘Yes.’
‘They’re going to love your song, by the way,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘I hope so.’
‘You’re not going to make me do the whole sad goodbye thing all over again, are you?’
