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The first cup of coffee works wonders, but it tastes awful. “I think I need to learn the French word for mud,” I say, lifting the empty cup.
“The French are not known for their coffee,” he says.
“You’ve been here before, right? Paris?” I ask, since he said the city was wonderful at that lunch. A man like him, inking deals around the globe, probably speaks French too.
We’re sitting at a tiny round table on the sidewalk as fashionable Parisians stroll by. French words drift past my ears but mean nothing.
“A couple times,” he says, lifting his espresso. “But always for work.”
He’s quick to answer, and the subtext is clear—he never came here with his ex-wife or with another woman.
Don’t read anything into it.
“Do you speak French?”
He finishes his small cup, then sets it down, his green eyes sparkling. “I’ll tell you a secret,” he whispers.
A shiver runs down my spine. “I’m listening.”
“I can bullshit my way through any restaurant or store, and that’s about it,” he says.
This makes me unreasonably happy. I like that he doesn’t know the language. That he’s brutally honest about his lack of language skills with me, but that he tries to finesse his way through it. That fits him, swaggering through life, pursuing what he wants with guts and brain and charisma.
“So, sort of like how you bullshitted your way through playing the piano,” I say.
He leans back in the chair, looking smug in the best of ways. “I wanted what I wanted,” he says, owning his choice to pursue me relentlessly that night.
But in retrospect, does he wish we’d been unmasked? That we’d both had all the facts before we scurried off to the library?
Maybe it’s the jet lag that makes me want to ask. Or maybe it’s that no one knows us here. I feel like we’re in a bubble, and that bubble emboldens me. “Would you have talked to me if I wasn’t wearing a costume?”
“No,” he says, immediately. “I wouldn’t have.”
My shoulders drop. I knew that answer was coming, but I asked the question anyway.
“And I’m glad I didn’t know,” he adds in his bedroom voice—the one he uses when he tells me to spread my legs for him. “I wouldn’t change a damn thing about the tryst in the library. The night at my home. The afternoon in the restaurant. Not a single thing.” He pins me with a dark stare. “Is that clear?”
I shudder out a yes. “Crystal.”
“Good. But just in case, let me add this—I’m so fucking glad I had a mask on the night you played piano. Because you are the most sensual, responsive, exciting woman I’ve ever known.”
Known.
He didn’t saytouched.
But known. Somehow that word carries even more weight. He’s not comparing me to his body count. He’s putting me on a pedestal for being…well, being me.
His reassurance breaks another layer of my walls. “My ex-boyfriend in college,” I begin, and he sits up straighter. “I was going to sleep with him. I didn’t.”
“Did he hurt you?” Finn asks, biting out the words.
“No.” I shake my head. “He didn’t hurt me physically. But he…” I stop, hesitate. This is harder than I’d thought it would be. Those journals I wrote in are twisted up with sex, and fantasies, and OCD, and secrets. I wasn’t so good at untangling my thoughts. I didn’t understand them enough to understand their separateness. And I don’t want to reveal all of myself. Just a part, because it feels like he’s earned it. “I used to write down what I did that day. What I thought. How I felt,” I explain.
“That makes sense. A lot of people do that.”
“Yeah and sometimes I had these uncomfortable thoughts,” I say, because that’s a safe enough way to tell him without slapping a label on myself. “Sometimes about random people. Like a professor. Or a teaching assistant.”
He nods for me to keep going, making it clear he’s not judging, just listening.
