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‘C’mere,’ he said, patting the bed in much the same way he had patted the windowsill last night.
Noémie didn’t want any more discussion. She didn’t want to blame him. They should leave it at this. They should part now, while they could walk away with only good memories. She picked up the closest item of clothing on the floor – his T-shirt – and wriggled into it.
‘Dan—’ she said, standing at the side of the bed.
‘Come here.’ His right hand was palm down on the mattress; his left, he held out to her.
She took his hand and let him pull her to his side.
‘Listen,’ he said.
‘No, Dan. It’s not good. I—’
He put his finger to her lips, then raised his hand to brush her tinted fringe away from her eyes.
‘It was about your hair,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Fronds of waving blue. It was supposed to be about your hair.’
She tried to think back to the words he’d written. ‘Myhair?’
‘I imagined you as a sort of sea nymph, beguiling me with your magic, and I dreamed that I was tangled up in it, trapped in it, and .?.?.’
She’d been so determined, always, to hide how much it was going to hurt when he went back to America, to his real life. She had cracked for him and kept it hidden. She had never said anything to try to keep him, to trap him, not one word. A flicker of anger rose up her throat, making her voice shrill.
‘You weretrapped?’ And shriller still: ‘By myhair?’
‘Not trapped, because I was glad to be there. Happy. No,excited.’ He thumped his head back against the wall, then rubbed his skull and turned to her with a sore, self-deprecating smile. ‘I was so fucking excited, I wrote a really stupid poem about it. I mean, it wassobad, it didn’t even make any sense. Right?’
He waited for her to speak. What was she to say? It was true that his poem made no sense, at least not to her. Her heart ached so much that she just wanted this to be over, and at the same time she was terrified that she would say the thing that would make him go.
She shrugged.
‘But I just couldn’t find the right words.’ Dan kept talking. ‘No, that’s not true,’ he said. ‘I wrote that poem because I was scared. Just like you said, I was chicken. I wrote a stupid poem to try to explain how I felt about—’
‘MyHAIR?’ She was shouting now and concentrating fiercely on not crying. ‘I don’t understand you.’
‘I wrote it because I couldn’t find the courage to tell you straight out that I love .?.?.’
‘My hair?Merde, Dan.Putain de merde.’
He sighed.
She waited.
‘You,’ he said.
‘Mais—’ She couldn’t think how to answer. His fingers were still threaded through her hair. His palm, warm against her ear, like a conch, magnified the sound of her own pulse.
‘I can’t leave you,’ he said. ‘You’re under my skin.’
‘Mais—’
He spoke quickly, almost too quickly for her to understand, as if he was afraid to give her an opportunity to stop him. ‘I’ll stay. I’ve been thinking about it all night. If you can’t come with me, I’ll stay. I’ll work in the bookshop and figure out school somehow. But, if you come with me, I promise, I’ll take care of you. It won’t be Paris, but it won’t be for long either. It’s not like we can’t come back. We’ll come back. More than I want anything else in the world, I want to be with you. Will you come with me? Or will I stay?’
‘Dan—’
