Chapter 23

In the days that followed, this same sense of foreboding would continue to grow until it felt so tangible I could almost choke on it. Some of it originated from my disorder anxiety, I was sure, but after seeing a picture of Isla and Elijah with the French prime minister, who was rumored to have invited them to dinner at his place, I knew that my fears weren’t unfounded.

My new room was compact, neat, and impersonal. By no means small as the Du Pont had a reputation to uphold as one of Paris’s only five-star hotels, though it fell severely short when compared to the luxuries of the penthouse suite I’d spent the better part of two weeks in.

I missed the pool and floor-to-ceiling windows of the penthouse, having a coffee making machine and an assortment of meals to choose from. But most importantly, I missed Elijah.

It was stupid of me to expect some sort of closure, a clean break and not this jagged stump that followed after me each time our eyes met, and he looked away.

Someone, Isla perhaps, had decided our shared car rides to Sanctuaire were in bad taste, which meant that now we were never truly alone—and while a part of me completely understood this, a smaller, more idealistic part hoped desperately that Elijah would suggest that we talk so I could finally get a handle on where things stood between us.

We could never be together in a true sense of the word, but I’d enjoyed being around him, looking past the front he put up to the person behind all of it: A shy, somewhat awkward man with a breathtaking smile who worked through crosswords with religious fervor and would talk about anything horror-related as soon as you gave him an opportunity to. He was fluent in four different languages, did not like the sensation of fingers through his hair, and oversaw a multibillion-dollar holdings company.

Elijah Wilder was magnificent, and I would’ve been quick to tell him this if he so much as hinted at a desire to actually have the conversation, but as soon as I was booted out of the penthouse our exchanges turned formal, limited, and with each day that passed it began to creep up on me, a possibility that once again I’d let myself get played.

I was an appetizer, and as soon as the main course arrived the lifespan of his desire for me flat lined completely.

It was an uneasy thought, and torturing myself with imaginings of him running his calloused palms over the perfect expanse of Isla’s body became a favorite pastime until I could barely stand to look at him in real life without wanting to send a bottle crashing into his head at how badly he’d humiliated me—an aide sleeping with her boss, no more than a walking cliché.

Work became my only form of escape, and I threw myself deep into it, showering after each conference meeting before setting down to go over my notes for the day.

I ordered room service as I penned down feverish observations into my notepad, went to sleep while running the numbers in my head, closed my eyes to see projections and flow charts—but even then, I barely managed to escape Elijah.

My only solace was that I had only a week left in Paris to look forward to, and I was determined that as soon as I arrived back in New York I would begin the odorous process of job hunting again, because I’d had enough, and maybe everything that’d happened just went to prove that once more, it was time to move on.

•

In learning to navigate the rocky terrain that was Elijah Wilder I’d picked up a thing or two along the way. You could call it a sort of sixth sense, which at the moment alerted me to the fact that Elijah’s eyes were on me.

Somehow, even without turning to crane my neck I could tell, and as I drank from the bottle of water in front of me, halfheartedly passing a spare pen to Lerato, whose ink had run out, I shifted nervously in my seat, feeling the weight of his gaze bear down heavily on me.

Almost three weeks had come and gone in a flash, some better than others, but now all that remained was this final meeting, and after it, the annual fundraising gala that was slated to hold tomorrow night. After it, we would all be homebound, and I could feel the excitement in the air, a tangible thing which resulted in more than the occasional murmur and a slowly hushed chuckle.

A hum ran through the room, one that hadn’t been present even on our first day together, and all of it felt alive, something with a little more color.

I felt it too, though I was a little bummed out that I wouldn’t be attending the gala as I’d forgotten to pack in any dresses to fit the occasion. It was for the best, really, as I could barely stand the thought of Elijah showing off his fiancée to the crème de la crème of society.

As soon as the bitter thought crossed my mind, I craned my head slightly to see that he was still looking at me, and when he made an unsubtle hand gesture which could’ve meant anything, I gave a slightly disappointed shake of my head, rolling my eyes as I looked away.

It figured that he would try to reach out on today of all days. A quickie maybe, one last fuck for the road before the curtains came down. Yes, I’d felt my heart skip at his acknowledgement, which was to be expected considering how I’d waited for so long without even a hint that he cared, but I knew better.

My body may not have been in the right place, but my head was, and only that mattered.

Without letting myself think too much on it I turned to look over to the area I’d been sat in formally before Elijah’s intervention and was surprised to catch Vincent watching.

We hadn’t shared even ten words since our last exchange, though I’d noticed that around the same time Isla booted me out of Elijah’s penthouse that he started to look at me with a funny expression on his face. It was unnerving, but there wasn’t much I could do about it without raising suspicion to myself and I figured that the best course of action to take would be to feign total ignorance.

It must’ve been a day of surprise, because within a breath of our gazes catching he offered a smile, giving me a tiny wave which I found myself returning as an amused smile to match his crept across my face.

I took another gulp of water as soon as our little nonverbal exchange was up and realized within a split second that Elijah must’ve caught it. A quick glance at his direction proved my hypothesis, as the stony glint in his eyes when they trailed away from me deliberately to settle on Vincent left no doubt.

A disbelieving scoff escaped me.

What did he think this was—a dime store paperback where the male love lead looked upon a heroine (whom he’d spent the entire book treating like a steaming pile of garbage, mind you) and professed that he’d loved her all along, all while she swooned helplessly like a little twit with two brain cells?

No. In fact, over my dead body. Our little tete-a-tete (a euphemism if ever there was any, though on the bright side you could see that I was starting to think in French now) had led to my making the executive decision to retire the clown suit.

There would be no going back, I knew, however this played out, but a few minutes more of Elijah’s gaze prickling into my skin proved to be unbearable and after a long and completely unnecessary internal debate, I got up, muttering a hasty excuse to Lerato, who was too busy writing into the binder she’d brought that she didn’t even deign to look up.

I knew he tracked my every movement as I navigated my way through the room and felt myself breathe easier when I stepped out of it, making a beeline straight to the ladies, where I got into a stall, collapsing into a heap of misery on one of the toilet lids, blindly reaching up to turn the locks as I let out a heavy sigh, feeling tears begin to prickle up at the corners of my eyes.

A shaky laugh escaped me as my fingers moved in slow, circling motions over my temples.

“God,” I said quietly, “What’s wrong with me?”

Here I was, prone over a toilet seat in the middle of Paris—tearing up over a number of reasons that made no sense to even me when I could be mapping out an evening of celebratory clubbing like I knew Paula would if she were in my position. The fact that she knew only a word of French (you guessed it: Oui) would never have stopped her.

But I was a loser. A twenty-something millennial, faced with an eternity of midlife crises to look forward to.

People came to Paris to flirt, and make love or war, flirt with cute waiters and meet handsome princes at art galleries like that one episode of Gossip Girl with Blair and the single Vivier she’d given Prince Louis, telling him to come find her in New York. I wanted that.

I didn’t want to have to enter into passive aggressive feuds with European concierges and fuck a soon to be married man who obviously didn’t give a rat’s ass about me. I wanted to let my hair down, put on a little black dress, and—

The door of the bathroom slid slowly open, and at the first sound of shoes clicking over marble floors I knew from the Candace of his footsteps that Elijah had followed me here. My traitorous heart skipped another beat, paused to let my brain verify that it was in fact him, and then it burst into a jig, which was hard considering how it remained in my ribcage an all. But trust me when I say it gave its all.