Chapter 71 Come
Chapter 71 Come
The street stops with me in the way that streets do not actually stop but that the specific moment of stopping makes feel like everything else has paused to acknowledge it.
I look up.
There is a road in front of me.
Not the cobbled pedestrian street I was walking down when I left the square.
A road with lanes and a traffic signal that is currently green and a delivery van that has just moved through the space I would have walked into if I had taken two more steps with my eyes somewhere in the middle distance and my mind six years in a past life in a bathroom counting missed calls.
I look at the van.
I look at the road.
I look to my left.
Daniel Ashford is standing approximately one arm's length away from me with his hand still partially raised from where he reached out and stopped my forward movement, not touching me, just present in the space in a way that communicated stop in a language that my body understood before my brain caught up.
He is in a dark coat over a white shirt, no tie, his hair slightly disturbed by the Paris wind in the way of someone who has been walking rather than standing, and he is looking at me with an expression that I have not seen on his face before and that I do not have a name for yet because I am still catching up to the fact that I almost walked into traffic for the second time in his presence.
"You," he says, "are a danger to yourself and to the automotive industry of two continents."
I look at the road.
I look at him.
"I was looking." I say.
"You were not looking." he says.
"I was thinking." I say. "Which is adjacent to looking."
"It is not adjacent to looking." he says. "It is the opposite of looking. Looking requires your eyes to be directed at the thing in front of you. Thinking requires them to be directed at nothing, which is what yours were directed at when you walked toward a green light with a delivery van in it."
I open my mouth.
I close it.
Because he is correct.
He is completely because I am standing on the pavement on the edge of a Paris road that I almost walked into and the correct response to being correct is not to argue about the definition of adjacent.
"Thank you." I say.
"What were you thinking about?" he says.
And that is when it happens.
Not because of the question specifically.
Not because of the road or the van or the fact that Daniel Ashford has now, twice, been present in the moment between my body and something moving faster than it.
But because the question is a simple and direct question asked in a simple and direct voice with no performance in it, no management, no warmth deployed as a tactic, just a man on a pavement in Paris asking another person what they were thinking about, and I have been holding something since a bench in a square and before that since a corridor this morning and before that since eleven twenty at night and before that since longer than any of those things, and the simple question with nothing performed in it finds the thing I have been holding and the thing I have been holding decides it is finished.
My eyes fill with water.
I do not make a decision about this.
My throat burn and my eyes water fast.
It's the way things that have been full for a long time eventually overflow when the last of the holding capacity is used up, and I press my lips together and I look at the road and I breathe through my nose and I do all of the things I know how to do when I am trying to not cry in a public place in front of a person who is a judge in the competition I am still competing in.
None of them work.
One tear.
Then another.
Then my face does the thing it does when I have lost the argument with it.
Daniel Ashford looks at me.
He looks at the road.
He looks back at me.
And for the first time since I have known him, which is to say for the first time since a California hospital waiting room and a paid bill and a haircut comment and a plane to Paris and a corridor at midnight, Daniel Ashford looks like a man who does not know what to do.
He is not cold.
He is not composed.
He is not doing the noting thing or the corner of the mouth thing or the flat even voice thing.
He is just a man on a pavement watching a woman cry and looking, for the first time in my experience of him, genuinely uncertain about what comes next.
He looks at the café across the street.
He looks at me.
"Come." he says.
\---
The café is called something with an ampersand (&) in it that I do not fully read because he holds the door and I walk through it with my eyes still doing the thing and my notebook clutched to my chest and my dignity somewhere on the pavement outside with the delivery van.
It is small inside.
Warm in the way of small Paris cafes that have been warm for long enough that the warmth is structural, built into the walls, the kind of warmth that arrives before you have taken your coat off and stays after you have left.
He finds a table at the back.
Two chairs.
A small round table with a surface that has seen many cups and does not apologise for it.
He sits across from me.
A waiter appears.
"Deux expressos." Daniel says. In French that has no self-consciousness in it, the French of someone for whom it is simply another language rather than a performance of sophistication.
The waiter leaves.
Daniel looks at me.
I look at the table.
I press the back of my hand against my cheek.
"I'm sorry." I say.
"Don't." he says.
"I'm crying in a café." I sniffle.
"In front of a judge. In the middle of a competition. This is not ......."
"Stop." he says. Not unkind. Just direct. "You don't have to manage this right now."
I look at him.
He looks back at me with those grey eyes that catalogue things and I wait for the cataloguing to begin, for the noting to start, for him to file this moment away
in whatever system he uses for filing things about Sera Calloway away.
He just looks.
Not noting.
Just looking directly into my eyes.