Chapter 78 Goodnight, Jean-Pierre
Chapter 78 Goodnight, Jean-Pierre
That thing moves in my stomach again.
It’s quiet but not small enough to disregard it.
There it is. Again.
The weirdness that feels like a warning.
I look at it directly, the way I have been learning to look at things directly rather than filing them under things I am not thinking about.
What is it?
My gut instinct?
Fear, maybe?
The specific fear of a woman who has been here before.
Not here exactly.
Not a Paris street in October with a baker who knows about ironwork.
But here in the sense of standing in front of a choice that requires something from her.
The last time I stood in front of a choice that required something from me I gave everything I had and came back with nothing.
I know that.
My body knows that.
My body is registering it right now in the form of this small quiet thing moving in my stomach and my brain is screaming at me to run from anything that looks like another Callum.
But…….
I look at Jean-Pierre.
At the open patient face.
At the man who stepped back when I stepped back on the rooftop without making it a wound.
At the man who texts at nine fifteen at night with no agenda except that he thought of something and wanted to share it.
At the man who said you look like you are paying attention to what is in front of you on the first day I met him over an almond pastry and meant it as the compliment it was.
Callum never paid attention to what was in front of him.
Callum paid attention to what was useful to him.
Those are not the same thing.
Jean-Pierre pays attention.
That is not a small thing.
That is not nothing.
That is, in fact, the thing.
I breathe out.
The small quiet thing in my stomach does not go away.
But I look at it and I look at Jean-Pierre and I make a decision that is not the same as ignoring it, that is different from what I did for six years which was to ignore every signal my body sent me because I had decided on a story and the signals did not fit the story.
This is not that.
This is seeing the signal and making a choice anyway.
A considered choice.
A better choice.
"Yes." I say.
Jean-Pierre smiles.
Not the wide unguarded laugh smile.
Something quieter.
The smile of a man who has been given something he was not certain he would be given and is holding it carefully.
"Yes." he says. Like he is confirming it to himself.
"Yes." I say again.
He reaches out.
He takes my hand.
Not dramatically.
Not with ceremony.
Just his hand and mine on a Paris street in the October evening with the 1817 ironwork talking to the 1847 stone above us and the city doing its thing in all directions.
His hand is warm.
The small quiet thing in my stomach is still there.
I breathe through it the way I breathe through things I have decided to move toward rather than away from.
We stand there for a moment.
Just looking at the building.
"It is a good building." I say.
"One of my favourites." he says.
"Better than the Palais Royal?" I say.
"Different." he says. "The Palais Royal is grand. This one is not trying to be anymore impressive than it already is."
"Hungry?" he grins
"Always." I reply smiling.
He squeezes my hand once.
We walk.
\---
He takes me to a restaurant three streets away that is the kind of restaurant that has been in the same spot since before anyone currently eating in it was born, the kind of place where the menu has not changed significantly in forty years because the menu does not need to change, where the people who work there know the people who eat there and the people who eat there know what they are ordering before they sit down.
Jean-Pierre knows everyone.
The owner comes out to say hello, patting him on the back and they have a funny conversation in french.
Of course, I do not understand them but it felt nice to see him banter with someone.
Pierre is just a prize for sore eyes and my aching heart, of course.
The waiter who brings the baguette knows his order.
There is a small table near the window that is apparently his table in the way when you have been going long enough and the restaurant has decided your name is on the fictional inheritance.
We sit in firm wooden chairs and enjoy our meal.
Pierre tells me about the bakery's first winter after he took it over from his grandfather, when the boiler broke and the bread would not rise properly for three weeks and he spent every morning from four to six trying to maintain the temperature manually with increasingly creative solutions before a customer who turned out to be a retired heating engineer noticed what he was doing and fixed it in forty minutes for the price of a croissant.
I tell him about Professor Armstrong's first feedback on my portfolio, which was three pages long and which I read in a university bathroom because I needed somewhere private to process what turned out to be the most specific and genuinely useful criticism anyone had ever given me about my work, delivered by a professor who cared more about students than just grading them.
He laughs at the bathroom part.
I laugh at the croissant part.
We drink red wine from old bottles that Jean-Pierre orders without looking at the menu.
I finally learn to say Bonjour with the french accent after miserably failing ten times already.
The restaurant does warm lights set the mood for easy evening conversation.
And I am here with this man who shows me buildings that talk to themselves across centuries.
Holding something new carefully.
The small quiet thing in my stomach is still there.
I notice it but I breathe through it and keep going.
Callum is not going to be the past that stops me.
He walks me back to Hotel Beaumont at eleven.
The Paris night is doing the cool dark version of itself, the city quieter than it was two hours ago but not quiet, never fully quiet, the specific nighttime frequency of a place that has decided it does not need to sleep completely to be at rest.
We stop outside the hotel.
He looks at me.
"Thank you." he says. "For tonight."
"Thank you for the building." I say. "The ironwork conversation. I needed that for the submission and I needed it for other reasons too."
"What other reasons?" he asks
I think about that.
About what the building gave me beyond the architectural reference.
About what it means to watch two versions of the same thing talk to each other across time and remain in conversation rather than contradiction.
Two different time periods talking to each other on the same building, yet still existing in harmony.
The building cannot be itself without that.
Maybe I cannot be myself without it either.
The past life and this one.
The woman who stayed quiet and the woman who is learning not to
In conversation with my past life and this life, not in mere contradiction of just actively avoiding repeated actions.
"Things I am still working out." I say.
"That is a good reason." he says. "The things still being worked out are usually the important ones."
I look at him.
He looks at me.
He leans forward.
And this time I do not step back.
His lips are warm and the kiss is brief and completely unhurried, the kind of kiss that does not demand anything from the moment except to be what it is, and when it ends he pulls back and looks at me with the quiet smile that is different from the wide laugh smile and I look back at him and the small quiet thing in my stomach is there and I am not pretending it is not there and I am not letting it make the decision for me.
"Goodnight, Sera." His boyish grin reappears, accompanied by his palm rubbing the nape of his neck sheepishly.
I blush, my eyes burning into his chest.
"Goodnight, Jean-Pierre."