Chapter 79 My boyfriend is cheating on me

Chapter 79 My boyfriend is cheating on me

Stage 4 results are announced on a Friday morning and Group Five passes with a score that, accounting for the half demerit point, sits comfortably above the elimination threshold.

Roe finds this out and makes a YAY sound in the conference room that Dr. Fontaine politely pretends not to hear.

I find this out and feel the specific satisfaction of work that was done properly landing in the place it was supposed to land.

Callum finds this out and nods once at his phone and puts it back in his pocket.

We are, the three of us, through to Stage 5.

Dr. Fontaine releases the Stage 5 brief immediately after the results, which tells me she has learned something about the energy in a room full of architects who have just received news and has decided that the most efficient response to that energy is to give it somewhere to go before it turns into something unproductive in a hotel corridor.

Stage 5 brief goes into my notebook.

Stage 5 will keep.

Today I am going outside.

\---

The morning is the kind of Paris morning that exists specifically to make you feel like you made the right decision by being in Paris, the air sharp and clean with the particular clarity that comes after two days of light rain, the cobblestones still slightly damp and catching the light in the way of surfaces that have been polished by weather rather than intention.

I have been inside Hotel Beaumont for four days straight.

Four days of the working room and the whiteboard and Roe's acoustic opinions and Callum's jaw doing the tight thing and submission portals and demerit points and espressos in small cafes and corridors at midnight and things I am filing under things I am not thinking about.

Four days.

The city has been out here this entire time doing its thing without me and I owe it my attention.

I walk without a specific destination, which has become my preferred mode of moving through Paris, the purposeful purposelessness of someone who has learned that the city gives you what you need if you are moving through it without demanding a particular thing from it.

I buy a coffee from a cart near the Seine.

I stand at the river and I drink it and I watch the water do what water does, which is move in the direction it has decided to move with complete indifference to everything happening on the banks around it.

I think about Stage 5.

I think about Elise's voice on the phone saying thrash him.

I think about the notebook entry from last night, I am choosing this.

I think about the small discomfort biting at my stomach.

I breathe through it the way I have been breathing through it.

I finish the coffee and keep walking.

\---

I am only three blocks from the cinema when I see Pierre coming out of a shop on the left side of the street, a boutique with a window display that has been arranged by someone with strong opinions about negative space, and he is laughing at something, the wide unguarded laugh that I recognise from the first time I heard it in the bakery, the laugh that does not check itself.

I feel the specific warmth of seeing someone you like unexpectedly in a city, the small uncomplicated pleasure of it, and I raise my hand to wave.

A small smile tugs at my lips.

I guess this is my boyfriend.

A blush spreads on my cheeks at the thought.

Then, I see a woman standing beside him with her hand tucked into the crook of his elbow. Her head tilts back as she laughs loudly at something Pierre says.

In response, Pierre gives her a forehead kiss, his expression becoming calm unlike his playful self.

She is laughing at the same thing he is laughing at, and she is wearing something that I register distantly as expensive and well considered, the clothing of someone who thinks about what they put on their body the way architects think about what they put on a site.

I lower my hand.

I stop walking.

They have not seen me.

They are three doors ahead of me on the same side of the street, moving slowly in the way of people who are in the middle of a conversation and the conversation is the point rather than the destination.

I stand on the pavement.

There are explanations.

A sister, maybe.

A friend.

A cousin.

Paris is full of Jean-Pierre's cousins, he told me himself, everyone useful in Paris is somebody's cousin.

There are explanations and I am a woman who chose this with her eyes open and I am not going to make a decision based on a woman's hand in the crook of an arm on a Paris street on a Friday morning without more information.

So I follow.

Not dramatically, of course. I’m not about to embarrass myself after realising she’s his cousin or a little sister that I don’t know about.

I’m just trying to disappoint the nagging feeling in my mind and the unsettling in my gut.

I know Pierre is amazing, but I am very sure that this small yet clawing feeling in my stomach is because I’m still afraid of loving again after Callum.

But, I won’t let myself be used, discarded and wounded beyond measure again!

I know my boyfriend - Pierre is the best!

Just walking in the direction I was already walking, the same side of the street, staying far enough behind that I am not immediately visible to them if they turn around, and I tell myself this is not following, this is walking, this is a woman on a Paris street going in the same direction as two other people who happen to be ahead of her.

I tell myself that.

I keep walking stopping few steps behind them as they stop outside a café.

It’s not the kind of café with a warm interior and espressos that he’s taken me to.

A larger place, open fronted, with chairs on the pavement under a green awning and a chalkboard menu that has been written in the handwriting of someone who has taken a course in it.

Jean-Pierre holds the door.

The woman goes through.

He follows.

They sit at a table near the window.

I stand on the pavement across the street.

I look at the café.

I look at the table.

At Jean-Pierre and the woman with the expensive clothes, sitting across from each other with the ease of people who have sat across from each other before.

The small quiet thing in my stomach, which has been a small quiet thing since last night, is no longer small.

It is not quiet.

It is doing something that I recognise from a past life, from standing outside a hallway door with a bottle in my hand and hearing a voice come through the wall, the specific physical sensation of a body that has understood something before the brain has finished processing it and is trying to communicate the understanding through the least comfortable available channel.

I cross the street.

I do not go inside.

There is a space at the side of the café, a narrow gap between the open frontage and the neighbouring building, and I stand in it the way people stand in spaces that are not meant to be stood in but that offer something the open street does not, which is the ability to hear without being seen.

I stand there and listen to them.

Pierre's voice carries the way it always does, without effort, with the natural projection of someone who is comfortable taking up the acoustic space around him.

"The thing about a garment," he is saying, "is that it cannot be itself without understanding what it is for. A coat that is made to be looked at and a coat that is made to be worn in cold weather are two completely different objects even if they look identical on the rack."

I press my back against the wall.

The woman's voice comes back, warmer than I expected, with the energy of someone who is being told exactly the thing she finds most interesting and knows it. "That is exactly it. That is the conversation nobody in the industry wants to have. We spend all this time talking about aesthetics and nobody asks what the garment needs to be itself."

"What does it need to be itself." Jean-Pierre says.

And there it is.

Those six words.

In his voice.

In a café in the 6th arrondissement on a Friday morning in Paris.

The same six words he used on our first day, standing at the Palais Royal, looking at the colonnades, talking about the relationship between the columns and the arches.

What does it need to be itself?

That’s the same question in the same voice from the same person but at a different table with a different woman.

I look at the cobblestones.

I look at the gap between the café and the neighbouring building.

The pit in my stomach grows larger.

Jean-Pierre keeps talking without noticing me.

He tells her about the garment the way he told me about the buildings, with the specific enthusiasm of a man who is finding the vocabulary for one thing inside the language of another, drawing the analogy with the focused warmth of someone who has made a discovery and wants to share it.

He tells her about the stitching the way he told me about the ironwork.

He talks about the silhouette of a dress, the same way he told me about the Haussmann roofline.

He tells her that the most important thing a designer can do is understand what a thing cannot be itself without, and remove everything else, and what remains is the truth of it.

What remains is the truth of it.

I wrote that in my notebook.

I wrote it in my notebook last night.

I wrote it under things going off track in this new life.

The woman laughs the laugh of someone who is charmed.

I know that laugh.

It came from my own throat three weeks ago over an almond pastry in a bakery on a narrow street.

I’m probably overthinking it.
I should get going before I say something wrong.
I push off the wall, intending to go in and say hi to Pierre when my eyes fall on a crazy sight.

Stranger lady and my boyfriend have their lips locked together in a passionate kiss.