Chapter 82 Bugatti Veyron. Again?

Chapter 82 Bugatti Veyron. Again?
I start walking again.

Not with a destination.

Just because standing still with tears on my face in a narrow quiet street has a limit and I have reached it.

The street opens onto a wider one.

The wider one has a road with a pavement that’s lined with cobblestones.

At the specific way wet stone catches light, creating mirages that gives me a headache whenever I look at them.
I am thinking about the notebook entry.

I am thinking about how I underlined it.

I am thinking about how I looked at the small quiet thing and breathed through it and chose past it and told myself that was wisdom.

That was not wisdom.

Now, I know that.

That was the same thing I did for six years with Callum, which was take an instinct that was trying to tell me something true and talk myself out of it because I had decided on a story and the instinct did not fit the story.

I am so tired of the stories I tell myself.

I am so tired of being the woman who breathes through the thing and calls it strength.

I step off the pavement and place one feet on the road.

Time to go back to the hotel. I just need to figure out the way back.

The sound comes first.

A sharp horn slams into my eardrums threatening me to take another step forward.

I freeze.

Warm air from the hood of the car two inches away from my calf breathes onto my leg and I feel it through the

I stop.

My entire body freezes.

Every system in it stops the way systems stop when the information arriving is too large and too fast and too close for anything except stopping.

I look up.

The car is the colour of something that costs more than I can conceptualise from a standing position on a Paris road, low to the ground, its bonnet ending at a distance from my legs that I could measure with one hand outstretched.

Two inches.

Maybe even one.

The street is very quiet aside the quiet purring of the car breathing on my calf.

My heart is making a sound I can hear in my own ears.

My legs are not working.

Not in the way legs stop working from injury.

In the way legs stop working when the body has received information that it does not know how to process and has redirected all available resources to that processing task, leaving the legs with nothing to run on.

I crouched.

I do not decide to crouch.

My body decides.

My knees meet the cobblestones and my hands come down to catch myself and I am crouched in the road two inches from the bonnet of a car that cost more than I can conceptualize and the tears that have been running quietly down my face since the narrow quiet street become something else entirely.

They become the kind of crying that comes from the bottom of everything.

Not the tears that run quietly while you are standing and trying to maintain some version of composure.

The other kind.

The kind that is loud.

That is hot.

That does not ask permission or wait for privacy or concern itself with Paris streets or nearby cars or the complete absence of dignity in crouching on cobblestones on a Friday afternoon.

The kind that comes from a place that has been waiting, patient and full, for exactly the moment when there is nothing left to hold it back.

I cry fully.

In the road.

On my knees.

Two inches from a Bugatti Veyron.

I cry for the woman who breathed through the small quiet thing and called it a choice.

I cry for the thirty-two missed calls.

I cry for the dish cloth around a burned palm.

I cry for three daughters I never got to name.

I cry for the notebook entry I underlined.

I cry for the same words in a café used on a different woman with the same warmth that I took and held and called mine.

I cry for the version of me that keeps choosing and keeps being wrong and is standing in the road now, crouched on cobblestones, wondering if the choosing wrong is not the circumstance but the character.

I cry because I am so tired.

Because I have been rebuilding for so long.

Because I thought this life was going to be different and it is different and it is also, in the ways that matter most, exactly the same.

I cry because I do not know what to do with that.

I cry because I am twenty-four years old and thirty years old at the same time and neither of those women has figured it out yet and I am starting to wonder if figuring it out is something that happens to other people.

I cry.

The cobblestones are cold under my hands.

I hear the car door.

I do not look up.

I hear footsteps on the cobblestones.

They stop.

Directly in front of me.

I look at the shoes.

Brown Italian leather.

The kind of shoes that are polished by someone who takes that specific task seriously.

The kind of shoes that belong to a man who has walked into boardrooms and acquisition meetings and rooms with significantly higher stakes than a Paris road on a Friday afternoon and has never once needed to run to get there.

He says nothing.

He crouches.

And before I have decided anything, before I have processed what is happening or who is crouching or what comes next, his arms come around me.

Not tentatively.

Not with the careful approach of someone asking permission.

Just arms.

Around me.

The way you pick up something that has fallen and needs to be steadied before anything else.

I struggle.

Not hard.

Just the automatic resistance of a body that has been managing itself for so long that being held by someone else registers as wrong before it registers as anything else, that has forgotten, in the specific way that bodies forget things when they have gone too long without them, what it feels like to have somewhere to put the weight.

I struggle.

And then I hear his voice lowly in my ear.

Not the flat even voice of corridors and café tables and competition briefings.

Something below that.

Something that lives underneath the composed surface of Daniel Ashford in the same way that the 1817 ironwork lives underneath the 1847 stone, earlier, more essential, the thing that was there before the performance of being in rooms.

"Be good," he says. "I won't eat you."

I go still.

Not because he told me to.

Because something in the voice, in the specific register of it, in the four words delivered with the complete absence of anything performed in them, finds the part of me that has been going and going and going and tells it, quietly and without drama, that it can stop now.

Just for a minute.

It can stop.

I go still.

He lifts me.

Not as if I am heavy.

Not as if I am fragile.

Just lifts me.

The way you lift something that needs to be somewhere other than where it currently is.

\---

The passenger seat of the Bugatti Veyron is the colour of cream leather and it receives me with the specific quality of something that was made with care, not just expensive care, considered care, the care of someone who thought about what it would feel like to sit in it rather than just what it would look like.

He buckles the seatbelt.

He does not ask.

He reaches across me and takes the belt and clicks it into place with the matter-of-fact efficiency of someone performing a necessary task, and his forearm passes across my field of vision and the Patek Philippe watch catches the afternoon light and I stare at it because staring at a watch is easier than looking at anything else right now.

He closes the door.

He walks around to the outside of the car.

I hear his voice through the glass, low and unhurried, making a call in a language that takes me a moment to identify as French because my brain is currently running on minimal capacity and language processing is not its priority.

I look at the dashboard.

At the instruments arranged in the way of something that was designed rather than assembled, each element in its place for a reason, nothing unnecessary, nothing that does not need to be there.

Quintessentialism.

I think that.

In a Bugatti Veyron.

On a Paris street.

Two minutes after crouching on cobblestones.

I think about architecture.

I am absolutely losing my mind.

He gets back in.

The door closes with the sound of something engineered to close exactly like that.

I am curled against my window.

Knees pulled up.

Face turned away from him.

Looking at the Paris street outside, at the cobblestones and the building frontages and the afternoon light doing its angled thing, and I am not going to look at him because looking at him would require me to have a face right now and I do not currently have a face, I have the remnants of a face, I have the raw material of a face that has been doing things on a Paris road for the last ten minutes that faces are not supposed to do in the presence of judges.

He does not tell me to look at him.

He does not ask if I am alright.

He does not do anything that requires me to respond.

He says one thing.

"Don't worry." His voice is the underneath register, the one that lives below the composed surface. "This is our thing."

I look at the cobblestones outside the window.

At the Paris afternoon.

At the car bonnet that stopped two inches from my legs.

Our thing.

I have walked into his car.

I have walked into his Rolls Royce.

I have almost walked into a van while he watched.

And now I have crouched on a Paris road two inches from his Bugatti and cried on cobblestones until he picked me up and put me in the passenger seat and buckled my seatbelt.