Chapter 70
Elena
Annabelle waited until she'd disappeared into the equipment room before she spoke. "That last one looked good."
"The last three were better." I wound the ribbon carefully around the handle, the way I always did, starting from the weighted end. "The first fifteen were educational."
"Educational," she repeated, and her voice had that particular quality it got when she was trying not to smile. "Is that what we're calling it."
"Michel calls it necessary." I set the ribbon in its case and reached for my water bottle. "She's not wrong."
She leaned forward, elbows on her knees. "You have afternoon classes, right? After this?"
"International law seminar at three." I drank, tipped my head back, felt the water move through me. "It runs until five-thirty."
Annabelle made a sound that was equal parts sympathy and disbelief. "You trained for—" she checked her watch, "—two hours and forty minutes, and now you're going to sit in a seminar for two and a half hours."
"It's a seminar. There are chairs." I capped my bottle. "I've survived worse."
"Do you actually retain anything in afternoon seminars? Or do you just—" she made a vague gesture, "—exist in the room."
I thought about Professor Marchand's voice, which had a rhythm to it that I had, on at least three separate occasions, found myself unable to distinguish from the sound the heating system made when the building was warming up. "I take good notes," I said carefully. "In the first half."
Annabelle laughed, short and genuine, and I felt the particular looseness that came after long training—the body's relief at having finished, the mind's relief at having gotten through. My shoulder would need ice tonight. My lower back would need the foam roller. I was already calculating the logistics when she said, "Go eat something. You've earned it," and I picked up my training bag and walked toward the door, the ribbon case under my arm, thinking about the three clean landings and telling myself to remember the feeling of them rather than the seventeen that came before.
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Maxime
I found her in the self-study room at half past one.
She was at the table by the far window, the one she preferred because it faced the courtyard and got the afternoon light without the glare, and she was so thoroughly asleep that she hadn't even registered the door opening. Her cheek rested on her folded arms, her hair falling forward over her face, her breathing slow and even in the way that meant she'd been out for a while. Her international law textbook was open in front of her, a page and a half covered in her handwriting—smaller and more controlled than it had been three months ago, she'd been practicing—and a half-empty coffee cup had been pushed to one side.
I stood in the doorway for a moment and let myself look at her.
This was the thing about Elena that I hadn't entirely anticipated when I'd decided, standing on the beach with my friends' warnings still in my ears, that I was going to pursue her: she was exhausting to want. Not in a bad way, not exactly, but in the way that anything genuinely complex was exhausting—the way a current you were trying to read was exhausting, or a wave you were trying to time. She was always in motion even when she was still, always somewhere slightly ahead of or behind the conversation, and the moments when she went fully quiet—like this, like right now—felt like something rare and a little precarious, the way a calm patch of water felt when you knew the swell was building offshore.
I came in quietly and set my bag down on the chair across from her. That was when I saw the edge of the box.
It was just visible at the top of her bag, which was open and slightly tilted against the table leg—a corner of matte black, the kind of surface that absorbed light rather than reflecting it, with the edge of a red ribbon just catching the sun from the window. I knew that kind of box. You didn't grow up in the circles I'd grown up in without learning to recognize the weight and proportion of a certain category of gift packaging, and this one had the specific dimensions and finish of something serious.
I glanced at Elena—still asleep, her breathing unchanged—and crouched to look more carefully without touching anything. The shopping receipt had slipped halfway out from under the box, and I could read enough of it to confirm what I'd suspected: Montblanc, the limited-edition line, the kind of set that came with a fountain pen and a mechanical pencil in a fitted case. The kind of thing you bought for someone who was going to use it every day for the next twenty years and know it.
I sat back in my chair and looked at the box for a moment longer than was probably necessary.
She'd been in gym this morning. She'd been training since before six. She'd somehow found time between the training hall and the afternoon seminar to go into a Montblanc boutique and buy something that cost—I did the rough calculation—more than most people spent on a weekend. And she hadn't mentioned it in any of the texts she'd sent me this afternoon, hadn't said anything about a gift or an errand or a stop she'd needed to make.
I pushed the receipt back where it had been and straightened up.
The room was very quiet. Through the window, the courtyard was doing its usual afternoon routine—a few students crossing the gravel, someone's bicycle chained to the iron fence, the specific quality of Parisian autumn light that made everything look slightly more significant than it was. I watched it and thought about the box, and about the fact that Elena had a boyfriend—me—and had apparently spent part of her morning buying an expensive gift that she hadn't mentioned to me.
When she stirred, twenty minutes later, it was with the particular disorientation of someone who hadn't intended to fall asleep and was now trying to reconstruct where they were and why. She lifted her head, pushed her hair back, blinked at the textbook in front of her, and then looked up and found me sitting across from her with my coffee.
"You're here," she said, her voice still blurred with sleep.