Wanderlust

“I’ll be even randier in the middle of the night.”

I laugh and place a hand on his chest. “And you’re avoiding the macarons. I want the full story of Aunt Sophie and the macarons.”

He groans. “Sophie liked to give us things she thought we’d taken a liking to. Well, there was one time when she was babysitting us and she had her favorite lavender macarons with her, and since I have a sweet tooth, I gobbled them up. Ethan wouldn’t touch them. Too purple, he said. She had to rustle up some cheese and crackers for him. For Christmas that year, she gave me lavender macarons and he got a cheese board.”

“And he teased you about the macarons instead of you giving him a hard time about cheese?”

“Of course. He teased me relentlessly. Because they were girly. He thought lavender macarons was the height of having something on me.”

“Did you even like them?”

Dragging a hand through his hair, he laughs. “Actually, they were pretty tasty, and the cheese was quite bland. But in his mind, I was the poor sod who had to suffer through the pretty little lavender macarons. And so, he managed to take the piss out of me even on his deathbed,” Griffin says, and I tense for a second, thinking we’re heading into darker waters with that last word. But he’s smiling, and so I relax. He’s not sinking under. He’s laughing at the memory, and the sight of him like this feels like the sun warming my shoulders. He’s coming out on the other side of grief.

He takes my hand in his. “He always made me laugh. And you’re pretty funny, too, my gorgeous American beauty, who smells like sex and flowers and candy and everything I want in the world.”

Something inside my heart rattles loose, like a bird escaping its cage. Flying free.

He’s everything I want in the world, too.

I squeeze his fingers. “Hey, Archie.”

“Hi, Judy.”

With my free hand, I brush his hair away from his forehead. “I’m falling in love with you.”

It’s not hard to say. It doesn’t take a lot of courage. It’s just the truth, and I want him to know, no matter what comes next.

A smile crosses his lips, lighting him up like the night sky. “I’m madly in love with you.”

“Yeah?” I smile dopily, and this is the bliss I want to live in. This. This feeling in my heart. The way I can’t get close enough to him.

He nods and threads a hand in my hair. “I didn’t mean for it to happen, but I was pretty much gone for you the day I met you.”

My heart is glowing now, I’m sure, shining so brightly the airplanes above can spot me. “It was the accent, wasn’t it?”

He laughs and shakes his head. “Nope. It was your attitude. You were so bold, and I loved it. I still do. I love it more every day. You made it so insanely impossible not to fall in love with you.”

My smile can’t be contained. “You really should have made yourself more irresistible because it’s pretty much the same for me.”

But then my smile falters when I remember once more our inevitable ending. This can’t last. This crazy, giddy feeling is a splash of fireworks in the summer sky. Awesome and sparkly and then gone in a heartbeat.

“I’m going to miss you like crazy. You know that, right?” he says, rubbing a thumb over my cheek.

“I know,” I whisper.

“Like crazy,” he repeats, his voice lower this time, tinged with sadness. “We only have two weeks left.”

As if I’m not painfully aware of the days on the calendar scrolling by. “Fourteen days,” I say solemnly.

“Let’s make them amazing. It’s all we can do, yeah?”

A lump rises high in my throat and threatens to yank down all the waterworks from my eyes, like the rainstorm I once longed for but am now trying to avoid. I swallow them whole. “Let’s do it.”

And because I can’t take this anymore, I can’t take the aching in my chest, I cover it up with a fierce kiss. I hold his face and claim his lips, and I pour every ounce of my sadness into his mouth.

It’s needy and hungry, like a confirmation of what we both know. We’re in love, and we’re ending, and we’ll make the most of these last two weeks, and we’re going to be okay with all the oddities and curiosities in our love story. We’re the out-of-place elephant on the roof of the church. We’re a sundial that doesn’t work. We’re the clock that’s only right twice a day. We’re ice cream that tastes amazing, but we can’t have it for every meal. We can’t have it much longer at all.

When we break apart, he stretches out an arm, reaches for his jeans, and grabs something from his wallet. It’s a notecard. An illustration of a bouquet of lilacs adorns the front.

“Open it,” he tells me.

I do as I’m told and read his words out loud. “Spend next weekend in Giverny with me. I want to go someplace with you where I’ve never been. I want to experience a place with you for the very first time. I want to take you there and see it through your eyes, too. Will you go with me?”

My throat tightens, but I will myself to relax, speaking softly. “Obviously, the answer is yes.”

I slip away to the bathroom, and when I return he does the same, but he rejoins me on the roof with a blanket, and he brings me close on the chaise.

When we wake, he taps my shoulder, squinting as dawn tugs at the cool morning sky.

“Number eight.”

I furrow my brow.

“I get to cross it off. Sleep under the stars.”

“I thought ‘sleep under the stars’ was for traveling.”

He shrugs and smiles. “I’ve decided this counts. Because it’s for when we had to and when we wanted to. And this is a ‘wanted to’ situation.”

This should make me happy. That he’s bending. That he’s flexible. That he found a loophole of sorts and made this night under the stars count. That I count enough to be something deep and meaningful to his dreams.

But I also know it means he’s one step closer to packing his bags.

26

Griffin

The nights are intoxicating. We make love past midnight. We fall asleep together on the terrace. In the mornings, we stop at the bakery and grab croissants. We go to work together, and even at the office the moments feel deliciously stolen.

We slip out for lunches, and sometimes those lunches take place at nearby hotels. Yes, we have nooners, and they’re fantastic. One evening, we return to Place du Tertre, and Joy finds the caricaturist.

“I’ll commission your portrait,” she says playfully, then asks the man to draw me.

Her French is great. She’s not fluent. But she’s learned so much so quickly that number six on my list is now crossed off. She’s not a work-in-progress anymore. She’s made it to where she wants to go.

She whispers something to the artist, and he laughs, then keeps sketching.

When the charcoal cartoon is finished, the man shows it to me. “My forehead is huge, and my hair is ten feet tall,” I say with a laugh, then my eyes drift down. The man has drawn something in my hand. A lavender macaron.

I laugh louder. “This is brilliant. Now you’re taking the piss out of me, too.”

She wiggles her eyebrows. “Looks like I can get your goat, too.”

The look of glee in her eyes cracks me up. Funny, how that’s what Ethan predicted for this item.

7. Have your caricature drawn in Place du Tertre. Preferably a highly amusing image that would have made me laugh.