Page 50 of Wished

“I know what you’re saying,” I say, “but it’s different.”

“How is it different? How is it that you can want happiness for someone else but not want the same for yourself? How can you give others what they want but feel guilty taking anything for yourself?”

I turn quickly, and Max stops a few inches from me. “What are you trying to do?” I ask. “I can’t change my life.”

He holds up his hand. “You have the choice to do anything you like.”

“You think I should have already taken the train to Paris?”

He shakes his head. “No. I think you should’ve said hello to me before yesterday.”

“And what would you have done if I had?”

He smiles and then leans down and takes a paper-wrapped bouquet of freesias from the flower display. “I’m not certain,” he says, holding the red and pink tinged blooms toward me. “Asked you to dinner? Begged you to join me for a coffee and a croissant? Purposely spilled my coffee, then automatically felt like an ass for spilling my coffee and asking you to clean it up just so I could see you? Hmm. Or I would’ve never spoken to you again, because I tend to avoid anything that smacks of passion. These are for you.”

He holds the flowers out to me, and the scent of strawberries, citrus, and floral notes surrounds me. I take the bouquet and the paper crinkles in my hands. “Thank you.”

“Freesias are the seventh anniversary flower,” he says, and there’s a teasing light in his eyes.

After he pays for the flowers, we wander down a narrow path toward the open-air of the Parisian sidewalks. It’s a beautiful late-spring day, and the rumble of a passing delivery truck echoes off the stone walls and the narrow streets. Through the trellised plants and the glass walls I can make out the spire of Notre-Dame.

It’s calling me, like the bells are ringing and I can’t help but turn and stare.

“If you avoid anything that hints at passion,” I ask, “then why are you giving me flowers? Why are you being?—?”

“Nice?”

Max’s eyes crinkle with his smile as we draw into the open city air. The dreamlike scent of Eden is replaced by the crisp exhaust and the stone-tinged air of city.

“Right,” I say, clutching the flowers to my chest. I drop my nose to the blooms and take a long, happy inhale. “No one’s ever bought me flowers before.”

When I look up, Max is staring at me with a line between his eyebrows and a wrinkle on his forehead. “Now that is just sad.”

I scoff. “Why?”

He shakes his head. “As you know, everyone deserves flowersat leasttwice in their life.”

“What? When you’re born and when you die?”

He laughs in surprise, and when he stops he’s grinning at me. “Three times then. And your wedding doesn’t count.”

I take another sniff and let out a happy sigh. “Fine. One down, only two bouquets to go.”

Max sticks his hands in his pockets and then glances around the tree-shaded street, looking toward the spire of Notre-Dame.

“I guess you’ve forgotten. I’m being nice because I like you. Even though you shackled me with a wish and thrust me into this daft, weird world. I like you. It’s a failing I have, liking you. I can’t seem to help myself.”

We smile at each other, and then he adds, “Besides, I have seven years of pseudo-memory full of turbulent, amorous passion. I’m surprised by the fact that I survived it. But here I am. Seven years married.”

A motorcycle rushes past, its engine roaring and bouncing off the glass, iron, and stone of the surrounding buildings.

“Did you ever think,” I ask, studying the now quiet Parisian street, “about how the worst thing imaginable is a life lived without love?”

Max steps closer, and at the same time I step closer to him.

“And since Paris is the city of love,” I continue, “a life without Paris is unimaginable.”

“Impeccable logic.” Max holds out his hand, palm outstretched. “Would you like to get lost with me? In Paris? Just for today?”

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