Sitting outside Cafe Wester, I was having such a good time with Shelby and Amrita that I almost didn’t want to leave. But I had to find out. I had to meet Maddox and see if there really was anything to his apparent belief that if he and I were only single at the same time, a great love might emerge.
Maybe we really were soul mates but had never had the chance to follow that thread to its destination. Now we had the chance. But only if I left my friends a few days early, got on a train the next morning and traveled three hours to meet him in Paris.
“So I’d be bailing on you two. He’ll be in Paris tomorrow, and I know we planned to go to Bruges.”
“Oh, sweetie, you know we don’t care,” Shelby said. “You can meet up with us after Paris. Or… if it goes well, maybe you and Maddox will stay in Paris all month. It’s the City of Love, after all.”
“Ha. I doubt that. But… hey, you never know.”
“Yes, you do. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be so damn nervous,” Amrita said.
The truth was, I was nervous but I wasn’t going to back out of meeting him. He’d been specific when he laid out the plan for where and when we’d meet. “We should meet at the Eiffel Tower. We can take the elevator to the Jules Verne restaurant and look over the whole city. Then we can race each other down the stairs.”
It felt like a French version of An Affair to Remember, which was then referenced in Sleepless in Seattle when the lead characters agreed to meet at the top of the Empire State Building, though I knew for a fact that Maddox hadn’t seen either movie, because if it wasn’t an action movie, he took a pass. In both movies, the couple almost didn’t meet up and almost lost their chance at love.
This was our chance. We were both on vacation, freed from our habits with our close circle of friends, the stresses of work behind us. I just had to let it happen.
Which is why I found myself sitting on a high-speed train, headed away from my friends in Amsterdam, waiting for my Parisian love story to begin.