Page 41 of French Kiss

Josh lay on his back, propping himself up on his elbows. He looked as comfortable as ever. It didn’t matter if he was in Paris or San Francisco. He always settled into his surroundings and made things work. The Frisbee came sailing over his head and landed in the grass, and he stretched to grab it. He held it up to me, no doubt thinking about our Ultimate games. Then he chucked it back to the kids, who were a hundred yards away, waiting.

“Thank you again for coming. And I’m sorry you had to travel all this way.”

“Don’t be sorry. I love Paris. It’s an amazing city. How much of it have you gotten a chance to see?”

I shrugged, looking around. “Not much.”

“That needs to change, starting now. Fuck Maddox, and his rock hard abs. This is Paris, baby.”

“Okay, let’s not talk about Maddox anymore. Deal?” I said. “When else are you and I gonna be in Paris? Let’s have some fun.”

“Works for me.” He leaned farther back, hands behind his head, eyes closed. The afternoon weather was perfect, the sun still high in the sky because sunset in Paris in the summer was late in the evening. During my time in Amsterdam, the sun hadn’t set until ten at night, and Paris was nearly as far north. It still felt like the middle of the day, and a light breeze wafted across the expanse of grass, bringing with it the scent of diesel fuel from the city buses that still ran on the stuff.

Lying on the grass in the sun, I started to feel relaxed for the first time since I’d boarded the plane for Europe. Clearly, my inability to unwind had been tied up in my nervousness about meeting Maddox. I’d loaded so many expectations onto our proposed time together that I was a bundle of free-floating anxiety and hadn’t even realized it. It was a relief to let him go.

“So, tell me about Germany,” I said. “How’s it been hanging with your family?”

“Oh, so great. I really missed my parents. I hadn’t seen them in a year.”

“No. Has it really been a year? I feel like they came to visit you recently.”

“That was a year ago in March. And I was out there for a wedding last May. So granted, I saw them twice in a short time, but not since then.”

“Wow, they must’ve loved having you around.” I suddenly felt guilty that he’d left his family to come chase after me and make sure I didn’t fall hard on my romantically propelled ass. “Did they mind that you left to come here?”

“Actually, they seemed relieved. It’s been years since I lived under their roof, and I think they were getting a little sick of me. I’m on them all the time about how they eat and whether they exercise. I get the feeling they were happy to see me come, happy to see me go.”

“I can’t imagine them being sick of you,” I said.

“You’d be surprised. I can be quite grating.”

“I was gonna mention…”

The Frisbee came back our way, and this time, Josh got up and jogged over to where it landed. Then he flung it back over to the kids who’d thrown it. A second later, it was sailing back toward him. The kids were laughing, goading him to throw it with them. He turned to me as if to ask my permission. I nodded. No one was more of a boy at heart than Josh.

He trotted closer to the kids and threw the Frisbee more gently, and one of the boys caught it. Then the kid intentionally threw it over Josh’s head and looked at him expectantly as it sailed past, but Josh stayed in one spot. All our years of Ultimate must have given him a sense of where it would go because, sure enough, it did a U-turn and sailed right into his hand. The kids shouted and pointed in delight.

At that point, he was completely integrated into their game, and he flung the Frisbee to one boy, who chased after and caught it. That boy threw it to his friend, who tossed it to Josh, not trying this time to make him chase it down. They played like that for a few minutes until Josh ran over to them and handed the Frisbee back, saying something that I couldn’t hear.

Then he came back over to me. “You wanna head someplace else?”

“Honestly, I could stay on this grass and be very content, but we are in Paris, after all, so we probably ought to see part of it.”

“Is this your first time here?”

“Yes. You?”

“I came with my parents when I was young a few times, and in high school, I actually had a French girlfriend. She was an exchange student at my school, and the summer after she moved back, I convinced my parents to let me do a French immersion program in Paris so I could see her. At the time, I don’t think they knew I was coming here to see a girl. I think they figured I was just this very industrious kid who researched a study-abroad program to learn a foreign language.

So I had two whole months here, and I did manage to learn some French and little else about the city. Back then, we weren’t going to museums and important historical buildings. The only sights I saw were the four walls of her bedroom.”

“As any teenage boy would.” I looked at Josh, trying to picture him as a teenage guy with a cute French girlfriend. It was actually easy to imagine, partly because he still looked like a teenager—he was lanky and wore an expression that said there was more to like about him than met the eye. “Do you know where she is now?”

“Last time I heard from her, she was moving to London to work for a bank.”

“Are you going to look her up?”

He looked at me strangely. “Wasn’t planning on it. Why? Do you want to meet her or something?”

“No. I just wondered if you kept in touch.”

“Nope, haven’t heard from her in years,” he said.

We were basically heading away from the Eiffel Tower, but every few blocks, we’d enter an intersection and I’d look back at the view between buildings, and I’d see it rising up in the distance. I wondered if I’d ever be able to look at it without thinking about being ditched there by Maddox. Not any time in the near future, I figured.

“Want to get a beer? Or wine or whatever?” Josh asked once we’d turned down Rue Saint-Dominique, which had at least a dozen restaurants and brasseries lining the couple of blocks in front of us. Then we made another turn onto Rue Cler, which had more shops and restaurants.

“Sounds good to me. Guess there’s no time like the present to begin the drinking-to-get over-Maddox process.”

I hated Maddox for bailing. But I hated myself even more for falling for his bullshit. I wished I’d never met him.

---