Page 78 of French Kiss

“D’you wanna go somewhere and talk?” he asked.

I nodded, looking around the lobby to see if the doorman or some other hotel employee was hovering, wanting to kick us out for being impostors. Then I remembered that Josh had been standing by the elevators just a few minutes earlier, and I felt foolish. “Wait, are you visiting someone here? Do you have somewhere to be?”

“Come,” was all he said, leading me toward the bank of elevators. I hesitated, not in the mood to see his parents or whoever was upstairs.

“I’m not dressed for here… maybe we should just get coffee down the street…”

“Just come. You’re dressed fine.”

We rode the elevator to the twelfth floor and walked down the hallway. I was surprised when Josh took out a key and opened the door to one of the rooms. “Whose room is this?” I asked, knowing it didn’t belong to Josh, the guy whose budget dictated that he eat ramen noodles twice a week in order to have cash to go out on the weekends. “Did you meet a French sugar mama?”

“It’s my room,” he said, taking a seat on a pale-blue-upholstered bench at the end of the bed, which had a cream-colored comforter and a few dozen overstuffed cream and pale-blue pillows. His words made no sense. It couldn’t be his room.

“I thought you were staying at your parents’ friends’ place.”

“That’s this. My parents are close friends with the general manager of the hotel. So when I asked for a recommendation on where to stay in Paris, he insisted on giving me a room here.”

I thought back to my much smaller room at the Hôtel de Seine and wondered if it made Josh more comfortable to stay in a place like that. Neither one of us had a Four Seasons kind of life.

But I had to admit the room was gorgeous.

The floor-to-ceiling windows, flanked by long cream drapes under a sweeping sash, were unlocked and opened to a balcony with a sweeping view of Paris rooftops and the Eiffel Tower in the near distance.

I walked over and looked out, wondering if Josh had stared at the Eiffel Tower the way I had and thought about our two days together. I wondered if he had regrets. Then I was aware of Josh’s presence behind me. I still didn’t know what I wanted to say to him. But he made it easier, reaching for my hand and turning me toward him.

When I looked at his face, I wanted to kiss him. I felt the magnetic energy between us, and my body threatened to take the matter out of my hands. For the moment, though, my brain was still in control.

“In the three years I’ve known you, there have only been two things that I knew for sure,” he said. “One, I want to be your friend forever. And two… I’m completely in love with you. What I don’t know… is if I’ve ruined both.”

With my hand in his, I felt the electricity of his touch. My heart was doing backflips, but I didn’t understand why he looked so sad. “Of course you didn’t. Why would you think that?”

“I said you could trust me. And I never meant to betray that.”

“It’s not your fault. I know you were trying to protect me. I get it.”

Josh took my face in both hands and kissed me gently on the lips, which melted me into a puddle and pulled me in deeper, to a place I couldn’t imagine. More heat coursed through me until I felt his kiss grow more urgent and my whole body responded. All thoughts or doubts left my mind.

Then Josh pulled away, looking concerned. He sat in the chair near the bed and I couldn’t help thinking he looked very natural in the opulent setting.

“I don’t like that look. You should look happy,” I said.

“I am happy. But we should talk.” Through the open balcony door, a faint breeze blew in as I stood there feeling the distance between is. “I need you to understand why I did what I did,” Josh said.

“You did it to protect me. I get it,” I started to say, but he shook his head.

“I wrote that letter partly because I felt like you deserved more than a text or whatever Maddox planned to do to say he was bailing.”

“I appreciate that. He did end up calling.”

“Big of him,” Josh said. “But what I said in the letter, that was mostly my own feelings about you. And they’re still true.”

I thought about what the letter had said about worrying that the reality wouldn’t measure up to the idea of us together. “But we’re past that. The reality does measure up… doesn’t it?”

“It’s not that. I saw the look on your face when you thought Maddox wrote that stuff to you. And that’s not the way you look at me. I mean, hey, I’m not sorry we got together. I never will be, and for the rest of my time on earth, I’ll remember those two nights. They were the best nights of my life.”

He was talking about us as though it was part of the past, like he’d already accepted that we’d never move beyond those two days together.

“Why are you saying it like that, like it’s over?”

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