Page 129 of 10 Days to Ruin

He tops off his cognac. “Less than you’d think.”

“Bullshit.” I grip his wrist. “Why are you doing this?”

Glass clinks as he sets the decanter down. Somewhere down the hall, Mom humsLa Vie En Rose. “Because you deserve to see that it’s a beautiful world, Ariel. And because your mother deserves better memories.”

My throat tightens. “And you? What do you deserve?”

His smile could frost the Seine. “We’re not here to talk about me.”

Through the window, the Eiffel Tower glitters behind a veil of falling snow—twenty thousand golden fireflies drunk on Christmas magic.

Sasha leans forward to kiss my temple. “C’mon. Let’s go explore.”

When Mama is ready, the three of us go downstairs and meander down streets dusted with glittering snowfall. Sasha doesn’t let go of my hand for a second as we duck in and out of shops. By the time night descends, we’re found our way to the foot of the Eiffel Tower. It looms overhead like a delicate iron finger pointing at the moon. I keep looking back and forth between it and my mom’s retreating figure as she goes gallivanting off in search of pastries and coffee to ward away the cold. Even from here, I can see how she’s still vibrating with joy.

A busker starts up with an accordion in one corner of the courtyard at the foot of the Tower. Grinning, Sasha twirls me in his arms and starts to slowly sway us back and forth. “Still think romance is dead?” he murmurs against my temple.

What a question.

I used to think romance was withered roses at a strip mall cemetery—all wilted clichés and empty gestures. But lately, I’m thinking differently. Because Sasha has blown romance’s coffin open with a smolder and a simple kiss to the cheek. Romance is a bandaged hand in a bathroom. Romance is dragging my mom to Paris in a snowstorm because her eyes dimmed when she mentioned a time in her life things were simpler.It’s brutal hands learning gentleness, Russian curses spilling like love poems between bites of sinfully good dumplings.

It’s terrifying, this grenade of a feeling blooming in my chest—a kaleidoscope shrapnel ofwhat if.What if it grows, a rose in this garden I thought was dead? What if it blossoms? What if we let it?

I gaze up at the man who taught me all of that. “I’d say it’s showing signs of life.”

His smile melts me. “There’s that optimism I know and love.”

I snort and butt my head into Sasha’s chest as he spins me out and back in, the accordion player in the courtyard coaxing his instrument to wail soulfully into the night. “You’re not exactly a ray of sunshine yourself, pal.”

“The farthest thing from it,” he agrees. “And yet you’re here with me anyway. What does that make you?”

“Insane, probably.”

“Most certainly. But what’s light without some shadow, hm?” He winks. “Each one needs the other.”

He gazes down at me as a violin player in the opposite corner of the courtyard starts up her playing. At first, the accordion player frowns. Then the violinist falls right into his rhythm. Two voices that don’t belong together finding a tune that neither one anticipated. So much more beautiful than either one would’ve been alone.

And as the music swells, and as the night is chilly around us but I’m still warm in Sasha’s arms, and as snow kisses my cheek and then Sasha does the same, and as one moment I never anticipated runs headlong into the next, and into the next, and into the next, I find myself looking up into blue eyes that I hated not so long ago and opening my mouth to say something that’s been true for a while now but neverthistrue, neverthisreal, neverthiscertain and undeniable deep in my chest:

“Sasha, I lo?—”

His mouth smothers mine. It’s a breathless kiss, and I’m almost panting when he breaks away. “I know I keep telling you not yet,” he whispers, “but it’s not because I— It’s not because I can’t— It’s just…Fuck.”

I brush my fingers against his lips. “It’s okay,” I whisper. “We’ll know.”

He nods. So many things seem caught behind the steel bars of his face, and it looks like he wants so badly to set them all free.

But not yet. Not now.

Soon, maybe.

He kisses me again, like we have an audience. Which, it turns out, we do—Japanese tourists are snapping photos while a street artist sketches our silhouette.

“Lots of Peeping Toms in Paris,” I grumble.

Sasha chuckles right into my mouth. “Let them be.”

Let them be. Let them watch and gawk and ogle. Let the whole city see how a monster holds his bride-to-be: one hand tangled in her hair, the other clutching her hip like she’s the last life raft on the Titanic. Let that stubborn rose shove its way up through graveyard soil.

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