Sweet Filthy Boy

  “And what about your husband? His job is very important, no? He cannot just leave Paris and go with you?” Her expression shows nothing but polite interest, but her stream of questions has me back on edge. When I don’t answer for a long beat, she presses. “Haven’t you talked about any of this?”

  “Um . . .” I begin, but I have no idea how to respond. Her blue eyes are wide and penetrating, and behind them I see something larger there. Hurt. Restrained anger. I look past her and see that there are a few people in the kitchen now, and they are all watching us: fascinated, eyes wide in sympathy, as if observing a car crash in slow motion.

  I turn back to her, growing anxiously suspicious. “Sorry . . . I don’t think I got your name.”

  “I didn’t give it to you,” she says, with a small tilt of her head. “Maybe I am misleading you by pretending I’m not familiar with your situation. You see, I know Ansel very, very well.”

  Understanding clicks like a lock in my mind.

  “Are you Minuit?”

  Her smile is elated, in an eerily wicked way. “Minuit! Yes, perfect, I’m Minuit.”

  “I assumed you had black hair. I don’t know why,” I mumble, more to myself than anything. I have the sense of being balanced on a teeter-totter: I’m still not sure whether I’ll land on my feet in this conversation. I want to turn and look desperately around for Ansel, or Marie, but Minuit is watching me like a hawk, seeming to feed on my discomfort.

  Somewhere behind me, I hear Ansel’s deep laugh coming toward us down the hall, hear him sing a few lines of the crazy French rap song he’s played the past couple of weeks as he shaves in the morning.

  “I sh-should go,” I say, placing my drink on a table next to me. I want to find Ansel. I want to pull him aside and tell him about this conversation. I want him to take me home and erase her thunderous expression from my memory.

  Minuit reaches for my arm, stopping me. “But tell me, how are you enjoying my apartment, Mia? My bed? My fiancé?”

  My heart literally stops, my vision blurs. “Your fiancé?”

  “We were going to be married before you came along. Imagine my surprise when he came back from a silly American vacation with a wife.”

  “I don’t . . .” I whisper, looking around the room as if anyone there would help me. A few people look on with sympathy, but no one seems brave enough to interrupt.

  “He only called me Minuit, you see,” she explains, her red hair sliding over her shoulder as she leans forward, “because I could never fall asleep. We got a new bed for our beautiful flat. We tried everything to wear me out.” Tilting her head, she asks, “How do you like sleeping in our fancy new bed in our beautiful flat?”

  I open my mouth, and then close it again, shaking my head. My pulse is racing, my skin clammy and flushed.

  I’ll get you a new ring. We’ll do it all over again. We can find a new flat with memories that are only ours . . .

  I need to get out of here.

  “We were together for six years. Can you even grasp how long that is? Six years ago you were only a child.”

  Her accent is so thick and I’m continually falling behind, grasping on to individual words to cobble together my comprehension. But I understand six years. Ansel called it “too long,” but I never in my wildest dreams imagined it would be such a significant fraction of their lives. Or that they were going to be married. I don’t even know when they broke up—I’d assumed they broke up when he moved back here almost a year ago—but from the circles under her eyes and the way her hand is shaking around her glass, I know I’m wrong.

  My heart seems to tear apart, piece by piece.

  I hear Ansel enter the kitchen, hear him yell, “J’ai acheté du vin!” as he holds up two open bottles of wine to the small crowd gathered.

  But his expression falls as his eyes catch mine across the room and then drift to the woman at my side.

  She leans closer, whispering directly in my ear, “Six years ago you had not yet been run over by a truck, huh?”

  My head whips around, back to her, and I stare up at blue eyes so full of anger it takes my breath away. “What?”

  “He tells me everything. You’re a tiny spot of time,” she hisses, pinching her thumb and forefinger together. “Do you have any idea how many times he does crazy things? You’re his most ridiculous impulse, and he has no idea how to fix this mistake. My taste was still fresh on his mouth when he saw you in your trashy hotel.”

  I want to vomit. The only thing I know is that I need to move, but before I can manage to put one foot in front of the other, Ansel is at my side, his hand curling tightly around my arm.

  “Perry,” he hisses to the woman. “Arrête. C’est ma femme. C’est Mia. Qu’est-ce que tu fous là?”

  Perry?

  Wait. Perry?

  I blink down to the floor as it all makes sense. His best friends in the world, the four of them. Ansel, Oliver, Finn, and Perry. Not another man . . . a woman.

  A woman he was with for six years.

  Four of us, together all day long . . . I don’t know that I’ll ever know anyone in the way I know those three . . . Those relationships are some of the best and . . . complicated of my life . . . We missed our families together, we comforted each other, we celebrated some of the proudest moments of our lives.

  I feel my face heat, my lips part in a gasp. How many times did Ansel let me assume Perry was another man, a friend? I told him everything about myself, about my life and fears and relationships, and he spoke only in vague generalities about Minuit and their “too-long” relationship.

  She looks thrilled, like a lioness that caught a gazelle. She wraps her arm around his bicep, but he shakes it off, reaching for me again.

  “Mia.”

  I pull out of his grasp. “I think I’ll probably leave now.”

  There are a million other things I could say—a million other biting things someone like Harlow or Lola would say right now—but for once I’m glad I won’t give voice to any of them.

  He calls after me but I’m already running to the stairs, tripping down the tight spiral. Behind me, his feet pound on the wood; my name echoes down along the banister.

  “Mia!”

  My mind bends away from understanding what just happened back at the party. Two magnets pushing apart.

  The sidewalk is bare, cracked, and crooked as I turn on Rue La Bruyère, sprinting into the small curve at St.-Georges. It’s funny that I know where I’m going now, so I can properly run away.

  I catch my breath between two buildings. I think he went looking for me the other way; I don’t hear him anymore.

  There are too many things I have to figure out now: how fast I can pack, when I can leave, and why Ansel left me to be blindsided tonight by a woman he was planning to marry before I came along. I have no idea why he kept this from me, but I feel the shards of panic pushing deep into my lungs, making it hard to breathe.

  How old this city is. The plaque on the building I’m up against states it was built in 1742. This structure alone is older than any love affair alive in this country. Ours might be the youngest, even though it always felt as though we were picking up where our souls left off on a thread much further up the line.

  I know now that I love him, that what we have is real, and that I probably loved him that first second I saw him from across the room, enjoying my happiness as much as I did. For whatever Lola and Harlow say about it, I’m a true believer.

  It is possible to fall that fast.

  Chapter NINETEEN

  ABOUT TWO BLOCKS from our apartment I know he’s behind me again, far enough back to give me some space, close enough that he knows where I am. Upstairs in the narrow hallway, I fumble with my keys as he bursts through the door to the stairwell, out of breath. At least he was smart enough to let me take the elevator alone.

  The fl
at is dark now, the sun no longer lingering in the sky, and I don’t bother to turn on any lights. Instead, I lean against the doorway to the bedroom and stare at the floor. He stops in front of the kitchen, directly across from me but leaving about four feet in between. Slowly, his breathing returns to normal. I don’t even have to look directly at him to know he feels miserable. From the corner of my eye I can see his slumped posture, the way he’s staring at me.

  “Talk to me,” he whispers, finally. “This is a horrible feeling, Mia. Our first fight, and I don’t know how to make it okay between us.”

  I shake my head, looking down at my feet. I don’t even know where to start. This is so much more than a first fight. A first fight is what happens when he keeps leaving the toilet seat up or washes my new silk dress in hot water. He kept me in the dark about Perry, about a fiancée he had, for two months—and I don’t even know why.

  I’m drowning in humiliation and we both seem so unbelievably naïve for thinking this was anything but a joke. This entire thing is such an epic rebound for him. Six years with her and then he jumps into a marriage with a stranger? It’s almost comical. “I just want to go home. Tomorrow, I think,” I say, numbly. “I was planning on leaving soon anyway.”

  I thought he was leaning against the wall but realize he wasn’t only when he seems to collapse back against it. “Don’t,” he breathes. “Mia, no. You can’t leave early because of this. Talk to me.”

  My anger flares, renewed at the slight measure of disbelief in his voice. “I can leave because of this! How could you let me walk into that? I was completely blindsided!”

  “I didn’t know she would be there!” he insists. “Marie and Christophe are my friends from before; she doesn’t really know them. I don’t know why she was there!”

  “Maybe because you were engaged? I don’t even know where to start. You’ve been lying to me, Ansel. How long were you going to let me believe Perry was a guy? How many times did we talk about him? Why didn’t you just tell me from that first moment in Vegas when I asked where ‘he’ was?”

  He takes a careful step forward, hands held out in front of him like he’s approaching a wounded animal. “When you first called Perry ‘he,’ none of us thought to correct you, because we were in a bar. I had no idea we would be drunk and married a few hours later—”

  “I’ve been here for weeks. You could have told me as soon as we got here that your fiancée lives nearby and oh, by the way, she’s Perry, the fourth member of your super-close gang—who is not a guy!” I press a shaking hand to my forehead, remembering the night someone came to the door while we slept, remembering how distracted Ansel was when he came back to bed—and how almost naked—how I asked him who it was and he said it was Perry, but again didn’t correct me when I called Perry he.

  “Oh my God, that night someone came to the door? And when I came home you were talking to her on the phone, weren’t you? You left the room to go talk to the girl you were going to marry but—oops!—you married me instead! No wonder she’s so fucking pissed!”

  He’s been speaking over me in tiny, pleading bursts, saying, “No,” and “Mia,” and “Wait,” and finally he gets a word in: “It’s not like that at all. After Vegas, I didn’t know how to tell you! Did I even need to make a big thing of it so soon? She wasn’t my girlfriend anymore! But then she called, and she came over . . .”

  “Fiancée,” I correct, “not girlfriend.”

  “Mia, no. We broke u—”

  “Have you seen her? Besides that night?”

  He regards me anxiously. “We had lunch twice.”

  I want to punch him for that. Especially since I never got a lunch with him during a workday.

  “I know, Mia,” he says, reading my expression. “I know. I’m sorry. I was hoping if we spoke face-to-face, she would stop calling and—”

  “And did she?”

  He hesitates. “No.” Ansel pulls his phone from his pocket. “You can read her texts, if you want. Or listen to her voicemails. You can see I never encouraged her. Please, Mia.”

  I push my hands into my hair, wanting to scream at him but not sure I can open my mouth again without bursting into tears. The last thing I want is to hear her voice again.

  “I wanted to tell you everything the night we played sinner and devil,” he says. “But I didn’t know how, and then we moved past it. After that, it seemed to become impossible.”

  “It’s not impossible; it’s simple. You just correct me any one of the hundreds of times I got it wrong and say, ‘No, Mia, Perry is a chick and I was with her for six fucking years and oh, by the way? I was going to marry her.’ Instead you tell me about Minuit and deliberately mislead me.”

  “I didn’t want to make you worry! I never expected you would have to meet her!”

  I gape at him, my stomach plummeting. Finally, the truth. He simply hoped he wouldn’t have to deal. “You think that makes it okay? That you lied about her by omission? That because I would never meet her it would be okay?”

  He’s already shaking his head. “That isn’t what I mean! We needed better roots,” he says, motioning between us frantically and closing his eyes as he struggles to find words. Even now my heart twists for him and how he seems to lose his ability to speak English fluently when he’s upset. He takes a deep breath, and when he opens his eyes and speaks again, his voice comes out steadier: “You and I were in a precarious place when you first came here. It was impulsive for both of us to do this. Work is a nightmare for me right now, but I wanted to make time for you. And then it became something more than fun and adventure with us. It was”—he pauses and his voice catches the tiniest bit—“it was real. We needed more time, just us. I didn’t want anything coming into this flat with us, especially not her.”

  As soon as he says it, the words seem to echo back to him and his face falls a little.

  “She lived here,” I remind him. “Even when you told me about Minuit, you didn’t say you lived together, that you were engaged, that you’d been together for so many years. That you had sex in that bed. If you had told me about her when I first got here—the full story—it wouldn’t even have been a problem. But tonight, the only person in that apartment who didn’t know what was going on was me, your wife.”

  I turn, walking into the bedroom, planning to crawl into bed before remembering it’s the bed they got together, hoping maybe Perry would sleep better on it. I groan, turning around and walking right into Ansel’s broad chest.

  When I try to push past him, he stops me, gripping my shoulders with shaking hands. “Please don’t walk away.”

  I feel like a tornado is crashing around in my mind, but as usual, even though I’m so mad at him I could scream, the feel of his body so close and his hands sliding up my arms is so comforting, it starts to make order out of the chaos. His eyes soften and he blinks down to my mouth. “We need to keep talking about this.”

  But when I try to speak, the words come out choked, stunted. “Y-y-y-y—” I close my eyes, trying again. “Y-y-y-y-you—”

  Fuck!

  I open my eyes, not sure what reaction I’ll see in his face because he’s really never heard me stutter and it hardly ever happens anymore.

  His eyes are wide and his face contorted in pain as if he’s broken me. “Shit, Mia.”

  “D-d-don’t.”

  “Mia . . .” He groans, pressing his face to my neck.

  I push him away, wanting pretty much anything other than his sympathy right now. The anger makes my words come out sharper, and with each one I deliver, my tongue relaxes. “Y-you were w-with her so long. I just . . . tonight I felt like the other woman, you know? For the first time yesterday, I felt like your wife. But tonight I felt like I’d stolen you from her.”

  “No,” he says, relief washing over his expression as he pushes my hair off my face so he can kiss my cheek. “Of course we broke up before I met
you.”

  Fuck. I have to ask. “But how long before you left?”

  His face falls and I feel like I can hear every second tick past as he hesitates to answer.

  “Ansel.”

  “A few days.”

  My heart sinks and I close my eyes, unable to look at him. “She moved out while you were gone, didn’t she?”

  Another hesitation. “Yes.”

  “You broke up with your girlfriend of six years only a few days before you married me.”

  “Well, technically we broke up three weeks before I met you. I’d been biking across the States before Vegas,” he reminds me. “But it felt like it ended a long time before that. We both knew it was over. She is clinging to something that doesn’t exist anymore.” He cups my cheek and waits until I look up at him. “I wasn’t looking for anything, Mia, but that’s why I trust what I feel for you. I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want you. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever known.”

  When I don’t say anything to this, he asks, “Can I tell you now? Everything?”

  I don’t bother answering out loud. On the one hand, it seems a little late for a full disclosure. On the other, a sick part of me wants to know everything.

  “Bike and Build started in May, and went through September,” he begins. “Finn, Olls, Perry, and I all became close within days of orientation. It was that kind of experience, okay, where everyone is thrown together and some friendships solidify, and others don’t? But ours, it did.”

  He pauses, trailing his fingers down my arm.

  “But it wasn’t an immediate affair with Perry and me, not sexual. She wanted it. At least, Oliver and Finn always insist that she wanted something with me from the first few days. I think I started to notice what they meant, maybe in July? And by August, I felt so much fondness and friendship for all of them that I would give her anything.” Pulling back so he can look at me in the dim light from the moon, he says, “Even sex. We only were lovers twice on that trip. A random night in August, when we were very drunk. And then, a few weeks later—after it had been so awkward and loaded with us—we were together on the last night before the excursion ended.”