I put my hand on his knee. Then I realized he wasn’t wearing gloves and moved my gloved hand to cover his bare ones.

“You know, I used to hate Paris, too,” he said. “All the noise, the way people can be so obnoxious, the stress, the gangs that hang around causing trouble for people. I spent most of my teenage years in fights, you know. What really taught me to love Paris was when I started in-line skating. I used to go out skating late at night when things got too much for me, and I would skate for hours, through streets that were so empty and quiet. I learned Paris that way, every part of it.”

He seemed to be trying to sell—or maybe give was a better word—something he loved to someone he loved, which made it worth at least a try from me.

Unfortunately, my sole experience with in-line skating had been with him and had not implied I would be good at all-night excursions. We looked at each other. “I’m game to try again,” I said defiantly.

“You yelled at me for four hours straight the last time.”

“It wasn’t yelling,” I said, offended. “I was just—expressing my fears.”

Sébastien examined a snowflake thoughtfully. “Why don’t we try you on a scooter first?”

I took to the push scooter immediately. You had to be pretty gifted to fall off it, and as an American in Paris, I was used to being taken for an idiot anyway. Besides, scooters were highly fashionable that year. Really—like feathers the year before.

We would head out nights after we ate, around 10:00 or 10:30. It didn’t matter if we were in the middle of the week. Sébastien might go to work the next day on very little sleep, but he could lose sleep to stop my breaking in his hands, to offer me his world, and invite me into his self. On the weekends, sometimes his friends joined us and teased me infectiously about my scooter; but during the week, it was always just the two of us.

We coast down the steep slope of our colorful street. Sometimes an Arabe or two is still open, casting warm, golden light into the dark street. At the intersection of McDonald’s and the Canal St. Martin, I let go of my sense of orientation and follow Sébastien as we cut through Paris at night, past revelers grouped outside nightclubs, across République, its statue silhouetted against the yellowish gray of a city’s night sky, down rue Turbigo, where all is quiet except for the regular swish of cars, and on, through the gray and black and streetlamp gold of Paris’ night streets, until we come out into the open at l’Hôtel de Ville, Paris’ palatial city hall.