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Chapters (45)
  1. Cover
  2. Blame Iton Paris
  3. Copyright Notice
  4. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  5. Book One
  6. One
  7. Two
  8. Three
  9. Four
  10. Five
  11. Six
  12. Seven
  13. Eight
  14. Nine
  15. Ten
  16. Eleven
  17. Twelve
  18. Thirteen
  19. Fourteen
  20. Fifteen
  21. Sixteen
  22. Seventeen
  23. Eighteen
  24. Nineteen
  25. Twenty
  26. Twenty-one
  27. Book Two
  28. Twenty-two
  29. Twenty-three
  30. Twenty-four
  31. Twenty-five
  32. Twenty-six
  33. Twenty-seven
  34. Twenty-eight
  35. Twenty-nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-one
  38. Thirty-two
  39. Thirty-three
  40. Thirty-four
  41. Thirty-five
  42. Thirty-six
  43. Thirty-seven
  44. Thirty-eight
  45. Thirty-nine

There was this weird freak of nature that Saturday: the sun came out. Sébastien and I didn’t want to go inside for this unnatural nice weather, so we walked along the Seine. Muguets, or lilies of the valley, were everywhere, adding a sweet, delicate scent to the car fumes and cigarette smoke of Paris. People stood on streetcorners and passed through parks with buckets of the little bell-shaped white flowers to sell as a gift for happiness. Ça porte le bonheur, les muguets. It was the first weekend after the Fête du Premier Mai, May Day, and I thought of sinking ships.

Sébastien had taken my hand as we walked. I kept looking at it, not sure how it felt there. Nervous, definitely. But his hand was warm and strong and lots bigger than mine, and he really was very good at spotting dog poop and pulling me back and forth to make sure I didn’t walk in it. I brushed a bug out of my hair impatiently. “Be careful,” Sébastien exclaimed. “You might hurt him!” The bug had fallen from my hair to my short-sleeved sweater, but he caught my hand before I could brush again and lifted the bug on his finger. “Look,” he said. “See the green glints on its body?” He set the bug safely on a tree planted on the quay and watched it crawl off. I felt like it would be easier on all of us if he would act as I thought a Parisian should—cynical, cold, arrogant, and easy to break up with in a couple of months—but couldn’t think of a delicate way to explain this to him.

We ended up on the Île de la Cité. Sébastien spread his jacket on the stones to prevent me from sitting in pigeon poop—a lot of poop hazards in Paris—and we dangled our legs over the water. My stomach tingled. It seemed it had been tingling for days. People chattered and laughed in the little island park just behind us, and at the tip of the island closest to the Louvre, a group of teenagers horsed around. “I think I like you,” Sébastien said softly.

Well, that sounded tepid. I was from a small Southern town. To my worst enemies, I said more positive things than that. I sulked as a firefighter speedboat roared past.

Sébastien tilted his head, a little puzzled by my indifference to his bared heart. “What do you think? Do you like me?”

“Sure,” I said nervously, with my natural gift for intimacy. Thank God we were doing this in French, a language where I could pretend I didn’t know what I was saying.