He played with a strand of my hair, leaned in, and tried to kiss me. I remembered that the French had invented major art forms in kissing and that I was sure to come across as a clumsy amateur, panicked completely, and jumped up. “Oh, look, there’s the Samaritaine, how’d that get there?” The Samaritaine is an enormous department store with a lovely Art Déco façade, and it doesn’t really drift around Paris surprising people with sudden appearances as much as you’d think. “Because I just remembered I need to get something there. Some, uh”—what could a woman need suddenly?—“some Tampax.” Damn it, wrong track, wrong track. “Some perfume. For my sister’s birthday. Which was in January and I’ve been forgetting it for the past four months. I have to run across right now, before I forget again.”

Sébastien kept hold of my hand, stood up, searched my face a second with a kind of bemused calm, and tried again. I managed not to fall into the Seine when he lifted his head.

He made sure I didn’t with another hand on my arm. He seemed to have taken on not letting me fall as one of his responsibilities in this relationship, rather like not letting me walk or sit in various kinds of animal poop. Which is really much more romantic than it sounds in a city like Paris.

He certainly looked happy with his lot in life, standing there on the edge of the Seine with a Bateau-Mouche passing by and all its tourists taking pictures of us. A little shy, a little eager, a little nervous, but mostly just happy. I think I was happy, too, but I was so giddy, scared, and—to be honest here—sexually excited that I couldn’t tell for sure.

“So,” he said, “what was it you wanted at Samaritaine?”

“Soap,” I said, having remembered that I couldn’t afford perfume and chocolate, too, “some nice soap.”

Cambridge wanted the deposit for lodging by June 1. I pressed the form open, set it by my laptop, and stared at it. I thought of Kipling and C. S. Lewis and Magdalene College. A friend of mine had spent a semester at Cambridge. It was the high point of his life. He felt as if he were living poetry.

The phone rang—Sébastien at the dorm entrance to pick me up for our third encounter. Did I get to call it a date yet? Had yesterday been a date?

Like most Parisians, Sébastien didn’t have a car, but today he had decided to take the Métro out to the Cité U to meet me and take the Métro back with me to wherever we went, rather than having us meet at some central point. This was a really sweet way for him to waste his time. Nobody liked taking the Métro more than they had to.