Chapters (45)
- Cover
- Blame Iton Paris
- Copyright Notice
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- Book One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Book Two
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
I began to laugh again.
“I was a teenager!” he protested. “I have a lot more self-control now! And you can ask anybody about that game! Everybody will tell you they made it too hard!”
I was laughing so hard we nearly missed our change at Châtelet.
“Seriously,” he said once we’d jumped off the train. He had hold of my hand and was leading the way through the crowds of moving people, letting the traffic break against his broad shoulders and keeping me in his wake. He looked over his shoulder to meet my eyes a second. “I don’t get mad anymore. I just decided that wasn’t the way to go. I don’t even get mad about Risk, and I used to be a very poor loser.”
“Oh, do you play Risk?” I said, interested. My brothers, all extremely poor losers, started me playing Risk when I was five. I grinned a little at Sébastien, provocatively. “It’s a good thing you don’t mind losing, then.”
He raised an eyebrow at me over his shoulder. “I don’t,” he said and grinned cockily. “But then I don’t lose,” he murmured into my ear as he took my waist to pass me before him through the turnstile.
Eight
It’s just because you’re getting easy Mission Cards,” Sébastien scowled. One best friend, Éric, slouched in his papasan chair giving me a searing look. A wiry bundle of nerves, most of them comic, Éric had failed his driver’s license test the day before and was beginning to consider that my fault. Éric was the best friend whose father owned Le Relais; he was the waiter who was there all the nights Sébastien wasn’t. I could only hope he didn’t recognize me. Adela, one night he was waiting tables, had kept drinking half a bottle of wine and then sending it back as no good, assuring me each time that this was how French people behaved.
A second best friend, Fabien, pushed back his owl-round glasses and looked vaguely smug. Fabien was also twenty-four and already balding. Various pictures of him in mouse-ear frames decorated the apartment, thanks to his working for EuroDisney. Judging by his playing, he had not often won this game against Sébastien or Éric and was enjoying their come-uppance. The fourth in this tight circle of friends, Éric’s long-term girlfriend and a part of their group since teenage years, looked thrilled. A woman so tiny she came up to my shoulder and had a face like a pixie, Virginie was a softie. There had been a couple of moments in the game when I might have faced a bit of a challenge if Virginie could bear to attack my weak spots, but she always chose to batter her forces against Éric’s instead. I might have encouraged this choice a little by looking vulnerable every time she weighed her moves.