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 would have stared at him in open outrage, only if I looked to the side I, naturally, fell down. “No, I am not! I’m not doing any kind of sport where I’m supposed to fall down.”
“Everybody falls down, Laura,” he said, exasperated. “That’s part of it.”
If I had even the remotest chance of accomplishing a dead halt that wouldn’t have ended in permanent paralysis, I would have done so. “Well, you certainly didn’t tell me that before we started! I don’t want to fall down.”
“She’s not usually like this,” Sébastien apologized to Éric and Fabien. He leaned a little away from me in a sotto voce. “Must be that time of the month.”
Suffice it to say that by the time we had gotten onto the Coulée Verte, the verdant Paris Greenway, and taken it up and down hills all the way to the Bois de Vincennes and halfway back, I was no longer in a tolerant mood. (Sébastien claims there aren’t any hills on the Coulée Verte, but I’ve been there, and this is simply not true.)
Okay, so actually, a lot of the day had been fun, in its terrifying way, especially since all three of the men were a hilarious comic team, all bent on making me laugh instead of scream or complain. They also circled me vigilantly, especially Sébastien, so that I hadn’t actually fallen that much, perhaps three or four times. Even when I did, they had usually tried so hard to stop me that they were under me when it happened. Usually the person under me was Sébastien, but on my best fall of the day, I took out all three at once.
But for a beginner, the whole trek was nearly a four-hour trip, so three-quarters of the way through it, I was exhausted, a fact that none of the guys seemed able to understand. “As slow as you’re going?” Éric asked.
I used my hands to push myself away from a rock wall I still didn’t know how to brake well enough to avoid. “You know, Éric, I’m getting to know you much faster than I’d like.”
He laughed.
We rounded a bend and came to the longest and worst hill of the route. For a hill that Sébastien said didn’t exist, it stretched on forever. “Sébastien!” I screamed.