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
“Trust me, we wouldn’t have had any fun with her,” Éric said, disgusted. “The only time we tried to take her out, she started crying after only half an hour, threw her skates at me, and took the Métro home.”
“She’s a little bit of a chouchoutte, Virginie,” Sébastien explained. A chouchoutte. Someone who likes to be pampered and babied.
“Darn it,” I said, aggravated. “Frenchwomen are so smart. Can I be a chouchoutte from now on, too?”
Fourteen
Okay,” Sébastien said next time. “This time I’ve got an even better idea.” I looked at him warily. I still had a giant bruise on my butt from his last idea. “I think you need another birthday present. Didn’t you say you wanted to go to Provence?”
I did say that. After a year in Paris, I had never been to Provence, and the lavender fields would still be in bloom if we hurried. Above all, I wanted to go to the Festival d’Avignon, the famous annual festival of theater productions. Critics were calling Isabelle Huppert’s title role in Médée the best since Euripides first created it, and I wanted to see what they were talking about.
Sébastien had actually managed to get tickets for the most talked-about play of the festival? And his old girlfriend had thought he wasn’t romantic? I cuddled against him in the train with mushy heart and kept cuddling all the way to the Palais des Papes, where I learned that Sébastien hadn’t, in fact, gotten tickets. He had just assumed we could buy them at the door.
I took a deep, calming breath and gazed at a woman in a nude leotard performing elastic contortions to elevator music on the steps of the Palais des Papes. We were surrounded by pale stone buildings that seemed sun-faded, irradiated with clear, dust-white heat and the resonating drone of cicadas.
“But that’s okay!” Sébastien said, sunnily showing that he had not only found a silver lining but had done so without noticing the cloud. “My family’s all down here visiting my grandparents at Chamaret. We can go spend the weekend with them instead!”
I was dating a man who thought spending a weekend meeting his French family for the first time was a wonderful birthday present, a perfectly acceptable substitute for the theatrical performance of the decade. “For my birthday?” I reminded him. We dodged a group of people in folk costume who were doing some hopping thing that involved smacking sticks together. Every conceivable set of steps or spot with good visibility was covered with actors performing something or trying to drum up enough of a crowd to start performing something.
Sébastien beamed. “I’ve been wanting you to meet my family. My mom, my stepfather, my little sister, and my stepgrandparents are there. This is a great opportunity, you can meet them all at once!”