I can’t imagine waking up on Friday and having no one to kiss like this. Was it only last Friday that I met her? It seems like a lifetime ago. A lifetime of intimacy and intensity compressed into less than a week. It’s madness, but a madness hinged on a truth that can’t be denied. Or are my feelings not real? Will they gradually lose steam as the days increase the distance between us? As she picks her life back up in Paris. Slips back into the mundane. Spends time with her family, friends and colleagues. Because I can’t imagine my life going back to how it was before I met her. The emotional residue of my break-up with Rebecca. Welcoming new guests to the apartment. I want to take the listing off the website straight away so no one else can sleep there and erase Camille’s presence, undo her memory.

“Hey.” Her hands are in my hair. Her face is so close. “It’s going to be all right.” She kisses me on the nose. “If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.”

I nod, biting back tears.

She runs a fingertip over my arm, leaving a field of goosebumps in its wake. “You’re so beautiful.”

“Say it in French,” I ask.

“Tu es si belle.” Her fingertip glides up again. “Si ravissante.”

Before I kiss her again, I vow to myself to learn French. I’ll watch French movies, listen to French songs in the car. Anything to make me feel closer to her.

Our bodies are pressed together. The warmth of her skin is soothing and arousing at the same time. I want her, but I want to lie here like this for a long while as well. I want everything I can’t have.

“Je te veux,” Camille says. And my brain might not know what it means, but my heart does. Even if she hadn’t spoken a word of English, I still would have fallen in love with her. Incontournable.

Camille brings a hand to my breast and lightly cups it in her palm. I look down, at her pale skin against my brown one. At how my flesh spills over her fingers. At all the physical differences between us. Emotionally, right now, we are one and the same. We live on the same page. We both want the exact same thing. For this night to never end. And if it does, for this memory to last forever, to feed our souls over distance and time.