Remy Laurent is laughter bottled into skin. It spills out of him at every turn. As they walk together through Montmartre, he tips the brow of Addie’s hat, plucks at her collar, slings his arm around her shoulders, and inclines his head, as if to whisper some salacious secret. Remy delights in being part
of her charade, and she delights in having someone to share it with. “Thomas, you fool,” he jeers loudly when they pass a huddle of men. “Thomas, you scoundrel,” he calls out as they pass a pair of women—
girls really, though wrapped in rouge and tattered lace—at the mouth of an alley. They, too, take up the call.
“Thomas,” they echo, teasing and sweet, “come be our scoundrel, Thomas. Thomas, come have some fun.”
They climb the vaulting steps of the Sacré Coeur, are nearly to the top when Remy stops and spreads his coat on the steps, gesturing for her to sit.
They divide the food between them, and as they eat, she studies her strange companion.
Remy is Luc’s opposite, in every way. His hair is a crown of burnished gold, his eyes a summer blue, but more than that, it’s in his manner: his easy smile, his open laugh, the vibrant energy of youth. If one is the thrilling darkness, the other is midday radiance, and if the boy is not quite as handsome, well, that is only because he is human.
He is real.
Remy sees her staring, and laughs. “Are you making a study of me, for your art? I must say, you have mastered the posture and the manners of a Paris youth.”
She looks down, realizes she is sitting with one knee drawn up, her arm hooked lazily around her leg.
“But,” adds Remy, “I fear you are far too pretty, even in the dark.” He has moved closer, his hand finding hers.
“What is your real name?” he asks, and how she wishes she could tell him. She tries, she tries—thinking maybe just this once, the sounds will make it over her tongue. But her voice catches after the A, so instead she changes course, and says, “Anna.”
“Anna,” Remy echoes, tucking a stray lock behind her ear. “It suits you.” She will use a hundred names over the years, and countless times, she will hear those words, until she begins to wonder at the importance of a name at all. The very idea will begin to lose its meaning, the way a word does when said too many times, breaking down into useless sounds and syllables. She will use the tired phrase as proof that a name does not really
matter—even as she longs to say and hear her own. “Tell me, Anna,” says Remy, now. “Who are you?”
And so she tells him. Or at least, she tries—spills out the whole strange and winding journey, and then, when it does not even reach his ears, she starts again, and tells him another version of the truth, one that skirts the edges of her story, smoothing the rough corners into something more human.
Anna’s story is a pale shadow of Adeline’s.
A girl running away from a woman’s life. She leaves behind everything she has ever known, and escapes to the city, disowned, alone, but free.
“Unbelievable,” he says. “You simply left?”
“I had to,” she says, and it is not a lie. “Admit it, you think me mad.” “Indeed,” says Remy with a playful grin. “The maddest. And the most
incredible. What courage!”
“It did not feel like courage,” Addie says, plucking at the rind of bread. “It felt as if I had no choice. As if…” The words lodge in her throat, but she isn’t sure if it’s the curse, or simply the memory. “It felt as if I’d die there.”
Remy nods thoughtfully. “Small places make for small lives. And some people are fine with that. They like knowing where to put their feet. But if you only walk in other people’s steps, you cannot make your own way. You cannot leave a mark.”
Addie’s throat tightens.
“Do you think a life has any value if one doesn’t leave some mark upon the world?”
Remy’s expression sobers, and he must read the sadness in her voice, because he says, “I think there are many ways to matter.” He plucks the book from his pocket. “These are the words of a man—Voltaire. But they are also the hands that set the type. The ink that made it readable, the tree that made the paper. All of them matter, though credit goes only to the name on the cover.”
He has misread her, of course, assumed the question stemmed from a different, more common fear. Still, his words hold weight—though it will be years before Addie discovers just how much.
They fall to silence, then, the quiet weighted with their thoughts. The summer heat has broken, given way to a breezy comfort with the thickest part of night. The hour settles on them like a sheet.
“It is late,” he says. “Let me walk you home.” She shakes her head. “You do not have to.”
“But I do,” he protests. “You may disguise yourself as a man, but I know the truth, and so honor will not let me leave you. The darkness is no place to be alone.”
He does not know how right he is. Her chest aches at the idea of losing the thread of this night, and the ease beginning to take shape between them, an ease born of hours instead of days or months, but it is something, fragile and lovely.
“Very well,” she says, and his smile, when it answers, is pure joy. “Lead the way.”
She has nowhere to take him, but she sets off, in the vague direction of a place she stayed several months before. Her chest tightens a little with every step, because every step brings her closer to the end of this, of them. And when they turn onto the street where she has placed her made-up home, and stopped before her imagined door, Remy leans in and kisses her once, on the cheek. Even in the dark she can see him blushing.
“I would see you again,” he says, “in daylight, or in darkness. As a woman, or a man. Please, let me see you again.”
And her heart breaks, because of course, there is no tomorrow, only tonight, and Addie is not ready for the thread to snap, the night to end, and
so she answers, “Let me walk you home,” and when he opens his mouth to protest, she presses on, “The darkness is no place to be alone.”
He meets her gaze, and perhaps he knows her meaning, or perhaps he is as loath as she to leave this night behind, because he quickly offers his arm and says, “How chivalrous,” and they set off together again, laughing as they realize they are retracing their steps, returning the way they came. And if the walk to her imagined home was leisurely, the walk to his is urgent, threaded with anticipation.
When they reach his lodging house, they do not pretend to say good-bye. He leads her up the stairs, fingers tangled now, steps tripping and breathless, and when they reach his rented room, they do not linger on the threshold.
There is a faint catch in her chest at the idea of what comes next.
Sex has only ever been a burden, a necessity of circumstance, some required currency, and she has, up until now, been willing to pay the price. Even now, she is prepared for him to push her down, to shove her skirts out of the way. Prepared for the longing to break, forced away by the unsubtle act.
But he doesn’t thrust himself upon her. There is an urgency, yes, but Remy holds it taut as rope between them. He reaches out a single, steady hand, and lifts the hat from her head, sets it gently on the bureau. His fingers slide up the nape of her neck, and through her hair as his mouth finds hers, the kisses shy, and searching.
For the first time, she feels no reluctance, no dread, only a kind of nervous thrill, and the tension in the air is laced with breathless hunger.
Her fingers fumble for the laces of his trousers, but his own hands move slower, undoing the laces of her tunic, sliding the cloth over her head, unwrapping the muslin bound around her breasts.
“So much easier than corsets,” he murmurs, kissing the skin of her collar, and for the first time since those nights in her childhood bed back in Villon, Addie feels the heat rising in her cheeks, across her skin, between her legs.
He guides her back onto the pallet, kisses trailing down her throat, the curve of her breasts, before he frees himself, and climbs onto the bed, and onto her. She parts around him, breath hitching at the first thrust, and Remy pulls back, just enough to catch her eye, to make sure she’s okay, and when
she nods, he drops his head to kiss her, and only then does he press on, press in, press deep.
Her back arches as that pressure gives way to pleasure, a deep and rolling heat. Their bodies press and move together, and she wishes she could erase those other men, those other nights, their stale breath and awkward bulk, the dull thrusts that ended in a sudden, abrupt spasm, before they pulled out, pulled away. To them, wet was wet, and warm was warm, and she was nothing but a vessel for their pleasure.
She cannot erase the memory of those other nights—so she decides to become a palimpsest, to let Remy write over the other lines.
This is how it should have been.
The name Remy whispers in her hair is not hers, but it doesn’t matter. In this moment, she can be Anna. She can be anyone.
Remy’s breath quickens as his tempo rises, as he presses deeper, and Addie feels herself quicken, too, her body tightening around him, driven toward the edge by the rocking of his hips and the blond curls tumbling into her face. She coils tighter and tighter, and then she comes undone, and a few moments later, so does he.
Remy collapses down beside her. But he doesn’t roll away. He reaches out, and sweeps a lock of hair from her cheek, and kisses her temple, and laughs, little more than a smile given sound, but it warms her all the way through.
He falls back against the pillow, and sleep comes over them, his leaden in the aftermath of pleasure, and hers light, dozing, but dreamless.
Addie no longer dreams.
She hasn’t, in truth, since that night in the woods. Or if she has, it is the one thing she never remembers. Perhaps there is no space inside her head, full as it is of memories. Perhaps it is yet another facet of her curse, to live only as she does. Or perhaps it is in some strange sense a mercy, for how many would be nightmares.
But she stays, happy and warm beside him, and for a few hours she almost forgets.
Remy has rolled away from her in sleep, exposing the lean breadth of his back, and she rests her hand between his shoulder blades, and feels him breathing, traces her fingers down the slope of his spine, studying his edges
the way he’d studied hers in the midst of passion. Her touch is feather-light, but after a moment, he stirs, and shifts, and rolls to face her.
For a brief moment, his face is wide and open and warm; the face that leaned toward hers in the street and smiled through shared secrets in the café and laughed as he walked her first to her home and then to his.
But in the time it takes for him to fully wake, that face slides away, and all the knowing with it. A shadow sweeps across those warm blue eyes, that welcome mouth. He jerks a little, rises on one elbow, flustered by the sight of this stranger in his bed.
Because, of course, she is a stranger now.
For the first time since they met the night before, he frowns, stammers a greeting, the words too formal, stiff with embarrassment, and Addie’s heart breaks a little. He is trying to be kind, but she cannot bear it, so she gets up and dresses as fast as she can, a gross reversal of the time he took to strip the clothes away. She does not bother with the laces or the buckles. Does not turn toward him again, not until she feels the warmth of his hand on her shoulder, the touch almost gentle, and thinks, desperately, wildly, that maybe—maybe—there is a way to salvage this. She turns, hoping to meet his eyes, only to find him looking down, away, as he presses three coins into her hand.
And everything goes cold. Payment.
It will be many years before she can read Greek, many more before she hears the myth of Sisyphus, but when she does, she will nod in understanding, palms aching from the weight of pushing stones uphill, heart heavy from the weight of watching them roll down again.
In this moment, there is no myth for company. Only this beautiful boy with his back to her.
Only Remy, who makes no move to follow when she hurries to the door.
Something catches her eye, a bundle of paper askew on the floor. The booklet from the café. The latest of Voltaire. Addie doesn’t know what drives her to take it—perhaps she simply wants a token of their night, something more than the dreaded copper in her palm—but one moment the book is on the ground, cast-off among the clothes, and the next it is pressed to her front with the rest of her things.
Her hands have gotten light, after all, and even if the theft was clumsy, Remy would not have noticed, sitting there on the bed, his attention fixed anywhere but her.
