The Chocolate Kiss

by Laura Florand

  In the vain attempt to create a home with a boyfriend who had said, “I love you” primarily because he thought that was what she wanted to hear in order to have sex.

  No other person had ever used those exact words to her. Her aunts didn’t say them. Her grandparents called her their chérie, their petite puce, and they clearly did love her, but they never directly said, “Je t’aime.” Her father, like her boyfriend, used English, a steady, often regretful phrase, for wherever Magalie’s mother went, Magalie had gone, too, which meant she had often been pulled from him. “I love you, sweetie.”

  Women sometimes said it about someone else, sitting at the tables in La Maison des Sorcières, a heartbroken, “Mais, je l’aime.” And Magalie would roll her eyes and make them some chocolate that would put their heads back on straight.

  What Philippe meant, she had no idea. But it made part of her curl warily away, into herself, because whatever he meant, it could only be a way to entice her own emotions out of her, to stretch them from her to him, where they would be ripped like over-tried tendons when . . . when . . . well, she didn’t know when, because she wasn’t planning on moving ever again. But some shift would occur, and with her emotions all out there, caught far away from her, instead of contained and strong within the island of herself, they would be torn to pieces when it did.

  Chapter 27

  In the morning, the apartment was empty, stretching away from her body, an alien, scary place, so that she jerked out of sleep in a moment of pure terror that she was a child again and waking on the other side of the world.

  She pulled herself together, annoyed, and went into the bathroom to find toothpaste. First things first. And pulling herself together was always first. Her hair was a mess, having dried in uncombed tangles. She jumped under his shower again and dragged his comb ruthlessly through her hair while the water ran over it, so ruthlessly that tears sprang from her eyes, but she didn’t stop.

  A door closed somewhere. “Magalie?” Philippe called. “Magalie, you have to come see.”

  He found her under the shower before she could finish and actually . . . blushed. “I beg your pardon,” he said, turning away, as if he had walked in on her naked.

  Which he had, but still.

  He, too, apparently got caught in the inconsistency, starting to turn back, hesitating, one foot moving toward and away from the door several times, as if his body didn’t know where to pivot.

  She turned off the shower and then couldn’t find a towel, since they were all on the floor by his bed.

  His head made up his mind what he wanted his body to do, and he turned to look at her. He smiled, his eyes sparkling with pleasure, as his gaze ran over her dripping form, but his blush was very deep.

  She shivered, goose bumps rising at the cold air and wet skin and the sense of exposure that she didn’t know quite what to do with this morning after.

  “Pardon,” he said and ducked out of the bathroom to bring her back a big towel.

  She wrapped it snugly around herself. Above the line of the fluffy white towel, every inch of her bare chest, shoulders, throat, and face must be a striking contrast of red, too. Maybe he could credit that to overly hot water.

  His smile didn’t grow wider, but it deepened, like good chocolate when the cacao was blended in, adding a richer element. Whatever he credited her redness to, he seemed to like what he saw.

  “Viens voir.” He claimed her hand and tugged. “You have to see this.”

  He led her to the bedroom window and pulled back the curtains with a flourish, like a magician’s assistant. He was watching her face as she saw the great flakes falling, and the snow carpeting the narrow cobblestone sidewalks below. The coating on the street was still shallow enough that the pavement showed gray-black through it, but the old iron railing of his window had a good inch of snow clinging to it.

  Paris in the snow. During the night, it had started snowing for them. She drew a breath at the magic of it.

  “The baker didn’t open,” he said. “I gather the roads are icy. I hope you like yogurt. Or, if not, we can walk over to my kitchens, and”—he held her eyes with laughter and something else that sent a lick of excitement through her—“I’ll make you anything you like.”

  He said that with great certainty that he could make anything she would like and make it better than any other time she might have had it.

  “I mostly eat eggs and bacon,” she said repressively.

  “Like an American?” he said, taken aback, and she realized he didn’t even know about that half of her. So, she thought, deeply reassured, she did seem to belong on that island in the heart of France.

  “Tu es une plaie,” he said, amused. A pain. “I cannot do eggs and bacon.” He said that the way a prince might say that he could not wax floors. “But I will be happy to make you the most exquisite kouign-amann you have ever tasted, instead.”

  A kouign-amann was an extremely difficult Breton concoction of butter, sugar, and dough layered through three elaborate days of turning, rolling, cooling, folding. It would blow her head off to try to make it. Philippe’s miniature ones were world-famous, and he undoubtedly had some in the final stage of production in his walk-in refrigerators in his laboratoire at that very moment.

  Which was presumably closed for snow, else he would be in it at this hour of the morning. He was going to have to throw out thousands of dollars of pâtisseries because of today’s closing. And he hadn’t even brought up one little, groaning complaint about it.

  “You really can’t do eggs and bacon?” she asked, intrigued.

  He looked revolted. “Please.”

  “How can you not know how to cook an egg?”

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t capable of it,” he said with reluctance. As if he was afraid he might be put through the test of actually being asked to do it. “I’m sure I could do anything I set my mind to.”

  She had to grin at his blithe unawareness of his own arrogance.

  He flicked a dismissive hand. “However, why I should set my mind to that, I don’t know.”

  “To avoid diabetes,” she suggested dryly. “You have to eat something besides sugar.”

  He threw an arm around her shoulders and hugged her against his side, an impulse that completely undid her. “I love restaurants. Truly,” he added, when she rolled her eyes. “I love them. I love having the best chefs in the world, or the secret unknown ones, cook for me. I love seeing what they come up with. I love looking at their menus, I love listening to their sommeliers advise on wines, I love plotting out the meal like an explorer’s route through all the choices.”

  He made her hungry for something, standing in the warmth of his arm, watching the cold, glorious snow, listening to him describe his pleasure. She had explored new restaurants with family and friends; she enjoyed it. But he made it sound like a warm fire on a freezing day. Evenings with him in restaurants seemed to stretch out infinitely into her future, full of the senses and discovery.

  When she looked away from the snow at him beside her, he was gazing at her with that something deeper than a smile in his eyes, as if he, too, had a vision, and she was sitting across the table from him in it.

  “I don’t,” he admitted, “usually eat their desserts, but occasionally I am provoked to curiosity. So”—he squeezed her shoulders against him—“kouign-amann ou yaourt? If there’s anywhere in the city open by this evening, I promise an excellent restaurant for dinner.”

  She swallowed, not sure what to do with all the warmth sliding over her. Her self-contained emotions kept wanting to stretch out and bathe in it. “I really live mostly on fruit and yogurt, and Tante Aja’s dal and curries. And in the winter, Tante Geneviève loves to make great pots of soup.”

  He turned her around to face him, her still in his towel, the snow sliding over the window beside them, his eyes kindling with warmth and desire and something else, something that seemed to give meaning to those two syllables the night before. “Bon Dieu. I have a whole new worl
d of flavors to give to you.”

  He said it like a man who could imagine no better gift.

  She couldn’t imagine a better one either.

  What awed her was how clearly he desired to give that most precious of gifts to her.

  He brought both her hands to his face and kissed the inside of each wrist, just at the base of the palm. “Come play with me in the snow, Magalie.”

  Paris in the snow was a gift. A rare gift for those who lived there, or those visitors who happened upon a miracle.

  Magalie and Philippe, both early risers, made the first footprints in the snow on his street, only his short trip directly across to the closed boulangerie having come before. As they reached the end of the street, only one other pair of footprints headed off on the street perpendicular to his; who knew who had made them or where he was going or what he was dreaming? The stranger’s footprints were blurring rapidly. The streetlamps glowed through the thick flakes.

  Philippe had crushed her hair under one of his ski hats, an extravagant but warm knit with dangling colorful braids of yarn that he blamed on his sister and that made him smile every time he looked at her. Between her own sweater and coat, she wore one of his wool sweaters as an extra layer. It wasn’t even touching her skin, nor visible to any observer, but it closed around her like some special, secret cocoon, an invisible superhero shield of warmth that was more than merely physical.

  He wore a considerably more elegant gray knit hat pulled over his own hair. “Why do I get the one your sister picked up to make fun of you in a ski resort, while you get the one that came off Faubourg Saint-Honoré?” she demanded, disgruntled.

  He tweaked one knit braid. “Because I’m bigger.” His gloved hand curled under her chin and over her cheek, and he traced a snowflake off her eyebrow. “Do you remember how you always wanted snow on Christmas when you were a kid? This makes up for all the times it didn’t come.”

  He bent and kissed snow off her lips, melting between them little sparkles of cold.

  The streets under the thick snow clouds were still gray, the flakes falling slow and large, like small white feathers drifting down from the sky. Molting angels, Magalie thought whimsically, and she tried to catch one. It rested for only a second on her glove.

  The streetlamps glowed magically through the flakes, as if their light was reaching the present through layers of time. Just for a moment, as they came into the Place des Vosges, all the lamps around the square were glowing in that muted, ancient way. Then they winked out, with the day arriving quietly under the blanket of snow.

  Against the bars of the fence that surrounded the square, leaning bikes and parked mopeds were acquiring layers of white. The great, symmetrical buildings of brick and strips of stone framed it all, snow slowly muting their blue slate roofs, sliding over the steep pitch and grasping for purchase. Magalie and Philippe stood under an arch of the arcades, sheltered for a little while, as signs of life grew in the city around them, but the open park filling up with snow was too tempting, and they went back under the falling flakes.

  Other people were starting to come out now, drawn to the thought of the Place des Vosges under snow: another couple on the other side of the garden, a mother and father with two small children who were jumping up and down, beside themselves. Snow gathered on the edges of the tiered fountains. It clung to the bare branches of the perfectly symmetrical marches of trees. Two teenagers burst in on the park from another side, one chasing the other with a snowball. An elderly man unleashed his small Jack Russell, which ran yapping and rolling in the snow with delight.

  “This is beautiful,” Magalie said softly. One of the most beautiful scenes of her life.

  “I can’t believe my luck,” Philippe said, as if he was hugging it to him. “I could have been throwing pebbles at your tower window, trying to get you to come down and share this with me.”

  “I would have come out into the snow on my own,” Magalie said, a little affronted. It was hard to tell if she would have wandered over the whole city in it, but she definitely would have explored the park at the end of the island, and the quays, and Notre-Dame. Probably would have gone as far as her green king on the Pont Neuf.

  “I know, Magalie,” he said very dryly. “It was coming out in it with me that was the trick. Let’s build a snowman.”

  There wasn’t enough snow yet for that, and Philippe was the first one who abandoned the effort to get his ball a decent size for a snowman base and instead threw it at her.

  She shot her ball right back at him, laughing, and ran through the park, ducking behind stately rows of trees and fountains like great pièces montées. Magalie, paying more attention to what was chasing after her than where she was going, had to skid to a halt and swerve to avoid running straight into a stroller, its transparent plastic covering collecting snow, and she ended up on her butt.

  Philippe loped up and hauled her to her feet, dusting off her butt with considerably more thoroughness than it could possibly need.

  “Pardon,” Magalie told the mother pushing the stroller. But the elegant woman only frowned at her with considerable disapproval and kept walking.

  Magalie looked after the other woman’s square but two-inch high heels and glanced down at her own flat snowboots uneasily. Damn it, had she copped out?

  Philippe laughed at her, reading her mind. “You can make up for it when the snow melts. I’ve got plenty of ideas of things you can do in boots.” He made a rueful, rough sound. “Far too many, I suspect.”

  Oh, really? She looked up at him, something hot running quick and hard through her under all the chill.

  “En fait, we could work out some kind of exchange where you fulfill all my sexual desires and I supply you with all the boots you want.”

  That sounded quite enticing, actually. She cleared her throat and tried to look uninterested. “Would that include boots from Givenchy?”

  “Magalie, you can’t tell me you’re willing to prostitute yourself for clothes but not for my macarons? That’s messed up.”

  Her shoulders slumped. “I probably would be willing just for your macarons,” she admitted sadly. Now that she had tasted one, her mouth was watering already at the possibility of tasting him again. She had no fiber anymore. It wasn’t so much moral fiber, because like her Aunt Geneviève, she thought this question of morals was made up primarily by Aunt Aja to annoy them, but just plain old backbone. “Although I wouldn’t mind a bonus,” she added wistfully. There had been this one pair of boots . . .

  Philippe gave a crack of laughter, pulling her in for a hard kiss. “It’s supposed to snow all day,” he whispered into her frozen ear. “Why don’t we go warm up for an hour or so before we come back out into the cold? I hear there’s nothing better on a snowy day than a cup of hot chocolate.”

  When he led the way out of the square going in the opposite direction from his apartment, at first she thought he had been joking about the break to warm up and instead was heading toward the Seine to see the bridges in the snow.

  They did walk down the Right Bank quays as far as the Pont Neuf and crossed over to watch the snow falling onto the statue of Henri IV on horseback that dominated its center—Magalie’s green king. Snow veiled the monuments and bridges all the gray length of the river. Coming back through the Place du Parvis Notre-Dame, they saw other couples snowball fighting, and someone had left multiple snow angels scattered all over the plaza, as if a heavenly host was gathering around the great cathedral.

  Behind the flying buttresses, they stood a moment on the arching bridge that connected Notre-Dame to the Île Saint-Louis, watching the drift of river and snow.

  A couple passed on the other side of the bridge, cuddled close together under a red umbrella.

  Philippe sighed. “I should have thought of an umbrella.”

  He watched the couple distance themselves, red bobbing over the dark coats so intimately pressed together, and looked down at her suddenly.

  “You asked me the other night what w
oman I had fallen in love with.” He was frowning, as if he was grappling with a serious structural issue with one of his pièces montées. “But there’s something I don’t understand, Magalie. How could you not know?”

  She stared at him while snowflakes fell into her eyes, and she had to blink them into icy spiderwebs between her eyelashes.

  Were they going to talk about this subject? It was one thing to whisper it when he was falling asleep after intense sex, but surely even he wasn’t going to go around examining the subject in the light of day.

  He didn’t seem to have the slightest fear of it, though. At least, not here under this fairy-tale snow.

  “I mean, Magalie—I’m busy. It happens, sometimes, that one of my desserts gets left on a plate. Not that often,” he added, as if he could probably count the times as individual wounds in his body, “but maybe someone who is anorexic and likes to torture herself. Or someone who is pregnant, and suddenly her hormones revolt at the sight of what she has been craving. Or . . . or . . . maybe some businessman who is trying to survive a meeting but has the flu and his nose is all blocked up and destroying his tastebuds. I mean, it happens.”

  Magalie curled her free hand around his forearm and gave it a consoling pat. Her mouth twitched, but truly it was pretty hard to imagine any other reason someone might leave a Philippe Lyonnais dessert unfinished.

  “I don’t go around pursuing those people personally with new and ever better works of art until they crack.” A pause. “Well, not directly,” he admitted. “I might make a new and better creation for the whole world anytime it happens, but I don’t personally chase down the masochistic person who didn’t eat the last one to try to win him over.”