Before we could enter, Crow grabbed my arm. “Can you speak French?” he asked. “How will we know what to order?”
Good question. I hadn’t worried about that in any other city. We seemed to always find someone who spoke English, but this place didn’t look like it catered to tourists.
“It’s okay. We can work it out. Use Google Translate or something. What’s the alternative? Get Mickey D’s? I’m not eating a Big Mac in Paris.”
“True.”
We entered, and the waitress pointed to a table. That much was easy. I understood pointing.
Even though it was daylight, this place had a romantic feel to it. The waitress had put us in a little nook away from the main room, as though she’d known we wanted privacy. Not that there were many other people in the place, since it was late in the afternoon.
I picked up the menu. Yikes, it was all in French, but there were some words I recognized. Some I guessed at. The waitress walked over, tapping her pencil on her pad. She said a few things in French. I had no idea what they were, but she sure sounded cranky. But I wasn’t used to French people. Maybe they sounded cranky no matter what they said.
We ordered soup and pointed to a few other things.
“What if they’re weird things?” Crow asked.
I shrugged. “We don’t eat them. It’s not like it’s the end of the world. If it’s too disgusting, we can ditch this place and get a baguette and some cheese somewhere.”
We didn’t have to worry, though. All the food was great. My belly had stretched with all the food by the end of it.
“But I need crepes. I can’t come to Paris and not have crepes. And macaroons. Oh, there are too many delicious foods.”
Crow’s eyes sparkled. “You have five more days. You don’t have to eat the entire city out of food today.”
I liked his logic. “Should we go?” I asked him.
“Just a minute.”
He fumbled with something in his pocket. I had no idea what. I was too busy trying to figure out our check. And did we need to leave a tip? I wasn’t sure on the system here. I should check online, or maybe it was easiest to leave a standard ten percent. I was going to ask Crow, but he didn’t meet my gaze. Weird.
“Ah, Fay, I have something,” he said.
“Umm?”
I still was only half paying attention. Then he handed a small box across the table. That got all of my attention.
“For me?” I asked.
He nodded.
My heart fluttered as I opened up the box. Crow didn’t seem like a jewelry-buying kind of guy, so this gift was all the more precious.
It was some kind of pendant. At first, I couldn’t work out what was on the silver chain, then I turned it toward the light.
“A firecracker!” I laughed.
“Yep.” He didn’t look at me.
“I love it. It’s perfect. You acted so weird when I said we needed to get something to commemorate today, but you had this all along. That was sneaky.”
He looked up and gave me a huge grin, his teeth gleaming through his beard.
I wanted to put it on right now. No, I wanted Crow to put it on me. That was the proper way to do things.
“You have to do it,” I said, handing the box back to him.
He stood up and fastened the chain, his fingers grazing the sensitive skin on the back of my neck. Every touch sent shivers of anticipation down my spine.
When he’d finished, I put my hand up to touch it.
“Thank you so much,” I said. “I’m going to wear it every day.”
Wow, Paris really was the city of love.
Chapter 19
AFTER OUR BREAK FOR lunch, we kept walking. I took thousands of photos. We ended up at another great place for dinner, then went to a little bar.
We’d had such a great time all day, but once we sat down to have a drink, Crow seemed nervous. For such a laid-back guy, that fidgeting was really strange.
We sat in the semi-darkness. A few small lights illuminated the room, but most of the light came from the flickering candle on our table.
“You’re an amazing girl, Fay,” he told me.
I smiled, but something about his tone made me think there was more behind his words than simply paying me a compliment. Did he want to break up?
But we’d just gotten everything sorted out. Things were so perfect. Surely, he wouldn’t have given me the necklace if he wanted to break things off this quickly.
“Thanks,” I said, not sure how to respond.
He had more to say, so I waited. There was no point rushing Crow, and if I kept talking, he might get distracted.
Maybe I should keep talking. Maybe I should distract him from what he wanted to say, because something told me it’d be no good.
His hand squeezed tight around his wine glass, so tight I worried he’d crush it and cut himself. Violin music played in the background, music so melancholy that it added to my bad feelings. The day had been so perfect that I wanted nothing to destroy it.
“What is it?” I asked.
He didn’t look at me but stared at the wine in his glass. In this light, that wine looked almost black.
“I need to tell you something. I’ve been thinking about it all day. We need to start out honest with each other, and if you change your mind about me after I tell you this, then walk away. I’ll understand.”
I nodded.
I couldn’t imagine anything Crow could tell me that would make me want to walk away. If he’d done bad things, they’d been justified. I knew him well enough to know that.
“Growing up, things were pretty tough,” he said. He was still staring at that glass, swirling the wine in small circles.
I didn’t talk. I’d give him as long as he needed. He wasn’t the kind of guy to open up easily. Man, I wished they’d shut off those damn violins, though.
“My dad was a drunk. Mom died when we were kids, and there was just the three of us: Dad, me, and my little sister, Cindy. He started drinking when Mom died, maybe before that, even. I was too young to even really remember her. But he was a nasty drunk.”
My stomach clenched. I knew there’d been shadows in Crow’s past, but I hated to think of him being abused.
“He’d always been rough on me, but I could handle a beating. I hated him for it, and I vowed I’d get out of there one day, but I couldn’t leave Cindy behind. I figured I’d put up with it, then, when she was old enough, the two of us would escape. I’d tell her stories about the little house we’d have. She wanted to have pretty things around, things that wouldn’t get smashed up.”
All I could do was nod. I wanted to reach out for him, put my arms around him, but the way we sat made that difficult. Crow seemed like he was a whole other world away, anyway. If I interrupted him now, even to give him comfort, he might crawl back inside that shell and never talk about this.
“When I was sixteen, he started getting worse. He’d always left Cindy alone before that, but she was growing up. He got this idea in his head that she was running around. He wanted to control her. She was a good kid, no different from any other girls her age, but when she started wearing makeup and dressing like a teenager, he told her she was a whore. A few times, he went over the edge. Screaming at her was bad enough, but when he raised his hand to her, I’d jump in.”
He finally raised that wine glass to his lips and took a sip. Then he sighed.
“I wanted to kill him, Fay. I had nothing but hate in my heart for that man, and if I’d thought I could get away with it, I’d have cut his throat and thrown the body in the river.”
He looked up at me then, and all the pain showed in his eyes.
If I could, I’d wipe away that pain. I wanted to take every bad thing in his life and replace it with good.
“Are you shocked?” he asked. “Maybe I shouldn’t...”
“You wanted to protect your sister. That’s not a bad thing,” I told him.
“I thought about taking Cindy and running, b
ut I had no way to support her. She’d have been taken away from me and put in a foster home, and I wasn’t sure which would be worse. All I could do was protect her. Then, one day, I’d been at a friend’s place. Cindy wasn’t home, either. We both tried to stay out of that place as much as we could. It sure wasn’t a home. I got back and thought the house was empty. I grabbed a Coke out of the fridge and was about to head to my room when I saw him. He’d fallen to the floor, all curled up in a ball. He struggled to call out to me, but the words were just a gurgle.”
He stopped and took a swig of his wine. A big swig. Then he stared at something over my head.
“I’ve never told anyone this,” he said. “Do you want me to go on?”
“If it helps.” I reached out for his hand, hoping I could give him some strength.
“I knew I should’ve called an ambulance. He was dying, and he couldn’t get up off the floor. I froze. That man had done so many terrible things, and I’d thought about killing him so many times. It seemed that fate had stepped in to do what I couldn’t. I just kept thinking that if he got help, one day he’d destroy us. One day Cindy would get a boyfriend, and then he’d go mental. The terrible things he’d done were just a shadow of what was to come....”
His hand tightened around mine.
“I didn’t help him, Fay. I left that house and didn’t come home for hours.” He gulped. The sound seemed to fill the room. “When I got back, he’d been dead for hours. I rang the ambulance then.”
“You did what you had to,” I said.
“I caused his death. I’ve tried to justify it. I’ve told myself that I could’ve stayed out for a few hours longer and I’d have never had to make that decision, but in the end, I could’ve saved him, and I didn’t.”
Crow looked up then. He looked me straight in the eyes. He wanted to read what I was thinking, searching my face for any sign of rejection.
“I’m not sure what you want from me,” I said. “But I’m not going to walk away. You protect the ones you love.”
I smiled at him. I needed him to know that I’d stand by him.
“She didn’t think like that,” he said.
“She?”
“Cindy. She knew, Fay. She knew I’d been home. That can of Coke sat on the coffee table near his body, and she worked it all out. He was her father, and she loved him in spite of everything. She’s a much better person than I am. She went away, and I never heard from her again.”
Crow kept sipping his wine, and those violins didn’t let up. I wanted to reassure him, to make things better, but I wasn’t even sure where to start. I could only keep holding his hand.
“You’ve never heard from her at all? Maybe, now that she’s older, you should try to get in touch.”
He shook his head and put his glass down. “We should get back to the hotel,” he said.
I guessed that meant the conversation was over, but as we left the bar, I put my arm around him and pulled him tight. Crow might have a darkness within him, but, like I’d always thought, he was a good person.
Chapter 20
WHEN WE GOT BACK TO the hotel, I hoped Crow would invite me back to his room.
He didn’t.
“Are you sure you want to be alone?” I asked him, putting my hand on his arm.
He stroked my cheek. “It’s been a pretty intense day. Don’t tempt me.”
Oh, I wanted to tempt him. I really wanted to tempt him a lot, but he was right. It had been intense. If he needed some alone time, I wouldn’t push him. Not tonight.
Instead, I went into my room and changed into my PJs. I wasn’t ready to sleep, so I grabbed my hairbrush and began brushing my hair. That often helped me to think.
The things he’d told me played with my mind. His sister rejecting him like that had obviously really hurt him, and hurt him still, no matter how much he brushed it off. That had been a long time ago, though. About ten years by my reckoning. Surely, in that time, her feelings had changed.
If she regretted it now, what would she do? If Crow had been a normal guy, she could have picked up the phone and called him or sent him an email but being in the Freaks made him far from normal. He had levels of privacy most people didn’t have. You couldn’t just look up his phone number, and if she wanted to contact him, her message would get lost in the piles of fan mail.
From the sound of it, Crow had severed all connections with his family and his home town. There was no one she could ask for help.
Even though I had no siblings, I couldn’t imagine cutting myself off from family. I messaged my mother every day. Sometimes I even talked to a photo of her, telling her things about my day. I’d always been close to Polly and my other cousins, even when Polly was a pain in the butt. That’s what family was like: you got annoyed with them, but it didn’t stop them being family.
I bet Crow’s sister felt like that too.
If only I could get him to contact her. She’d probably be so happy to hear from him. Those kinds of bonds didn’t just die.
How could I get him to do that, though? He was stubborn as hell, and if I raised the subject, he’d just close off. I needed to be much trickier than that.
Could I track her down? I had no idea where she lived, and she might’ve even changed her surname by now, but I had to try. She’d be 24 years old, and I knew her home town. I had no idea where she would’ve moved to.
I opened up my laptop and went online. First of all, I checked the Freaks’ official site to get any details. No mention of a sister on Crow’s bio. But, hey, Elijah had two older sisters. Figured. Guys like him always had older sisters who spoiled them rotten. That was what made them grow up to think they were God’s gift to women.
I’d have to tell him that theory.
After the official site, I trawled through all the fan sites. Even there, no one mentioned a sister, although a few did say that Crow’s father had died of a heart attack.
Then I checked forums. That didn’t help, either, although someone had posted: Forget the Freaks, Wreckage is where it’s at. That chick singer is so hot.
I bookmarked that to read again later. I didn’t get nearly enough fan mail for my liking.
Then I read a reply that wasn’t as nice. Obviously from someone with no taste.
I couldn’t spend the night reading about myself. I had someone to find.
I wondered if she looked like Crow. Obviously, she wouldn’t have the beard. Well, I hoped not. And it was hard to know what his mouth and jawline looked like underneath it. But I imagined she had those same sparkling eyes and dark hair.
I tried Facebook first, but Mom was online and she got chatting to me.
What are you doing up so late?
Trust her to know the time difference. I told her I was about to sleep. I didn’t want to tell her about Crow. I wasn’t sure how much she’d heard from Polly. But then I didn’t want to not tell her, either. I tried casually telling her I we were together, but there was no way I could slip something like that past her without a fuss. She wanted all the details.
I’d grabbed my phone to take a photo of my necklace.
Interesting was all she said.
I told her all about sightseeing in Paris and sent her some photos.
Is he a good person? she asked. That’s the most important thing.
He’s a good person, I replied. He’s the best.
I’d just shut down the window when I heard a light tapping on my door.
It was Crow.
“I didn’t wake you?” he asked, and I shook my head. “I couldn’t sleep.”
He walked into my room, and I wrapped my arms around him, holding him tight. Then I glanced over to make sure I had nothing incriminating on my computer screen. I didn’t want him to know I’d been digging into his past.
He held me tight for a long time. I guessed confessing the dark secrets of your soul took a lot out of a person. Finally, I took his hand and led him over to the bed. I couldn’t stand up hugging him forever.
I
climbed into bed beside him and curled my body against his. He didn’t try to kiss me or any of that. He just held me tight, stroking my hair, until he fell asleep.
Chapter 21
WE WERE STILL IN EACH other’s arms the next morning. “I could get used to waking up next to you,” he said.
“You’d better,” I answered. I kissed him lightly on the nose. “Waking up next to me should be on your life agenda, top priority.”
“Your bed hair...”
Yikes! Did I look like an idiot? I tried to jump up to fix it, but he held me tight.
“I like it,” he said. “It’s cute.”
I crept my hand up his body until my arm was around his neck. “It is nice waking up together,” I said.
It was also nice seeing him much happier today. The storm had passed and the sun had come out. I guessed it was a relief for him to have confessed his secrets and have that out of his system. He’d been brave telling me, not knowing how I’d take it and thinking I might reject him. My heart ached for the younger Crow. Walking away had never been an option. Instead, I wanted to make his life brighter and happier, to wipe out the horrors of his past.
“You haven’t had second thoughts?” he asked, as though he was reading my thoughts.
“Not a one.”
The way he gazed into my eyes made me woozy. It’d be so easy to skip breakfast and stay in bed with him. I suggested that. We could get room service and stay right here.
“And what’s everyone going to think if we’re both missing from breakfast?” he asked.
Even when we stayed at places with room service, Damo liked everyone to gather for breakfast, which was unusual for someone who liked his privacy so much. I guessed it was one of the few chances to get the bands together in one place, but I bet it was more to make sure no one had stayed out all night partying.
“I don’t really care what they think,” I said. “They have to get used to us being together sooner or later.”
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