Anna and the French Kiss

by Stephanie Perkins

  “Um,” he says. “Would it be weird—”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, piss off. I’m not talking trousers. I only want under the blankets.That breeze is horrible.” He slides underneath, and now we’re lying side by side. In my narrow bed. Funny, but I never imagined my first sleepover with a guy being, well, a sleepover.

  “All we need now are Sixteen Candles and a game of Truth or Dare.”

  He coughs. “Wh-what?”

  “The movie, pervert. I was just thinking it’s been a while since I’ve had a sleepover.”

  A pause. “Oh.”

  “...”

  “...”

  “St. Clair?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Your elbow is murdering my back.”

  “Bollocks. Sorry.” He shifts, and then shifts again, and then again, until we’re comfortable. One of his legs rests against mine. Despite the two layers of pants between us, I feel naked and vulnerable. He shifts again and now my entire leg, from calf to thigh, rests against his. I smell his hair. Mmm.

  NO!

  I swallow, and it’s so loud. He coughs again. I’m trying not to squirm. After what feels like hours but is surely only minutes, his breath slows and his body relaxes. I finally begin to relax, too. I want to memorize his scent and the touch of his skin—one of his arms, now against mine—and the solidness of his body. No matter what happens, I’ll remember this for the rest of my life.

  I study his profile. His lips, his nose, his eyelashes. He’s so beautiful.

  The wind rattles the panes, and the lights buzz softly in the hall. He sleeps soundly. How long has it been since he’s had a decent night’s rest? There’s another uncomfortable tug on my heart. Why do I care so much about him, and why do I wish I didn’t? How can one person make me so confused all of the time?

  What is that? Is it lust? Or something else altogether? And is it even possible for me to feel this way about him without these feelings being reciprocated? He said that he liked me. He did. And even though he was drunk, he wouldn’t have said it if there wasn’t at least some truth to it. Right?

  I don’t know.

  Like every time I’m with him, I don’t know anything. He scoots closer to me in his sleep. His breath is warm against my neck. I don’t know anything. He’s so beautiful, so perfect. I wonder if he ... if I ...

  A ray of light glares into my eyes, and I squint, disoriented. Daylight. The red numbers on my clock read 11:27. Huh. Did I mean to sleep in? What day is it? And then I see the body in bed next to me. And I nearly jump out of my skin.

  So it wasn’t a dream.

  His mouth is parted, and the sheets are kicked off. One of his hands rests on his stomach. His shirt has hiked up, and I can see his abdomen. My gaze is transfixed.

  Holy crap. I just slept with St. Clair.

  chapter twenty-one

  Imean I didn’t SLEEP sleep with him. Obviously. But I slept with him.

  I slept with a boy! I burrow back down into my sheets and grin. I can’t WAIT to tell Bridge. Except . . . what if she tells Toph? And I can’t tell Mer, because she’d get jealous, which means I can’t tell Rashmi or Josh either. It dawns on me that there is nobody I can tell about this. Does that mean it’s wrong?

  I stay in bed for as long as possible, but eventually my bladder wins. When I come back from the bathroom, he’s looking out my window. He turns around and laughs. “Your hair. It’s sticking up in all different directions.” St. Clair pronounces it die-rections and illustrates his point by poking his fingers up around his head like antlers.

  “You’re one to speak.”

  “Ah, but it looks purposeful on me.Took me ages to realize the best way to get that mussed look was to ignore it completely.”

  “So you’re saying it looks like crap on me?” I glance in the mirror, and I’m alarmed to discover I do resemble a horned beast.

  “No. I like it.” He grins and picks his belt up off the floor. “Breakfast?”

  I hand him his boots. “It’s noon.”

  “Thanks. Lunch?”

  “Lemme shower first.”

  We part for an hour and meet back in his room. His door is propped open, and French punk rock is blaring down his hall. I’m shocked when I step inside and discover he’s straightened up. The heaps of clothing and towels have been organized for laundry purposes, and the empty bottles and chip bags have been thrown out.

  He looks at me hopefully. “It’s a start.”

  “It looks great.” And it does look better. I smile.

  We spend the day walking around again. We catch part of a Danny Boyle film festival and take another stroll beside the Seine. I teach him how to skip stones; I can’t believe he doesn’t know how. It starts drizzling, so we pop into a bookshop across from Notre-Dame. The yellow-and-green sign reads SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY.

  Inside, we’re struck by chaos. A horde of customers crowds the desk, and everywhere I turn there are books, books, and more books. But it’s not like a chain, where everything is neatly organized on shelves and tables and end caps. Here books totter in wobbly stacks, fall from the seats of chairs, and spill from sagging shelves. There are cardboard boxes overflowing with books, and a black cat naps beside a pile on the stairs. But the most astonishing thing is that all of the books are in English.

  St. Clair notices my awed expression. “You’ve never been here before?”

  I shake my head, and he’s surprised. “It’s quite famous. Hey, look—” He holds up a copy of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. “This is familiar, eh?”

  I wander in a daze, half thrilled to be surrounded by my own language, half terrified to disturb anything. One wrong touch might break the entire store. It could collapse, and we’d be buried in an avalanche of yellowed pages.

  The rain patters against the windows. I push my way through a group of tourists and examine the fiction section. I don’t know why I’m looking for him, but I can’t help it. I work backward. Christie, Cather, Caldwell, Burroughs, Brontë, Berry, Baldwin, Auster, Austen. Ashley. James Ashley.

  A line of my father’s books. Six of them. I pull a hardcover copy of The Incident from the shelf, and I cringe at the familiar sunset on the cover.

  “What’s that?” St. Clair asks. I startle. I didn’t realize he was standing beside me.

  He takes the novel from me, and his eyes widen with recognition. He flips it over, and Dad’s author photo grins back at us. My father is overly tan, and his teeth gleam fake white. He’s wearing a lavender polo shirt, and his hair blows gently in the wind.

  St. Clair raises his eyebrows. “I don’t see the relation. He’s much better looking.”

  I sputter with nervousness, and he taps my arm with the book. “It’s worse than I thought.” He laughs. “Does he always look like this?”

  “Yes.”

  He flips it open and reads the jacket. I watch his face anxiously. His expression grows puzzled. I see him stop and go back to read something again. St. Clair looks up at me. “It’s about cancer,” he says.

  Oh. My. God.

  “This woman has cancer. What happens to her?”

  I can’t swallow. “My father is an idiot. I’ve told you, he’s a complete jackass.”

  An excruciating pause. “He sells a lot of these, does he?”

  I nod.

  “And people enjoy this? They find it entertaining, do they?”

  “I’m sorry, St. Clair.” Tears are welling in my eyes. I’ve never hated my father as much as I do right now. How could he? How dare he make money off something so horrible? St. Clair shuts the book and shoves it back on the shelf. He picks up another, The Entrance. The leukemia novel. My father wears a dress shirt with the first few buttons casually undone. His arms are crossed, but he has that same ridiculous grin.

  “He’s a freak,” I say. “A total ... goinky freak.”

  St. Clair snorts. He opens his mouth to say something, but then sees me crying. “No, Anna. Anna, I’m sorry.”

 
“I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have seen this.” I snatch the book and thrust it back onto the shelf. Another stack of novels tumbles off and crashes to the floor between us. We drop to pick them up and bash heads.

  “Ow!” I say.

  St. Clair rubs his head. “Are you all right?”

  I wrench the books from his hands. “I’m fine. Just fine.” I pile them back on the bookcase and stumble to the back of the store, as far from him, as far from my father, as possible. But a few minutes later, St. Clair is back at my side.

  “It’s not your fault,” he says quietly. “You don’t pick your parents. I know that as well as anyone, Anna.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Fair enough.” He holds up a collection of poetry. Pablo Neruda. “Have you read this?”

  I shake my head.

  “Good. Because I just bought it for you.”

  “What?”

  “It’s on our syllabus for next semester in English.You’d need to buy it anyway. Open it up,” he says.

  Confused, I do. There’s a stamp on the front page. SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY, Kilometer Zero Paris. I blink. “Kilometer Zero? Is that the same thing as Point Zéro?” I think about our first walk around the city together.

  “For old times’ sake.” St. Clair smiles. “Come on, the rain’s stopped. Let’s get out of here.”

  I’m still quiet on the street.We cross the same bridge we did that first night—me on the outside again, St. Clair on the inside—and he keeps up the conversation for the both of us. “Did I ever tell you I went to school in America?”

  “What? No.”

  “It’s true, for a year. Eighth grade. It was terrible.”

  “Eighth grade is terrible for everyone,” I say.

  “Well, it was worse for me. My parents had just separated, and my mum moved back to California. I hadn’t been since I was an infant, but I went with her, and I was put in this horrid public school—”

  “Oh, no. Public school.”

  He nudges me with his shoulder. “The other kids were ruthless. They made fun of everything about me—my height, my accent, the way I dressed. I vowed I’d never go back.”

  “But American girls love English accents.” I blurt this without thinking, and then pray he doesn’t notice my blush.

  St. Clair picks up a pebble and tosses it into the river. “Not in middle school, they don’t. Especially when it’s attached to a bloke who comes up to their kneecaps.”

  I laugh.

  “So when the year was over, my parents found a new school for me. I wanted to go back to London, where my mates were, but my father insisted on Paris so he could keep an eye on me. And that’s how I wound up at the School of America.”

  “How often do you go back? To London?”

  “Not as often as I’d like. I still have friends in England, and my grandparents—my father’s parents—live there, so I used to split my summers between London and San—”

  “Your grandparents are English?”

  “Grandfather is, but Grandmère is French. And my other grandparents are American, of course.”

  “Wow.You really are a mutt.”

  St. Clair smiles. “I’m told I take after my English grandfather the most, but it’s only because of the accent.”

  “I don’t know. I think of you as more English than anything else. And you don’t just sound like it, you look like it, too.”

  “I do?” He’s surprised.

  I smile. “Yeah, it’s that . . . pasty complexion. I mean it in the best possible way,” I add, at his alarmed expression. “Honestly.”

  “Huh.” St. Clair looks at me sideways. “Anyway. Last summer I couldn’t bear to face my father, so it was the first time I spent the whole holiday with me mum.”

  “And how was it? I bet the girls don’t tease you about your accent anymore.”

  He laughs. “No, they don’t. But I can’t help my height. I’ll always be short.”

  “And I’ll always be a freak, just like my dad. Everyone tells me I take after him. He’s sort of . . . neat, like me.”

  He seems genuinely surprised. “What’s wrong with being neat? I wish I were more organized. And, Anna, I’ve never met your father, but I guarantee you that you’re nothing like him.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Well, for one thing, he looks like a Ken doll. And you’re beautiful.”

  I trip and fall down on the sidewalk.

  “Are you all right?” His eyes fill with worry.

  I look away as he takes my hand and helps me up. “I’m fine. Fine!” I say, brushing the grit from my palms. Oh my God, I AM a freak.

  “You’ve seen the way men look at you, right?” he continues.

  “If they’re looking, it’s because I keep making a fool of myself.” I hold up my scraped hands.

  “That guy over there is checking you out right now.”

  “Wha—?” I turn to find a young man with long dark hair staring. “Why is he looking at me?”

  “I expect he likes what he sees.”

  I flush, and he keeps talking. “In Paris, it’s common to acknowledge someone attractive. The French don’t avert their gaze like other cultures do. Haven’t you noticed?”

  St. Clair thinks I’m attractive. He called me beautiful.

  “Um, no,” I say. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Well. Open your eyes.”

  But I stare at the bare tree branches, at the children with balloons, at the Japanese tour group. Anywhere but at him.We’ve stopped in front of Notre-Dame again. I point at the familiar star and clear my throat. “Wanna make another wish?”

  “You go first.” He’s watching me, puzzled, like he’s trying to figure something out. He bites his thumbnail.

  This time I can’t help it. All day long, I’ve thought about it. Him. Our secret.

  I wish St. Clair would spend the night again.

  He steps on the coppery-bronze star after me and closes his eyes. I realize he must be wishing about his mother, and I feel guilty that she didn’t even cross my mind. My thoughts are only for St. Clair.

  Why is he taken? Would things be different if I’d met him before Ellie? Would things be different if his mom wasn’t sick?

  He said I’m beautiful, but I don’t know if that was flirty, friends-with-everyone St. Clair, or if it came from someplace private. Do I see the same St. Clair everyone else does? No. I don’t think so. But I could be mistaking our friendship for something more, because I want to mistake it for something more.

  The worrying gradually slips away at dinner. Our restaurant is covered with ivy and cozy with wood-burning fireplaces. Afterward, we stroll in a comfortable, full-bellied chocolate mousse trance. “Let’s go home,” he says, and the word makes my heart drum.

  Home. My home is his home, too.

  There’s still no one behind the front desk when we get back, but Nate peeks his head out his door. “Anna! Étienne!”

  “Hey, Nate,” we say.

  “Did you have a nice Thanksgiving?”

  “Yeah. Thanks, Nate,” we say.

  “Do I need to check up on you guys later? You know the rules. No sleeping in opposite-sex rooms.”

  My face flames, and St. Clair’s cheeks grow blotchy. It’s true. It’s a rule. One that my brain—my rule-loving, rule-abiding brain—conveniently blocked last night. It’s also one notoriously ignored by the staff.

  “No, Nate,” we say.

  He shakes his shaved head and goes back in his apartment. But the door opens quickly again, and a handful of something is thrown at us before it’s slammed back shut.

  Condoms. Oh my God, how humiliating.

  St. Clair’s entire face is now bright red as he picks the tiny silver squares off the floor and stuffs them into his coat pockets. We don’t speak, don’t even look at each other, as we climb the stairs to my floor. My pulse quickens with each step. Will he follow me to my room, or has Nate ruined any chance of that?

  We
reach the landing, and St. Clair scratches his head. “Er ...”

  “So ...”

  “I’m going to get dressed for bed. Is that all right?” His voice is serious, and he watches my reaction carefully.

  “Yeah. Me too. I’m going to . . . get ready for bed, too.”

  “See you in a minute?”

  I swell with relief. “Up there or down here?”

  “Trust me, you don’t want to sleep in my bed.” He laughs, and I have to turn my face away, because I do, holy crap do I ever. But I know what he means. It’s true my bed is cleaner. I hurry to my room and throw on the strawberry pajamas and an Atlanta Film Festival shirt. It’s not like I plan on seducing him.

  Like I’d even know how.

  St. Clair knocks a few minutes later, and he’s wearing his white bottoms with the blue stripes again and a black T-shirt with a logo I recognize as the French band he was listening to earlier. I’m having trouble breathing.

  “Room service,” he says.

  My mind goes . . . blank. “Ha ha,” I say weakly.

  He smiles and turns off the light. We climb into bed, and it’s absolutely positively completely awkward. As usual. I roll over to my edge of the bed. Both of us are stiff and straight, careful not to touch the other person. I must be a masochist to keep putting myself in these situations. I need help. I need to see a shrink or be locked in a padded cell or straitjacketed or something.

  After what feels like an eternity, St. Clair exhales loudly and shifts. His leg bumps into mine, and I flinch. “Sorry,” he says.

  “It’s okay.”

  “...”

  “...”

  “Anna?”

  “Yeah?

  “Thanks for letting me sleep here again. Last night ...”

  The pressure inside my chest is torturous. What? What what what?

  “I haven’t slept that well in ages.”

  The room is silent. After a moment, I roll back over. I slowly, slowly stretch out my leg until my foot brushes his ankle. His intake of breath is sharp. And then I smile, because I know he can’t see my expression through the darkness.