Dancing with Paris (A Paris Time Travel Romance)

by Juliette Sobanet

  Those first few days in Paris felt light-years away as I stopped at a charming flower shop on the corner and bought a bouquet of pink roses, then took off down the street and found myself walking right by the tree-lined boulevard that led to Jean-Pierre’s nightclub without giving it so much as a passing glance. The club had since been shut down after one too many dancers had accused Jean-Pierre of sexual harassment and had quit the show, leaving him with a mountain of debt and an even bigger pile of enemies.

  Breathing in the scent of the roses, I continued my leisurely stroll and shook off my memories of Jean-Pierre, eternally grateful that both Titine and I had had the courage to quit dancing for him and to tell that sleazy drageur, as they say in French, to take his nasty advances and shove them up his you-know-what.

  As I crossed through Place Saint-Michel and reached the Seine River, its waters glistening in the sunlight, the trees that lined the riverbanks swaying softly in the breeze, I thought about how drastically the world around me had shifted since that night just four months ago—the night I’d taken Solange’s life in order to save both Antoine’s and my own.

  It was as if, ever since that night, the universe had gone into a permanent state of joyous celebration. Wrongs were righted, and my life—Ruby’s life—as well as the lives of everyone around me, began to work themselves out.

  I’d succeeded in stopping Solange’s evil soul from derailing fate, and in doing so, an outpouring of love, joy, and hope had resulted.

  And each day that I was here, that joy, that hope, swelled in my heart. I felt it each time Antoine gazed into my eyes and told me he loved me, each time I visited Titine and saw the healing that was replacing her despair over losing Robert.

  But even with all of the positive changes this new life had brought for me, I still couldn’t help but wonder if in stopping my own murder, I had completely erased my future as Claudia. The journal that had traveled back in time with me was now completely empty, every last line erased, except for the one entry I’d written with Ruby’s hand when I first arrived. And the cover of the People magazine had changed too. Solange’s face had faded to the point where she was completely unrecognizable…of course that was okay with me.

  The one thing that wasn’t okay with me, though, was the fact that my ultrasound photo had also continued fading. It was now just a washed-out blur of black and white. The outline of my baby girl, the date of the sonogram, even my name…it was all gone.

  The magical Madame Bouchard hadn’t made any more appearances either, so while I desperately wanted answers about the future, especially about my baby, it didn’t seem they were coming anytime soon.

  On the one hand, I couldn’t imagine leaving the beautiful life I’d built here with Antoine; but on the other, I still couldn’t shake the idea that the portal Madame Bouchard had spoken about was somewhere out there, just waiting for me to find it. Waiting to suck me back in and take me away from this man I’d fallen head over heels in love with, from a life I’d grown to adore, and transport me back to my future life, my future baby—the baby I felt certain I was destined to have. I wondered constantly if the next day, the next hour, the next moment would be my last here in this life.

  And if given the chance, which life would I choose?

  A siren blared down the street, snapping me from my thoughts, my worries, from these frantic emotions that raced through my head without pause. And just like I had each day for the past four months, I bottled them up and told myself that my life here was amazing, that I should be thankful, and that when the time was right, I could have a baby here, with Antoine.

  But as I repeated those positive thoughts in my head to drown out the worries, one more nagging concern crept up.

  What if I had a baby here with Antoine and then somehow stumbled across the portal and was sent back to my life as Claudia? What would happen to my child here? To Antoine? Would I lose yet another possibility of a real family?

  I shook my head and gazed up at the fancy apartment building in front of me, then told myself to stop worrying and just live my life in the here and now.

  After all, if this past-life experience had taught me anything, it was that all I had was the current moment. And after everything I’d been through, everything I’d done to right the wrongs of the past, I had to trust that fate was on my side now.

  I rang the buzzer, glancing up toward the sky as I waited, wondering if fate was some entity that I could talk to, or if Madame Bouchard was listening.

  You’ll take care of me, won’t you? I asked the clouds, hoping they’d deliver the message.

  But instead of some powerful voice traveling down from the heavens, it was Titine’s.

  “Come on in!” she cooed through the speaker in the new singsongy tone she’d recently adopted.

  I laughed up at the sky, the sound of her voice reminding me that life here was good, then let myself in and took the elevator up to the top floor. Just two months ago, Titine had moved into a gorgeous penthouse apartment, and with its perfect view of the Seine River, it was a far cry from the tiny studio she used to call home.

  Such a high standard of living never would’ve been possible for Titine before, but when Robert’s parents got wind that Titine was pregnant with their only grandchild—by way of me and Antoine—they’d bought it for her free and clear, and had sent with it a hefty portion of the money Robert had left for them in his will. The apartment and the money hadn’t erased the pain of losing the father of her child and the man she loved, but it had certainly given Titine hope that she could raise this child on her own and that life could, and would, get better. And after what Titine had been through—after what we’d all been through—we couldn’t place a price tag on hope.

  “Hey, sweetie, thanks for coming,” she said, opening the door and pecking me on the cheeks. “The paint in the nursery is finally dry, so we can start hanging things on the walls now. And whenever that handsome fiancé of yours is available, I’m ready for him to come over and put the crib together.”

  “Got it, chief,” I said, smiling at her growing belly. Titine was five months along now, and she was glowing from head to toe. I handed her the bouquet of pink roses as we walked into her apartment together.

  “Thanks, love. How sweet! I’ll put them in the nursery. They’ll be baby Adeline’s first flowers.”

  I stopped when I heard the name Adeline roll off her tongue. It was the first time she’d mentioned it.

  And Adeline, as I knew from my life as Claudia, had been my mother’s birth name. Although later in her life, after my mom had officially cut off all contact with my grandma, she’d legally changed her name to the very simple Jane.

  I reminded myself though that things were different this time around, and hopefully my mother would never feel the need to change her name just to spite my grandmother.

  Titine stopped and placed a hand on my arm. “There you go again with that far-off look in your eyes. You do like the name Adeline, don’t you? I came across it in that baby-name book you gave me last week, and I just fell in love with it. You don’t think it sounds too much like my name, right? I mean, I could always go back to Martine, but that just feels so old, and I’m so used to people calling me Titine, you know? Okay, I’m babbling.”

  I laughed as we walked down the shiny hardwood floors toward the nursery. “I love the name Adeline,” I told her. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Oh good.” She rubbed her belly and smiled at me. “I had a feeling you would like it. I’m still going on your insistence that it’s a girl, you know. I mean, we don’t know for sure.”

  “Trust me, Titine,” I said with a smile, “it’s a girl.”

  “All right, all right. You better be right, because I don’t know what I would do with a boy. I mean, with a girl, I can teach her to dance, speak French, we can play dolls together, have tea parties. It’s going to be so much fun.”

  I stepped into the newly painted nursery, the walls now a light shade of pink, and couldn’t help but th
ink of how my mother—when I’d known her, at least—had loathed the color pink. She hadn’t been girly at all. She’d never been fun or adventurous in the way that Titine would surely be. She’d never played games with me or encouraged me to be creative. I knew she would come out differently this time around, though, and I was certain that there was no way this new beginning to her life couldn’t change everything.

  “What do you think of the paint? It’s not too pink, is it?”

  “It’s perfect,” I said, feeling a strange tug at my stomach, a twinge of a feeling I wasn’t yet ready to admit I was having.

  “I’m going to go put these gorgeous roses in a vase. I’ll be right back.” Titine bounced into the hallway, leaving me alone in the empty nursery—the nursery that in another four months would hold a beautiful baby girl who had no idea that things had happened so differently the first time around. She wouldn’t have the faintest clue that in the first version of her life, she hadn’t even been given the chance to get to know her shining, young dancer of a mother, but instead had been shipped off to the States and raised by her strict, older grandparents, and consequently had lived her life with a steel wall surrounding her, the pain of having been abandoned by her mother making her afraid to let anyone in.

  My mother’s future was more promising now, and of all of the wonderful changes that had occurred since the night I’d changed fate, I knew that this change, this renewed outlook for my mom, was one of the best.

  Still, though, as I traced my hand along the smooth walls and breathed in the scent of the new paint, there was that feeling again.

  The what if.

  What if I had lost my only chance at having a baby when I left my life as Claudia? What if that was my one opportunity to correct all the wrongs my own mother had done, and to create my own little family, as imperfect as it might have been without a father in the picture. What would happen now? Where would that baby go? That baby who was destined to be born to Claudia?

  I shook my head and fought off the thoughts of need, of want, of jealousy over Titine’s excitement for the baby who would be sleeping in a crib in this very room in just a few short months. I was happy for her, thrilled that after that horrific day at the hospital, both she and the baby had recovered. Even though she’d lost Robert, she’d stayed strong and had decided to keep the baby and to raise her herself.

  But in my heart, there was that pang, that longing for my own child. And I knew that no matter how wonderful my new life as Ruby was turning out, no matter how in love I was with Antoine, no matter how fun it was going to be getting to know my young grandmother as a new mom, I couldn’t shake that intense longing.

  But since I wasn’t sure if I would ever return to my life as Claudia, since I didn’t know if the portal Madame Bouchard had spoken about was just around the corner, or if it had disappeared forever, I knew my only choice was to take action here and now, in this life. In my fresh, unwritten existence as Ruby.

  Perhaps that baby was still out there, just waiting to be mine.

  Titine floated back in the room, interrupting me from my thoughts, and as I turned to face her, my heart swelled. I had to tell her.

  “I want to have a baby,” I announced, beaming from ear to ear. “I know we haven’t set a date for the wedding yet, but I want to have a baby with Antoine.”

  But in Titine’s eyes, instead of the excitement and maybe even the hint of surprise I was expecting, I saw a trace of something else—of pity.

  She walked over to me and placed her hand on my shoulder, the sad look in her green eyes intensifying.

  “What is it, Titine? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “You don’t remember, do you, Ruby?”

  “Remember what?”

  She took in a deep breath and didn’t let go of her grip on my shoulder. “When we were living in New York, and you were with Thomas…” She stopped, her voice suspended in midair and her gaze traveling to the floor, to the window—anywhere but to me.

  “What, Titine? What happened with Thomas that I don’t already know?” I felt the panic rising, the hysteria that I hadn’t experienced since my first few chaotic days as Ruby boiling to the surface once again.

  She cleared her throat, and as she finally lifted her eyes to meet mine, I recognized in them the same determination I’d felt when I’d had to tell her about Robert’s murder. And before she even spoke, my insides crumbled.

  “Ruby, you were pregnant once. With Thomas’s baby. That’s why, even though he was so awful to you, you wouldn’t leave him. And one night, when you were about six months along, the two of you had a really bad fight. Well, you were always having bad fights, but this one was the worst. Thomas hit you really hard, Ruby…in the stomach. You passed out, started bleeding, and like the sick bastard he was, he just left you there…to die.

  “I tried calling you late that night, and when you didn’t answer, I just had this gut feeling that something bad had happened with Thomas, so I rushed over, and you…you were…oh, God, Ruby. It was a nightmare. They had to perform emergency surgery to stop the bleeding. You lost the baby that night…and the damage was so severe that you had to have a complete hysterectomy.”

  My hand shot to my lower abdomen. “The scar on my stomach…it wasn’t from Thomas. It was from the surgery.”

  Titine nodded, the sorrow in her eyes unbearable. “When we first arrived in Paris, you made me promise never to bring it up again. It was all too painful. And then after you had that fall during rehearsal and you kept asking if you’d lost your baby, I didn’t have the heart to tell you again that you had. I thought by now that surely you would’ve remembered on your own. I’m so sorry, Ruby.”

  “So I’ll never be able to have my own children. That’s why I hated him so much. That’s why I…”

  Titine nodded. I didn’t need to say it. I hadn’t only killed Thomas out of self-defense. I’d also killed him because he’d taken my baby away from me.

  I stared back at my sweet, young grandmother, the closest friend I’d ever had in my life, and as she tried to comfort me, telling me that I would be like a second mom to her child, that Antoine and I could adopt, that it would all be okay, I stopped listening, my heart closing up inside my chest, my hope, my soul deflated. And as she wrapped her tiny arms around me, her full, round belly pressing against my stomach, all I could think was why.

  After everything I’d done to change fate, after I’d called up the strength to literally kill an evil soul and in doing so had erased all of the wrong that soul would bring if left to her own devices, after I’d rebuilt not only Ruby’s mess of a life, but the shattered lives of Titine and Antoine, why would I be denied the chance to have my own children? Why would I be brought back here, with no obvious prospect of getting through the portal, and still not be able to have the one thing I felt so sure that I was destined to do?

  I lifted my face from Titine’s shoulder and glared at the happy white clouds floating along outside the window, as if nothing could faze them. As if nothing monumental had just occurred. I wanted to scream at them to pass along another message for me, to tell fate or Madame Bouchard or whoever the hell was listening that this wasn’t fair, this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. I’d done what they wanted! And where were they now, when I needed them the most? Who was calling the shots here? Where was the silver-haired woman who’d brought me back here in the first place? Where was the big man in the sky, patting me on the back, telling me I’d done a good job, that I’d accomplished what I’d been sent back to do and now I could finally have my dream of a real family?

  As it turned out, fate didn’t have my back after all. Fate didn’t care about all the good that I’d done.

  I didn’t scream at the clouds, though. I didn’t have the fight left in me.

  Instead, for the first time since Solange had held the gun to my head that terrifying night four months ago, since that hopeless moment where she’d made me feel as if my presence here was all for nothing, I cried.


  I didn’t end up helping Titine decorate the nursery that afternoon. Instead, I left her there with piles of girly paintings, fluffy baby bunnies and teddy bears, boxes of pink and white furniture yet to be assembled, and her dwindled excitement. I promised her that I would come back to help tomorrow, but told her that today, I needed to get some air, clear my head, and spend some time alone.

  She reluctantly let me go, that look of pity never leaving her eyes. And I couldn’t take it; I couldn’t bear the way she looked at me. I had to get out of there. I had to break out of those four pink walls that would soon house a baby.

  And most important, I had to figure out what was next, since it was becoming clear that I would never have my own.

  Winding endlessly through the streets of Paris, I didn’t pay attention to where I was going or where I would end up. The only marker of how far I’d gone was the tip of the Eiffel Tower, which appeared through the trees or in between buildings every so often.

  How would I continue on in this life when, on the inside, I was still holding onto the remnants of my hopes and dreams from my life as Claudia? When I couldn’t answer the questions Antoine had been asking about why my eyes were a different color now, why I talked differently and acted differently from the old Ruby? About why the story I’d told him about my father’s murder didn’t match up with stories Titine had mentioned to him about my family.

  I wanted so badly to tell him that even though I was Ruby—and I did feel at home here, in this life and in her body—I still wasn’t only her. I was someone else too. I was a woman who’d grown up feeling unloved by my own mother. A woman who’d been independent ever since that fateful day when I’d lost my father and realized my mother would never forgive me for his death. I was a woman who’d studied psychology in college and had become a therapist so that I could help others avoid the problems I’d dealt with in my own family. I’d counseled couples on how to get along, how to raise their children, how to overcome setbacks when I, myself, had never been able to see a relationship through to marriage.