The Summer of Him

by Stacy Travis

  A wave of emotion washed over me because I was in Paris. At sunset. I’d dreamed of coming here, and it was finally dawning on me that it had happened. It wasn’t about meeting a guy, though I wasn’t about to kick this one out of the picture. It was about spreading my wings and figuring out if I was flight-worthy.

  Chris put an arm around me for the photo, and I felt an unexpected twinge in my belly. My cheeks flushed as my heart started beating faster. Just being that close to him made me feel a nervous glimmer of attraction. I worried he could feel it from where his arm rested across my shoulders, but his body language didn’t betray anything. My physical reaction surprised me, partly because I was normally levelheaded and my head was clearly not calling the shots. We were playing the part of a couple on a bridge for one picture, and my body was buying right into it.

  His touch felt like an electric jolt, running from his hand through my body and quickening my pulse. The physical attraction was beyond my power to control it and I struggled against its unwelcome intrusion into a pleasant dinner with a fellow traveler, albeit one with a stellar physical form. The fact that he had this effect on me had nothing to do with his fame or his place in the public eye. I hadn’t felt it when we were just sitting and talking. Well, maybe I had felt it a little, but my rational brain had still been holding court, reminding me that it was just one dinner with someone I’d never see again.

  But now… his hand across my shoulder burned like it would leave a mark, a hot, sweet reminder of the butterflies that were massing in a storm as I tried to breathe evenly and slow my heartbeat.

  “Merci, bonne soirée,” Chris said as the man handed back my phone and he leaned in to look at the photo.

  “Not bad,” Chris said. “See what I mean about the lighting? Perfect, right? You’ll have to send that to me.”

  That surprised me. He wanted a copy of the forced photo with the girl who cries over groceries and doesn’t watch superhero movies? Well, he didn’t know about that second part yet. Maybe it didn’t need to come up.

  “I have to tell you,” I couldn’t help saying, “you don’t seem actor-y.” I looked him over, up and down. He certainly looked like a person throngs of female humans would want to watch on a screen in the dark, but I wasn’t talking about his appearance. He was just… real. And kind and normal. He was the kind of person I would want to be friends with… or date… or spend much more than one evening with, if we weren’t in a foreign city with pre-set parameters and limits. So I stuffed those thoughts away, because… what was the point?

  “Well, thanks. I think. Was that a compliment?” The corners of his mouth edged up into a grin and he looked pleased, but a little confused.

  “Yes. Totally. Absolutely. And I don’t know a lot of actors, or any actors other than my neighbor who does the voice in Burger King commercials. So I know I shouldn’t generalize. But like I said, I work for a PR firm, and we have some actor clients, and my colleagues kind of complain that they’re a handful. Demanding and arrogant. You just seem really… nice.”

  “Thanks,” he said again. “I strive for nice. And normalcy. And sorry your clients are like that. Some actors are, I guess. I mean, I certainly know a few…” He got a strange look on his face that I couldn’t decipher.

  “I’m sure.”

  “And I should say, you’re chill compared to most women I meet. I’m glad our paths crossed this morning.”

  I grew suddenly tongue-tied. Was I chill? I had no idea. I decided not to admit I’d had no idea he was any kind of a big deal until a half hour earlier. Let him think I was chill. “Thanks,” I said, eager to change the subject. “Um, I guess we should go to dinner?”

  Chris didn’t move. He kept his back against the rail of the bridge as I moved to start walking. He grabbed my hand and pulled me back, so I turned to face him. He didn’t say anything for a moment. He tilted his head and looked at me like something about me confused him.

  “Everything okay?” I asked.

  He nodded, his gaze shifting to my eyes. “You didn’t know, did you? That I’m an actor. You didn’t recognize me?”

  Caught. I felt the heat creep over my cheeks again. He didn’t seem bothered, just curious. “I… I mean… no. I’m sorry. I don’t see a lot of popular movies.”

  “Please. No apologies,” he said, looking from my eyes to my lips like he had earlier. “I like it.”

  “You like that I live under a rock?”

  “I don’t think you live under a rock. I think you probably have better things to do with your time than watch action films.”

  “You don’t find it insulting?”

  He shook his head. I was acutely aware that he was still holding onto my hand and like every other part of me he’d touched so far, it was melting. “Not at all. The types of movies I do aren’t for everyone. It’s not a thing for me.”

  “But it’s your job. And you’re obviously good at it. I just happen to be the one person in the world who doesn’t like caped crusaders.”

  That made him laugh. “I don’t wear a cape.”

  “Maybe you should. I think you’d look fetching in a cape.”

  His smile opened up a little more. “Noted.”

  I was relieved to hear that he really didn’t seem to mind that I was oblivious to his clearly-successful career. I’d be able to relax during dinner and not worry about that secret coming out. I’d have enough to worry about just trying to keep my pulse from skyrocketing and my face from turning the shade of a beet if his hand happened to graze an exposed inch of my skin.

  The sun was down, and the clouds were reflecting even more beautiful shades of pink and orange. “Look. Gorgeous, right?” I pointed to make him turn around and take in the last moments of the sunset and see the astounding color spectrum. He gave it the sunset a passing glance and nodded.

  “Gorgeous,” he agreed.

  But he wasn’t looking at the clouds. He was looking at me.

  Chapter Twelve

  Frenchie Bar au Vins

  It was almost as if that Frenchman on the bridge had decided we were a couple, so we started acting like a couple. Or maybe it had nothing to do with him and everything to do with the insane molten heat that erupted every time Chris touched me. After walking a half dozen blocks and crossing over the Les Halles mall, Chris put a hand on my back to point me toward a set of stairs. Just for a moment. But I swear his hand left its own heat signature, a mark on my back that I felt radiating warmth for blocks. I started to wonder if he really had superpowers. I also started to wonder if I’d be able to relax at all during dinner, between his arrestingly deep, dark eyes and this new mysterious heat element.

  We made our way down a lively street which was dotted with dozens of cafés and bars, all spilling over with people who congregated in the street. Chris grabbed my hand as we wove in between groups of people milling and hanging outside the bars. It felt completely natural, like Paris had cast a spell over the evening, except for the flames licking my palm and snare drum in my heart. I needed to get a grip.

  I decided not to clutter my brain with analysis. Actor, superhero, whatever. One night dinner, one-night stand. I didn’t feel the need to put nouns and descriptions to the night ahead. Chris was leaving in the morning, which was a huge relief. It allowed me to let down my guard for the night and just enjoy being there with him. There would be no awkward questions at the end of the night—what are you doing tomorrow? Should we try to meet up again? No? Too awkward?

  Annie’s words came back to me: “It’s the definition of a one-night stand.” It felt good not to think too much.

  The restaurant Chris liked was down a small street, where I saw that every table was filled at Frenchie, the fixed-menu restaurant I’d seen written up on countless food blogs when I initially researched the trip. I looked longingly through the window at the perfectly presented dishes on the diners’ plates. Johnny would’ve hated it. Chris said he’d been there twice and loved it.

  “It’s great, but honestly, I lik
e the wine bar better. It’s more casual, and the food is incredible,” he said, pointing at the sister restaurant across the street. “But if you come too early, people are crowded three deep at the bar and hanging out the door. The wait can be an hour. We timed it perfectly.”

  I didn’t bother to point out that he could probably get a table instantly anywhere he wanted. If people recognized him as easily as the waiter had at La Fontaine de Mars, they’d roll out the red carpet and give him the best seat in the house. But he didn’t seem like he had the kind of ego that would exploit that.

  Even though the crowd was thinner, every seat in the wine bar was still full. We waited about ten minutes, sipping glasses of Sancerre wine by the bar. The bartender, who looked a little younger than me and a lot prettier in that French-chic way, was eyeing Chris the whole time we stood there. I almost felt protective of him, annoyed that people didn’t just leave him alone and let him come to a restaurant in peace. But he seemed unbothered or even oblivious to the attention, so I wasn’t going to be the one to make a big deal of it. His eyes never wavered from mine, a bit to the irritation of the bartender, who tried a couple of times to interrupt our conversation to ask if we needed anything else. We didn’t.

  Dinner was a blur of wine and small plates, which we shared at a tiny high-top table, perched on barstools in the window. Something about being in France allowed me to drink coffee and wine and barely feel their effects. What I did feel was the effect of Chris.

  He lightly touched my hand while I was telling him a story about my dad, interlacing his fingers with mine like we’d known each other much longer than a few hours. Maybe he was always like this with people—comfortable in casual intimacy. Maybe he was just acting like a good dinner date. But I was falling for it.

  With every touch of his hand, I felt another magnetic urge of wanting to be closer to him. It was loud in the restaurant, where every table was still occupied an hour after we’d arrived, so I had to lean in to hear him talking. When he moved his barstool closer to mine, I wasn’t sure whether he was just making it easier for us to talk or feeling the same attraction to me.

  We talked about mundane things, telling each other stories that gave a small window into parts of ourselves. I learned that Chris’s mother met his dad when she was a visiting professor at the university where he was finishing up graduate school. “She was a few years older than him, and he was very impressed with how smart she was,” he said. “She’s definitely smarter than him.”

  “What does she teach?”

  “Art history. And he’s an accountant. He always says he has to work hard to keep up with her when she’s talking about her work, and she has to work hard not to fall asleep when he’s talking about his.”

  “Cute.”

  “They are pathologically cute. It’s almost annoying. It’s the kind of relationship people write about in timeless classics like Jane Eyre.”

  “Except Rochester was tricked into marrying Jane’s sister and she goes mad.”

  “Okay, maybe not the best example.”

  I put my hands up. “Hey, I’m not judging. They’re your parents. If you say your dad is Rochester, I believe you.”

  He laughed, but then his expression changed suddenly, like he’d gotten distracted by a thought that bothered him. He swirled the wine in his glass and looked away. If I’d known him better, I might have understood the meaning behind look or whether it was one of his personality traits. But this was a guy I’d met only hours ago and would never see again after tonight, I reminded myself. And while I cared that he seemed unhappy, it didn’t seem like my place to dissect his expressions and offer analysis.

  Instead, I focused on drinking my entire glass of water, and by the time I was finished, he pivoted and asked me about my family. I gladly talked his ear off to fill the void.

  “I’m an introvert in a family of extroverts… I focused on school and my grades because I knew it was a way to win points with adults, teachers, and my parents… My best friend from college lives near San Francisco, which is hard because I have more fun with her than with anyone and I don’t get to see her much…”

  He listened quietly, and eventually, his mood shifted back, and he was asking me questions. “Was your dad always into cooking?”

  “It was kind of a phase. Not a good one. Every Sunday night, we’d have some new dish he’d learned to make because he’d taken a Chinese cooking class with some chef he found on YouTube. He dragged me to a market that had some kind of black eggs that smelled like Sulphur and chicken head and feet and I swore to him I was never going to eat anything he made with those ingredients.”

  “Was that what he bought?”

  “No, he bought noodles and a wok and a lot of soy sauce. The cooking was fine. I just wasn’t a big fan of hot and sour soup or fish sauce, and truthfully, most of what he made was awful. And my mom was worried I’d offend him if I didn’t eat what he made…”

  “Kids don’t have a palate for those kinds of flavors unless you start them young. My mom made Spanish food my whole life,” he said.

  “Sounds delish.”

  “To me, it was. I was a kid who was used to squid and pork belly and saffron, but after one or two tries, my friends wouldn’t come for dinner at my house unless I promised we could order pizza.”

  “Ah, now it’s sounding like my childhood.”

  “Good old American junk food. Nothing better,” he said.

  “Hey, pizza doesn’t have to be junk food. It has at least three food groups if you count the sauce.”

  “I see we’re dealing with a low nutritional bar here,” he said, smiling.

  “I’m actually a pretty healthy eater, but I do have a soft spot for pizza. And anything involving cheese.”

  “Well, you picked the right country for that.”

  As if on cue, three more small plates were dropped on our table, one of them a cheese plate with three selections, a small ramekin of marmalade, and two dried apricots. We’d just finished a dish of tomato and cherry salad and fried zucchini in an amazing sauce. I couldn’t tell what was on the other two new plates, but I trusted anything that came out of the kitchen. Every dish had been perfection, and I’d long ago lost count of how many plates had been delivered to our table.

  Despite my rocky start at Monoprix, my day had turned out well. I snuck a glance at Chris and noticed once again how attractive he was. His eyes did that crazy sparkling thing and when he smiled, it actually made me feel a little breathless. I could see why people would want to watch him on a big screen.

  At the same time, I was having a hard time reconciling the calm, solicitous, regular-seeming guy across from me with the mega-star I now knew him to be. So I chose not to think about it. What was the point? We were just two people having dinner and tomorrow I’d be back on my own to gawk at more art.

  Six more plates and two glasses of cold wine later, we were outside on the street, reversing our path back toward the river. I’d already come to think of it as my anchor in the city, with everything I wanted to do in Paris having some relation to the water. I knew the Seine bifurcated the city, giving it its characteristic right bank or left bank, but I hadn’t anticipated its magic. The water, which at nighttime reflected the lights of the buildings, exerted a magnetic pull. As we walked, I felt more energized as we got closer to the river, eager to see the lights of the Eiffel Tower looming over the water.

  Or maybe I just wanted to go back to the bridge where I’d first felt my surprising physical response to being touched by Chris. During dinner, he’d been one hundred percent focused on our conversation and our food, but as we walked back toward the bridge, he grabbed my hand again and brushed the back of it against his lips. It was a sweet gesture, but the small fire that ignited every time he’d touched me caused a small inferno in my belly that I had to work hard to quell. I struggled to control my heart, which was racing and causing a flush in my cheeks.

  Get a grip on yourself. He’s just being nice.

  Whe
n we got back to the spot where we’d stood hours earlier, we stopped and looked out over the water. This time, we didn’t need the eager Frenchman to suggest that we stand close to each other. I rested my elbows on the rough stone wall of the bridge, looking at how the lights shimmered in the current of the river. He reached an arm around me and pulled me nearer. I felt the breath go out of me again with the closer contact.

  Just to be clear, I was not a person who went all jelly-like over contact with a guy. It never happened. So this was something new, this feeling that merely having his hand on me made it hard to breathe normally, this sense that I was falling into an abyss of unreal pleasure. I couldn’t rationally understand how one individual person could have this kind of effect on me. It was a little unnerving. And I didn’t want it to stop.

  “Different in the dark, huh?” he said, gazing out. It snapped me out of my rapture. A boat was passing under the bridge, shining its lights on the riverbank while the passengers gasped at the beautiful buildings reflected in the water. Everything about this place was picturesque. “Equally amazing though. There’s no such thing as a bad view here.”

  He moved behind me so I was leaning against his chest and he had his arms wrapped around me. “It’s perfect,” I said, feeling my heart rev up another notch as his arms folded me in.

  “You’re perfect,” he whispered near my ear, sending a shiver along my skin. When I turned to look at him, his mesmerizing gaze made my breath hitch. From just inches away, I took in his face, all his features gently chiseled as if Michelangelo had deftly sculpted them from soft marble. I could imagine him playing the role of swoony best friend in a rom-com and leaving throngs of women moaning his name, but at that moment, we were alone. And he was running a finger over my cheek, staring into my eyes.