Which I do.
It shouldn’t be possible to come this hard so many times in one morning, but I manage. I let her have it. I fuck her all the way through. By the time I’m finished with her she’s got both hands braced against the headboard. At the bitter end I drop my head down onto her back and rest there until she pushes me away, laughing.
Until she rolls onto her back and throws an arm over her eyes. It takes a while for her breathing to settle, and I indulge myself in the pleasure of watching it.
I think she might fall asleep, but no.
I’ve barely caught my breath and she’s already propped over her notebook again.
“It starts with a woman on a plane.” Holly pauses, tapping her pen against her cheekbone. “Maybe it starts before that. The Mona Lisa….” She trails off, scribbling more notes.
“Does it have a name?”
She laughs, a short, musical sound that makes her shoulders shake. “I was thinking of calling it Diamond in the Rough.”
“Diamond in the Rough?”
“That’s what you are. Diamond in the Rough by Holly Frank. Though it’ll have to be sexier than my other stuff. Maybe I’ll use a pen name. What do you think?” Holly rolls over onto her back, abandoning the notebook, and threads her arms around my neck.
“Some of that shit is still classified, you know.”
“Well,” she says, “I can probably change some of the details. It is fiction, after all. To be honest if I wrote everything as it happened, some people wouldn’t believe it.”
“Sometimes I don’t believe it, and I lived through it.”
“We went through all that shit, but there’s a silver lining after all. There’s this.”
My lips quirk in a smile. “A book?”
“No.” Her eyes glisten. “You. Us. We’re the silver lining.”
“I love it,” I say, my voice hoarse. “And I love you.”
Her eyes melt. Her whole body melts against me. And of course I’m fucking hard again. It never stops with her, and I never want it to. “I love you, too,” she whispers.
“Are you going to write that into the book?” Love, I mean.
“Of course. It’s the best part.”
EPILOGUE
Holly
On our first morning in Paris, I wake up to mimosas.
“If you’re not walking around Paris drunk on champagne, it’s not a honeymoon,” Elijah says as he hands me the glass. There’s a whole tray of food: croissants and eggs benedict and olives and fruit. He must have ordered the entire breakfast menu.
I laugh without a sound and take a sip of the bubbly orange juice. “What do you know about honeymoons?”
“I know that ours is perfect.” He drinks his entire flute of mimosa in one swallow. And then he gives me a small, abashed grin. Even though we’re married now, and even though we’ve been living together for months, it still surprises me to see that expression on his face. No one’s smile is more hard-won than Elijah’s. “We have a whole city to explore. Where to first?”
I know exactly where I want to go first, and I tell him so.
Elijah shakes his head and laughs. “Do all writers have such an obsession with coming full circle, or is it just you?”
“You don’t have to be a writer to appreciate symmetry,” I say in a prim voice, though secretly I love when he teases me. Teasing usually turns into something much more fun. But not today—if we have sex all morning, I’ll have to nap all afternoon, and this is our honeymoon. We can stay awake all night instead.
An hour later, he keeps his hand on the small of my back in the crowd at the Louvre. Sixteen-year-old me had to keep her feet planted and her elbows out to see the Mona Lisa. She didn’t know she was minutes away from meeting the love of her life. All she cared about was finally seeing the most famous painting in the world.
And that was only the beginning.
Now I don’t have to keep my elbows out. People just…get out of Elijah’s way. He’s muscled and large and wears an expression that looks like a scowl even when I know he’s pleased. Wherever he’s going, a path opens up for him. It’s like walking around with my own personal security.
Which he is.
No one blocks our view of the painting this time. I’m a lot closer than I was when I was sixteen. She still looks small—surprisingly small. I still don’t know why Da Vinci didn’t choose a larger canvas. Something about the size commands my attention. Something about it pulls me in, makes me want to look closer, but the velvet rope stops me.
Elijah leans down and grazes his teeth along the shell of my ear. “Do her eyes follow you?”
“No.” This time, when he asks the question, I’m free to turn away from the painting and lean into him. He’s warm and solid against my back. And mine. He’s mine. “Do they follow you?”
His green eyes twinkle. “Hard to say,” he says. “There are more interesting things in the room. She caught my eye years ago in this very spot. I couldn’t stop looking at her.”
It’s so strange and shimmering, standing here with him. I half-expect to see a younger version of myself waiting here with a younger version of him. Me pretending to be cool. Him in his museum security clothes. So much space between us.
“I want to do this,” I say.
“This?”
“The tourist stuff. That’s what I want to be in Paris. A tourist. Not someone on the run, with secrets. Not someone with the military closing in. I want to see every sight and go to every tourist trap and buy a bunch of cheesy keychains that cater only to tourists.”
“Okay, and we should definitely only speak English.”
That one makes me giggle, because Elijah’s French is flawless. He can actually tailor his accent as if he were from the north or south, if he’s in the upper classes or a working man. He blends in effortlessly here, but it would be funny to see him as the bumbling tourist instead.
We take an Uber to Notre Dame, which wasn’t on our visiting list when I came here as a teenager. A hushed sort of quiet greets us as we enter the church. The intricate ceiling and stained glass draw my eyes upward. We’ve spent a fair amount of time in churches, Elijah and I, but usually in their basements. There are multiple little stands to light candles, and I stop at every single one, dropping in a small donation and selecting a thin, waxy candle.
I didn’t come from a religious family, which is ironic. My father was actually a priest before he met my mother, but he fell out of the church, disillusioned and disgraced. Our childhood was loving with easter eggs and warm yuletide traditions, but there was never a sermon to attend on Sundays, never prayers before bedtime. So I’m not even sure I’m doing it right, this prayer thing, but I close my eyes when I light each candle, sending up silent gratitude to whoever looks down on us for keeping Elijah safe, for letting him find his way to me.
We take a photo in front of the Eiffel Tower and marvel together at its size. I’m too crowd averse to take the elevators up, but we do take plenty of photographs. We play with the distance and perspectives, pretending that he’s holding the Eiffel Tower on his shoulders, pretending I’m squeezing the whole thing between my thumb and forefinger.