“So, Catherine. Twenty years to explain. You should go first.” His eyes challenged mine, a playful smile on his lips. I took another sip—all right, it was a gulp—and breathed deeply.
Right—a succinct summary of my adult life. Go.
“Well, I finished uni—I became a teacher, like I’d planned, like my sister, Sarah. You remember Sarah, yes?” A quick nod signalled for me to keep going. “So, I started teaching, obviously …” Why am I nervous? Damned gorgeous Frenchman. “Then ten years ago we moved to London—me and Sarah.”
“This explains your accent.”
“Mine?”
“Yes, it is, ah, mostly English, but still some Australian, n’est-ce pas?” he teased. He was right. I’d never really shaken some of my Aussie-accented words. It was a dead giveaway to anyone who paid attention to that sort of thing.
“C’est vrai—guilty.” He smiled. “Anyway, Sarah went back to Australia after a couple of years, and I stayed in London. Teaching. And that’s about it,” I lied, ignoring the glaring omission of Scott from my tale.
“Now you.”
His lingering look told me he had questions, but he didn’t pry. Instead, he said, “I also finished university and moved to Paris. Then I started working for a magazine—”
I interjected. “Writing?”
“Oui, yes, writing articles.” He’d been a terrific writer when we were kids. I was glad he’d stuck with it.
“There, I met my wife …” Whoa. What???
“Hold on, you’re married?”
He licked his lips and took a sip of wine. It took far too long for him to answer and my stomach plunged into my shoes as the moments ticked by.
“I was. For a short time, a few years. We were very young.”
“So …?”
“We divorced, uh, eight years ago. We remain friends.” Oh. “Vanessa.” Great, so she had a name. Vanessa. Certain Jean-Luc’s wife would have been stunning, my mind immediately produced Vanessa Paradis stealing languidly between rose bushes, like in a perfume ad.
I tried not to be jealous of the woman he had married—mostly because I had no right to be. I abruptly changed the subject. “So, do you still work for the magazine?”
He shook his head and drank more wine. “Non, I stayed there for a few years, then I went freelance. A little bit of a risk, but it was good in the end.”
“And now?”
“Now it is the same. I write for some magazines and some blogs—they are less money, but often more interesting—and sometimes the newspaper. Current affairs, important issues, political matters at times.”
“Wow, that’s impressive, Jean-Luc.” I meant it.
“Merci. I think it is interesting—at least for now. I travel a lot, though, and that is, ah, you know, comme ci comme ça.” Like this, like that, the equivalent of “so-so”. I’d never regularly travelled for work, so I could only guess how quickly the shine would wear off. Sarah said the two years she worked for Ventureseek were the best and the worst she’d ever had.
“And what about the guy?” His question shook me from my thoughts. The guy? Oh, you mean Scott, the cheating bastard!
“We broke up. Ten years ago. Here, actually.”
“Here?”
“Paris.” The surprise on his face was nearly comical. “Yes, I know.”
“What happened?” I looked at him and oscillated between telling the whole truth, telling an abridged version, or quipping his question away. I went with the short explanation.
“When Sarah and I moved to London, it was only for a year. Scott … well—we were still together, and I thought we could make it work long-distance. Apparently, he didn’t. He started cheating with a colleague soon after I left—which sucked because he came to visit, and we had a whole trip planned—Paris, Nice, Florence, Rome. He confessed about the affair right before we left on the trip and foolishly, I decided to come anyway, thinking we could fix it—fix us. The whole thing unravelled from there.” So not such a short explanation.
“I’m sorry, Catherine.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“And now? You have someone?”
I did not.
I had not had someone since Scott. I’d had dates and lovers and a couple of fuckbuddies. And I’d stupidly slept with my flatmate a week ago, but no, I did not have someone. I didn’t want someone. I was good without having a someone.
“No,” I said as lightly as I could. “No one.”
It was natural I would then ask the same question of him, but a hard lump formed in my throat. I thought of the extra helmet and barely choked out, “And what about you?”
Again, he took an annoyingly long time to respond. At least, it felt like it. It was probably no more than a second, but time halted while I waited. He shook his head and smiled. “No, no one at the moment.” At the moment. My mind leapt back to Vanessa in her rose garden, a trail of lovely women following her in flowing dresses. Surely, there was a line-up of beauties waiting their turn with this scrumptious man.
His fingers played with the stem of his wine glass, and I noticed that his sipping had slowed down—probably because he had to drive me back to the campsite soon—too soon.
“I missed our letters …”
Guilt engulfed me, followed closely by anger—at Scott.
“Me too.” Deep breath. “Jean-Luc, I so regret ending our friendship like that. I thought it was the right thing to do … Scott, he was just so jealous of you. But still, I felt terrible about it—feel terrible about it. And I’ve missed you—not only the letters, but you, our friendship.”
He was staring at his wine glass, his brow creased. “I’m really sorry,” I added for good measure. He wouldn’t meet my eyes, and I reached across the table for his free hand.
If I’m honest, before that night in Paris, I hadn’t thought about him in a long time. But it didn’t mean the feelings weren’t there. I’d stuffed them into a little box that I’d tucked away deep inside me. From time to time, I’d open the box and remember what it was like having a clever French boy as my bestie. On trips back to Australia, I’d pull an actual box down from the top of the wardrobe in the guest room and spend an hour or two flicking through photos and reading back over the dozens of letters.
But in my everyday life, Jean-Luc Caron was a spectre of a long-ago friend. Even watching him across the table, I had a hard time remembering his exact face at the age of fifteen. He looked up and I saw a gloss of tears in his eyes. I am an utter cow.
He blinked them away. “And right when email became a thing, too,” he replied, a smile tugging at the corner of his lips.
“Sorry?”
“We could have kept writing and saved all that money on stamps.” His smile was gentle, but it didn’t reach his eyes. He squeezed my hand, then let it go. It seemed I wasn’t quite forgiven and all I wanted was to make it right between us.
“Do you remember when we stole your parents’ brandy?” he asked, taking the conversation off on a much-welcomed tangent.
“Hah! Oh, yes, I remember that clearly. It was my first taste of a hangover. You, I recall, were fine the next day.”