Sun-Kissed (24 page)

Memoir

Blame It on Paris

SNOW-KISSED

The snow fell over the black granite counter in a soft hush of white. Kai focused on the sieve she shook as she brought a winter of sugar to the dark world, letting the powder slide across her thoughts the way snow on a falling night would, taking all with it, even her, leaving only peace.

That peace lay so cold. She had almost forgotten how cold she felt, until he showed up.

The man who, once upon a time, had always made her so warm and happy.

Now he stood at the window, looking as cold as she was. Destroying all peace. Past him and the pane of glass, only a few flakes fell against a gray sky, rare and disinterested, nature as usual failing her. Her fall of powdered sugar could not come between her and him, could not blur him to some distant place cut off by the arrival of winter. Could not hush him, if ever he chose to speak.

No, all she could do was concentrate on the sugar-snow. Looking up—looking at him—undid everything.

“I don’t think they’re coming,” the man said finally, and she swallowed. It was funny how her whole body ached at his voice. As if her skin had gotten unused to his vibrations running over it. As if she needed to develop tiny calluses at the base of every hair follicle so that those hairs would not want to shiver.

Light brown hair neatly cut, he stood angled toward the window, shoulders straight, with that long, intellectual fitness he had, the over-intelligent, careful man who had played sports almost like he might study for a test, maintaining perfect physical fitness as just another one of his obligations. She still remembered when he had discovered Ultimate Frisbee, the awkward, unfamiliar, joy-filled freedom in him as he explored the idea of playing something so intense
just for fun
. It had been rather beautiful. She had gone to all his games and chatted with the other wives with their damn babies and even played on his pick-up teams sometimes, although unwilling to put forth the effort to be part of his competitive leagues.

Those fun, fun years full of weekends of green grass, and friendly people, and laughter. They had had too many happy days. They clogged in her all the sudden, dammed up too tight, hurting her.

She had screwed them all the fuck up. Forever.

She didn’t know what to say to him, after what she had done, so she concentrated on shedding snow, like some great, dangerous goddess bending over her granite world, a creature half-formed from winter clouds, drifting eerily apart from all humanity. She wished he had not come, but the thought of him leaving wrenched a hole in her that filled up instantly with tears.

Hot, liquid tears that sloshed around inside her and wanted to spill out. That in itself was terrifying and strange; she had thought she had tamed her tears down to something near-solid and quiescent, a slushy of grief that lay cold in her middle but no longer spilled out at every wrong movement, every careless glimpse of happy couples or children laughing in a park.

She had so hoped that she had reached a point where she could—see him. Where all that long process of coming to peace with herself and her losses would be strong enough to withstand a glimpse of him. But all of her, every iota of strength and peace, had dissolved into pain and longing the instant she saw him step out of his car, a flake of snow catching on his hair.

Damn it, his mother was supposed to be here. She was supposed to come with her magazine staff for this shoot, a whole entourage to make it easier on both Kai and Kurt. How could they have abandoned her to this reopening of wounds because they were afraid of a few flakes of snow?

She focused with all her strength. She had to get this sugar exactly right, not too thick, not too shallow, not too even, not too ragged, leaving perfect graceful curves and fades into black at its edges. It was soothing to work on that white against gleaming black. To focus on those tiny grains, almost as tiny as cells of life.

She could control these grains. She could always get them right. If she worked hard enough. If she really, really tried.

“The snow is supposed to start from the south and close us off,” Kurt said from the window. “They probably didn’t want to chance it.”

Now why would Anne Winters’s staff do that to her? Leave her alone with him just to avoid bad roads? Those selfish people, it was almost as if they had . . . families. Reasons to live that were far more important than she was.

Kurt shifted enough to watch her, but she didn’t look up. She shouldn’t have let him come, but for God’s sake, his mother was Anne Winters. First of all, Anne had only rented the cabin to Kai so affordably on the condition that Kai maintain it for her use in photo shoots when she wanted it. And even without that agreement, Kai was a food stylist who regularly contracted to Anne Winters’s company. She could hardly refuse this photo shoot for next year’s holiday edition, Anne’s biggest. And accepting it, she had to jump through Anne’s hoops, even the famous multi-tasker’s insistence on having her lawyer son with her for the weekend so she could work on contract negotiations simultaneously. Her formidable presence and the bustle of her staff should have helped dissipate all this miasma from their past and saved them from any need to linger in it.

Besides, Kai was supposed to be strong enough for this now. She had worked so hard to heal, to grow strong. To still and chill those tears down to something—bearable.

“Are you ready to be snowed in?” Kurt asked. “Do you want me to run to the store and pick up any supplies while there’s still a chance?”

Her stomach tightened as if he had just pierced it with some long, strange, beautiful shard of ice.
Kurt. Don’t take care of me. You always did that so, so
—the ice shard slid slowly through her inner organs, slicing, hurting—
well.

“Why don’t you check your email so that you’ll know for sure whether they’ve cancelled?” he suggested. “Or find your charger so I can check my phone?” They had matching smartphones; their shared two-year contract still hadn’t expired.

She didn’t check her email or find her charger mostly because she didn’t dare leave this powdered sugar snow. She had to keep her focus. She had to.

She hadn’t yet managed to say a word to him. When she had opened the door, she had meant to. It shouldn’t have been so hard.
Hello, Kurt
. She could say that, right? After practicing it over and over in her head on the way to the door. But the instant their eyes met, his hazel gaze had struck her mute. As the moment drew out, his hand had clenched around his duffle until his knuckles showed white, and his whole body leaned just an inch forward, as it had so many, many times in their lives, when she greeted him after a long day or a trip, and he leaned in to kiss her.

She had flinched back so hard that her elbows had rapped the foyer wall with a resounding smack, and he had looked away from her and walked quickly into the cabin without speaking, disappearing to find a room for his things. It had been at least twenty minutes before he reappeared, his hands in his pockets, to set himself at that post by the window and watch the road. Probably sending out a desperate mental call to his mother:
Hurry up, God damn it. Where the hell are you?

But the cars hadn’t come, and now he watched her. She could feel his gaze trying to penetrate her concentration on the snow. But she had to get that powdered sugar snow just right. She had to. Even if she had to play at snow for all eternity.

“Kai,” he said and she shivered. Her name. Her name in his voice. “Can you still not even look at me?”

Named one of the best books of 2013 by Dear Author and Romance Novels for Feminists, #1 in Amazon’s Short Fiction, and voted by readers as the AAR Tearjerker of the Year (you are warned).
Available here.

THE CHOCOLATE TOUCH

“She’s back.”

Dom straightened from the enormous block of chocolate he was creating, gave his
maîtresse de salle,
Guillemette, a disgruntled look for having realized he would want to know that, and slipped around to the spot in the glass walls where he could get the best view of the
salle
below. He curled his fingers into his palms so he wouldn’t press his chocolaty hands to the glass and leave a stain like a kid outside a candy shop.

She sat alone as she always did, at one of the small tables. For a week now, she had come twice a day. Once in the morning, once in the afternoon. She was probably a tourist, soaking up as much French artisanal chocolate as she could in her short stay in Paris, as they liked to do. But even he admitted it was strange that her soaking up should be only of him. Most wandered: him in the morning, Philippe Lyonnais in the afternoon, Sylvain Marquis the next day. Tourists read guidebooks and visited the top ten; they didn’t have the informed taste to know that Sylvain Marquis was boring and Dominique Richard was the only man a woman’s tongue could get truly excited about.

This woman—looked hard to excite. She seemed so pulled in on herself, so utterly quiet and contained. She had a wide, soft poet’s mouth and long-lashed eyes whose color he couldn’t tell from that far away. Hair that was always hidden by a hood, or occasionally a fashionable hat and a loosely tied scarf, like Audrey Hepburn. High cheekbones that needed more flesh on them. A dust-powder of freckles covered her face, so many they blurred together.

The first day, she had looked all skin and bones. Like a model, but she was too small and too freckled, so maybe just another city anorexic. When she had ordered a cup of
chocolat chaud
and a chocolate éclair, he had expected to see her dashing to the
toilettes
soon after, to throw it up before the binge of calories could infect her, and it had pissed him off, because he loathed having his chocolate treated that way.

But she had just sat there, her eyes half closed, her hands curling around the hot cup of chocolate caressingly. She had sat there a long time, working her way through both éclair and
chocolat chaud
bit by little bit. And never once had she pulled out a journal or a phone or done anything except sit quite still, absorbing.

When she had left, he had been surprised to feel part of himself walk out with her. From the long casement windows, he had watched her disappear down the street, walking carefully, as if the sidewalk might rise up and bite her if she didn’t.

That afternoon, she was back, her hands curling once again around a cup of his
chocolat chaud
, and this time she tried a slice of his most famous
gâteau.
Taking slow, tiny mouthfuls, absorbing everything around her.

Absorbing him. Everything in this place was him. The rough, revealed stone of the archways and three of the walls. The heavy red velvet curtains that satisfied a hunger in him with their rich, passionate opulence. The rosebud-embossed white wall that formed a backdrop to her, although no one could understand what part of him it came from. The gleaming, severe, cutting-edge displays. The flats of minuscule square chocolates, dark and rich and printed with whimsical elusive designs, displayed in frames of metal; the select collection of pastries, his
gâteaux au chocolat
, his éclairs, his
tartes
; clear columns of his caramels. Even the people around her at other tables were his. While they were in his shop, he owned them, although they thought they were buying him.

The third afternoon, when the waiter came upstairs with her order, Dom shook his head suddenly. “Give her this.” He handed Thierry the lemon-thyme-chocolate éclair he had been inventing that morning.

He watched the waiter murmur to her when he brought it, watched her head lift as she looked around. But she didn’t know to look up for him and maybe didn’t know what he looked like, even if she did catch sight of him.

When she left, Thierry, the waiter, brought him the receipt she had left on the table. On the back she had written,
Merci beaucoup
, and signed it with a scrawled initial. L? J? S? It could be anything.

A sudden dread seized him that
Merci
meant
Adieu
and he wouldn’t see her again, her flight was leaving, she was packing her bags full of souvenirs. She had even left with a box of his chocolates. For the plane ride. It left a hole in him all night, the thought of how his
salon
would be without her.

But the next morning, she was back, sitting quietly, as if being there brought repose to her very soul.

He felt hard-edged just looking at her restfulness, the bones showing in her wrists. He felt if he got too close to her, he would bump into her and break her. What the hell business did he have to stand up there and look at her? She needed to be in Sylvain’s place, somewhere glossy and sweet, not in his, where his chocolate was so dark you felt the edge of it on your tongue.

She needed, almost certainly, a prince, not someone who had spent the first six years of his working life, from twelve to eighteen, in a ghastly abattoir, hacking great bloody hunks of meat off bones with hands that had grown massive and ugly from the work, his soul that had grown ugly from it, too. He had mastered the dark space in his life, but he most surely did not need to let her anywhere near it. He did not like to think what might happen if he ever let it slip its leash.

“She certainly has a thing for you, doesn’t she?” his short, spiky-haired chocolatier Célie said, squeezing her boss into the corner so she could get a better look. Dom sent a dark glance down at the tufted brown head. He didn’t know why his team persisted in treating him like their big brother or perhaps even their indulgent father, when he was only a few years older than they were and would be lousy at both roles. No other top chef in the whole city had a team that treated him that way. Maybe he had a knack for hiring idiots.

Maybe he needed to train them to be in abject terror of him or at least respect him, instead of just training them how to do a damn good job. He only liked his equals to be terrified of him, though. The thought of someone vulnerable to him being terrified made him sick to his stomach.