(Lest They Leave - Chapter 4)

[madscenes]

CHAPTER INDEX

CHAPTER 4




The wait was insufferable.

After Edgar had driven her home, scolding her for the state of her shoes, it’s going right out of my salary, just you wait and see, it was still hours until Charles was off work, and who knew how long it would be until he deigned to venture home. The days before, Sylvie had lain awake until a quarter past one and half past two, waiting for him, but not waiting with any kind of longing, rather it was the kind of impatient expectation that he’d be there one moment only to vanish the next, the expectation that with him the world would fall back into its usual rhythm, turning on its axis, see, sunset, sunrise, a zenith somewhere, too. And then, once he had gone, that predictability would take a shake again.

One more day that stood and fell with him.

She hated it.

So, after dinner, she had Claire light the fire in the grand living room, telling her to leave it burning at its fullest, Sylvie would guard the flames, before taking her seat in the large armchair by the fireplace, facing the windows that showed her nothing but nightfall now, tugging her legs up beneath her, pulling a blanket across her lap. There, she waited. No kind of longing, just patiently counting the hours. She had stocked up on books (old French translations of Shakespeare from the library), a newspaper, a big pot of tea and biscuits, she would be all right until dawn, and Claire had already promised her, Charles never came home later than that. It would not be a new day without him.

Five, she got as far as. Claire left the doors to the living room ajar around eight o’clock, shaking her head at her mistress not for the first time since she’d arrived from Marseille, and the majestic grandfather clock had just struck one, when she heard him in the doorway. His steps were unmistakable. At least they were to her. Could Eloisa Paolo tell the difference? She must see so many people, after all. Listen to a lot of footfalls on resounding wooden floorboards.

Sylvie turned in her seat, the orange shine from the slowly dying fire making her hair glow like gold, polished. Charles, in turn, was watching her.

“You’re still up,” he correctly observed.

His coat was folded over one arm, his fedora was askew on his head, he looked like his clothes were crawling right off of him. Sylvie swallowed and looked away, into the light, the orange and yellow, the amber and the gold. The flames danced, so she couldn’t help recalling Armand and herself doing the Charleston at that old party. Then, she wondered if Italian actresses also danced it. Lastly, like an afterthought, she wondered if her brother did.

Who else would mademoiselle Paolo dance it with?

“I figured you’d like to know,” she said slowly, holding the secret back, if only because she was dying to tell him. To see his face. She turned her own face back in the direction of him, in the meantime he’d caught his hat between the fingers of his free hand, it now hung at his side, crumbled in his grip.

“What would I like to know?” he asked, sullenly. Tired, she thought. And she cared, for some reason she didn’t understand. Well, she was his sister.

“Armand invited me to meet his parents this Sunday for dinner.” Despite her vow to keep Armand to herself, to pursue him for her own sake, she was still anticipating the moment when Charles would recognise the possibilities of this arrangement, her aloof older brother; acknowledging the possibilities of how much further she could take him in his business, without knowing a single thing about coffee beans, plantations in Africa or distribution routes from there. Simply by knowing something about Armand, and that something was how they shared an experience. How they wanted to share even more. It was only human, wanting another drink of water, another dance.

Another kiss.

Sure, she could feed herself the fruit of that knowledge, but she could just as easily offer it to Charles as well, be the modern-day Eve that the aunties had feared she’d become; see him want it, reach for it, and proceed to walk away with it on her own. Applesauce! Hadn’t she watched him do the same enough times already?

Always in sight, with him, yet never within reach. Sylvie’s lips thinned into a line, hard, desperate. Let me be something to you, it meant. Let me mean something, let me matter.

However, quickly her mouth laid down its defences. It gave in. When Charles’ expression lit up in a brief glimpse of life, enthusiasm, delight, Sylvie’s walls eroded, crumbled and fell, like the world had done once and continued to do, every time he wasn’t somewhere she could see him. So simply, she had delighted him. Wouldn’t she like to do it again? No, the question was, really, couldn’t she do it again and when? Couldn’t she do it again and soon?

“You work fast,” he just commented, but it was a compliment and Sylvie basked in it.

“I’m very charming, didn’t you know?” she tried her luck, teasing him. All she got for her efforts was that same wry smile he’d smiled in the car, taking her from Gare du Nord and home.

“That’s news to me,” he replied.

She refused to feel downhearted. “Are you happy?” she asked. Oh, she so wanted him to say it, to hear the words. For a long while, he simply looked at her, and she looked right back, their eyes locked and his were dark, unreadable, he carried the night within him, she thought. Like their father had done, too. Their father who sang the best lullabies, she remembered, because the night came naturally to him.

On the other hand, Sylvie had their mother’s eyes, they were blue like the sky at dawn. The sky that had fallen. No more sunrises from that side. Please, she remembered begging at the theatre. Where he had led her down the stairs in some kind of compliance, and she’d let herself be held, and she had been content like that.

Would it always have to be him? Would it never be her? The business, the actress and the darn agency.

“I’m saving ‘happy’ for when you succeed,” he said, giving her a curt nod before turning away, heading down the hallway, shrouded in shadows everywhere the light from the embers didn’t touch which was most places, he’d outwaited the flames well and good. “Go to bed, Sylvie.”

Sylvie decided, unmoving in her armchair, now was the time to feel downhearted. Downhearted, determined and furious.

The grandfather clock struck two before the last embers had died, and she’d fulfilled her promise to Claire about guarding the fire, leaving not a single biscuit untouched either. Until then, she stayed up.

Sick of Charles’ orders.


~*~


After lunch Sunday afternoon, kept lighter and less heavy on the meats than usually in recognition of Sylvie’s evening plans, she took Claire with her to her mother’s old dressing room, at this point mostly cleared of boxes and old stowing, because a lady lived in the house once more, rumour had it, and they started going through her ever-growing wardrobe, thanks to monsieur Martin who kept providing, his dressmaking shop sending new outfits over, hats and shoes and lots of dresses, on the daily at this point. Just this morning, a lovely blue evening dress had arrived. Sylvie was looking it over now, considering. On the right shoulder, it wore a big rosette, bundled together with velvet fabric and matched to the dusty blue of the rest of the garment.

“It’s a bit wintry, isn’t it?” she asked Claire who was preoccupied shuffling through a row of red dresses, it was all colour-coordinated in those closets, her maid had put such work into the arrangement of everything. “I don’t want to look like an ice queen in April. I’m not the one supposed to be melting. They are!”

Armand’s parents; Armand could do with a little melting, too, for that matter.

“Maybe one of the yellow ones, mademoiselle. It is Easter.” Claire crossed the floor, holding two different dresses up, a lovely flapper-style evening garment in a pale yellow with inlays of gold and sequin embroidery in a contrasting orange, creating some faintly oriental pattern. The other was darker, but also shorter and Sylvie dismissed that one immediately. She wasn’t dancing the Charleston with Armand’s father, at least she didn’t plan to.

If he asked, who knew?

Weighing the skirt of the pale-yellow dress between both hands, Claire showing it off from different angles as Sylvie let the fabric slide between her fingers, she heard his footfalls approach, the same way she knew the sound of the mice in the cellar, although she rarely went, the draft through the windows in her room, although she never felt cold. Things that existed in her world, but still far, far, far from her. Charles came to a halt in the doorway to the dressing room, looking both her and Claire over, Claire making a disapproving noise, trying to hide Sylvie’s exposed undergarments from view, her knickers and her bandeau bra. She was dressed in little else.

Sylvie just waved her hand at the other woman, drop it, it meant. No use. Instead, she took the dress from the maid’s hands, holding it up in front of herself, showing it off in Charles’ general direction.

He frowned. “Too modern,” was his final verdict, continuing after a moment: “Monsieur Dubois –“ the elder, he meant, Armand was just Armand, to the both of them now, “– doesn’t care for modern women.” Turning his eyes on the maid, he proceeded to point at the heavy, wintry evening dress, commanding, “Get her that one.” Although she knew he had undoubtedly picked it for its more traditional design, Sylvie wished for a hot second that he’d say, it would match her eyes, because if he had, she’d have worn it in a heartbeat. No resistance whatsoever.

Hurrying over, Claire quickly grabbed it, holding it out to Sylvie obediently, but because Charles didn’t give a flying fart about her eyes, she glared at him, before shaking her head at Claire softly, in a way that definitely meant, no. Sure, the blue velvet did match her eyes, but what did he know about that? What did anyone care? Monsieur Dubois could have his modern woman, and Sylvie would find a way to make him like her.

“I’ll wear this one, Claire,” she said, looking Charles straight in the eye, slipping the pale-yellow dress with its golden inlays and orange sequins off its hanger and holding it out for Claire to prepare. First, they needed to fix up her hair, just a hint of finger waves tonight. Something not too modern, right?

In the doorway, Charles’ lips twisted for a second before he turned away wordlessly, closing the door behind himself as he left. He didn’t let it hit him, unfortunately.

Claire returned after having hung everything in its proper place, the wintry dress back among the blues in the closet, while leaving Sylvie’s outfit of choice to steam in the utility room at the other end of the house, so it would be ready for dinner. There were hours to go; plenty of time to accessorise, to apply a discreet and traditional makeup, if that was how they liked it. Plenty of time to get the right curl into her hair.

Just never enough time to question herself; Sylvie had done that enough in the ages that came before the one she lived in now.


~*~


“My father might comment on the dress,” Armand said in a moment’s afforded intimacy, as they walked close together, arm in arm, from the grand hall where she’d been introduced to his parents upon arrival to the dining room in the southern end of the great Dubois mansion lying on the outskirts of Paris, only a short drive from Versailles, a location which was chosen quite deliberately.

Monsieur Dubois thinks himself part of a new generation of kings, Charles had let mention before sending her off. She hadn’t known whether to interpret it as a warning or not. Their father had been an emperor.

And a new kind of king doesn’t need a new kind of woman, Sylvie had replied, nevertheless. To which Charles had smiled his wry smile and told Edgar to bring her home safely, preferably before midnight.

Demands he should better begin applying to himself, really.

“Don’t you like it?” she asked Armand, her tone of voice betraying just a glimmer of worry. The style of it had reminded her of the pink drop-waist she’d worn the first night she met him, only less ornate or heavily embroidered. The cut was similar, same designer, same inspiration. He shook his head, but to soothe her.

“I think you look like a little starlet.”

“Well, that’s what matters to me,” she replied.

His arm flexed beneath her hold as he drew her a little closer to himself, discreetly, nothing too flashy, nothing too daring, but she appreciated the smile he sent her. Grateful. If nothing else, it had to be his turn eventually. He made her so terribly grateful last time.

After a good two minutes’ worth of walking, criss-crossing up and down hallways, she’d need a maid to show her out once she left, that much was certain, they entered a dining room which was larger than the whole ballroom at her parents’ house, a large oblong table set in the middle for four people – and decked with lamb at least ten ways, a dinner table like in the former glory days, the manner in which generations before them served food. Sylvie felt suddenly all mismatched in her modern costume. Armand seemed to be able to tell and gave her hand a squeeze.

The room itself was kept in gold and other metallic hues, like the mirrored walls of palaces before the Revolution. Even the wallpaper was striped in silver and gold. She knew from Charles that although it looked like something out of a prior century, it was relatively newly built and most of it, pretence. His words, not hers.

New-money people are like that, he’d shrugged, examining her appearance as she’d shown up with a slight finger wave and a fine layer of face powder on. It might not be old, but it’s good money all the same.

Her brother cared nothing about these things, and that was at least one thing they saw the same way.

“What a glorious room, this,” she remarked, making monsieur Dubois and his wife exchange a pleased look. Armand pulled out her chair for her before she seated herself. Across the table, monsieur Dubois did the same for his madame. It felt like some bizarre display of monkey see, monkey do, an act on a raking stage, after taking careful direction.

Maybe she should learn from mademoiselle Paolo, though from hear-say, she’d guess, monsieur Dubois shared tastes with his son in that regard. So, maybe she would simply have to endure the unease of her own strangeness; horsefeathers, she had practice in that, at least.

“Madeleine has been in charge of all the interior,” monsieur Dubois answered, referring to his wife, another one with M, she could join Marguerite’s and Marceline’s little club back in Marseille, Sylvie thought. “She has an impeccable sense of aesthetics.”

Madame Dubois bowed her frail-looking head. “He exaggerates.”

Going by the looks of the husband she’d ended up with, a man who resembled his son so much that they could be mistaken for brothers, one slightly older than the other, but not by much, Sylvie would say that she did indeed have good taste, if appearance was truly all that mattered to you. Next to her, Armand shifted slightly in his seat, as if he was looking at his father just then and being, uncomfortably, reminded of the same thing. Out of the blue, Sylvie remembered him maintaining that the plantations in East Africa weren’t exactly his.

She liked that about him. That slight insistence on independence.

“Likewise, I’ll say your dress makes quite the statement,” monsieur Dubois finally arrived at what, for him, must have been the point all along. Sylvie smiled widely, ignoring the awkwardness falling, like night, over the table. Madame Dubois, for her part, didn’t, rather she giggled nervously and waved for the maid, pointing at the soup terrine on the tray cart. The maid, younger than Claire by a few decades, as well as blonde and voluptuous, nodded quickly and began arranging for soup bowls to be filled and divided among the party. Monsieur Dubois was the first to be served, then his wife, then Sylvie and Armand, last. The soup was a dark ombre colour, rich, full of cuts of lamb and various vegetables. She had never had a lamb soup this way before.

“As all art is supposed to,” she replied, waiting for monsieur Dubois to dig into his food before starting, herself. He stalled. Next to her, Armand shifted anxiously, then managed a half-laugh, quickly clarifying:

“Sylvie is an artist, Papa.”

“In fabrics?” monsieur Dubois wanted to know, waving his spoon like a conductor’s baton.

“In paints,” Sylvie told him. He uttered a deep hmm-ing sound, thoughtfully, and began to eat. The rest of the table seemed to breathe a sigh of relief at the sight. Personally, Sylvie was more interested in the soup, it tasted exquisitely. She’d definitely never had anything like it before.

Opposed to difficult men. Those she got a taste of by the dozen.

“What a delicious soup,” she chirped, expecting another generous praise of madame Dubois’ many talents, but instead monsieur Dubois simply said, as if that settled the matter and told her everything she needed to know:

“From Morocco.”

Glancing sideways at Armand, he met her gaze slowly, shaking his head the slightest bit. Better not pursue, it meant, she could tell very clearly.

So, she said: “That must be why the colours are so vibrant.”

Admittedly, she was not strong out in geography, she knew only what little Armand had told her in the shadows of the gardens at home, but was Morocco on the way to Abyssinia, from France? Wasn’t one country in the north, and the other in the east? Did the Dubois family have business in Morocco as well? Good business? Or bad business? It was evident, if nothing else, that they had imported a soup recipe from there, and for now that soup was business enough for her.

As long as they’d brought home Armand, too, what else did Sylvie care about it?

She ate another spoonful and felt the young man gradually relax next to her once more; though his posture remained flawless, his breathing betrayed him. It eased out, little by little. It made her smile and beneath the table, she touched her fingers to his knee, the one closest to her, the strong bend of his leg. He moved it into her touch, until the father spoke again, making her withdraw. Not quickly, but respectfully all the same.

“Do you paint still lifes, mademoiselle Gallard?” monsieur Dubois inquired, flippantly. Next to him, his wife laughed in a very muted way, it fitted the fragile air about her. Sylvie hesitated a long moment, not sure how to respond in a manner that wasn’t flat-out cheeky but they did say, you combatted fire with fire, and she wasn’t the one to start this round. She only followed the direction she was shown. The play and the stage and the cues, all over, wasn’t it?

Besides, she could see how Armand was opening his mouth to speak and while it warmed her to the core of her chest, that he considered her to be a damsel he didn’t mind saving, she’d rather there be nothing to save her from in the first place. Come now, it was only a joke. At least, it was no wry smile and turned back.

The aunties had taught her to count her blessings, it had even been one of their better lessons.

“I paint people, monsieur Dubois,” she told him, cheerfully. “Like the kings of the past had their various portraitists.”

One eyebrow raised in a way that implied she was being very clever and very embellishing, Armand looked at her, head slightly tilted to one side in a way that made his jawline look nice and his eyes bright and his whole appearance ducky, right? There was a curve to his mouth, almost a smile, she wanted to kiss it and see it turn into a proper one. They both knew she painted surrealistically. It wasn’t quite like some Louis XIV.

It felt like a secret shared joke. Really, wasn’t that the cat’s pajamas!

“Don’t we have cameras for that nowadays?” his father carried on, but still sounded intrigued. This gentleman who saw himself as a new generation of king, following in the footsteps of men with birthrights he had no claim to, only their habits, their influence and their wealth. Sylvie didn’t reply for a long moment, looking pointedly aside at Armand and slowly, slowly reaching out to place her hand on top of his on the tabletop, the spotless white tablecloth as backdrop. Armand’s mother watched them for an equally long time.

“Cameras aren’t as romantic, I believe mademoiselle Gallard is saying,” she told her husband, then. “Let the girl paint Armand, it would be for perpetuity.”

“Once, you would send a portrait of the heir to his future fiancée,” Sylvie informed the room at large, the golden and silver-striped walls, the old architectural style that had been no more than twenty years in existence. The father, the mother, the son, seated in the middle of it. “Maybe these days, the fiancée will paint the portrait herself. Times change, don’t they?”

“They do,” Armand replied.

“For better and for worse,” monsieur Dubois conceded, leaving the soup mostly untouched as he placed his spoon next to the bowl. Around the table, everyone else did the same. He looked straight at Sylvie, across the displays of lamb and fine wines, then smiled in a way that appeared somewhat foreign to his features, like the act of digging a modern woman was unknown and unfamiliar to him still. Sylvie thought, oh, that was a lesson for another day. “Let’s see if you can do it in the style of that dress, mademoiselle.”

It was meant as a challenge.

Both Armand and Sylvie laughed; both of them knew. Surrealism was her favourite. Sylvie shook her head, meaning yes, and said: “That won’t be a problem, monsieur.”


~*~


After what amounted to a five-course meal with various snacks and side dishes – as well as the worst dessert she had ever had to pretend to like for thirty-five straight minutes, it wasn’t one of the maids, neither the voluptuous, blonde one nor the elderly matron with the wart that showed her to the door, it was Armand.

His parents sent her off at the stairway that led to their private quarters upstairs with a familiarity they hadn’t greeted her with, the mother kissing both her cheeks with enough air between them to breathe properly and monsieur Dubois stooping so low as to kiss the back of her hand. The King, she thought to herself, smiling slightly, and the Coffee Baron’s little sister.

As he straightened up, his smile said that he was thinking the same thing himself. However foreign the expression still appeared on his face, and who could tell, maybe smiles became a foreign thing after a while, when you had been a stranger yourself for so long in far-away places, he conveyed that much clearly enough.

If Sylvie didn’t like the notion of being a prop, passed from her brother to Armand’s father and back, she sure didn’t give it too much thought, especially as – in that moment – Armand stepped forward, out of line with his parents, and held his arm out to her, like an invitation. Not ‘be led’, but rather ‘be held’ and she’d like that very much, wouldn’t she? She could lead herself, thank you, she simply hadn’t decided on a destination yet. Neither was she in any great hurry to figure it out.

Armand didn’t seem to mind waiting for her, and so long as she didn’t walk alone, at least she wouldn’t stumble in the dark or get lost in the labyrinth of his enormous house. If only her parents had had the kind of lifeline that Armand was proving to provide for her now, right? If only.

She took his arm, looking down at where her hands clasped his elbow, her hair in its immaculate finger waves still sticking to the side of her head. He looked over at monsieur and madame Dubois, she felt the way his head tilted to the side, imagined his jawline, the cut of it.

“I’ll walk Sylvie to her car, Maman, Papa,” he said. It wasn’t a question. He wasn’t asking permission. She liked that about him, his insistence on himself. His authenticity.

How she looked forward to painting that.

They followed the myriad of hallways, covered in a deep-red carpet from start till finish, to the lobby with the double stairways leading up to the ballroom that took up the whole northern end of the first floor, monsieur Dubois had explained upon her arrival, and from there Armand waited for the maid to dress Sylvie in her mink and her gloves, turning down her offer of getting his outerwear, too.

“You’ll freeze,” Sylvie warned him.

“It’s only a short walk,” he assured her, smiling softly, the only edge to him that she could find, and that was only because she was looking for it, the jut to his jaw and his strong chin. He looked keen, even just in his suit, with no hat, no scarf, no gloves. Once she was ready to go, he offered his arm again, and she took it. The same feeling of being held gripped her, although she was the one doing all the holding.

“My parents won’t say it, but they were very impressed,” he told her as they walked side by side, the open courtyard in front of the house lit along the edges by all-new electrical lampposts. The shadows fell at intervals, covering their shoes, their legs, then their fronts and their faces. It was playful, atmospheric, and felt like a small rebellion against the late hour. When they passed by a small chestnut tree at the corner of the mansion, he brought them to a halt. She wondered whether they could still be seen from the first-floor windows. She wondered whether she cared if they could.

“Were you impressed?” she asked him, the gravel crunching beneath her heels as she shifted from foot to foot, the chill crawling up beneath her skirts, her fur coat, seeping through her stockings. He huffed out a breath that could’ve been a laugh, but didn’t feel mocking, maybe not even truly amused.

“Yes, but I’d expected to be,” he replied, reaching out slowly to catch her arm in one hand, halting her restless movements. Sylvie went very still. It was the first time he’d been so forward with her; she was the one who had initiated everything else, or he had asked her to choose him, herself.

Here, now, she felt chosen.

“That’s what matters to me,” she said. She didn’t move out of his reach or shrug off his hold on her.

When Armand leaned down to kiss her, it wasn’t the kind of kiss that she had given him at Charles’ extravagant party, in the shadows of their own garden, it wasn’t chaste or mild-mannered or, indeed, very gentle at all, as if he’d set all those aspects of himself aside, not because he didn’t think she had earned them, but because he seemed to think she had earned to experience him without.

She liked that. She found it encouraging. Kissing him back, feeling the way he was trying to strike a comfortable middle ground for her, as if it was obvious but hopefully not too obvious that he was the first man she had ever let near like this, Agnès didn’t count and wasn’t a man, besides, Sylvie eventually reached up both arms and linked them behind his nape, tugging him down towards herself, to encourage him as well. Yes, it meant. Please.

Don’t let go.

He didn’t. His hands supported her by the waist, pulling her in towards himself, the same way but less primly as he’d done, walking her to the dining room, and they stood front to front for a long moment, breathing each other in, and he tasted like the coffee they’d drunk before her visit had ended, and she wondered where from the beans came tonight, North or East Africa.

Drawing back, she was short of breath. He was as well, another experience shared, like the Charleston and the small square on Boulevard Saint-Germain. “Tell me about Morocco,” she asked. For the first time, he shook his head at her in a way that meant no, unmistakably so. She, in turn, nodded. To say, understood.

“Not tonight,” he said. What kind of man was he, really, that even his refusal could hold a promise?

The rest of the way to the car, they walked close together but without touching. When Edgar saw them appear from the broken shadows hanging over the courtyard, he sprang to his feet and hastily threw open the door to the backseat for her.

Like Cinderella and her prince, Armand was seeing her off as the clock struck twelve.


~*~


“I said, before midnight,” Charles reminded her quietly, as she sauntered, feeling light as a feather, past the grand living room where she had been waiting for him a couple of nights ago, and where he was waiting for her now. He was dressed in his pyjamas and a light dressing gown, nursing a glass of cognac. It was almost two, the drive home had taken a while, Edgar cursing the whole way. I’ll be getting in trouble for this, mademoiselle, he’d muttered when closing the car door after her, lighting her way back inside the townhouse with an old-fashioned oil lamp he’d found in the shed. By the main hallway, she’d been able to convince him to let her go the rest of the way on her own. It was late. No one was up, neither should he be. Go to bed, Edgar.

He'd shaken his head at her, but not argued. It wasn’t in his place, was it?

If it weren’t in Charles’ place either, he didn’t care.

Wanting to say something coy, something she could imagine Eloisa Paolo would say, you gave me a fright, chéri, don’t hang around in the dark like some heel, she met his eyes, however, and could tell, it wasn’t the right occasion. Maybe he’d been home all night, waiting for her. Maybe he hadn’t seen mademoiselle Paolo even for a spell, because of her. Maybe Sylvie shouldn’t be as delighted by that thought as she was. So, she replied, “We had such a good time, Charles.”

In the moonlight that streamed through the windows, the only source of illumination in the big, eerily silent room, Charles’ eyes looked bottomless and without pity. “You’re the one who’s happy,” he observed.

Can you afford me that much, she wondered. You can afford everything else, after all.

What she said was, “One of us has to be.”

He huffed out a breath. On Armand, it would have been a laugh, she was sure, it would have been lovely, but she could never tell with her older brother. He might be irritated, he might be sad, Sylvie wouldn’t know the difference one way or the other. Part of her wanted badly to tell him how tonight the world had opened up a little more to her, the first man ever had kissed her on the lips and even that experience wasn’t barred to her, it wasn’t out of reach, where in Marseille and before Marseille, at the school, she had lived in a cage. Charles had kept her there. That had been his choice.

Swallowing hard, she turned to leave, continue down the hallway, mossy green carpets muting her footfalls, towards her own quarters. He got up from the armchair so quickly that his drink sloshed, and he put it down on the nearest horizontal surface, a buffet near the doorway. Then, he moved up in front of her, blocking her way and looking down at her from the heights that were his and which she could never reach.

“Edgar should’ve walked you all the way inside,” he remarked. Sylvie shrugged.

“I told him not to.” A pause and she implored Charles, simply, “Please don’t make things difficult for him because of me.”

“I’m making things difficult for him because I’ll be doing his work instead.” He moved up next to her, grabbing her by the shoulder, it was in lieu of putting his arm around her, she imagined. She’d like to imagine.

“No one’s asking you to,” she said, her breath a little bated, wanting to hear him say that he wanted to.

“No,” Charles just responded. They walked together past closed doors, rows upon rows of them, Claire had been throughout before she left for mid-town where Sylvie had eventually learned she lived with two children and a chimneysweep husband, though only by overhearing her chatter with the gardener. The only privacy they touched upon when they were together was Sylvie’s, naturally.

She didn’t get her ‘I want to’ from Charles, but omissions could be just as telling as the words themselves, right? Not as satisfactory, but between them, it seemed Sylvie was the one chasing Charles’ satisfaction, not the other way around. He steered her towards her rooms, the hallway didn’t feel as dark, scary or long in his company. Her arm burned where he was gripping it; glancing sideways up at him, she found herself smiling slightly.

There was a split second where she saw them from the outside in some strange fashion, this tall, thirty-two-year-old fellow who looked forty at the least, dragging off with a ten-year younger girl that no one would believe for a hot second was his sister, and she wondered in that moment where she had got the courage to follow him and even more so, where she had got the courage to fight him. Who was this girl? Who had Sylvie become after arriving in Paris? Was it the clothes? Was it the circles, the society here? Was it the security of having her own place to return to halfway through the night that would otherwise have swallowed her, the nights had been endless and pitch-black in the aunties’ house, always.

Dawn could never come fast enough.

With him, she wasn’t afraid. Puzzled, sure, and often frustrated, but not afraid of anything except the loss. That was such an old feeling, however, she knew how to navigate that sea, didn’t she? Unlike the big boat that took her parents, she could find her own way across, but she’d rather they found it together, if she was honest.

The rest of the distance between the living room and her quarters were crossed in an almost comfortable silence, as if they both enjoyed going somewhere.

As if they were both relieved that now, ‘somewhere’ was the home they shared.