AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Well, that’s a question out of left field, Ms. Courtenay.” But then the smile bloomed shyly on that wide mouth. “Despite being quite a disappointment to my mom, who was absolutely amazing, I don’t remember my childhood as unhappy. We had nothing and my mother, a widow, cleaned rich people’s houses. We lived in a little town on Lago di Como. I swear, to this day I can’t think of anything more beautiful than the lake’s water on a summer evening. So maybe that peace of the early Lombardian dusk and the bluish-green of Como is my favorite memory.”
Chiara, who had been casting her sight into the distance as she spoke, uttered the last sentence looking straight into Vi’s eyes, and then she leaned in and gave her a perfectly innocent, and thus perfectly acceptable, kiss on the cheek.
“Thank you. I needed a little bit of that peace and a little bit of that color tonight.” And Vi forgot about all her earlier misgivings and prayers. She was sinking, and she felt like nothing could stop the undertow from pulling her into the deep.
She blinked slowly, lost in the beauty surrounding her, the imagery once again overriding her thought processes. The way the Paris evening hung in the air like a kite in the soft summer breeze, its colors bleeding into the mood of their conversation, leaving marks of wistfulness on Chiara’s face. A face that was now close to hers, eyes watchful yet careful in their pursuit.
An eyebrow raised, and Vi felt the kite soar. What a vision Chiara was, the city at her feet, that indolent brow, demanding and arrogant, but the eyes amused.
“You look… All this… I don’t know…” Vi trailed off, words escaping her, so she just gestured at Chiara and beyond her at the City of Lights, confused by what she was seeing, at what she wanted to express.
But Chiara just tipped her head to the side slowly, her gaze pensive, before she carefully tucked a flyaway lock behind Vi’s ear, making her shiver.
“I wonder…”
The murmur was so quiet that, for a second, Vi believed she’d imagined it. And then Chiara was gone, gait graceful and unhurried. Vi gulped and deliberated if she should follow, but before she could make up her mind, Chiara was back holding her phone. She flicked it open to the camera app.
“Don’t worry about the bells and whistles and all the things that make photography so overwhelming. Aperture, depth of field, dynamic range. I don’t care about any of that. I’ve been watching you. You have a vision. You always seem to. The gown, the views, and the people. Show me what you see.”
Slender hands pushed the phone into Vi’s, and with a practiced assuredness, Chiara took a step forward, closer to the edge, and Vi’s breath caught. Paris and Chiara Conti were made for each other. Moody, tempestuous, untamed, a wild spirit wrapped into a veneer of carefully constructed sophistication.
All the hours spent daydreaming with her camera, all the books she’d read under her covers on photography, came roaring back into Vi’s mind. She took a breath, focused, and her fingers captured her vision.
When she finished in what could have been seconds or minutes later, Chiara took the phone from her shaking hands, and Vi heard her exhale raggedly. The amber eyes were large, expressive, holding wonder in them like a wounded bird. She lifted them to Vi, and her smile was radiant.
“Ms. Courtenay, you’ve been holding out on me. On yourself as well, I bet.”
Vi could feel the pleasure in her back teeth, like something overly-sweet, it was so acute, so sharp, it verged on pain.
“It seems I have use for you beyond being Aoife’s favorite gopher, after all.” Chiara pocketed the phone and turned back to the Parisian roofline as the birds made their last circles in the dusk sky. Vi watched them lightheaded. She suspected it was more from Chiara’s words than from her fear of heights.
* * *
In the distance,someone was playing music, and the heavy thrum of the bass found an outlet in Vi’s chest, her heart beating to the slow rhythm as the notes pulsed and saturated the air. They stood there for another hour, the remainder of the food in the container and Vi’s plans to attend the family dinner, all forgotten.
Chiara watched the sunset, and Vi watched Chiara, her heart trembling along with the far-away songs. There was such serenity in the other woman’s posture, in her slow, deep breathing, that Vi dared not ask anything else at the moment. She decided that she would in the future, now that she had permission.
But she wouldn’t touch the topic of Frankie. Or what had happened the other day. Or all the heavy, meaningful silences at Lilien Haus. Eventually she thought she’d figure them out, but this… This quietude she would not mar with whatever those silences meant.
* * *
She baskedin the dreamy thud of her heart inside her chest, and in the way it kept her warm and safe all the way to her tin can of an apartment on top of Montmartre. Nothing fazed her. Not the dirty subway car, nor the man in the back of it throwing her dirtier looks, yet.
She was smiling like a loon despite being drenched by the surprise cold shower that had hit her right before she entered the Palais Royal station. Even the wet sounds her Converses made as she climbed the seven stories up to her apartment didn’t bother her. Neither did the climb itself. The elevator never worked right in this building.
She felt invincible, the warmth of Chiara’s eyes and the soft words of the shared memory spurring her on.
When she opened the door, backing into the room, her eyes were on the few envelopes she’d picked up from her mail box downstairs. The studio was quiet. Perhaps too quiet. She whirled around.
“Genevieve, your place is disgusting.”
4
ONCE UPON A TIMELY SCHEME
Genevieve Courtenay was grateful that she managed to swallow the scream of fear, then succeeded in doing the same with the whimper of pain at catching her fingers on the door handle as she fumbled to close it.
Who else but her father could be waiting for her in the dark? And what else would he say? Derision and disgust were two of the emotions most often expressed by Charles Courtenay upon beholding his first- and only-born.
