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Vi raised her eyebrow at the needless memorization Aoife had subjected her to, then decided that there were more important matters at hand.
“I’m only half English.” She straightened to her last inch, throwing back her shoulders, and looked down on him from her almost six feet. “My Savoy side has not offended the French, to my knowledge.”
He paused the twirling of his mustache and cracked a small smile. “We would’ve beaten them into submission if they’d dared.”
“That’s what you said about the Russians in 1812 and the Brits at Waterloo in 1815, and how did that turn out for you?”
He stared at her and then began puffing out again with patriotic pride. But before he could argue that the Russians didn’t actually defeat the French in 1812, and it was in fact the cold weather and hunger that had caused so many of them to perish on the march back from Moscow, Vi shook her head at him and lifted her hands palms up.
“Never mind, just… Why did Aoife make me memorize the order if you had already completed it?”
Vi looked at the two bags on the counter in front of her, noticing that the man was giving her an appraising, lecherous look now. That raised her hackles immediately.
“The food smells good, I’ll give you that. But if you’ve been dealing with the Lilien Haus crowd long enough to know their specific order without me having to rattle it off and still can’t recognize a lesbian when she walks in, I got nothing for you, brother.”
To his credit, he didn’t startle this time nor fluster. He shrugged, and then his face took on a blissful, faraway look.
“Lesbian, schmesbian…” He actually sighed loudly. “Chiara Conti is a goddess. You foreigners don’t appreciate beauty if you think we French can’t deify a woman who looks like that. She doesn’t have to be straight. She just has tobe. I’m a beauty connoisseur.”
Then he leaned in and offered Vi his rather large—for such a scrawny man—hand. She responded on instinct and found his handshake to be strong, firm, and warm. His eyes looked directly into hers and he simply said, “Zizou. Like the greatest football player that ever played for France.”
“Vi. Genevieve. Like my great-grandmother who slept with the future king of England, and as she got older, retold the story of that night at every party to the profound embarrassment of the entire family.”
As they both dissolved into laughter, Vi grabbed the bags and exited the bistro, thinking she might have just made another friend.
* * *
Her day wasa blur after lunch. For a person who proclaimed herself to be a ‘one-woman-show’, Aoife had a very well thought-out task list for Vi that made Vi feel productive, despite most of those tasks being menial. Still, it was good to be doing something and be appreciated for it.
As the evening descended on the warm and slightly suffocating Paris June, Vi hurried down Rue Saint-Honoré, trying to outrun the rain that would surely split the tumultuous sky at any moment. She stumbled, almost going head over heels on her own shoelaces, and as she crouched down to tie them, juggling her messenger bag and the papers she was delivering for Aoife, she heard something right as the clouds finally opened to release the first rivulets of a summer shower.
A meow. A tiny, pitiful—yet all things considered rather demanding—meow. She turned around, still crouching, and that’s when she saw it. Him? Her? A rather dirty, small thing of undetermined color that could have been anything between gray and black.
The animal looked back at her and meowed again, the sound even more obnoxious than the first time. Vi, who was getting soggier by the second, just managed to stuff the paperwork into her bag, certainly mangling it in the process, and as she extended a hand towards the creature who was lounging on the wet sidewalk as if it was a throne, it swiped at her hand, fortunately missing it entirely.
Vi yelped at the unexpected attack but still made a grab for the cat who struggled in her hold and tried to bite her, meowing even louder and, to Vi’s ears, even more demandingly. That’s when Vi noticed the rather mangled back paw. Shit. What should she do?
And then, amidst rain and thunder and water running all over her Chucks, a window opened across the street and Chiara’s shout shook her out of her indecisive stupor.
“Ms. Courtenay, bring her here!”
* * *
“How didyou even know she was aher?”
Vi ran a towel over her wet hair and said a small prayer that her blazer had kept most of the rain away from her white shirt. As it was, only her shoes, her hair, and her dignity had suffered any lasting damage.
Chiara was running the towel over the no-longer-mewling or struggling cat, who was drying quickly and revealing a very interesting chocolate color to its fur.
“She has been creating a ruckus under my window for half an hour. It sounded all sorts of disdainful. Arrogant even. But also quite majestic. Only a woman would do that.” Gentle hands examined the cat’s back paw and the crease on Chiara’s forehead deepened. “I’d have gone to her sooner had I known she was in trouble. Judging by the meows, I just assumed she was spoiled. Now I’ll have to call the vet.”
Vi raised her eyebrows.
“You’re keeping her?”
“Well, I can’t exactly throw her out. She needs help. Afterwards, we shall see, right,piccola?” Chiara leaned down, and her nose touched the cat’s who allowed Chiara to nuzzle her. Vi goggled. The cat who’d wanted to strip several layers off Vi’s skin was rather docile with Chiara.Well, of course.
“I don’t actually think ‘piccola’ suits her, though. She looks to be fully grown despite her diminutive size. And the tiny legs.”
