Page 101 of All That We Are Together

But on other days…

He was the curve of the moon,

Its smile, its mouth.

And the heat of the sun. Its light.

I traced all those lines,

Got lost in the vertices,

Trembling as I found myself in him.

89

Leah

“Where are we going, Axel?” I asked as we crossed the Seine and our steps echoed over the sidewalk on the Pont d’Arcole.

He didn’t reply; he just walked faster toward the square in front of the cathedral of Notre Dame, then put his arms on my shoulders to guide me. The cold night bit into my flesh, and I shivered under my coat.

“What are you doing?”

“Just stand still right here.”

And he walked off in a straight line.

We looked at each other, and I could hear him panting despite the distance. Then he brought his fingers up to the tip of his nose. He looked up at the dark sky and then back at me. The light of the streetlamps revealed the unease in his face.

“We both know we’ve been through bad times, but I want you to think of all the good things we’ve experienced together. The things you can’t stop thinking of despite how painful all the rest of it is. Do it now, and…” He bit his lower lip before proceeding. “And every time a good memory appears, take a step toward me.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You don’t have to. Just do it. Please.”

“This is weird even for you, Axel.”

“Babe…”

“Fine.”

I yielded when I heard him, though I wasn’t sure any of this made sense, because if he meant good memories I had about him, I could have just taken off running toward him instead of walking. But maybe Axel didn’t know that. Maybe he had doubts and fears too. So I did what he asked. I closed my eyes, thought of us, about the time he used to spend with me when I was just a girl and he had better things to do, when he could have hung out with my brother, how he spent the afternoon in my room, observing my progress when he would come visit my father, how he took care of me and opened the doors of his home to me, how he insisted I had to open my eyes, all those conversations we had, and how he gave in when I asked him to give me a kiss while we were dancing to “Let It Be” and everything started to change, to fill with color and joy and his skin touching mine…

Just as it did then, when I realized I couldn’t take another step because he was already an inch away from me, as though the entire world had shrunk down to the two of us.

“I could have covered a lot more distance,” I whispered as all those memories he’d given me passed through my mind.

He grinned.

“I was hoping that if you reached me, it might be a sign that you’d say yes.”

“Say yes?” I could feel my eyebrows rising up.

“Look at your feet.”

There was a circular stone embedded in the ground, and inside it, a bronze compass rose.

“This is the zero point of the country, and I thought…I thought it might be the perfect place to find out if there was any possibility you and I could begin again too. From zero. Because I want…I want everything we didn’t have. I want to go on a real date with you. I want us to get to know each other, the way we are now. What do you say, Leah?”