Page 10 of Only After We Met
“You’re not funny, Rhys.”
“Good. I wasn’t trying to be.”
She sighed. Confused. As if she couldn’t believe what I was saying was true. But it was. It was the first thing I thought when she told me her story, that if I’d gone out with her for five years, withthe girl who made me smile every time she spoke, I’d miss her voice, its soft, firm presence that never went away. I’d never met a person who had so much to say and whom I wanted so much to listen to.
“Where are we? We got off track.”
I shook my head and looked up. “I live there. In that gray building. On the corner.”
5
Ginger
“You want to come up? And just to cut you off before you start making excuses, I’m not asking you if you want to go to bed with me.”
Funny enough, I didn’t feel that way. And yet I was excited. I looked up at the outline of his building beneath the streetlamp while he waited for a reply.
“Honestly… I ’ve been in need of a bathroom for a while now, but I didn’t want to ruin the magic of the moment. You know, a walk at night through Paris and all…”
He laughed and shook his head. “Come on. You need some rest.”
He opened the door, and we took a narrow stairway up to the top floor. He put the key in the lock and invited me in, apologizing for the sorry state of the place and its small size. It was an attic studio with a mattress on the floor and the kitchen on the other side of the room. I saykitchen; what I mean is a hot plate on a wooden counter someone had tried unsuccessfully to sand down and varnish. The walls were bare except for a few spots of damp,and exposed beams crisscrossed the ceiling. Rhys pointed to the door of the bathroom after leaving my backpack on a chair with threadbare upholstery.
“It flushes weird,” he warned me.
“I’ll keep that in mind.” I went in.
I washed my hands and face before coming back out. When I did, Rhys was in the kitchen area boiling a pot of water. Glancing over, he opened a creaky cabinet.
“You in the mood for some noodles? I didn’t get full.”
“Sure. Nothing spicy though.”
“Nothing spicy. Got it.”
I walked over beside him and stood there shoulder to shoulder, watching the noodles go limp as he stirred them in the pot.
“What are you thinking?”
“Just how weird this all is,” I said. “Don’t you think? I mean, I was in London in my room a few hours ago. And now I’m in the apartment of some guy I just met in Paris. But the weirdest thing is…”
I wasn’t sure if I should say it. He turned, and I saw his eyes were lighter than I’d thought at first: the color of icicles. And that made me think of winter.
“Spit it out. What’s the weirdest thing?”
“I don’t even feel uncomfortable.”
“Just like home, huh?”
“I’m serious, Rhys. I feel like I’ve known you a long time, but I don’t actually know anything about you. We haven’t even told each other the basics, the stuff you have to type in when you open an account on a dating app. Hey—don’t look at me like that.” I slappedhis arm when I saw his mischievous smile. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just weird that we’ve been talking for hours, and we don’t even know how old each other is or what each other does for a living. Do you have a job? Are you studying? What are you doing in Paris?”
He reached up to grab bowls off the upper shelf, and his white shirt rose up a few inches. I looked away quickly, almost wishing he’d just kept his jacket on.
“That’s what I like the most.”
“What? Not knowing?”
“Yeah. That you didn’t just come out and ask me that stuff. If the first things you’d wanted to know about me had been my job and my age, we probably wouldn’t be here.”