Page 7 of Only After We Met

“Where are you going with this?”

“Imagine the salesgirl is like,Oh, it looks perfect on you, andyou save for it for months and months. You wear it, you’re like,Wonderful, and then you put it in the washer, and it comes out all covered in little balls of fuzz.”

“That’s quite an image, Ginger.”

“I just wasted all that time.”

“I don’t believe in wasted time.”

I took a deep breath. He got up to break the silence. As I finished my last bite, I watched him at the counter paying and ordering two more beers. I didn’t even bother offering him any money. I was still thinking of that damned raggedy sweater. When Rhys motioned for us to go outside, I followed him. I followed him like it was the most natural thing in the world, taking the bottle of beer he offered me and walking along the Seine toward the bright lights of the Eiffel Tower. We were two strangers in the middle of the city under a dark winter sky, strolling as if we had all the time in the world. I liked it. I felt good.

“Weren’t you ever tempted to do the same as him?” he said, picking up where we’d left off. “You never wanted to have new experiences? You thought you’d just, what, finish college, marry Dean, have kids, and that’s that? I’m not judging you. I’m just wondering.”

“When you put it that way, it sounds boring.”

“Those are your words, not mine.”

“I don’t know. I guess. I’m a simple person.”

“You don’t seem simple to me at all.”

He turned and walked backward. It looked funny. I laughed and took a sip of beer.

“What kind of person am I, then, Rhys?”

I could tell he was thinking. I could feel it.

“Contradictory. Sweet. Clever.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. Complicated.”

I almost savored that word. No one had ever thought of me that way. It was probably the last word my friends or family would use to describe me, and I was surprised it struck me so much. My eyes stung.

“Thanks, Rhys,” I whispered.

“Hey, what’s up? Are you crying? Shit…”

He set our beers on the ground and grabbed my shoulders. It was the first time he’d really touched me, and his hands felt firm on my green army jacket as his fingers squeezed softly and he crouched down to my height and looked me in the eye, and I stopped running from him.

“Sorry. You must think I’m crazy.”

“No.” He slid a thumb over my right cheek and wiped away the tears. “You want to know what I actually think of you?” We were very close, and his other hand was still on my shoulder. Our breath was turning to vapor in the cold and mingling with the darkness. “I think you want a lot more than you know. I think you’re the kind who says they just want one piece of candy, but you really want to close the shop down and grab handfuls of everything you want and throw it all up in the air.”

I laughed despite my tears. It sounded so stupid, so childish, but there was so much truth in his words. We looked at each other in the silence. Intensely. Intimately. I blew my nose. Nothing could have been less attractive, but it didn’t bother Rhys.

“I guess you’re the type to be happy with just one piece?”

“No.” He smiled, a dangerous sort of smile, wry, the kind that burns into your memory forever. “I robbed the shop a long time ago, and I took everything I found there.”

“This is nice. You not knowing me, I mean.”

“Yeah.” He took a breath. So close…

Then he looked away, helped me take my backpack off, and threw it over his shoulders without explanation before bending over to retrieve our beers and passing me mine. He walked, I followed him, and I asked myself how long it had been now since our paths crossed for the first time. Two hours? Maybe. Maybe less. And I thought of something I’d heard of so many times and that I never thought had anything to do with me. How you couldknow a person, supposedly, even when you barely knew a thing about them. What other way was there to explain something so strange, so magical, and so unexpected? Behind him, I tried to catch certain details: the way the damp wind blew his hair all over, the sharp masculine outline of his features, the way his threadbare jeans hung off his hips, or his long steps, hard for me to keep up with even if he seemed to be just ambling.

He turned and caught me looking, and I blushed.