Paris, He Said by Christine Sneed

didn’t come to Paris because I thought—” She stared at him.
    He batted away her words with a dismissive hand. “You had to know, Jayne,” he said. “You were counting on it. Some part of you was, and that is just fine.” He gestured to the waiter for the check, which arrived on a small black platter instead of inside a leatherette case. Laurent took a few bills from his wallet and settled them on top of the paper.
    “I really wasn’t,” she insisted, her body tense with nervous joy.
    “I can see that you are very excited,” he said. “But I know you must be very tired too. We will take a taxi home instead of walking back.”
    She nodded, still stunned.
    On the ride back to her new home, she held Laurent’s hand tightly and rested her cheek against his shoulder. He smelled so good, even after the cigarette he’d smoked outside the restaurant before summoning a cab; she was used to the harsh smoke now and had grown almost to crave the scent on his clothes and hair. She was so tired, luxuriously at peace for the first time in weeks; she wanted to keep her eyes open, to feel everything that was happening to her, to stare at the golden light reflecting off the ancient stone buildings along the Seine. The Eiffel Tower was glittering in the distance as if fairy dust had been tossed onto it, its lights an undulating cape of gilded, winking flecks. She closed her eyes for a second, and when she opened them again the taxi had pulled up in front of their building on rue du Général-Foy, the street emptied of all its daytime occupants; its nocturnal lighting, soft and a little spooky, reminded Jayne of a set where a vampire film might be shot.
    Laurent was gently shaking her awake. “Chérie,” he whispered. “You’re home now.”

    Laurent’s words from the previous night still dominated Jayne’s thoughts as she moved through the crowded, noisy streets to Sacré Coeur, a walk she had planned since long before she stepped off the plane. She peered into the boutique and department store windows on boulevard Haussmann, its sidewalks clogged with tourists, the bulky shopping bags at their sides making it difficult for anyone to pass.
    She had not sent an e-mail bursting with the news of Laurent’s offer to Liesel or Melissa or to the one art instructor she still kept in touch with, Susan Kraut, whom Jayne had worked with eight years earlier, and had seen again four years after that summer when she passed through Chicago on her way home to Los Angeles from New York. During the long layover she’d arranged between flights, she had taken the train into the city and gone to the gallery on Wells Street where her former instructor was exhibiting new paintings—moody, unpopulated interiors of homes that looked haunted by benevolent ghosts. Jayne had taken an intensive painting class with Susan, having begged her parents for the money to enroll in the three-week summer course. During those rainy, hot June days at the school that sat like a sullen gray fortress on the western periphery of Grant Park, Susan taught her to work with light and focused more on composition than any of Jayne’s previous instructors. The portraits Jayne first began to paint in the class, most in color, the somber interiors, the more chromatically vibrant exterior landscapes, formed the core of her portfolio. She had been working with these subjects and the themes of absence, longing, and dream-like loneliness ever since.
    When she showed some of these early paintings to Laurent, the few she’d hung on the walls of her apartment in New York, he looked at them closely for what felt like a long time. Her stomach tensed as she watched his face for some hint of his thoughts. Finally he said, “You were twenty-one when you painted these, Jayne? Why have these not already been sold? Because they would sell.”
    Nothing anyone had ever said to her had given her more pleasure than those words. Now, her legs moving her toward the domed Parisian cathedral