She stared at the flowers for a moment, gathering herself. Francis had never brought her such extravagant flowers, and he was the one who was supposed to be here in Paris with her, buying her flowers and seeing it together.
After nearly a year with Francis, marrying him had seemed inevitable.
Instead, this beautiful, impossible man had brought her flowers and breakfast in Paris.
He tilted his head. “You’re crying again.”
“I am not,” she said, wiping her face on her tee shirt again. She gulped some air and said, “The flowers are just so beautiful that they caught me off guard. And it was so nice of you to bring me croissants.” She took the flowers, the paper crackling in her fingers. “I’ll put these in some water. I really do appreciate them, Augustine.”
His smile was wary. “Are we still doing the ‘Augustine’ thing?”
“Yes.” She found a plastic water pitcher among the assorted useless things in the kitchen cabinets and filled it with water for the flowers. “Yes, and I don’t want to talk about why. Don’t tell me who or what you really are. Just be a mystery, okay?”
“All right,” he said, though he was still frowning, and his eyebrows still pinched together.
“It’s not about you,” she said. “It’s about me. I just don’t want to be me anymore. I want to be somebody, anybody else. I want to be a superhero or a princess in disguise.”
His dark eyebrows twitched.
She continued, “But I’m pathetic and stupid, and I want to be anybody else, so you can be someone else, too. Otherwise, I’d feel bad about lying to you.”
Augustine closed his eyes and shook his head. “I don’t think I’m following your logic.”
“That’s because there isn’t any. Just accept it, okay? Let’s just do it.”
He spread his hands. “All right. I’m game. It’s probably better, anyway. For the time being, my name is Augustine, and I owe you a coat. Is your name actually Dree?”
“Uh, yeah,” she said, wincing because he’d caught her. “I was too drunk to make something up. My name is Dree, and I shall call you ‘Auggie.’”
He cracked up, laughing long and hard from his gut. He placed one hand on his lean, flat stomach as if his tummy were going to split open. When he wound down, he said, “Auggie, yes. By all means, let’s call me Auggie. Friends of mine will perish when I tell them this. Can we eat breakfast? I’m famished.”
“Sure. Didn’t you get something to eat while you were out?”
“I don’t eat in the mornings. I have to attend—” He stopped talking and frowned.
“The gym?” she offered.
“Right,” he said, drawing out the word. “I have to attend the gym.”
She set the pitcher of white flowers on the bedroom dresser by where Augustine was standing. He opened the box and began setting out the food on paper napkins he’d brought. Inside the box, a stack of a half-dozen croissants nestled little tubs of butter and strawberry jam.
She said, “Strawberry is my favorite! That is so sweet of you.”
He smiled at her, and his dark eyes crinkled at the edges. “Mine, too.”
Dree found some knives in a drawer, slathered butter and jam on a croissant, and bit into the flakey, buttery heaven. Brittle layers shattered in her mouth, and tender layers inside collapsed when she bit down. “Oh, my God. This is nothing like those little crescent rolls from the tube. Those are just bread.”
He raised one eyebrow while he ripped off a hunk and stuffed it into his mouth. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“Those little rolls in the tube, and when you open the tube, it explodes and you jump.”
He shook his head as he spread jam on his croissant.
“Must be an American thing.”
The way his lips closed around the pastry and he sucked on his thumb made Dree’s knees flinch. Damn. She tried not to watch him nibble and lick the French pastry and failed.
She wanted to be the croissant, but she wasn’t supposed to see him or touch him ever again.
Stupid bucket-list napkin, bossing her around.
When Augustine had finished chewing the last bite, he glanced up at her. “Are you going to tell me why you were crying?”
She shook her head and concentrated on buttering her next bite of croissant.
“Then lie to me,” he said, reaching for another croissant.
What? “Lie to you?”
“Yes.” He tore another croissant to pieces with his long fingers. “That’s what you said we should do. If you don’t want to tell me the truth about why you were crying, tell me lies.”
It was completely ridiculous, so she laughed at him. “Okay, I don’t even know how to start.”
He was standing straight and still as he ate, not leaning on the counter or fidgeting. “What could be so awful that it would make a beautiful woman like you cry?”
She did laugh at him for that. “I don’t know, alien abduction? The state of the whole world? That I had no one to bring me flowers, but now I do?”
His gaze slowly rose from his croissant to her eyes.
Dree realized what she’d said and waved her hands, crossing them like she was waving off a landing airplane. “Oh, I didn’t mean it like that. I’m not imagining that we have a relationship. We don’t. It was just one night, and that’s all it was supposed to be. I just meant that it was nice of you to bring me flowers this morning. If there had been something else going on, if I were in Paris alone for some stupid reason when I should have had a romantic trip planned but then everything went to shit, it’s not your responsibility. I don’t expect anything from you. We’re cool. That’s all. We’re cool.”
Augustine held a piece of croissant pinched in his fingers, staring at it and not eating it. Butter and strawberry jam leaked onto his fingers. His steady look seemed resigned and sad, not freaked out.
Or he might be screaming inside and good at covering it up. It was hard to tell with guys sometimes.
“It really is okay,” she said. “I was just thinking about things I might do in Paris, like tourist stuff.”
He finally spoke. “Last night, it sounded like you had a bucket list.”
“Funny you should put it like that, a bucket list.” That’s what Roxanne and Gen had called it the night before. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
Augustine neatly wiped his fingers on a paper towel and then reached over and picked up her special napkin that was covered with black handwriting and her map for the rest of her life.
“Uh, yeah,” she said. “You don’t have to look at that.” A lot of it was pretty embarrassing and made her look like a tramp. Well, even more like a tramp than she’d already made herself look by screaming that she wanted to screw all the men in a bar and then taking a guy home for the hottest sex of her life.
Yeah, the tramp ship had already sailed.
He studied it, frowning in places. “This is quite a list.”
“I wasn’t planning on doing it all.” She totally was.
Augustine tilted his head, glanced up at her with a startled expression, and then looked back at the napkin as his eyes grew larger. “A threesome, a foursome with three guys, a gang bang. You mentioned these last night.”