Curio Vignettes 05 Exposure

Exposure

Cara McKenna

This is the fifth title in the Curio Vignettes series, follow-up stories to the novel
Curio
.

Love can drive a normal man to extraordinary feats—inspire him to scale a mountain, swim an ocean, brave a raging fire.

Didier Pedra wouldn’t consider himself a normal man, but an unexpected romance has changed him nonetheless. A severe agoraphobe, he left his flat for the first time in years to prove himself worthy of the woman he loves. A long-enabled prostitute, he’s now given up the clients who’ve warmed his bed, padded his bank account and coddled his disorder, ensuring he need never venture outside the safety of his home.

For Caroly, he’s taken the ultimate leap of faith—boarded a train to travel farther than he has in half a lifetime, so they can celebrate the start of their future together with a trip to Provence. There are no gains without struggle, and this love is a prize worth fighting for.

Exposure

Cara McKenna

Dedication

As with this entire series, my thanks and love to Bobbi and Ruthie. We’ll always have Paris.

And to my editor, Kelli. We’ll always have…Akron. Who needs Paris, anyhow? We’ve got the Provence of northeastern Ohio.

Chapter One

The car bucks in a deep rut as we turn up the driveway, gravel crunching under the tires until we slow to a stop.

“Whewww.” Caroly’s blue eyes are wide, darting all around. Her grip on the wheel has blanched her knuckles, betraying the calm she’s been faking all the way from the Avignon train station.

Those fists match my heart, tight and bloodless. But we’ve made it. I give her shoulder a squeeze and a pat. “Well done.”

With a comically hysterical sigh, she switches off the engine and collapses over the wheel, honking the horn and startling herself. She laughs and straightens, and drops the keys in her purse. “Okay. We survived.”

Yes. A cab ride from Paris’ Latin Quarter to the Gare de Lyon train station, two and a half hours to Avignon. Thirty minutes in the hire-car parking lot while Caroly re-taught herself how to drive, not having done so in five years. And finally an hour’s journey—with a detour to collect groceries—to our destination.

Any one of those steps on its own would be enough to mire me in churning, nauseous worry for days beforehand. All of them together, strung in a terrifying marathon? Torture.

Except…

It’s bizarre,
I think, opening the door and stepping into the cool air, but I’ve emerged nearly Zen at the end of the ordeal. As though I slipped through a wormhole into the core of my own agoraphobia and shot out the other side so coated in panic, I’m not afraid.

Stretching, I take in the countryside, the hills dyed mauve by the approaching dusk. We didn’t pass any other vehicles in the final kilometers of the trip. Caroly wanted remote and rustic, and she’s gotten it.

I fill my lungs with air more clean and fragrant than I’ve smelled in forever. Small wonder—this is the farthest I’ve traveled in nearly fifteen years. Heaven knows what grasses and flowers I’ll prove allergic to, after breathing nothing but city air since adolescence.

Driving stress forgotten, Caroly claps, grinning at the cottage. “It’s just like the photos.” Photos she’s been ogling obsessively on her phone for weeks.

“Nicer, even. Let’s hope the inside proves just as suitable.”

“Look! There’s my chim-
ney
,” she says in a sing-song, pointing to the roof. She’s been very excited by the prospect of fireplace access.

We gather our bags and the groceries from the trunk and carry them up the flagstones. The house is ancient, pleasantly so. Stone walls, pitched tile roof sprouting flowers, the window panes thick and wavery. Caroly consults a print-out then heads to an assembly of potted plants, poking in the largest urn until she holds up a key, triumphant.

“I won’t get to pick the lock then,” I say, pretending disappointment.

“Ooh, neat.” She returns and shows me the key, a knobby old charming thing from a more prideful time when we bothered to give flourish to everyday objects. The door lock matches, its scalloped edges boasting a decorative inlay of vines. It opens with a satisfying, loud click, and Caroly pushes the door in on whining hinges.

We head into the main room and find a lamp.

Her eyes light up, along with the bulb. “Oh. It’s perfect.”

“It is.”

The inside’s as rustic as the exterior, but with touches of modernity—old beams and stone, but the furniture is in good nick, rugs new, only the faintest whiff of mustiness. Far nicer than either of us had let ourselves expect. The ceilings are lower than in a modern home, but I don’t mind. I’m fairly tall but I’ve lived in a slope-cornered garret flat for years, and I enjoy feeling closed in upon.

We set our bags on the couch and carry the groceries through to the rear kitchen, small but well appointed, with a garden window overlooking the valley. I slide it open to let the breeze usher some of the closeness from the room. It’s early October and the rains ended a week ago. The autumn blooms have begun to make their debuts, dots of color in the distance and scrubby trees silhouetted against a darkening blue sky. We’ve missed the lavender, but the air is crisp, promising deep sleeps under warm blankets…should my brain allow such a thing beneath an unfamiliar roof.

I don’t like new places. The only explorations I’ve been comfortable undertaking are those bathed in candlelight, above, beneath and inside a new woman’s body. As a prostitute, my role was to navigate those landscapes with the intuition and confidence of a perennial lover, and I can say without bravado that I was excellent at my job.

But the outside world… There I’m as good as blind, lacking even the most basic internal compass, head full of static and screaming chemicals from my disorder at the mere
thought
of an unknown journey.

We’re here in Provence for only four days—a short time by most vacationers’ standards, yet this is monumental. I’ve slept in the same bed every single night for the past five years, with the exception of one evening I passed slumped in a chair at my mother’s bedside in the hospital. Four days is an eternity to be away from my routines, stranded far outside my precious, hateful safe zone.

Yet somehow…

I don’t feel as I’d expected. My panic faded when we left the town behind, calm growing with every kilometer we put between us and civilization.

“Ooh,” Caroly calls. “This is lovely.”

I follow her voice across the living room and into the master bedroom. Its double glass doors open onto an overgrown garden and in the far, far distance, you can make out a steeple and the roofs of a tiny village, and the dark stripe of a river snaking through the valley.

Caroly bounces on the bed. It’s wide, made up in a thick, colorful quilt and lit by matching sconces on either side. So different than my dark bedroom, set for seduction. No pigeons roosting beyond the windowpanes, just the hum of insects getting ready for their evening shift. No twinkling city lights, but soon enough, surely more stars than I’ve seen in half a lifetime.

“I wonder what sort of moon it will be.” I should know these things. People who leave their homes know these things; people who keep their curtains open and enjoy things as vast and crushing as the sky.

“Just past full,” Caroly supplies, staring through the windows at the sinking sun. The edges of her dark-blonde curls are tinted pink by the light, skin stained rosy. I move to sit beside her, taking her hand atop the covers.

“This was a very good idea.”

“How are you feeling?”

I shrug. “I’m still a bit raw from the journey. And from the…differentness. I doubt it will fade completely while we’re here, but it’s the being here that’s important.” I squeeze her hand. “Getting you your stone cottage. A trip to mark the official start of all these new changes.”

And so much will change when this holiday is over. A few days of leisure in a calm place where I may stand a chance at truly relaxing, then the stress of the drive and the train and the taxi. Then home, blessed familiarity with the added excitement of Caroly. Her things have been moved in; welcome additions that make me see my flat through new eyes. A brief domestic respite before the hard adjustments begin. Necessary struggles.

I accepted a job two weeks ago, one that fell into my lap custom-made, the answer to an unarticulated prayer. The elderly proprietor of a shop in Gobelins offered me part-time work, mending antique watches and other mechanical curiosities. His eyes and back and fingers are growing too weak for the task.

I took Caroly there one afternoon and the owner had been at work, operating on the guts of a grandfather clock. He’d been struggling with the escape wheel, and Caroly volunteered me to take a look. To say I “dabble” with clockwork is to say an alcoholic “enjoys the odd tipple”. I’d never have offered my help, afraid to sound too pushy or patronizing. But my help was welcomed gratefully, and we left an hour later, she with a new charm for her bracelet and I with an offer of sporadic employment, doing the thing I love best.

Well, the thing I love best aside from seducing Caroly.

The wage I’ll make from the antique shop is a fraction of what I commanded as a prostitute. But I have much in savings, and I’ll earn enough to feel I’m contributing. Far more worrisome than the pay cut is that the job will demand I walk ten blocks to the shop, several days a week. That’s ten blocks outside my miniscule comfort zone, but a pretty enough commute, with walk signals at most of the street crossings.

“You’ll be getting paid to do exposure therapy,” Caroly had suggested as we marked up a map with colored pens. You’d think we were negotiating a route into darkest uncharted Africa, not a two-kilometer stroll through the only city I’ve called home. She’s right though. The prospect of enjoying so many new mechanical challenges will ease the way there, and the promise of seeing Caroly when I return home will make the return trip bearable. As much as it scares me, I’m eager to look back a year from now and see just how much more manageable the journey might feel.

I’ve said goodbye to my clients over the past month and a half, all beloved acquaintances, welcomed visitors to my lonely realm. Yet as my world’s grown bigger, I’ve found there’s no room for them in it. The monogamy I never thought I valued has grown magnetically attractive and changed my priorities. As much as I’ve cherished the years I spent with those women, their company enabled me. It fed my bank account but also my crippling anxiety, and a time has come when I finally prefer to feel frightened and alive rather than safe and numb.

I lace my fingers with Caroly’s. “You did very well driving.” She’d been as nervous as I’ve ever seen her…save perhaps for the evening she first turned up on my threshold.

“I did, didn’t I? It’s been so long, I wondered if I’d remember how. Thank goodness the French drive on the right. Otherwise I’d probably have drifted into the other lane out of habit and gotten us killed. But we made it.”

“We did.”

“I’ll be our chauffeur if you’ll translate. Provençal may as well be Esperanto, to my ears.”

Caroly is American, and after living in Paris for two and a half years her French is strong, if inelegant. She has a keen eye for anything artistic, a thousand names for the color blue, but no ear for languages. I speak French of course, and English and Portuguese and Spanish as well, and passable Italian. These are the ways in which a shut-in does his world traveling, through language and music and books and recipes. Provençal is a blend of dialects, but I spoke well enough to make myself understood at the market.

She thumps our linked hands against my thigh. “I think it’s wine time. I bet we could both use a glass.”

“Agreed.”

We rise and head for the kitchen. We selected several bottles at the store, and she chooses the Clairette de Die.

“Something bubbly, to celebrate surviving the journey,” she declares.

I inspect the cabinets, finding no flutes but a couple of brandy snifters. “These will have to do.” I set them on the scrubbed-pine table and take the bottle from Caroly, ending her spirited struggle with the cork. I wrap it in the hem of my shirt and twist it free with a mighty pop. The spray wets my shirt and the floor, but Caroly catches most of the eruption with the glasses.

“I guess that was a bumpier ride than I realized.” She finds a cloth to mop the spill while I rinse my shirt, and we meet at the table and hold up our glasses.

“To Provence,” she says.

“This wine is from the Rhone.”

“Whatever. To France.”

And we toast, the fizz teasing my tongue.

After a sip and an admiring sigh she says, “We toast a lot. Like, every single night.”

“There is much to celebrate.”

“And we drink a lot.”

“There is much to drink.”

She laughs. “And yet I don’t know that I’ve ever seen you drunk.”

“I prefer indulgence to gluttony.”

She taps my glass with hers. “Well put.”

I examine my wine, holding it to the light to watch the streaming bubbles. “This is lovely.” White, when I so often drink red; sparkling when I nearly always drink still. It’s funny to find myself enjoying the newness of everything. Perhaps my need for the predictable is just a lie I’ve been fed by my disorder. Perhaps it really is people I fear, more than the unknown or the open.

Still, I must walk before I can run. In Paris I crawl, it feels, but perhaps in a place like this, I could even manage to stroll. Move with ease like a normal man, mind wandering through daydreams instead of hounded by waking nightmares.

We take our glasses through the bedroom and out the doors to the side garden. The sky is deep indigo now and already the stars are emerging. So white, like holes pricked through a shade, leaking pinpoints of pure sunlight. Which is nearly what they are, I suppose. Far off suns, winking through the cold, empty vastness. I breathe deeply of the cool air, quenching as a glass of water washing away a hangover’s sour glaze.

I’d worried this first evening would be lost, consumed by the task of simply waiting for my heart to recover from the journey and the change of scenery. But I feel far more at ease than I’d expected. Caroly notices.

“You look pretty relaxed,” she says, rubbing my shoulder. “Or is that just relief for the transportation portion being done for a few days?”

“It is, but it’s more.” I sip my wine. “I thought this would bother me—this hill, this gigantic sky, all this space. But I don’t mind it. Not as much as I’d feared.”