What If It's Love?: A Contemporary Romance Set in Paris (Bistro La Bohème Book 1) (24 page)

“Why are you in bed when it’s light outside?”
Katia asked.

Anton tousled his daughter’s hair. “Lena isn’t
feeling very well.”

Katia looked worried. “Are you sick? Do you
have to eat medicine? Can I take your temperature?”

Her eyes lit up. “Daddy, did you bring my
doctor’s kit? I need to examine Lena.”

Anton spread his arms apologetically. “Sorry,
baby. Your doctor’s kit is back at home. But I brought your favorite car.”

He turned to Lena. “I wonder if I should be
worried or thrilled that she prefers cars to dolls.”

“Hmm. I think that you think you should be
worried but in reality you’re thrilled,” Lena said.

“Am I that transparent?” Anton asked.

Lena just smiled and cupped Katia’s plump
cheek. “I’m not sick, sweetie. I’m just . . . tired.”

Katia frowned, thinking hard for a few
seconds before delivering her diagnosis. “It’s because you ate too much candy
and didn’t take your nap. That’s why you’re tired.”

She pursed her lips and turned to Anton. “Daddy,
shall we take all her candy away?”

Without waiting for an answer, she turned
back to Lena. “You can have half of it back when you aren’t tired anymore.”

“Why only half?” Lena asked.

“Because . . .” Katia
stretched the word until she ran out of breath, and then went for honesty. “Because
we haven’t got any at home! Mommy gives me fruit instead. But I want candy.”

Lena threw her hands up. “I’m very sorry,
sweetie, but I agree with your mom on this. Besides, I haven’t got any candy
around here.”

Katia’s eyes became round. “You ate
everything
?”

When Lena nodded, Katia’s face fell with
disappointment. Lena couldn’t bear to see the little girl’s hopes crushed like
this. She mouthed
ice cream
to Anton and he nodded.

She turned back to Katia. “Cheer up, candy
patrol. I might have something else of interest for you. How about vanilla ice
cream?”

Ice cream was definitely of interest, so Lena
was obliged to get out of bed to retrieve it from the freezer.

After Anton and Katia left, Lena picked up
her phone to text Lydia who’d left her several alarmed voice mails. She told
her she was fine and she’d be away for a while. And, in a manner of speaking,
she was. Her mind was in another dimension, trying to find a reason why life
wasn’t a waste of time.

In particular, her comfortable, charmed life,
shielded from misery, need and pain. Shielded so well that most of her
essential experiences and emotions were secondhand, derived from the novels and
poetry she translated. They were a little stale and a little musty, those secondhand
emotions, but one hundred percent risk free. As for her heart, she’d locked it
in a safe box and thrown away the key. She had hoped it would shrivel and dry
up, but instead it was beginning to rot. Lena knew it because she could smell
the putrid odor.

She stared out the window and thought about
the man she’d loved, all this time. How her love had bellowed and done
somersaults right under her nose—and yet she’d failed to notice it, or to
acknowledge it for what it was. How she found excuses to dismiss it and words
to diminish it, by calling it a crush or a flame. At best, she called it an
infatuation. But mostly, she avoided naming it, so that she could pretend it
wasn’t there.

Because I’m a coward.

Lena pushed her blanket aside and walked over
to her massive bookcase. After a quick scan, she pulled out the biography of
Marina Tsvetaeva she’d written. Curling up in her favorite armchair, she opened
it on page one and began to read. When she closed the book a few hours later,
she had the answer to her existential question.

Throughout her life that ended too soon,
Tsvetaeva had excelled at taking ill-advised decisions, making bad choices, and
falling for the wrong men. But she had never hidden from anything. She had
faced life head on. She had
lived
.

Lena opened her e-mail and sent Jeanne her shortest
note ever.

Is your offer to visit you in Paris still on?

* * *

“What a jerk!” Jeanne said, for the third time in one hour.

As soon as Lena had arrived at Jeanne’s place, they’d all but glued
themselves to the couch while filling each other in. Jeanne had trouble
wrapping her head around the fact that Dmitry had been having a secret affair
for months.

“Will you stop calling him that, please?” Lena begged. “I’m not an
innocent victim in this story. In a way, I’ve been asking for his infidelity.”

“Please don’t tell me you had a secret lover, too.” Jeanne cocked her
head.

“I won’t—I haven’t. But I haven’t exactly been a loving wife to
him, either.” Lena sighed, exhausted from the topic. She preferred to talk about
Jeanne again. “So, are you currently on or off with your boyfriend?”

“We’re back on, even though I’m not sure how much longer I can do this.
We argue all the time. I’ve changed over the past three years. I think I’ve
grown up, but the problem is that he hasn’t. If anything, he’s regressed.”

Lena smiled. Jeanne was well aware of what she thought about her
boyfriend, so there was no point in repeating herself. “And what about Mat? He
was so hopelessly smitten by you three years ago. Is he still in Paris?”

“Who’s Mat? Oh, that malnourished friend of Rob’s from Normandy? No, he
left Paris. I think he went back to the boondocks. But to do what? I’m sure Rob
has told me—I just can’t remember.”

“And how is our favorite Spaniard? He left Paris a couple of years ago,
didn’t he? Have you heard from him since?” Lena asked.

“You haven’t heard? Pepe is doing great. He works for an international
real estate agency now. And he did end up finding his Nordic goddess.”

“No kidding? I want to know everything about her!”

“I haven’t personally met her, but I’ve heard so much about her from Pepe
over the past year that it feels like I have. I couldn’t make it to his
wedding, so I was strongly encouraged to comment on every single wedding
picture they posted on Facebook. And they posted
tons
of them. I
remember commenting and commenting, until I was at my wit’s end for things to
say. And then I realized I’d just finished the town-hall batch and hadn’t even
started on the church and the party pictures. I hope Pepe appreciates the extent
of my goodness.”

“But who is she, what’s she like?” Lena pressed, expecting a twist—something
like the Nordic goddess turning out to be a raven-haired Inuit from the
real
North.

Jeanne only smiled, her fingers scrolling and tapping on her phone. When
she found what she was looking for, she held the phone out for Lena to see. It
was one of the famous wedding pictures—a close-up of a blue-eyed blonde
with a smile full of teeth whiter than her bridal veil. She looked as
Scandinavian as they came.

“Oh my God! Pepe found exactly what he’d been raving about! She looks
like somebody cut and pasted her from his daydreams,” Lena said.

“Apparently, she adores him. She looooooves that he’s so full of color
and spice, I am told. She calls him something like
scoot
, which is
supposed to mean
treasure
in Danish. Oh yeah, her name’s Nana. She’s
from Copenhagen, and that’s where they live now.”

Lena chuckled. “I can’t believe it. Not only did Pepe find his blonde, he
ended up living in a country where there’s one at every corner. He must have
done something really good or suffered greatly in his previous life. Or both.
Maybe he fought against Franco and was tortured to death?”

“I don’t know what he did in his previous life to deserve this, but he
sure didn’t do much in his present one, apart from wanting it really, really
badly. Maybe that did the trick—who knows?”

Jeanne grinned. “Oh, and you should hear this—do you know what he
calls her when he isn’t calling her
mi amor
?”

“No. What?”

“Snow White! He calls her ‘my Snow White’.” Jeanne started laughing. She
held her hand up to signal that she wanted to add something but her every
attempt was thwarted by fits of laughter that rocked her whole body.

She finally calmed down, wiped off her tears, and pulled up another
wedding picture on her phone. “Can you see why now it’s so funny?”

The photo showed Pepe and his Danish beauty standing next to each other
in front of the priest. The bride was a full head taller than the bridegroom.

Lena snorted. “Our Pepe looks positively
dwarfed
,” she managed to
say before both of them burst into another fit of hilarity.

It was just like the old times. Lena was immensely grateful that Jeanne
was there for her, that she hadn’t changed—well, except for the color of
her hair, which was now a more realistic copper red.

She mustered all her courage and asked Jeanne about Rob.

“I haven’t seen him in a couple of months,” Jeanne said. “Last time we
talked he was working like crazy trying not to screw up his first major order.”

“I saw him two months ago in Moscow,” Lena said. “He was still with
Amanda. I have the impression they’ve moved in together by now.”

Jeanne searched her eyes. “Lena, are you trying to give yourself a reason
not to call him? Cut that crap, honey, and give the guy a call. You know, just
to say hi.”

“I will
 . . .
when I’m
ready.”

It would have to be soon, she thought, or else she’d lose the nerve. If
she didn’t lose her mind first from not knowing.

* * *

With its statues, ponds, and colorful metal
chairs, the Luxembourg Gardens were a magical place, as beautiful in summer’s
green as in autumn’s yellow or winter’s white. That is, if you managed to
meditate yourself into a deep state of denial of the hordes of tourists
strolling up and down its sandy alleys and producing a multilingual bedlam
while dropping blobs of ice cream on the ground. Lena finally spotted an
unoccupied chair hidden behind a rectangular-shaped shrubbery. She sat down and
searched her contact list for Rob’s number. She had no idea what she would tell
him.

When he answered, she blurted out in a single
breath, “Hi, it’s Lena. I’m in Paris.”

“Hi, Lena,” he said.

Did he sound happy to hear her voice?
Indifferent? Annoyed? She was too nervous to tell, nor did she have a clue what
to say next. Why on earth didn’t she prepare for this call?

Rob broke the long silence. “So, what brings
you to Paris?”

“I had a date . . . with the
Eiffel Tower,” she said, finally recovering her speech capacity.

“Ah! So now you’re OK with its
open
approach to love?”

Oh God. She opened her mouth to say,
No, I’m
not. Sorry about this call—it was a mistake
, and hang up. But then it
occurred to her this was what the old, cowardly Lena would have done.

She would see this conversation through, even
if all she got was closure. “Yes, I am. But only as far as the Eiffel Tower is
concerned.”

“I see. Then I guess you’re just calling to
say hi to an old friend,” he said, his voice cold.

Amanda.
This could only mean he was still with her. And why wouldn’t he be, having
moved in with her only a month ago? What was she thinking, coming to Paris,
calling him like this?

But wait—Rob didn’t know she and Dmitry
had split up. Only . . . what was the point in telling him now?
What would it achieve except making this huge letdown even bigger? Better end
this quickly.

“Yes, I just wanted to say hi,” she began and
stopped.

She couldn’t make herself say
to an old
friend
. And . . . Rob hadn’t actually
told
her he was
with Amanda. She had filled this information in for him, which meant there was
still a tiny flicker of hope. And Lena chose to go with that flicker.

“Dmitry and I split up,” she said, not
bothering with a smooth transition.

“What? When?”

“Shortly after you left Moscow. He told me he
had a mistress, and I . . . I was relieved. And so was he, I
think.”

There, she’d said it. Lena closed her eyes
and tried to take solace in the knowledge that this conversation would be over
in a moment. As soon as Rob expressed his sympathy and wished her good luck.

After a short silence, he asked, “So why are
you in Paris now?”

“I . . . I’m visiting Jeanne.”

“I see.”

She waited for him to continue, but he didn’t.
As the silence stretched, she realized he wasn’t going to say anything. If only
she could see his face now! But as it was, she was in the dark—and he
wasn’t putting on the lights for her.

I can do this. I must do this.

She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m here because
of you. I wanted to see if . . . if there’s still any hope for
us.”

Her hands began to tremble. She felt like she
was in one of those nightmares where she stood naked before a crowd. It was
terrifying. She hadn’t allowed herself to be this vulnerable in ages.

“Amanda and I broke up, too,” he said.

Lena didn’t dare speak, afraid she had
imagined his words and was loath to clear up her misunderstanding.

“Lena, we broke up.”

“But . . . but you just moved
in together.”