raises it to his lips, kissing my fingers. “I want you to come back to Paris with me. Stay with me. If you still need to go back in three weeks, then I’ll make sure you get back home. But until then, I don’t want to be apart from you. I don’t want this to be our goodbye.”
I give him a wan smile. I’m thrilled that he wants to be with me, that he wants me enough to invite me to stay with him in Paris, luxuriating in all the romantic words and gestures, yet I’m deeply saddened. Because I know that I have to use my head to see myself through this time. That my heart and body have to take the back seat if I want to do the right thing.
I slowly shake my head, and it’s like the net comes back, taking all those butterflies away. “I’m so sorry. I wish I could. But I can’t run away from my responsibilities, my problems. These last few days here have been some of the best of my entire life, if not the best, but I can’t keep on pretending to be someone else.”
“You don’t have to. You just be Sadie. I’ll be Olivier. And we’ll be together.”
“Until I have to leave again.”
He closes his eyes, nostrils flaring as he takes a deep breath. “Until then.” Then he opens them and nods. “At least I tried. Couldn’t have lived with myself if I hadn’t asked. But I respect your wishes, Sadie. I’ll always respect you.”
Little does he know that my actual wish would be for my brain and logic to take a hike.
He leans in and kisses me, softly at first; then his arms go behind my back, and he rubs the still-soapy loofah up and down, making me shiver. I ignore the pang in my stomach, as I’m sure he’s ignoring his, and we fall into that easy, heady rhythm our bodies know so well.
All the regret and disappointment wash down my body, swirling into the drain until it disappears.
For now.
It’s been two days since Olivier asked me to come to Paris with him.
Two days since I turned him down.
Two days of spending almost every hour in each other’s arms, within each other’s touch. Other than the time he had to jet off to Saint-Tropez for a meeting, we haven’t left each other’s side.
It’s like we’ve fused in some way I never thought possible.
That molecular level of connection that I was talking about before?
Yeah, well that was before we even slept together.
Now that we’ve been having sex constantly, it’s morphed into something else entirely. A symbiote? Who the fuck knows. All I know is that I have to leave him today, and every single part of my body, heart, and soul is screaming at me.
Telling me I’ve made the wrong decision—I should have agreed to stay.
Telling me that I’m harming myself if I go.
Telling me that my body actually belongs to his, like two magnets kept apart in separate drawers, inching up and up and up, trying to reach each other.
It’s crazy.
I know.
It hurts my brain to know I even feel this way, because it goes against every logical cell in my body.
This is not something that Sadie Reynolds feels.
And this is definitely not the way that the sane Sadie Reynolds behaves.
I’m the girl who lost her virginity to her best guy friend to get it over with.
I’m the girl who went out with Tom because he seemed like the most boring guy on the planet and, therefore, the least likely to break my heart or give me any surprises.
And I’m the girl who tossed all that hard-earned cynicism aside in order to have a fling with the hot, rich French guy who saved her life.
But this has turned into more than a one-night stand, and it has the chance to turn into something even more than that. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t have any delusions that if I went with him to Paris we would turn into something more than a vacation romance. He has his business and his life there; I have my life in Seattle: school, my mother, my dwindling bank account.
It’s just . . . I have a chance to keep this going. I have a chance to indulge myself in this man and everything he’s offering me. This doesn’t have to be goodbye.
And yet it will have to be goodbye at some point, so it might as well be now.
“Here you are,” Olivier