Limitless - Kate Hawthorne Page 0,4

she grumbled.

“And I’ll be his uncle whether I’m here, there, or somewhere else.”

“I just want you home,” she sighed.

“I know.”

“Call Mama,” Aeliana said.

“I already told Patera I would.”

“Filia,” his sister said.

“Filia, Aeliana.”

He hung up the phone and turned it off, throwing it back into the junk drawer. It landed on top of a postcard, a battered old thing that used to hold the highest place of honor among his things. It had to have been nearly sixty years old by that point, a memory he’d found in a dusty shoebox that belonged to his father. The box, the postcard, and the other things inside of the box had been the bug his sister had talked about, and he’d never been the same since.

Leonidas couldn’t have been older than nine or ten when he found the box, taken the postcard as his own and pinned it up on his wall. Then he’d begged for stories of the things his father had seen, the people he’d met, the way he’d felt when he reached the tomb of St. James in the end. Leonidas fell asleep every night for at least a year staring at that picture, thinking about the age when he’d be old enough to go do the walk, to follow in his patera’s footsteps, and then find himself too.

It was the life choices his patera made after returning from Spain that had ensured their family would never want for money, promised that Leonidas could travel the world for as long as he wanted on money he hadn’t himself worked to earn. He never tried to be flashy about his family being wealthy, but he took the advantages it offered him with no complaint.

He took his freshly made coffee over to his bed and sat down, tucking himself into the corner so he could look out the window and down at the street. It was…Wednesday, he was fairly certain, and the air still felt thick with the promise of rain.

“The city, then,” he muttered to himself, standing up and drinking half of his coffee in one swallow. It was late, like his sister had said, and he didn’t have anything to do. Taking a walk across the Seine would kill some time, and maybe he could find some place to people watch.

He’d only been walking for a few kilometers when he ended up near Le Select, which was a café, he’d never even thought of eating at, but it wasn’t the dozens of wicker chairs and wide-eyed tourists that stopped him in his tracks. It was the man across the street from the café, the man with bleached blond hair and a scowl on his otherwise flawless and beautiful face.

Who, Leonidas wondered, could be anywhere in this city with a frown like that? He lingered across the street, watching the man to see if his reaction changed, but it didn’t. He just stood with his arms folded across his chest and a frown marring his features. His eyes moved, watching people cross the street and form a line, waiting for seats, watching people eating and drinking and laughing together, watching people pretend to be Parisian…

He didn’t know anything about this man, but in that moment…

He wanted to.

3

Andy

Andy stood on Boulevard du Montparnasse and frowned.

He hated everything about Paris so far, and he’d only been there for a handful of days. He’d come from Bruges, where he’d sent a few postcards back to the States before he’d left from Brussels on a train to Paris. Charlie would like that he’d gone to Bruges because he was obsessed with the movie and, if Andy was being honest, it was the only reason he’d gone that far west.

Belgium, on the whole, was absolutely beautiful. One of his favorite stops from his travels, but Paris…

He hated it.

Paris was loud and busy and crowded, and the weather was unpredictable and he didn’t think he’d stopped sweating since he’d gotten to France. The sky was mostly blue, but the clouds that hovered held so much precipitation in them, Andy found himself praying for rain just so the air could dry out when they’d emptied.

He stared across the street at Le Select which had, of course, piqued his interest because it was in Montparnasse, because Miller and Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald had been there before, and he was thirsty for things and places and moments that held history like that. But as he studied the cramped couples and groups at the tables on the street and counted