Read Online Plum Blossoms in Paris by Sarah Hina - Free Book Online

here; how his jaw flexes with feeling when I recall my mother’s words, urging me on; and finally, how he grips his fork at their shared insistenceof a sojourn to Shakespeare & Co. What fool could stomach dead geniuses when this brilliant, living man sits before her!
    I stay because I am starting to feel real again.
    Mathieu informs me that he is a freelance tour guide. He wants to be my guide for the next—and here he breaks off, a cloud passing over the clock. The bubble of our delusion wavers. But we are not ready to invite endings.
    He wants to be my tour guide. Mine.
    “This is what I will do. You have, by now, transformed Paris into a long list of places and things to check off, have you not?” He eyes my bag under the table, suspicious of Rick’s presence.
    I nod sheepishly.
    “You have been hiding out in McDonald’s, tourist blights, avoiding places that might require a passing understanding of French.” He says it like it’s true, and I don’t refute it. “This deadens the city. It puts you on the defensive, Daisy, like Paris is something to be overcome, not enjoyed.” Even though he’s lecturing, there is still profound joy at his saying my name—that horrid, hated name—like it’s familiar living. “Paris is, above all, a sensual city. So this is what we will do.” He sits up and looks deeper into my eyes. “We will drown ourselves in each sense and suck on its many pleasures until we are overcome and wasted on them. One day we will allow for the sound of Paris, another for the taste, still another for the vision of Paris … you understand.” He smiles, a slow wonder. “By the end of each day, we will be so intoxicated that we will stumble to find our feet again. And then we will awaken and fill ourselves once more.”
    What do I do? What does any drunken person do when given a hand? Take it, and hold on for dear life.
    We finally end our lunch because he has an engagement. An English couple. In town for two days, they have two things on their list: where Princess Di died and the Eiffel Tower. We laugh, a couple of contemptible bastards.
    I have seen the Eiffel Tower. Yet at no time, while perched on its lofty lip, did I feel as elevated as I do now, darting down the littered stairs of the nearest metro station, birthing a hard seed of hope in my heart.

    That moonless night, I lie atop a bed that is not my own, listening to the traffic whip down a street whose name I do not feel confident to pronounce, thinking not of Mathieu, born of a country that still feels strange, but of Andy. For when one, sober and alone, reflects on the drunkenness that comes before, there is doubt that any of it could have happened. Mathieu is still a dream. A lovely one, but hazy, and too wondrously fleeting. His eyes, so clear to me before, have faded to black. I cannot recall if he is right-or left-handed. I do not know his last name.
    Andy Templeton I will not forget. Our sturdy seed laid roots and flowered perennially. If the blooms have withered and died with time—victims of too many fallow seasons—I can still press the dried petals to my heart and catch a last whiff of their fading scent. They smell like home.
    After tossing and turning until even the traffic slumbers, I call his apartment. It is nine his time. He will be doing something predictable and Andy-like: studying, fixing a late dinner of jarred sauce and rotini after coming home from the library. I do not know what I will say to him, only that I must hear his voice across the ocean that divides us.
    He does not answer.
    I curl around my hurt and try not to think of what there is to do in Cambridge, on a starry night, for a newly single premed student sniffing for fresh memories.

Chapter

7
    I am daunted the next morning. My eyes are wide, like a rabbit’s, in the mirror. My hair empathizes by inventing a new part. Exasperated, I pull the shag back into my trained ponytail, impatient with the time and devotion it takes to look pretty. Oh, I want