Read All for You for Free Online

memories.
    “Yes,” he said. “I can see that.” Can I kiss you? Just right now? He’d fought five years to be the man who deserved to kiss that mouth, and maybe he’d been assuming she’d recognize his right immediately.
    Again, his gaze downward let him skim his own body. As far as he could tell, strength and competence and confidence pretty much radiated off his every cell these days. His personal radius felt about ten times bigger than anyone else he crossed paths with in the street. He tried to be polite and not pushy, but people shifted out of his way on the sidewalk before he could even start to shift out of theirs. “Walk?” he asked again, low.
    She hesitated and then shrugged defiantly and turned to head up the sidewalk toward République. She had a brisk Paris stride, and he kept his much longer one slow, not in a rush to get to a café to meet with friends but in steady determination to get through terrain or his day.
    It didn’t take them long to reach the great Place de la République, empty of protestors today, people hurrying across it and a few families lingering at the fountains. Célie headed toward the canal, a nice, quiet place to walk. He only knew where they were because he’d had to look up her work address on a map of Paris and always liked to scout out the terrain before he stepped into new territory. Paris had not been his stomping grounds, in the old days.
    The canal was pretty, though. Even prettier than in films, because now it felt like a real place. Shaded by plane trees, arched with bridges, filled with this quiet, dark water that rippled only when someone tossed a stone into it.
    He glanced down at Célie and caught her in the act of sneaking a glance up at him. She quickly looked away.
    “How’s your brother?” he asked, for something to say.
    “Oh, is that why you’re here?” she demanded truculently. “You’re looking for him?”
    He cut her an astonished glance. Their whole cité and every gang in it had known that the only reason he kept putting up with her brother was that she came with him. If he had beaten the crap out of Ludo the way he’d wanted to when her brother started getting into drug trafficking and trying to drag Joss and Célie after him, he’d never have gotten a chance to see Ludo’s sister again.
    And he’d needed Ludo’s sister. Seeing Célie nearly every day had made him feel like he had a—a teddy bear or something he could take to bed with him at night. Something that made him feel warm and secure and happy against darkness. He’d even tried as hard as he could not to fantasize about her too explicitly, because it had seemed wrong. Tender fantasies, more, where he tried not to let his mind go below her shoulders, and then tried not to let his mind go below her waist, and then the clothes above the waist had slowly faded away, and now, now … well, in the past five years, he’d long since lost all barriers to the fantasies. They’d gotten hotter and deeper, and she’d given more and more of herself, more and more willingly, every time. They’d kept their sweetness, though.
    “I was looking for you,” he said, and her brown gaze lifted and caught with his. He reached for her arm and pulled her out of the way of an elderly lady with a grocery trolley bag.
    She jerked away and then had to apologize to the older woman for bumping into the groceries.
    “Ludo got out two years ago,” Célie said tightly, once the woman had moved on. “But he went to America. He said it was better than staying here. He didn’t have a visa, but he didn’t come back, so I guess …” She shrugged, in an aggressive display of indifference.
    “So you’ve been on your own?”
    She looked a little confused. “Well, my mom.” She shrugged again. “Cousins.”
    Célie’s mother and extended family were not exactly the rock on which a woman built a castle. “You’ve been on your own.”
    She shook her head firmly. “I’ve had work. Dom.”
    Dom. Joss