The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat) (32 page)

Had she made a fool out of herself?

He was
so
quiet. Not smiling, not winking, not shrugging.

The ivory and brown of the bridges over the water under that gray sky turned the Seine into something ancient and stubborn, persistently romantic through whatever any century threw at it, but a little tired now, ready for spring. Patrick sat at last on a bench, and she sat beside him, tucking her arms in tight against the weather. Leaning his forearms on his knees, Patrick stared at his interlocked hands, thumbs worrying at his own knuckles. Once in a while he glanced at a passing barge or sideways at her.

“Aren’t you cold?” she asked him finally, after about fifteen minutes of this.

“Yes.” His rough voice was self-deprecating, his mouth wry. “But I don’t think I can handle pulling you onto my lap to warm me up just this minute, Sarah.”

She couldn’t quite figure out how she felt about being his go-to hot-water bottle. Charmed or indignant? It would be a heck of a lot warmer than her current position on the cold stone bench. “You could at least zip up your jacket.”

He looked back at his worrying thumbs. “Then you wouldn’t be able to slip inside it,” he muttered.

She stared at him. Was that a
flush
on his cheeks? Twice in twenty-four hours? She slipped a hand under his collar to curve over the nape of his neck, and he jumped. The warmth of his skin made her realize how icy her fingers must feel against it.

His head turned as he relaxed his body into the touch, and his gaze ran over her face. His mouth softened. “Kiss me?”

She leaned into him, and he yielded hungrily to the kiss, letting her take control, inviting her in. By the time she came up for air, he had pulled her to stand between his legs. He laid his head against her breasts, through her heavy coat, and the tension sighed out of him heavily. “Sarah. Thank you.”

She stroked his head, the pleasure of being able to touch it and learn its texture still an unfamiliar delight. Would she ever get used to it? “Why ‘thank you’?” she asked.

He kept one side of his wry smile buried in her chest, not saying anything for a moment. And then, softly, “For being so pretty.”

She sat down on his thigh so she could get a better look at his face. Just the position that she had been unsure about a second before.

He took one of her hands in his, gazed at it a moment, his face sober, then slowly ran his thumb down each finger before closing his hand firmly over hers, shutting the rest of the world away from it. Guilt pricked her, that
her
hands were the ones so protected, so consoled, and yet even with the guilt, there was something extraordinarily beautiful about having him think they were worth sacrificing his own to protect them. “Sarah,” he said finally, and the strain in his voice wrenched her heart. “It’s like I can’t breathe. When I try to say it. I’m trying. I just–”

She slipped her hand in between the panels of his jacket, which had been left open so she could always slip in, and rested her hand over his heart. Thud, thud, thudding, too hard. She spread her fingers as best she could and pressed them firmly.

He took a deep breath and managed half a shaky laugh. “You know those cultures where you can’t compliment a baby, because they think it will attract demons and bring harm?”

It was a common Korean belief, to which her mother subscribed with intense paranoia. Sarah didn’t interrupt him to tell him.

“If someone in one of those cultures can’t
say
– certain things, it’s not…it’s not because they don’t care enough about the baby. It’s the opposite. You know?”

Her eyes stung, shocking her. That was twice in one day now, and she
never
cried.

“It’s just – Sarah, I know I should say it. I know I’m being ridiculous. But it feels like I’m tying you to a funeral pyre and setting it on fire when I even try.”

And under her hand, his heartbeat was, indeed, going crazy. She rubbed his chest with the heel of her palm, trying to soothe it.

“It’s all right, you know,” she said softly. “I just don’t understand how you can, ah…think I’m so pretty…when I could be so much better, if only I worked harder. When I should be
perfect
for you. So sometimes…sometimes…it means a lot to me when you try to show it.”

His lips curved, wry and tender. He lowered his head to rest it against hers.

“It helps me believe in you,” she whispered, her hand still caressing over his chest where his heartbeat thudded so hard.

He said nothing for a long time, just holding her.

“You didn’t just change your mind about becoming an engineer, did you?” she asked, low. “It wasn’t like a kid who sometimes wanted to be an actor, sometimes a firefighter, sometimes the garbage collector. Something happened.”

His body stiffened. “What did Luc tell you?”

“Nothing. Essentially he said I was being a coward, and I should put myself out there and ask.”

“
He
said that?” Patrick muttered. “That bastard.” But there was no heat in the word. “He has nerve.”

Evidently. But then, that was one thing these top chefs didn’t lack, wasn’t it? Nerve.

Which made it all the more important to pay attention to where and why their nerve failed them.

“So I’m asking,” Sarah said.

Patrick’s fingers rubbed over her knee as she sat on his thigh, rubbed and rubbed and rubbed. “She was just like that,” he muttered finally.

“A girlfriend?”

“My mother,” he said and winced, deeply embarrassed. “I know. I know. I’m twenty-seven. It’s high time I got over my mother.”

What an odd thought. She curved her hand over his rubbing one. “I’m pretty sure I’m never going to get over mine.” But that was okay. Her mother didn’t deserve to be “gotten over.”

A funny movement of his shoulders, like it wanted to be a shrug but just couldn’t make it. “Your mother sounds incredible. I wish I could be half as strong as she is.”

Oh, you sweetheart.
Sarah pressed a kiss into his temple, on an upsurge of feeling.
To honor her before you even meet her.

When your own mother…?

“She was just like what?” Sarah asked carefully. It felt invasive to be pushing into him this way. Like she was, well…stepping out of herself. Into him.

A huff of a breath. Patrick’s index finger pressed into her kneecap. “First it was the favorite toy that she took away. If she wasn’t happy about something, you know, if I did something wrong. The favorite, of course.”

Sarah’s worst punishments had been when she was asked to go to her room and think about ways to improve her behavior. Sarah and, most particularly, Danji had been spoiled in every way their mother had been capable of spoiling them. It wasn’t fear of punishment that had kept Sarah kicking her heels against the chair, sobbing over those letters she couldn’t get right. It was just that, in the same way her mother couldn’t deny them anything, it had never occurred to Sarah that she could deny her mother anything either. She was in college before she ever started to wonder about who
she
could be. She’d been looking at her engineering school’s brochures on its program in Paris, in fact.

“Then it was your best friend, that you lost the right to see. Or the right to play on the soccer team, when you’d just made captain.”

Her lips parted. Something sick coalesced suddenly in the pit of her stomach.

“So you learned to hide which friend you liked the best – you talked about him as if he was a jerk. You learned to act like sports were a pain, that she dragged you to when you would rather watch TV.”
You
, he kept saying, as if he had to distance himself. “You learned to talk
really passionately
about certain TV shows, so that would be the first thing to go.”

Sarah’s teeth sank into her lower lip. Her hands wrapped around his arm, holding it tightly.

He looked up at her suddenly: “I got good at that, Sarah. But I never thought, I never thought–”

She petted that strong arm, kneading it through the leather, up and down. The switch to
I
went too deep suddenly, grief already seizing her for how painful she knew the thing he was going to pull out would be.

“Do you know how hard I worked to be ready for the engineering track?” he said suddenly, viciously. “I figured out when I was twelve that there weren’t many astronauts, that engineering was the way to get to the stars. And that you had to be the best to work on a Mars rover or some equivalent. That since Americans were the ones doing the Mars missions, I would probably need to get into our best school, Polytéchnique, and then get another degree in the U.S., to make the right contacts.” His mouth twisted. “The Polytéchnique has that great exchange with Caltech, for example. My grades were so damn good. I was the head of all my classes. All on my own – no one helping me with homework at night, because my mother was too busy smoking something or with a boyfriend. For three fucking years, I worked five hours after school every damn night, or more if I needed to. Then she got mad at me because I was rude to one of her boyfriends when I was fifteen, and she yanked me out of the damn sciences program and put me into the pastry apprenticeship track. To punish me. Because she knew how much I wanted it. My
life,
Sarah. She took away my damn
life.
Whenever I see news about the Mars rovers, with their names like Opportunity and Spirit, I still – I still hate her so bad.”

Her hand fisted slowly over his heartbeat. Her mother must know hate – a powerful, utter hatred of some people, although all she poured out onto her own daughters and her husband was an intensity of love. Sarah knew some people deserved every drop of hatred you could give them, but you still –
gave
it to them. Gave them that part of yourself and stained it black for them. And they sure as hell didn’t deserve that, the right to turn any piece of someone’s soul black. She wished she could wash the stain out, the way she had always wished her love would wash her mother clean. How sad for Patrick, one giant embrace of affection and warmth for all around him, to have that hate in him. That twisting of his ability to dream.

“And you know what pisses me off even worse?” Patrick said into her hair. “That she
still
might manage to screw me out of what I want, when she’s not even here. Like, now I’ll
let
her.”

“You’re not letting her,” Sarah said quietly and firmly. “Patrick – she doesn’t have that much power over me.”

He lifted his head as she spoke, and then, at the last word, laughed, quick and involuntary. “I was hoping you were going to say she didn’t have that much power over
me.
”

“When someone you loved when you were tiny fits you to their mold, it can be hard to break out of it,” Sarah said softly. Her hands flexed.

Patrick rubbed her knuckles again. “You did.” And then he amended, “Well…okay, maybe you didn’t. But you’re still going after your own dream with everything in you. I love that, the way you just lock your fist around it and won’t let anyone or anything wrest it away from you.”

Sometimes she thought that her own dream was really, at heart, just to be her. That everything else was just a symbol of it.

But, of course, to be her
perfectly.

“You just need to figure out what yours is,” she said.

“I kind of think I have,” he said ruefully. That warmth that she always thought of as his special gift was back in his eyes, for her, heating her all the way through. That warmth and laughter he had developed to deal with the world, when he could have chosen so many other things. Bitterness. Hatred.

“Really? What is it?” she asked curiously, despite herself. She knew he wanted to keep his dream hidden, but – “To open up your own restaurant? To go to Mars still?”

His eyes widened. He stared dumbfounded a moment, and then dropped his forehead back on top of her head with slightly too much of a thunk. “You know, for someone who seems to see right through me, you’re not as perceptive as you could be. You must be your own blind spot.”

What did that mean? “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me.” Maybe one day he would be able to.

And she thought again of how soon her internship was ending. How much longer did
one day
have?

What was she going to do? What risk was she going to take?

Or was she not going to take any risks? Just stay inside herself and hope the risks would be taken for her?

“I might,” he said. “That’s the thing, Sarah. I just might. It might be one of those dreams you can’t get, unless you lay it all out there.”

Chapter 31

They had reached the Pont Neuf, as they followed the Seine’s lower quay toward Patrick’s apartment, when Sarah’s brain pointed out that he still didn’t make sense. Jesus. He was worse than being on a misdirected research project, trying to process unwieldy data around the wrong question, realizing it
still
didn’t add up, she was still
missing something. Or maybe so was he. Willfully.

Because – Meilleur Ouvrier de France. Maybe a man could tell himself he was doing it for his chef and maybe in many ways he really was – after all, their whole career choice was focused on pleasing others. But the Meilleur Ouvrier de France was the ultimate achievement of their career. It took
everything
out of a person, and most people failed. You didn’t get that good unless it really, really mattered. But she could see now why Patrick would have to pretend to himself that it didn’t.

Now how to approach this? For all the times he had nurtured her in the kitchen, could she help him reach
his
dreams, while keeping them safe, too?

“How did you adjust?” she asked finally. “From engineering to doing so well in
pâtisserie
?”

“Oh, I didn’t.” A light voice, amused.
Right.
“When she forced me from the sciences track into the apprenticeship track, I went completely wild. I essentially broke any chance of the state allowing her power over me again – and ended up in the foster care system. And I had been at Bernard Durand’s for less than two months and was about to break that, too, when Luc stopped by to visit, because Bernard is always after him to go be a role model to his foster kids. I don’t really know what Luc saw in me. I didn’t like him. I didn’t like anybody right then. But I still remember him saying to Bernard, ‘He’s too old to fit in here. Let me take him up to Paris with me. We’ve got a spot for an apprentice I can get him, and he can stay with me.’ I didn’t trust him at all, but – well, he grew up in the streets, right? He understood things, like why I would be wary. So he just got me that apartment the size of a bed down the hall from him, so I’d have my own space and sense of control, and then he took me into the kitchens where he was sous-chef and said, ‘Here, see how much you can make of
this
opportunity. That’s what I did.’ And so…I did.”