Page 15 of Impulse Control
Day seven.
René yells. Always. Faces lie. I hesitate. He notices. I survive. Barely. Small man, huge energy, terrifying, magnetic—pick two.
Métro smells like old stone and regret. Le Marais smells like coffee, bread, and boutique chaos. Model winks. I almost dropped my camera. Almost.
Furniture hunting. Markets. Cobblestones. People. All faces, all lies, all stories. I’m noticing everything. Always.
Dom sent flowers. Really. Roses. Arrived at the office while I was mid-lecture on light and shadow from René. I didn’t answer. Smelled like trouble anyway.
I haven’t blinked. Haven’t cried. Haven’t quit. Yet.
Also, this city is trying to kill me softly, and I kind of love it.
Chapter
Four
RACHEL
By the end of my first week with René, exhaustion had stopped feeling dramatic and started feeling earned.
The kind that settled into your bones and didn’t ask permission. The kind that came with sore feet, ink-stained fingers, and a brain that wouldn’t shut up even when my body begged it to. I’d slept hard every night and still woke up tired. Not depleted. Just… used well.
That was new.
We’d been back to Le Marais twice—different streets, different boutiques, same ruthless attention to detail. René never wandered. Even when it looked like he was drifting, he was editing in real time.
Once we crossed the river and climbed into Montmartre, where everything tilted just enough to remind you the city wasn’t built for convenience. René said very little about why we went where we went. He rarely explained his choices. He expected you to notice.
Art director. Photography editor. Gatekeeper of what the Paris Daily deemed worthy of ink.
But that was the public version.
Privately, he was something else entirely.
He knew this city the way some people know scripture. Not just landmarks—rhythms. The woman who opened her bakery at 5:12 instead of five. The tailor who worked out of a fourth-floor walk-up and only took appointments on Tuesdays. The protest routes before they were announced. The quiet cafés where journalists traded information like currency.
He didn’t just assign stories.
He found them.
Or more precisely—he waited until the city revealed them, and then he was ready.
Today, Montmartre felt like a held breath.
Tourists clustered near Sacré-Cœur, cameras up, wandering loud and careless. Locals slipped around them like water. The air smelled like espresso, cigarettes, and something sweet frying nearby. Cobblestones caught the light unevenly, daring you to misstep.
René stopped near a cluster of stalls and pop-up racks—local designers, handmade pieces, things you couldn’t buy anywhere else because no one had bothered to mass-produce them yet.
He didn’t look at me when he said, “Watch.”
Which, with René, always meant:Learn.
I did.
And then I didn’t.
Because she was there.
