Page 100 of The Edge of Always

We’re walking slowly now, the pace dictated by me and my pitiful body. Emmett knows where we’re going, so I try to remind myself to take in the streets as we pass them until we arrive at a small, nondescript building.

‘It’s here,’ he tells me, halfway down some regular Parisian boulevard. The blue door. The final thing that Earl painted.

The door is old, worn. The stones around it are crumbling, their edges no longer sharp.

It’s the same as at the cemetery – the feeling that Earl was here, in this very spot. I can feel him urging me on, pushing me forward towards the door.

Inside, the lights are on, but the windows are frosted. Emmett doesn’t move.

‘Maybe this is where they met?’ he says.

‘I think so too.’

‘I’ll see you in a couple of hours. I have my phone – call if you need me?’

We’d swapped numbers earlier, self-consciously and quietly. I hadn’t wanted to think about the fact that I’d have a means of always contacting him now, if I needed one.

‘Okay, but are you sure you don’t want to come in?’ I ask. For a man who just had sex twice, Emmett seems heavy, weighed down in a way that reminds me of the past.

‘No, this is for you. Go, and I’ll see you soon.’ He leans down and kisses me, gently. It feels like the intimate gesture that it is, and his being in such close proximity addles my senses and makes me wish with everything that I have that things were different.

By the time I push the door open, Emmett is already gone. I’m greeted by a bright room, people sat around the middle of a space where a stool is covered with a white cloth.

‘Bon soir, madame.’ A man with an expansive beard comes over to me. He’s pencil thin and wearing a stripy suit.

‘Bon soir, I have a booking, for the life drawing…’ but before I even manage to finish half a sentence, the man lets out a string of very loud, very French exclamations. I’m almost certain that I just heard every French swear word going.

‘It is you!’ he finishes.

‘Er…’

‘Louis! LOUIS!’ Another man, this one in every way diametrically opposite to Louis, appears in a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts. ‘The model is ready, she will wait no longer. MERDE!’ The man in the Hawaiian shirt also spots me.

‘We must talk after class,’ Louis tells me, before he and the guy in the shirt have a whole conversation about me.

I can’t interrupt them because a model is walking through the space now, a white dressing gown draped loosely over her shoulders.

And then there’s a naked woman on the stool. I stumble towards one of the spare easels. I’m having some sort of out-of-body experience; it’s all just happening so fast. Obviously I’d signed up to the drawing class, but didn’t I realise that I don’t do that anymore? Drawing makes you feel free, but I’m not free. I’m trapped inside a broken body.

The model arranges herself into an artful position, one knee raised, which she rests her elbow on and her chin on her hand.

And yet… I’m in front of a blank canvas. I can hear Louis and the other man still arguing in the back room.

I must look like a startled deer who has never so much as wielded a pencil because the person next to me, who is head to toe in neon pink Lycra, leans over and says in heavily accented English, ‘Is just a little fun, yes?’

I nod, grateful even as stress claws at me, pulling me towards the blue door and away from here.

She gives another encouraging smile, readjusts her tiara and then sets to work.

Fun.

Some people are inclined to think that artists are a bit snooty. And probably some of them are. But I love artists. Artists might be lots of things, but they are rarely boring.

It’s weird if I just sit and stare at the model without drawing.

I could just do a little. I didn’t think that I could come to Paris, and here I am. I didn’t think that I’d ever see Emmett again and look what happened there. In Paris, anything is possible. So yes, surely I can survive one art class. I mean, I’m light-headed, and my heart is pounding, but I think it’s the paint fumes. Hopefully, it’s the paint.

I pick up a pencil, far more my medium than paint, and try to ground myself in the moment. I’m somewhere that Earl was. He might have painted in this exact spot.