Page 76 of Across Time

I know what Mark’s expecting, but I can’t go through with it. When he touches me, I will crave calloused hands on my skin that are not his, Henri’s weight and size and smell pressing against me. I’m missing those things more and more with every hour that passes.

I take a cab to the corner of Quai Voltaire and Rue Bonaparte. Mark is already waiting, a wide smile on his face when I emerge from the car.

He looks good, tan and a little thinner from the weeks in Nepal. I smile back, still nervous but also relieved. This isn’t some stranger. It’s Mark, who I’ve adored for two full years. And if my adoration is a bit more tempered than it was, perhaps that’s for the best. There’s always been a piece of me that felt like he could do better, but that piece of me is gone. He’s a good man, but if I was enough for Henri, I’m enough for anyone.

I cross the street and his arms band tight around me, his mouth landing on mine. It’s the way he’s always kissed me, but it feels as if I’m experiencing it all from a distance, like an alien noting all the aspects of some strange human custom, perhaps wondering what possible purpose this joining of the mouths could have: the texture of his tongue against mine. Moisture on my lips. It’s not like kissing Henri. It doesn't make my limbs melt, it doesn’t make me forget where we are.

I don’t want this, I hear a voice in my head saying, and it makes me panic, because this is what I have, and it’s what I’ve planned for. I want to become the version of me who thought Mark hung the moon, who truly believed this was the best path I could take, because I’m not sure where we stand if I’m no longer her.

I pull away and he smiles down at me, pushing my hair back, leaving his palms on the sides of my face. “I'd forgotten how beautiful you are," he says softly. “I’ll try to behave for the next hour or two but it’s not going to be easy.”

For the next hour or two. My chest tightens. I’ll deal with it when the time comes.

We get a table at Café Flore. A drink or two will calm my nerves, I promise myself. It will put me back, mentally, in the year I belong.

Mark flags down a waiter and orders himself bourbon. He starts to order me a margarita and I stop him and ask for a glass of Beaujolais instead.

“Look at my little sophisticate after a summer in France,” he says. “I thought you’d never come around to drinking wine.” There’s a shade of condescension in the words. I guess there has been before, but it’s never bothered me until now.

For the next hour we talk. I tell him the little I can about my time in France, which isn’t much, but mostly he talks about Nepal. The conversation is interesting, but it lacks something. We don’t banter, and the only time he laughs is when he’s recalling something funny that happened on his trip. No matter what we are discussing—whether it’s art or music or movies or the future—it all feels a little empty, like a conversation you have to pass the time while stuck in line.

My roommate that summer in New York called us Ivy League Barbie and Ken, and I’m sure that’s exactly what we look like right now, a perfectly matched set of blondes in expensive clothes. But I’m not enjoying this, and I don’t know how to fix it. Mark is a lovely man, but Henri is like the cornerstone of a building and Mark is merely a decorative element on its exterior, pretty but ultimately meaningless.

He squeezes my hand. “You seem different tonight. Is everything okay?”

“I’m fine,” I lie, smiling at him across the table. “I think I’m still a little under the weather is all.”

He leans forward to take my other hand. “Maybe it’s time we went back to the room?”

My pulse rises. “No,” I reply too quickly. “I’m not tired at all.”

He laughs. “I know you’re nervous about tonight. Don’t be, okay? It’s going to be good. I’ll take care of everything.”

I slowly release a breath. I'd be nervous under the best of circumstances. I'd be nervous if there were no Henri, if I'd never gone back to 1938. But this is different. It’s not nerves. It’s an absolute unwillingness.

“Mark,” I whisper, “I’m sorry. But it’s not happening tonight. I’m just not ready.”

Just then a waiter bumps our table and Mark gives him a dirty look. “Watch it,” he snaps.

It’s a tiny show of irritation, but it reminds me a bit of André, the way his kindness came easily to him when things were going well and abandoned him completely when it didn’t. I’ve never seen Mark when things aren’t going well for him, I realize. It’s probably the kind of thing I should become familiar with before this moves forward.

He forces a smile. “It’s fine. Let’s just go to the room. Nothing has to happen.”

* * *

We walk along the Seine to his hotel.

I’m in Paris, wearing couture and walking along one of the most famous rivers in the world under a full moon with a man who thinks he wants to marry me. It’s my most ridiculous high school fantasy on steroids. And yet I’m longing for a different man and a different place entirely.

“What a perfect night, huh?” he asks, grabbing my hand. “Look at that moon.”

I do, and all I think when I see it is that it’s the same moon Henri is looking at in another time. I can’t bring myself to think of him in the past tense. The moon is as close to infinite as anything can be, neither past nor present, and I choose to believe somewhere Henri exists under its glow still. Will he think of me when he sees it?

"Have you given any more thought to transferring?" Mark asks.

I stumble a little, jolted from my thoughts and surprised by the question. "Mark, I've only got one year left. I want to graduate with my friends. And besides, I can't transfer from Penn this late in the game. It'd take a year just to get in anywhere."

"So take a year off," he says, as if it's the simplest thing in the world. "You don't even have to work, or if you wanted to, I'm sure there's a gallery somewhere that would be all over a super-hot receptionist who majored in art history."