Chapter 39

She lets you sleep in.

You wake up to the particular quality of hotel morning light coming through curtains that don’t quite meet — a detail that makes you smile before you’re fully conscious, that takes you back to her bedroom and the lamp and the morning after the party — and Alysa is already awake beside you, on her phone, the particular stillness of someone who has been awake for a while and has been deliberately quiet about it.

She looks over when she feels you stir.

“Morning beautiful,” she says softly.

“Morning,” you say.

She puts her phone down and turns toward you and tucks a strand of hair behind your ear — the gesture that is so entirely hers, so specifically the way she reaches for you — and you close your eyes briefly and just — be here. Paris morning. Her hand. The cold outside the window and the warm inside.

“No practice today?” you ask.

“Not until tomorrow,” she says. “Today is yours.”

Yours.

“Ours,” you correct softly.

She smiles.

“Ours,” she agrees.

They hit the streets at ten.

The city is doing its Paris thing — grey and cold and beautiful in the specific way of European cities in winter, the kind of beautiful that doesn’t try, that is just there in the bones of the place, in the buildings and the bridges and the particular way the light falls even when the sun isn’t showing itself.

Alysa moves through it like she’s been here before, which she has — competitions, she explains, three times over the years, enough to have favourites and to know where to take you.

“First stop,” she says, turning down a side street you’d have walked straight past.

The boutiques are small and warm and the kind of places that have one of everything, carefully chosen, where the racks aren’t full but everything on them is worth looking at.

You fall into the rhythm of it immediately — the same rhythm as the thrift store where everything began, you and her moving through a space together, picking things up and holding them out and giving verdicts — except here you’re on her side of it, here you’re the one in the fitting room while she sits outside and waits and gives opinions.

The first dress is pale blue, slightly structured, with a bow at the back.

You come out of the fitting room and she looks up from her phone and just — stops. Looks at you properly.

“Yes,” she says.

“You haven’t even—”

“Yes,” she says again, with complete certainty.

You look in the mirror. It is very good actually.

“Yes,” you agree.

The second is a soft knit in cream, short and slightly oversized, the kind of thing that looks effortless.

You come out.

She tilts her head.

“Also yes,” she says. “But different yes. That one is a Sunday yes.”

“A Sunday yes,” you repeat.

“As in — perfect for a Sunday. Comfortable yes. The blue one was a going somewhere special yes.”

You look at yourself in the mirror.

“I’m getting both,” you say.

“Obviously,” she says.

The lingerie boutique happens naturally.

You’re walking past and the window catches your eye — something in it, the way it’s displayed, delicate and pretty and entirely your taste — and you slow without meaning to and she slows with you and you glance at her and she glances at you and there is a half second of something that is equal parts warmth and amusement and she simply holds the door open.

You go in.

She is, to her credit, very well behaved.

Mostly.

She sits in the small chair by the fitting room and you bring things in and come out and she gives opinions that are helpful and also slightly devastating and at one point she says, about something you’re holding up, that one with a quality in her voice that makes you feel warm from the outside in and you add it to the pile without further discussion.

You buy three things.

She carries the bag.

The thrift stores are hers.

Two of them, on streets she navigates with the confidence of someone who has done research, and you understand immediately why she loves this — the treasure hunt quality of it, the way you never know what you’ll find, the particular satisfaction of something good pulled from the middle of something ordinary.

She’s in her element.

You watch her flick through racks with that focused ease and think about the very first time — the store at home, her arm full of potential, holding things up and asking yes or no — and feel the distance between then and now like something warm and measurable.

This time you’re on her side of it.

“Yes,” you say, when she holds up a dark vintage blazer with interesting buttons.

“Yes,” you say, when she finds a silky blouse in a deep green.

“Absolutely not,” you say, when she holds up something plaid with great optimism.

She puts it back immediately and points at you. “That’s fair.”

“I have to be honest with you.”

“I appreciate it,” she says, already moving down the rack.

She finds something for you.

You’re browsing a few racks away when she appears at your elbow with something in her hands — a soft cardigan, slightly vintage, in a colour that is almost pink and almost lilac and exactly between the two. Small pearl buttons. The kind of thing that is so entirely your aesthetic that you almost don’t understand how it ended up in a Paris thrift store.

“Don’t say it,” she says.

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“You were going to say something about me knowing your style.”

“I was going to say thank you,” you say.

She holds it out.

You take it.

Your fingers brush hers.

“Thank you,” you say softly.

She looks at you for a moment with that expression.

“Try it on,” she says.

The bags accumulate through the afternoon.

Paper ones and plain ones, a box from the lingerie boutique, the thrift store things in tote bags she produces from her own bag because of course she carries tote bags. By three o’clock you are both laden and slightly tired in the good way of people who have spent the day doing something they enjoyed, and you find a small café and sit at a window table and have coffee and split a pastry and watch Paris go past outside.

Her bags on one side of the table.

Yours on the other.

The lingerie boutique bag between them.

She glances at it.

Glances at you.

Says nothing.

But the corner of her mouth does the thing and you look out the window and feel warm all the way through and let the afternoon be exactly what it is — golden and cold and Parisian and entirely, completely theirs.

Back at the hotel she drops onto the bed with her bags and looks at the ceiling with the satisfied exhaustion of a good day fully spent.

You sit on the edge of the bed and look at her.

At this girl in her thrifted finds and her dark hair half escaped from wherever she put it this morning and her silver ring and her doc martens still on because she hasn’t quite gotten there yet, lying on a hotel bed in Paris on the rest day before the biggest competition of her season, completely unbothered and completely beautiful.

“Good day?” she asks the ceiling.

“Really good day,” you say.

She turns her head to look at you.

“Get dressed beautifully tonight,” she says. “I’m taking you out.”

You look at the bags.

At the short satin mini dress in one of them — form fitting at the top, slightly puffed at the bottom, the colour of dark plum — that you both agreed on in the second boutique without much deliberation at all.

You look back at her.

“How beautifully?” you ask.

She smiles at the ceiling.

“You’re most beautiful,” she says.