Bound Together (13 page)

Amanda found me in the little business center, hunched over the computer. “Come on,
Zoey
, we
gotta
go.”

I followed her outside
where the group was waiting
and shared a knowing
look
with Matt.
We both knew we’d be hooking up tonight
, and it made me all the more excited to get to
on with the adventure
.

Our trip was more than half over and still Matt and I hadn’t de
cided on a topic for our paper, but maybe we’d come up with something genius on the next stop of our tour.

I
hung out
with Amanda during the
three
hour
walking tour of the city’s architecture
and listened to her drone on about how cute
she thought
Bobby was.
Gag me. He was a pre
-
pubescent
dwarf with shifty eyes. But they were both about a four, so who was I to judge?

*****

We arrived
back
at
the hotel,
I grabbed my room key and headed to the lobby hoping Matt had the same idea and would meet me
t
here.
A few minutes later, Matt came out of the elevator and without missing a beat, walked up and took my hand. “Shall we?” he asked, sweeping me towards the doors.

S
uppress
ing
a grin,
I
worked my hand free from his.
He avoided meeting my eyes, suddenly embarrassed that he’d violated our arra
nge
ment.
With him at my side, being in
a
new city didn’t intimidate me. I felt like we could do anything we wanted. And we did.

Whereas t
he
few first
days had been warm and sunny,
it
had
now
turned chilly and damp
, I huddled into my thin thread-bare cardigan and ignored Matt’s repeated attempts to give me his jacket.

We spent hours walking the Champs
Élysées
, which is this huge avenue in Paris, lined with shops, cafés, and cinemas. We reached the Arc de
Triomphe
,
and took the
stairs all the way up
to the top and looked out over all of Paris.

Matt was being really quiet, but that was fine with me.
We stood the top for a while, just looking out at the clear sky and the city spread before us.

We were too intimidated to ride the metro back, though I knew it would have been an easier way to get around. So we turned and walked back the way we’d come from. There was so much to see along the tree
-
lined sidewalk, so we hardly noticed that we’d racked up so many miles.

After walking for a while, we stopped at a café and ordered cappuccino
s
and sat at an outdoor table.
When Matt reached for his mug, I noticed he was still wearing my black elas
tic hair tie around his wrist, and e
ven though I had more in my room, I was still wearing my hair down.
I tried not t
o think about what either of tho
se things meant.
Now that we were no longer walking, the cool air gave me goose bumps through my long
sleeved T
-
shirt.

I wasn’t used to spending this much time with someone my own age and having to make conversation.  At home, I rarely had to time for form a coherent thought, it was mostly just
shouting
commands at my siblings to do this or stop doing that, and with Morgan, I mostly listened to her stories about her latest crush.

Luckily, Matt and I felt comfortable enough around each other that neither of us
fe
l
t
the need to make constant chatter. But still, we
hadn’t said much in the last
hour and it was bugging me that I couldn’t think o
f a single thing to talk about, especially now that we were
sitting across from each other and he was just staring at me.

“Using only one word, what was your first impression of me?” I asked him.

“Huh?”

I knew he’d heard me, so I just waited for him to comprehend what I meant.

“You sure you want to play this game?” He looked over at me.

“Yeah, just hit me with it.”
I cracked my knuckles.

“Okay.” He shrugged. “I guess the first thing that came to mind was
cold
.

Cold?
I wrapped my hands around the little mug, trying to draw some warmth from it.

“
I don’t think that anymore,
” he added. “B
ut the way you distance yourself from everyone at school, I guess that was the impression I had.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

“What about me?” he asked. “What was your first impression of me?”

“Spoiled
,
”
I
blurted out
without
hesitating
.

“Spoiled?”
He seemed genuinely surprised.

“Yeah. You work for your
dad
, you drive a nice SUV,
you
can do pretty much whatever you want at school, or get one of your minions to do it for you.”
I wasn’t going to mention the All
-
American hero vibe he gave off, his perfect clothes and skin.
Or the clean, male way he smelled.

“Hmm
.” He considered it. “My Dad pays me minimum wage and I have to work way more than I’d like, and that truck was my brother’s. I had to beg my parents to let me keep it and I make the payments now.” He rubbed a hand across his hair. “And at school, I guess that’s just me keeping up appearances, doing what everyone would expect.”

So I had him all wrong once again.
I took a sip of my cappuccino.
Maybe it was safer not to talk, that way he wouldn’t keep revealing things that made me seem like a bitch and him less and less like the guy I’d initially thought.

*****

At dinner that night
I
trailed
my finger across the length of the menu until I found
what I was looking for –
l
es entrees
. I read over each one carefully.
I didn’t want to repeat my
horrible
experience
of ordering
our first night
in French
. I studied the menu, concentrating on the individual words that made up th
e item.
Endives au bleu et aux
noix
—
I knew what that was. It was definitely a salad. I couldn’t go wrong with salad, could I?

My e
ndive salad
came
with
bleu cheese crumbled on top.
Cheese in France was an entirely new experience
.
It was stinky and rank, but still somehow
still
delicious. The salad c
oupled with g
enerous hunks of baguette
made the perfect meal.
The food here was quickly becoming my favorite thing about Paris.
Well, that and hooking up with Matt. That boy’s body was seriously
bangin
’ and I desperately wanted to make it my own personal jungle gym.

I stole a glance at him
across
the table
, and watched him stuff a crusty piece of baguette in
to
his mouth
. I purposefully distanced myself from him
in public
. I didn’t want anyone to suspect anything was going on
between us
with all the time we were spending together, and well, Bobby blatantly catching us making out.
I figured it was best not to arise any
more
suspicions.

Matt glanced at me and gestured to my mouth, then touched his own lips. He started to lean across the table. I held my hand up, stopping him. “Parker, please – we’re in public.”

He pressed his lips together, suppressing a laugh. “I wasn’t going to kiss you,
Zoey
,” he whispered, leaning in towards me. His amusement on his face slowly fell when he realized what I meant. “I was just trying to tell you that you have a piece of spinach in your teeth.”

My hands flew to my mouth. “Oh.”

I excused myself from the table, clumsily dropping my napkin from my lap when I stood. Matt and I both bent down to retrieve the fallen napkin and bumped heads. His eyes flicked up to mine and he smiled. I attempted a half smile without opening my mouth, lest I flash my spinach-filled teeth at him again, and then scampered away towards the bathroom.

I was now used to the act of dining lasting a few hours
,
which only left us with a bit
o
f time
hang out when we got back to the hotel.
Bobby, Amanda and Stephanie plus a few other
kids were
going to sit by the bank of the
Seine River
and drink. Matt and I joined them
, but I walked behind the group with a quiet girl named
Shanea
I’d never actually spoken to
.
Why change that now?
We were bundled up in sweatshirts, scarves and jackets and a
carried along a
few bottles of cheap red wine.

The Seine River was more of a canal, carved out through the city. We sat on
a
stone ledge in front of the water
and watched the twinkling lights that lit up a bridge ahead, and far in the distance, the Eiffel Tower rose up above everything else around it. I felt free here, like I
could
be or do anything I wanted. It was a very powerful feeling.

Matt walked down to the end where I was sitting and handed me a bottle of wine.

I took a long swig while he sat down next to me. Without saying anything, I scooted over close to him,
until our legs were touching,
trying to get warm
. He
put his arm around me
and pulled me close
.
We passed the bottles of wine around until all three were gone, and divided among the
seven
of us, we all had a happy buzz. On the walk back to the hotel, we made zigzagging trails through the streets and
they sang our school fight song at the tops of their lungs. I didn’t know the words.

We were out of breath and rosy
-
cheeked when we made it back to the hotel.
I wanted some time alone with Matt and I know he did too by the way he lingered in the lobby, but there was nothing we could unless we were willing to be obvious about it, and ask
e
ither Bobby or Amanda to give us some privacy. We both chickened out and went our separate ways.
I la
id
in my bed
unfulfilled, un
-
tired and a little tipsy
thinking of Matt and his soft
kisses
.
I thought about everything I’d learned about him so far this trip, and the pieces fit together in a much different way than I expected them to.

Chapter Sixteen

Matt

We got to the
Musée
du Louvre
just before it opened, and luckily there were only a few other people in line. Zoey and I were an efficient team, once we got inside, I got the tickets while she got a map and scoped out the layout of the place. We met back up a few minutes later. “Where are we headed?” There were several staircases leading off in different directions from the marble lobby we stood in.

She pointed to the exhibition room on the second floor directly above us. “The
Monna
Lisa is up there. We can work our way to it though.” Zoey pulled me along, in the opposite direction of the crowds of people who were heading up to see the
Monna
Lisa.

Zoey lead me into a long room filled with marble sculptures of naked dudes. She walked along a head of me. She seemed most interested in the sculptures that had their junk hanging out. She’d stop in front of one, and take her time studying it, before moving on to linger over another one. I was about to head to the next room in the exhibit when I noticed she motioned to a statue of four huge men carved from limestone. They were nude, of course. She stood there in awe, her head tilted back,
jaw
open. I walked up beside her. “Enjoying the view?”