Page 63 of The Riviera House Swap

‘For not replying to that last letter you sent. For not getting in touch at all when I promised I would,’ she told him. ‘I guess it would be easier these days, you know, with Facebook and mobile phones and things. But I shouldn’t have just left you hanging. I should have been upfront with you. Especially after… well, you know.’

‘After…?’ he prompted.

She flushed. ‘Well, you were my first. I thought…’

‘Oh yes, and you were mine, Nina,’ he said, nodding his understanding. ‘It meant a lot to me.’ He shook his head. ‘I was sad when you rejected me. But it was a long time ago. So it doesn’t matter. We are different people now.’

‘Yes!’ she said, almost too enthusiastically. ‘We are different, and I guess I know what I want now in a way maybe I didn’t then.’

‘But of course,’ he began. Then the waiter interrupted them, hovering with his notebook poised in anticipation of an order.

‘Oh sorry,’ began Nina, ‘we haven’t…’

‘I will have the steak,’ Pierre interrupted – his tone harsher and his French more rapid when speaking to the waiter. ‘With the frites, and green salad.’

‘Oh,’ Nina said, panicking that she hadn’t yet made her own choice. She’d assumed he’d laid his menu down because he was too taken by her, but clearly he had made his choice. She quickly scanned the menu, then simply said, ‘I’ll have the same, please.’ She was pretty sure he hadn’t said steak tartare, so she ought to be safe.

The waiter nodded and took their menus, poured Pierre a small amount of red wine to taste and watched him swill it expertly in his mouth.

‘Yes,’ said Pierre at last. ‘It is good.’

The waiter, who looked about nineteen years old, nodded as if deeply respectful of Pierre’s expertise, then half-filled both their enormous glasses. Then he went off to the kitchen to pass their order to the chef.

The brasserie was filling up now and Pierre kept looking around every time another couple or party came to sit nearby. ‘I did not realise it would be so busy tonight,’ he confessed.

‘It’s OK. All adds to the ambiance,’ she smiled.

‘Yes, that is true. But it is not intimate,’ he said, sadly.

There was something a little well, intimate, about his using that word. She smiled at him again. ‘It’s great,’ she said. ‘A lovely place.’ Although, in fairness, the brasserie was a little run-down compared to some of the restaurants she’d visited and passed during her time here and she wondered a little at his choice. Now she understood – he’d thought it would be quiet so they could talk.

They were silent for a moment, looking at each other. ‘I am sorry,’ Pierre admitted. ‘I can’t remember what we were speaking about. I think it’s because it is hard to focus when I am with you.’

She blushed again – perhaps she really was becoming her seventeen-year-old self – and said, ‘I was just apologising. You know. For not returning that last letter. I’ve sometimeswondered what might have happened if I’d come over – if we’d seen each other again.’

‘Do not worry about this,’ he said. ‘You were young. We were both young. Twenty is far too young to be making grown-up decisions. It is practically still a child.’

‘No, seventeen,’ she corrected.

‘Quoi?’

‘We were only seventeen,’ she said. ‘Not twenty. Because you were still at lycée, and I was at school.’

Pierre laughed. ‘I am terrible at maths!’ he said. ‘So now you know my secret. I would never be able to manage an office like you. I am confined to using my patisserie management skills instead.’

She laughed along too. Although it didn’t take a maths whizz to work out that twenty-year-olds don’t tend to go on school French exchange. Perhaps he was as nervous as she felt.

She longed to ask Pierre if they could take a photo together so she could send it to Sal and Bess, but decided that asking for a selfie would make her seem as if she’d never properly left high school. Instead, she asked Pierre to tell her about his own intervening years.

‘Ah, I did not marry like you,’ he said, a little wistfully. ‘But I tried. I made love to many, many women.’

‘Oh,’ she said.

He grinned, clearly pleased with the revelation. She felt a little odd about it – was she the right person to be boasting to? But perhaps it was only a turn of phrase rather than anything else.

‘That’s… good,’ she said at last.

‘Yes, but I was never in love,’ he said, sadly. ‘I see beautiful women and we have a lot of fun in the bedroom. But I never found my love. My true love.’ His hand crawled across the tabletowards hers and suddenly, their fingers were touching. She felt a tingle run up her arm and met his eye.

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