Page 69 of Host for the Holidays
“Goodnight, Rémy.”
“Goodnight, Madi.”
And then we go our separate ways.
And my way is to lie down on my bed and stare up at the ceiling, wondering how soon Madi will let me spend another day with her.
TWENTY-NINE
MADI
Today wasa day.It feels like I lived an entire week in the space of the last sixteen hours. I should be devastated. I should be tired.
I’m neither. I’m just . . . well, when I go down to brush my teeth and use the bathroom before calling it a night, I’m disappointed when I don’t run into Rémy. That’s how I am.
And that’s weird. No one needs to tell me that. I just spent hours with him, and I just broke up with my boyfriend of two years. Something is seriously wrong with me.
Rémy’s door stays closed as I use the bathroom, which is probably for the best. I need to process everything that’s happened since I left this morning.
When I get up to my room, I see my phone light up.
Siena:*GIF of Mr. Bean sitting in a field of flowers, looking at his watch*
I chuckle. Patience was never one of Siena’s fortes. She has a great memory, though, so there’s that.
I glance at the ladder that leads up to my bed and grimace. But hey, after standing a thousand feet above Paris, I can handle five feet above the floor. I’m basically fearless.
I stick my phone up on my bed and climb the ladder like it’s nothin’. Photography didn’t work out, but maybe I should look into firefighting. I don’t love the thought of putting out actual fire, but I could be good at rescuing cats stuck in trees.
I slither into my bed like a snake to keep from hitting my head on the sloped ceiling. And now it’s time to throw Siena a bone. I swipe to open my phone and navigate to the photos app.
As a photographer, I spend a lot of my time super-zoomed into photos. I pay attention to all the details to make sure there’s nothing to mar the big picture. If you’ve done a portrait session with me, I know the exact hue of your irises and the diameter of any zit on your face that day. I know if your mouth tilts when you smile and if one eye is slightly bigger than the other—the good, the bad, the ugly. But none of it is actually ugly. I love seeing humans up close like that. We are fascinating and so diverse.
The point is, right now, I’m prickling with curiosity because even though I saw the pictures the lady at the top of the Eiffel Tower took, I couldn’t reallyseethem because Rémy was watching me. Now I can take my time inspecting every minute detail of them as is my God-given right as a photographer.
I smile as I look at the first photo and the text in the top corner telling me there are twenty-nine others like it. I tilt my head to the side, partially because the photo itself is tilted.
Rémy and I look comfortable together. I never thought of myself as one of those heartless people who immediately moves on from a relationship, but I feel like it should have been less normal for me to take a picture alone with a guy that isn’t Josh just hours after breaking up.
I zoom in on Rémy’s face. Hot dang, he’s attractive. It’s not just how he looks, though. Looks only take you so far. It’s everything else about Rémy—how thoughtful he’s been, how willing he is to literally hold my hand as I push through my fears, how . . . just how he makes me feel generally. And that smile . . . it does something to his eyes that—
Okay. Enough of that. I can do my pixel-level inspection later. Right now it’s time to appease Siena. I start flipping through the photos, trying to find one that I can send to her. I’ll be cropping out Rémy. No offense to him, but I don’t need Siena jumping through the phone when she sees that I didn’t go up alone.
It’s harder than I thought it would be, though, finding a picture that I can crop decently and still make it clear that I am, indeed, at the top of the Eiffel Tower. I choose the last one, since it’s the straightest and also the one where only my camera bag is cut out of the photo. Then I carefully crop it so that you can clearly see the patterned puddle iron bars beside me, but there’s no way of knowing who I’m with.
I send it, then hurry to shoot her a text right after.
Madi:There you go! A thousand feet up and even smiling.
I swear the text has only been sent for ten seconds when I get a response.
It’s the same picture I just sent, but it’s marked up like a homework assignment. There’s a red, lopsided circle around my shoulder where you can see a bit of Rémy’s thumb I couldn’t quite crop out. On top, again in red, it saysWHAT KIND OF CROP JOB IS THIS?!
She knows me too well. With a sigh, I send the original, uncropped picture because I know my best friend, and if I try to fight this, I will be up all night, and I will end up sending it to her anyway. She always wins.
And now she’s calling me.
As suspected, her level of enthusiasm approaches dangerous levels—dangerous to my hearing, if nothing else. She cuts out a bit because of the spotty service, but she’s going on about how Rémy is the best souvenir I could possibly bring home and how the Eiffel Tower is untoppable as a first date.
