The two of them walk along the beach in the midnight surf; the waves lap up against their bare feet and the breeze stops to wrap around the two of them before leaving. His jacket is slung over his left shoulder, the neat bowtie pulled apart and draped around his neck; her heels dangle from her right hand, her hair loosely around her bare shoulders. The lights of the veranda twinkle brightly behind them, but the shadows they cast are lessened by the moonlight.

The water is cool enough to leave a trail of numbness across her skin when a particularly adventurous swell of current ventures to trip up her ankles. The raw tingle that the ever-receding-and-returning warmth creates reminds her of the last time she stepped foot onto this beach. It had been less than a year ago (how strange that time had passed so slowly!) when she’d sprinted desperately across the punishing sands of a hot afternoon in July to try and catch the man she loved. She hadn’t been properly shod for it then, either – whoever had mandated that women had to wear such unreasonable footwear to weddings, anyway? – and immediately lost her yellow flip-flops in a castle moat not twenty feet from the car.

The air is warm enough that he thinks not of the water that is soaking into his slacks and in all probability wrinkling their toes, but instead of the breeze between them and the pale light that reflects off of the surf behind and before them. The first time that they were here, he was dressed in a hawaiian shirt and shorts, he remembers, and her in a red tank top and maroon skirt, and it was pure chance that they found each other. Well, almost pure chance, for he had seen her walking the beach at night, and he was...what had he told her again...oh, right - looking for inspiration for his books.

“Oh, so you’re a writer,” she said keenly, looking for all the world like a dog who’d just spotted a new ball in the park.

"Well, yes," were his first words as stretched out and stood up. He remembered the quirk of her smile, more than anything else, was what drew him to her. "I'm more of a reader, but occasionally people and places will drive me to put pen to paper. People always do seem to expect more after publishing the first book, so here I am."

“How difficult it must be, having people who actually want to read more of your work,” she commented, with a raised eyebrow. He laughs, a smooth roll of music that she, even to this day, wishes she knew how to transcribe onto staff paper.

“What sort of writing do you do?” is the next question. They’ve begun strolling down towards the waterfront, a silent agreement that their newly-found companionship needs no introductions. The crackle of the bonfire in the distance provides a quiet accompaniment to their footsteps as she keeps an eye out for more driftwood while the other rests on his tall, agile figure.

He had waved a hand dismissively, looking a touch embarassed. "Something fairly boring to you, I predict. Mostly ghostwriting, honestly, and I can't really talk about that or they'd-" he drew a line across his throat, grinning and trying to draw a laugh out of her. "Trying to break out and write something under my own name. What about you?"

“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,” she had responded with mock-solemnity, hoping to draw out the mystery of her glamorous occupation for as long as possible. In the end, it had taken him a full two weeks to pry all the pertinent details out of her; in between coffee dates and late brunches (and once, even following her incognito from the used bookstore that they’d met at one evening, to her graveyard shift at- oh, so it was a bakery, was it?) he had slowly pieced together the story that he sought, from her nondescript middle-class family and middle-child childhood to her college days in Arizona, the dreams of med school that had been put on hold when she found herself in debt, independent, and incapable of paying her way straight through another four years of education.

“So I found a job baking cakes,” she said nonchalantly, speaking around her mouthful of Belgian waffle with strawberries and cream. “Couldn’t ask my parents to do more than what they already have, anyway, what with Brendan applying to Yale this year. Really, I was just looking for any job that would tide me over for a year, until I could save up enough to pay off some of the loans and whatnot. But it’s really not as bad as it sounds, it pays well. Apparently I have a gift for desserts. And I can make a mean Génoise.”

"That," he remembered saying, pausing for dramatic effect to fork a piece of the sponge cake into his mouth, "I completely agree with. I could live off this food forever, I think; my mom only ever taught me how to cook pasta and rice and the essentials. So, you'll be gone after a year, then?" He thought she smiled very softly before deflecting the question, and it was the game of cat and mouse again, with him asking what he hoped were tangential questions (So, how's the economy looking? Thought about what kind of house you want? Going to live somewhere that allows pets?) and her never revealing more than she wanted (Bright as the glaze on that donut; a comfortable, lived-in one; and of course!).

After few days, he stopped trying, acknowledging defeat to her resolve, but the underlying 'What will be?' was never far from his mind. As they wandered the halls of the museum in late October, strolling together through the past, she asked him about his time in school, and he told her all of the usual stuff - the boring classes, the funny professor, the crazy roommate...and then he told her of a semester abroad, about the lights of the Eiffel Tower and the silence in the world at 2a.m., and about how the only song he learned was that old song by Joe Dassin. And she smiled, tilting her head, and he made a decision, pulled away from her...and started into the first line, quietly at first, and then louder, a tall, skinny man in a tweed jacket and jeans singing French in the middle of the hall, flanked by a mammoth and one side and a sabretooth tiger on the other.

His voice was a bit rough and his tone was a bit off and there were many, many weird looks from the other visitors, but he ignored everything, his eyes only on her and a smile on his lips. As he finished the last line, "Il y a tout ce que vous voulez aux Champs-Elysées..." a little old woman that was security came over, telling him that he was being a disturbance, and that unfortunately it was a good song but he had to stop singing. He smiled and nodded to the lady and then turned to her, his face suddenly a bit flushed as he thought about how he had probably just embarassed her to death.

But instead, she had met him with a beaming countenance and hooked an arm through his, saying as they made their way through the rest of the hallway, “I love it! It sounds so, so jaunty, like something that would accompany two people as they frolicked through the streets of Paris, singing and dancing without a care in the world, heedless of rain or shine.”

“Mm,” he had offered, choosing not to reveal how closely her interpretation of the song had skimmed against the actual lyrics.

“It’d be a lovely song to dance to, I think. Maybe someday, I’ll learn French, and go there…” she trailed off wistfully.

“Well,” he had said with a laugh, “you don’t need to wait until you can speak French. I could translate for you!”

“Would you sing and dance with me, too?” she returned, with a twinkle in her eye.

He pursed his lips at that, thought wrinkles spreading across his forehead as he imagined the two of them together, hand in hand, strolling through the streets with all the tourists and frenchmen and tout le monde - and quietly, seriously, he turned to her and replied, "I would."

She turned to him, curious at his tone, and he shook his head, shaking the seriousness off like a puppy, and lifted her hand, twirling under it in a reversal of roles. "Though contrary to today's performance, the singing and dancing is usually done in the cafés and nightclubs, not in the middle of halls or streets. And it's not really dancing as much and bumping and grinding to the music, these days...but there are still a few nightclubs that remember the classics. How about this summer, then, mademoiselle?"

Someone older and wiser would have artfully evaded the invitation or firmly redressed it as a weightless proposal, meant only in jest, but she was not world-worn then, nor familiar with how to handle the cruelties of chance and the subtleties of conversation. And so she had said yes, giddily and whole-heartedly, caught up in the honey-golden, flower-scented vision of La Ville-Lumière, a land she had only ever seen in movies and photographs, set foot on in dreams. Oh, if only she had known, then, how much that single “yes” would mean to him in the weeks and months to come! He’d answered her with a promise, and taken hers as one in return, although she had given it lightly, with no inkling of how much anguish it would cause both of them when the time came to set sail.

“I can’t believe I actually took her words at face value,” he thought to himself, turning the map of Paris over and over in his hands. The places that he’d circled with an orange highlighter began to blur together into a mess of entangled loops.

“Well, the more fool I, I suppose,” he said aloud, staring unseeing into the glass of Scotch that he held. There was no use in dwelling on it, he knew. Despite the genuine distress that she had expressed, she had also a hidden note of titanium threading through her refusal, strong, lustrous, and utterly resistant to whatever forces might try to tarnish her bright future. He could do nothing to change her mind, nor would he, given the chance- he would not have been able to look her in the eye again if he had dragged her away from a life’s work, a calling that meant so much to her.

He downed the rest of the Scotch in one gulp, and let his head fall back against the sofa. Well, no use in wasting all the time and energy he’d put into the plan, even though everything he’d imagined doing had been with her by his side. Why not travel this summer? Perhaps it’d jump-start his creativity, help him find the motivation he needed to finish an actual novel.