Pretending

      The staircase was dark and narrow, winding slowly down to the foyer. I was taking the steps quickly, the soles of my shoes making soft thumps on the worn carpet, stretched thin over the years. The only light came in through the dirty windows on the two thin, French doors of the entrance. They illuminated the crumbling stucco of the walls and the broken tiles at the edges of the small area that housed the mailboxes and a three-legged table with a vase and one fake rose. I pushed open the doors, slipping out into the street, the rush of cold air tempered by how cold the foyer had been.

      He was waiting just to the right of the front steps in a long black coat, his head bowed until he heard the doors snap shut behind me. And even then he didn't look up past my hand on the rail, saying simply, "No gloves, Angel? They'll be cold."

      He took two steps to meet me and I put one ungloved hand in his.

      "I'll keep one in your pocket and one in mine," I said, and did just that, descending the steps to join him on the sidewalk.

      We walked through the 6th arrondisement for hours. Around the narrow blocks, sometimes twice around. We came to the Jardin du Luxembourg and walked through the faded landscape, not yet dead, but in its last throes before being claimed entirely by the creeping clutch of winter. Sometimes we spoke and sometimes we didn't. He held my hand in his pocket, sometimes lacing his fingers through mine and then unlacing them. My other hand, in my pocket, clenched and unclenched to the rhythm of our footsteps, which seemed almost to match the thrumming of my heartbeat.

      We crossed the gardens on a diagonal, then went back up through the streets that surrounded the campus of la Sorbonne until we reached the river. We stopped for a while overlooking the Ile de la cité, the towers of the cathedral rising out of the tangled tree branches, the stone the same dead-ish color as the barren limbs. The air was colder off the water -- it always is -- and I tucked my neck further down in the collar of my coat.

      We didn't linger long.

      Instead of crossing a bridge to the Right Bank, we walked down the steps, closer to the water, but back toward the way from which we'd come. We passed other couples like us, huddled close, sometimes even sharing pockets as we did. And yet none of the couples were quite like us.

      When we were almost directly across from les Tuileries, he stopped and turned me toward him.

      "Tell me where it hurts the most," he said.

      Wordlessly, I let my chin fall to my chest, my hair spilling forward, almost covering my face. After the smallest moment, I felt both his hands on the back of my head, his fingers gently pressing against the crown of it. I imagined it was almost still soft back there, as if a part of me was still a child, still a baby, and that part hadn't hardened yet. Not like the rest of me.

      "Your problem is you're too forgiving of other people's flaws, Angel."

      I lifted my head, but his hands stayed buried in my hair, his palms cupping my skull at the base of my neck. I looked as deeply into his eyes as I could, trying to find out what he could mean, but the instant I felt closest, he pulled his hands away and I lost my concentration. I felt dizzy and he tucked my hand back into his pocket, pulling me toward another set of stairs to take us back to the street level.

      "I'm not forgiving," I whispered after a while. "I'm just pretending."