Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I am not much of a drinker. I have nothing against alcohol or those who choose to imbibe, but it has always seemed a superfluous expense to me. I tend, therefore, to make a small amount of alcohol last a very long time. Even my mother has teased me about my ability to nurse a drink. This is why I hesitate to say that I was drunk when I slid into the back of the taxi to go home that night. I wasn’t entirely sober, either. So, when I found myself reluctant to climb the eight flights of stairs to my apartment, I did not do what a responsible, intelligent 29-year-old woman would do. I did not suck it up and go home anyway. 

I decided that I would very much like to see the Luxor Obelisk lit up at night because that is the most logical place to go at 3am in January. Either I seemed more in control of my senses than I was or the driver simply did not care what happened to me once I left his cab because he took me there without question. Or perhaps he did question it and I did not understand—he was an immigrant with a distinct and difficult accent. Immigrant to immigrant, I wanted to commune with him but the few words he spoke sounded more like a magic spell than coherent French. Admittedly, I was not in my top linguistic condition.

I got out of the cab at the Place de la Concorde, just as a light snow began to fall. I looked up and was charmed because snow fell so rarely in Paris compared to my childhood home. Snow is only charming when it floats down like tiny bits of lace to disappear on the ground or just build up in the corners. That means that it is almost always charming in Paris. There is also the backdrop, of course. I am convinced that Paris can render any weather short of catastrophic charming. The image of the Place de la Concorde, lit up at night, veiled in a light snow, is frozen in my mind like a Christmas card.

I approached the obelisk in a fog. If I was thinking anything, I do not remember what it was. All I remember is that the place was deserted and it felt like it had been lit up just for me. That sort of muted solitude and exaggerated romanticism is what I looked for to replace the romance that was nonexistent in my life. The moment captured it perfectly and I was completely satisfied with my visit, so I tried to find a new angle to appreciate the view as a reached the bottom of the obelisk because the cab was gone and those stairs were still waiting for me back home.

While I was standing at the obelisk, staring up into the night sky, someone stepped up to stand beside me. I glanced over, then turned my gaze back up at the sky. But I had to give the figure beside me another look because I was not sure what I had seen. He was wearing a long dark woolen coat. That wasn’t unusual in itself but the collar was unlike any you were likely to see strolling the streets of Paris in 2023. Paired with the conical hat which I recognized as the late 18^th century pre-cursor to the top hat, the ensemble put me in mind of Leslie Howard’s Sir Percy Blakeney in the final scenes of the 1934 film The Scarlet Pimpernel. The film was outlandishly misinformed about history but had decent costuming. This man did them one better with a powdered peruke that curled between the stop of his ears and the brim of the hat. 

The question was, why this man decided to dress in such a way and take a stroll around the Place de la Concorde at the witching hour in January. I am too ashamed to admit exactly how long it took me to remember where it was that I was standing. I flinched violently as I thought of all the lives that had been lost in this place two hundred thirty years before. If this man was pulling a prank, it was in bad taste. The alternative was that he was a ghost, an idea which made my stomach flip. I have always been unsuccessful in convincing myself completely that ghosts do not exist, though I do try.

I wanted to speak to the man, to get him to respond and dash my fears, but I did not know what to say. I have always been a poor beginner of conversations, especially with strangers, and most especially strangers who may or may not be the ghost of a soul murdered by the government during the French Revolution. I stood there, gaping like a fish while he stared up at the obelisk.

At last, he looked at me. I was started by the way the lamplight reflected in his large eyes and took a step back. He struggled with words of his own before, at last, he spoke.

“I am sorry, but I seem to find myself quite lost,” he said in clear, if not completely standard French. “I do not remember there being an obelisk in the city. Certainly not anywhere near where I wish to be.”

“…Which is…?” I asked.

“Rue de Saintonge” he answered. 

“I don’t know it,” I answered. The name sounded familiar but I couldn’t begin to imagine where in Paris it might be.

The man looked back up at the obelisk. “Where are we?”

“Place de la Concorde,” I told him.

He immediately looked at me with a narrowed-eye gaze that made me think he thought I was lying. I half turned from the monument and swung my arm out to gesture at the large street that branched off from the square.

“There’s the Champs-Elysées.”

The man turned around to look where I had indicated and he fell back against the fence that surrounded the monument.

“Mon Dieu,” he gasped and made a jerky movement like he did not know whether to cross himself or just cut and run and was therefore rooted to the spot. His expression was deceptively calm but his voice shook as he asked, “What is that?”

“The Champs-Elysées,” I answered. I was honestly a little disenchanted with his reaction. Either he was overacting some sort of delusion or an insulting farce, or he was the most uninspiring ghost I had ever imagined I would come across. Either way, the magic from my snow-frosted Christmas card was now well and truly gone.

“No, it is not,” he said, shaking his head to emphasize his point.

“Yes, it is,” I answered, not having the strength of mind to resist a battle of wills.

The man looked around. He gave the entire area a relatively thorough examination. Then, he grimaced and shook his head. “Even if I allow for, for, for those things,” he gestured vaguely at the street and I struggled to comprehend what it was he took issue with, “there is no Place de la Concorde and there is no obelisk at the end of the Champs-Elysées.”

There was a spark of hesitation in my mind, as I think back now, the shadow of an idea that it may have been a bad choice to engage a complete stranger, a man, in an argument in the middle of the night with no readily available means to return to my apartment safely. But, as I have said, I had been drinking and had been so fortunate as to pass my entire life with no serious threats on it. I ignored my instincts.

“You are monumentally mistaken,” I informed the man, “but, out of sheer curiosity, what exactly do you believe should be at the end of the Champs-Elysées?”

“Place de la Révolution,” he said without a moment of hesitation.

“Good God!” I was a little louder than I had intended and the man stepped back from me in surprise. He was probably just as unsure what to make of me as he was of those things that drove up and down the Champs-Elysées at all hours of the day and night. “I suppose next you’ll be asking what happened to the guillotine.”

“The… What is it the guillotine?” the man asked. 

Not a victim of the Terror then; just a sick man in need of help. I decided the charitable thing to do would be to send him where his guardians were probably worried to death about him. I pulled my phone out of the deep left pocket of my winter coat. 

“Where did you say you need to go?”

The man said nothing.

“Come on, I’ll call you a taxi. Where do you live?” I unlocked my phone and opened the GPS application.

“Rue de Saintonge,” he said.

“Number…?”

“Number 30.”

I typed it in, then second guessed my spelling when the app kept slipping to number 31 and pulling up the image of a restaurant. 

“Like this?” I asked and shoved the phone in his face.

The man balked at the glowing screen and would not look. I sighed and turned the phone away from him. I opened the web browser and went to Google. I typed my guess for the spelling of the street name. The search engine showed me a map of the 3^e arrondissement with a small street highlighted. Well, there was that. 

Now to find number 30. I typed “no 30” after the street name and the restaurant from the GPS app appeared. I scrolled down. The first link was tripadvisor for the restaurant. The second was titled, “Robespierre in the rue de Saintonge”. No wonder the name had sounded familiar. I looked numbly up at the man.

“Um…” I didn’t dare ask. It made no sense anyway. You can’t play Robespierre and pretend not to know about the guillotine. And what was this Rue de Saintonge, anyway? Why not Rue de Saint-Honoré? 

The man flinched and inched further away from me. “Yes?” he asked.

“It’s a restaurant,” I said. 

“That is impossible.”

“That’s what it says.”

“Forgive me if I do not trust your black magic device,” the man said more warily than indignantly.

“It’s a smartphone.”

“A what?”

I sighed. “Never mind.”

“Can it show me how to return home?”

“It will take you to a restaurant.”

“I do not live in a restaurant.”

“I assumed not.” I grimaced. I had to ask. It made no sense. I felt foolish. More than anything, I did not want to ask and be wrong. Robespierre without a guillotine—it’s ridiculous. “Um…May I ask your name?”

“Is it important that you know my name?” the man asked.

“N-no,” I stumbled over myself, not expecting his reluctance. “I just realized that I didn’t know it, and it feels wrong just keep calling you, ‘Hey, you’.”

“You have not called me ‘Hey, you’ even once,” the man pointed out.

“Oh, right. Well… My name is Alexis Barden,” I said. “I live in the 15^e, by Dupleix.”

“You are babbling,” the man said.

I persevered and held out my hand in greeting. “It’s nice to meet you. And you are?”

The man did not make a move to take my hand, but rather stared at me in puzzlement. “I do not understand your determination.”

“Well,” I said, retracting my hand, “anyway, I don’t think I’ll be able to get you to your house tonight. Do you have any friends or family you could stay with?”

“I have no family in Paris. As for friends, there are none on whom it would not be a burden for me to appear on their doorstep in the middle of the night.”

“Of course,” I said. “But where does that leave you?”

The man was silent.

“I want to help you, but you’re not leaving me many options,” I said. “What do you want me to do? I don’t even know who you are.”

The man looked down and, with a sigh, a layer of pride or fear, perhaps a mixture, peeled away as the reality of his situation became more clear. He looked up at me.

“My name,” he said, “is Maximilien de Robespierre.”

Chapter Text

Looking back, I almost certainly wanted to be wrong. I would have been embarrassed at my thoughts if he had told me that his name was Julien Durand or something, but it would have been a private embarrassment that no one would ever have needed to know about. 

Instead, I was face to face with a man who asserted that his name was Maximilien de Robespierre. Even if I wanted to argue that he was not crazy and his parents were incredibly cruel specimens of humanity, there was still the fact that he was dressed like the Scarlet Pimpernel. It struck me then that this was a poor comparison to have made. 

For a long moment, probably too long, I did not know what to say. Although I’d been running my mouth since I met him, I was now afraid of him. Certainly, he had not acted in any aggressive way, but he was delusional. A perfectly peaceful person with delusions like this might snap once their delusion was questioned one too many times. 

“Monsieur…de Robespierre,” I said slowly, trying to decide the most politic way to make a hasty retreat. He looked so sad and lost, though, that I could not continue. His guardians must be in a state of nigh-on panic right now. How, after all, could someone who believes himself an 18^th century man ever hope to maneuver a modern city without coming to some kind of harm or other. I supposed that I could help him find his way home. All I had to do was play along with his delusion since I was not his psychiatrist and therefore not equipped to deal with the fallout. “Is there anywhere else you can go?”

He shook his head. “You tell me that my home is a restaurant. What will my friends’ homes be? A shoemaker? A butcher? Some poor soul who wanted nothing more than a peaceful night?”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Do you have any money?”

“I do not have enough for lodging,” he said, “assuming that is the direction your inquiry was leading.”

“Right. Well, you’ll freeze if you stay out here,” I said.

“I am aware,” he answered grimly.

I could take him home, I supposed, but he was a stranger and crazy. What if he got attached, too attached? What if I couldn’t get rid of him? No, my address was not something I wanted him to know. I could take him to the police but, having grown up in the United States, I was always a little leery of the police. I would never have the same things to fear as my neighbors of color but the paramilitary, machismo, good ol’ boys club put me off. It was different in France to a degree, but reflexes built over two decades were hard to overcome. I could take him to a 24-hour café, but then I would likely have to stay with him to buy coffee because I could guess that his money was as period as his dress.

“Nothing will get done just standing in the cold, either, I guess,” I concluded aloud. I unlocked my phone and searched for the nearest 24-hour café. But in the heart of tourist land, the only things within walking distance were a couple of brasseries whose pictures were full of escargot and prices reflected their location. 

I looked up and found him watching me with a great deal of interest. He stayed out of arm’s reach but he craned his neck, trying to catch a glimpse of what was on my screen. I wondered briefly if I might be able to convince him to remove the peruke—I seriously doubted it. And even if I did, what then? He still looked ridiculous in knee breeches and buckled shoes. Perhaps taking him to a brasserie in the middle of the night was not the best idea. I was too tired to deal with staring waitstaff.

It was about then that my sense of self-preservation threw up its hands in defeat. Fine! it seemed to say, take him home! I don’t care anymore! It left a lingering sense of guilt as it departed, which I then rationalized away with a reminder that I had done things very nearly this stupid in my early days of independence and I hadn’t been murdered yet—and it wasn’t like this was my first choice. If there had been even a single 24-hour McDonald’s in the area, I wouldn’t have thought twice.

It was three kilometers to my apartment from the Place de la Concorde. I checked my phone to be sure. That made for a  forty-five minute walk, give or take depending on our pace and street crossings. In short, it was out of walking distance for this time of night and this time of year. 

So, although I  wasn’t sure how my delusional guest would react, I called a cab. I led my new friend to the roadside to wait but he only followed me part of the way, refusing to stand too near the street on account, I realized, of the cars which passed intermittently.

The car arrived a few minutes later and, as might have been predicted, Robespierre did not want to get in it. He regarded it with great suspicion and remained where he was standing. I appealed to his sense of reason, reminding him of what his options were, and that did the trick. A ride in the mysterious vehicle was less daunting than a night on the streets, it seemed.

The taxi driver gave Maximilien a very long look, as if he was deciding whether to take us or not. I interposed myself between them and, with the most saccharine smile I could muster, and told the man my address. I must have looked normal and sober enough to reassure him because he started the meter and turned back to the front. The car ride was short, which was good because my companion began looking quite queasy within moments of beginning it. I watched the familiar scenery slip by behind my delusional stranger as I grappled with the fear of being covered in vomit in the backseat of a taxi. It was likely the same fear the driver was feeling when I caught him glancing suspiciously in the rearview mirror at us.

When we arrived, I reached across Robespierre and popped open the door. He fairly tumbled out with shaking knees. I removed my wallet from my purse and paid the driver. Then, I slid out of the back of the car, myself, and closed the door behind me. The cab drove away and I was left in front of my building with a man who thought he was Maximilien de Robespierre. Was it too late to change my mind?

My guest was looking around the neighborhood with great interest. Having crossed into the 15^e arrondissement, we were now in Napoléon III’s territory, something the real Robespierre would never have known about. My building was one of the elegant, white buildings whose façade had been made to make Paris look cleaner and more modern back in the 1860s. Across the street was a wall which hid some uglier, more modern buildings whose function I had never bothered to learn. 

“This way,” I said, and led him to the door that opened on the staircase up to my apartment. 

The staircase was old, steep, and narrow. There was no elevator in the building and I had overlooked the stairs as an inconvenience because where else would I find an apartment in downtown Paris so cheaply? It was lit by old, buzzing bulbs on each landing. They were set on motion detectors which had a delayed reaction to anyone passing under them. All of meant that you climbed the stairs in a perpetually dim haze because not one set of lights turned on until you were halfway to the next landing and, even then, the yellow light they let off was not very strong.

When the first bulb flicked on with a noticeable pop, my companion almost jumped out of his skin and nearly tumbled back down the half dozen steps he’d already climbed. He stared down at the naked bulb in horror.

“What was that?” he asked. “Is someone there?”

“No,” I answered, “it’s black magic, just like my little box.” I waved my cellphone, but he wasn’t looking. “It won’t hurt you. Let’s just keep climbing.” 

I made him pass me to walk in front, but I wasn’t certain that I would be able to catch him if he actually fell. He froze for a moment every time a light came on, but his reaction was less and less noticeable with every floor we ascended. On the fourth floor, he paused and looked back at me.

“Are you certain that there will not be trouble for bringing me home with you?” he asked.

I stared at him in momentary confusion until I realized that  he was referring to my nonexistent guardians. “I live alone,” I answered.

He looked me up and down then, slowly, from head to foot. It was the sort of look that a woman eventually gets used to receiving in her life. It was slightly better because he was not leering, but he was definitely appraising, trying to determine what sort of woman I was that I lived alone. I began to tell myself that this sort of appraisal was socially acceptable in his time and that I would simply have to endure for the time being and then I remembered that there was no such thing as his time, at least not as distinct from my own time. He was crazy, not from a different time. 

I stepped around him and continued up the stairs. This was a bad idea, a very bad idea. I was caught in my own thoughts, a mix of regret and frustration, for the next flight of stairs and the exercise helped me burn through the negativity, as it often does. I suddenly realized that I didn’t hear him behind me. I stopped and turned around to find him on the step below me, looking up with a great deal of confusion as to why we stopped in the middle of a flight. I had been stomping my frustration out too loudly to hear him right behind me. 

Embarrassed, I fairly well bounded up the last two flights to my apartment door. I took my key out of my pocket and focused on breathing slowly as I slid it into the lock and felt the heavy bolt turn over with the turning of the key. I swung the door open and gestured for the madman to enter my home. 

I followed closely after and requested that he take off his shoes as soon as we were inside. I locked the door behind us and traded my shoes for some slippers, which I had taken to wearing while living in Korea. I took out the guest slippers, rarely worn, and laid them out for Robespierre, who put them on without question.

My apartment was small and sparsely furnished. I had a bedroom, which fit little more than my bed, and a bathroom which, unlike most French bathrooms, contained both a stall shower and a toilet for space-saving convenience. The rest was an open layout. One corner was the kitchen, complete with a washing machine, an oven, and a stove. There was a little bit of counter space and a few cupboards. It was not impressive but still larger than some apartments where I had lived. The combined dining/living room contained a few heavily laden bookshelves, a sofa which pulled out into a bed for international guests, a tiny coffee table which was my dining table more often than I liked to admit and a television from which emerged an HDMI cable that was connected to my laptop almost perpetually because I would rather pay for internet than cable. Tucked away in a corner was a folding table and four chairs which served as my dining table when I had guests or wanted to live like a proper human being. By the door was a cabinet in which I stored shoes and coats. This was where I hung both my coat and my guest’s.

I invited him to sit on the sofa and then realized that there were several books on my shelves whose titles might cause question if they were noticed—Peter McPhee’s Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life being the first one to come to mind. I selected them from the shelves and quickly went to store them away in my room.

“Would you like anything to drink?” I asked when I returned, not quite ready to go to bed with a complete stranger in my home. “Coffee? Tea? Orange juice?” 

“Coffee,” he answered with very little hesitation.

Ah, yes, there was that 18^th century fascination with the caffeinated beverage. I went to the kitchen and took my French press out of the cupboard. It was my preferred method of making coffee and more in line with 18^th century expectations than an espresso machine would be. I set some water on the stove to boil.

While I was waiting for the water, I looked back at my guest on the sofa. He was looking around at every nook and cranny of my apartment and so did not notice me staring. In the bright light of my apartment, I noticed things that I had not seen outdoors or on the stairwell. 

He was not a very big man. Even under the multiple layers that made up his 18^th century costume, he looked like he was fine-boned. He was also very pale, maybe even as pale as I, the perpetual winner of the inner-arm-paleness-competitions I used to have with the fairest-skinned of my friends. He had a small, heart-shaped face and large light eyes. From across the room, I couldn’t tell what color they were—blue, green, or gray. His nose was very straight and perhaps a little too large for his face, but not clownishly so. His mouth was a little wide and a little thin but his lips were quite shapely despite their thinness.

It struck me that he looked quite familiar. My stomach did a sick little flip and the kettle screamed at me that the water was boiling. I turned off the stove and poured the water into the press. Then I unlocked my phone and opened the folder of Robespierre portraits which I hadn’t really meant to keep on my phone, I simply hadn’t gotten around to deleting them, that was all. 

First, I went to the lithograph Charlotte had claimed was the most accurate in her memoirs. I looked at it, then at the man in my living room. It was startlingly similar. But, I told myself, Charlotte was an old woman when she said that. Her brother had been dead for forty years. Her memory was probably failing. 

So, I went to the only portrait which I could recall was taken from life—the one of him sitting in an office with a little dog from his last visit to Arras. The Robespierre in this portrait did not look much different from the one in the lithograph. The similarity with the man in my living room was only rendered more alarming because he appeared to be wearing the same jacket as in the portrait.

The timer for the coffee went off, so I turned away from the portraits to press down the plunger and then pour the coffee into two mugs. I carried the mugs into the living room and handed one to my guest, taking the opportunity to make note of his eye color when he looked up at me—green. 

I sat down on the sofa next to him but not touching him. What were the chances of a man who looked just like Robespierre having a delusion that he was Robespierre? What were the chances of such a man living in Paris? I couldn’t begin to imagine how this might happen but…what if he was real? Or maybe I was the one who was crazy. Maybe I was having a hallucination à la Fight Club. 

“Tell me,” I said slowly and carefully and as formally as I could in my non-native French, “Monsieur, how did you find yourself at the Place de la Concorde?”

He stared down into the coffee which he had just sipped for a long moment. Then he looked up at me. “I cannot without sounding mad.”

There was no point in telling him that I already thought he was mad, so I said, “I won’t think you are mad. I might be able to help you if I know where you got lost.”

“I was returning from the Rue Saint-Honoré and, when I turned a corner, rather than seeing a familiar street, I was facing the…Place de la Concorde, you said?”

I nodded.

“I was facing the Place de la Concorde with the conspicuous obelisk in the center.”

That was bizarre enough to encourage me to ask, “What was the date?”

Now he looked at me like I was mad. “Today, clearly.”

“Not so clearly,” I answered. “You just described being moved inexplicably through space. The question is worth a serious answer.”

“The sixth of January,” he said.

“Of what year?”

“1790.”

It made no sense. The date was unimportant in the life of Maximilien Robespierre. So, why then? If he was delusional, it would only make sense for him to believe it was an important time in Robespierre’s life, right? But, likewise, if he was plucked out of time by some future time traveler, shouldn’t it be at a significant moment?The senselessness of it was both argument both for and against his identity.

I couldn’t even test him. The things I knew about Robespierre were all things that anyone could know about Robespierre. Even failing the test might not be an indication that he was not Robespierre, considering the potential for distortion of facts over two centuries. I was reminded briefly of Asimov’s “The Immortal Bard”. 

It was clear by the look Robespierre was giving me that he believed every word he was saying. The question was, did I believe him? I hated to admit it, hated to believe that I was such a fool, but yes; I believed him.

Chapter Text

Robespierre’s next question to me was what year I thought it was. When I told him that it was 2023, he looked around my apartment again and admitted that it made sense, that we were clearly still in Paris, but it was not his Paris anymore.

We sipped our coffees silently after that. I couldn’t think of anything to say to him that wouldn’t make matters worse or sound completely callous. What do you say to a man whose entire world has been dead for two hundred years? Maximilien was almost certainly engaging in silent contemplation of his new reality. 

When we were both finished with the coffee, I took the mugs to the kitchen where I rinsed them out and left them in the sink. I returned to the living room and dragged the coffee table to to TV stand, silently apologizing to my downstairs neighbor. I asked Robespierre to stand and move out of the way, then pulled the sofa out into a bed. I went to my room for fresh sheets and then made up the sofa bed. I did all of this under the watchful gaze of one Maximilien Robespierre. 

“You may sleep here tonight,” I said. “It’s late, so we’ll have to figure this out in the morning.”

I struggled to maintain my façade of calm certainty as he searched my face of reassurance. He was probably more afraid than he’d ever been before in his thirty-one years. How was I supposed to reassure him? Tell him it would be OK? Hug him? It all felt so wrong. I couldn’t even muster one of those so-called reassuring smiles. What were we supposed to do now?

“I’m going to bed,” I said. “I’ll be in there if you need me for any reason.” I indicated the door to my bedroom. “Would you like the lights on or off?”

Robespierre considered this for a moment. “Off, I believe,” he said.

I nodded and, when I passed the light switch on my way to my room, turned off the lights. Maximilien was left in the semi-darkness that was the darkest it got in big cities. 

“Good night,” I said.

“Good night,” he answered weakly, and I slipped into my room.

It was 4am, but I couldn’t sleep. Perhaps it was the coffee, but it was more likely the fact that Maximilien Robespierre, the Incorruptible himself, was in my living room. 

I collected the books that I had tossed across my bed earlier and stacked them neatly on my bedside table. Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life was on top and its cover was the same portrait from Arras that I had been looking at in the kitchen. I picked the book up and rubbed my thumb across the painting’s face. The Robespierre in my living room hadn’t even sat for that portrait yet. 

How was I supposed to help him? If I could find a way to send him back, he would go to the guillotine in less than five years. Could I send him back, knowing that? If I didn’t send him back, the repercussions would be enormous. If I told him what happened and sent him back, either he would follow his original path and die or he would change it and the repercussions would likewise be enormous. This was all assuming there was a way to send him back at all. What if he was stuck here forever? 

I hugged the book to my chest and lay back on my bed. It did not once cross my mind at the time that this might not be my problem to solve at all. 

The next morning I woke up, still dressed, still clutching the book. I reached to my nightstand to check the time on my phone, but it was not there. I had left it in the kitchen. Instead, I very nearly knocked over the precarious pile of books from the night before. I groaned and got up.

I changed into my comfort clothes—a soft sweater and a twirly skirt that spoke to my inner 5-year-old—then smoothed down my short hair into a semblance of order and left my room. I shuffled into the living room and peered over the back of the sofa. Robespierre was asleep. I relaxed a little.

In the morning light, he looked even paler and thinner than the night before. He looked younger by about ten years, too. This was partially due to the relaxation of his face in sleep but mostly it was thanks to the removal of his peruke. He had laid it carefully on the coffee table next to his self-consciously folded clothes. He had left only his shirt and breeches on. 

It was impossible to tell how long he might had lain awake last night but, once he fell asleep, he had clearly slept fitfully, tossing and turning, because he was now horribly twisted up in the blankets and his shirt had been pulled askew so that his left shoulder was visible through the opening in the front. Trying to disturb him as little as possible, I gently tugged the blankets to cover him more comfortably. 

I watched him for a moment, wondering if there was anything else I could to do make him feel even a little better. I was always bad at determining other people’s needs, which was why I usually ran away when someone required too much of me. I could write a book on the excuses I’d made up to avoid any serious commitments in relationships of any type. My personal favorite in the romance section was, “I’m too in love with Robespierre for any modern man to measure up.” I’d given that one up a year ago, when I realized that I was a stone’s throw from thirty and too old to be playing those kinds of games. But Karma, it seemed, was not going to let me off the hook that easily. Shirk this responsibility. What was it they said about her? Oh, yeah, she’s a bitch.

Breakfast, that was it. Breakfast always made me feel better when I was having a bad morning. Something warm and comforting. I had no idea what kind of food would appeal to 18^th century French tastes but I knew what my modern Dutch-bred American stomach was requesting: hot rice porridge with butter and brown sugar, half a grapefruit, black coffee, and orange juice. It would have to do. I thought I remembered Charlotte’s memoirs saying that Maximilien was not picky about food, but he liked fruit and coffee. 

I unplugged my laptop and carried it to the kitchen with me. There I found my phone at 11% battery. I plugged the phone into the computer first. Then I opened iTunes and started some music softly. I needed some balm for my soul and nothing worked like music. I put my favorite playlist on shuffle and started humming with the first dreamy tune to begin playing as I turned around to pull out the cookware to start breakfast. 

While the water thought about boiling for the porridge, I googled Charlotte’s memoir and searched the PDF for the word “fruit”. There it was, the passage: “Many times I asked him what he wanted to eat for dinner; he answered me that he did not know. He liked fruit and the only thing which he could not pass over was a cup of coffee.” The coffee and grapefruit should go over well, then, right?

A peppier song came on and I began wiggling out an improvised dance through the kitchen as I turned back to cooking. I was feeling a lot better now. At least I had resources to help me if I ever found myself at a loss when dealing with Robespierre. It kind of felt like Charlotte herself was on my side. 

“Had to have high, high hopes for a living…” I sang as I poured the porridge into two bowls. I was off-key, but I didn’t care. Who was going to hear me? I sliced two little slabs of butter on the top of the hot rice, then sprinkled the brown sugar on top. If only I had blueberries.  I took a plump grapefruit from my refrigerator and sliced it in half. Each half was placed on its own little place and I scored the wedges so that they could easily be spooned out. I was practically domestic. My grandmother would have been proud. “Always had high, high hopes.”

I started back to the living room to take out the folding table, then froze. Robespierre was sitting on the edge of the sofa-bed. He had put his waistcoat and cravat back on. He looked a little worse for wear, his short dark hair sticking out at all angles, but very alert. He was watching me intently. I felt my face grow hot. That was who was going to hear me.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Making breakfast,” I answered. 

He nodded slowly and seriously, like he was filing away some important information for later. “What is that…is it music?”

I scrambled back to the kitchen to turn off my music. “Yes. Well, it’s Panic! at the Disco, not Mozart, but yes.”

“How does it work?”

“It’s hard to explain and it’s not really important,” I said. 

I went to the living room and set up the table with two chairs around it. I had a tablecloth, which Robespierre probably would have appreciated, but I didn’t see much point in taking it out. I invited him to sit down at the table, then went back to the kitchen to retrieve the food. When I set it in front of him, he began to eat without comment or complaint. I took my seat across from him, pulled up my legs under me, and began eating as well. It was good that I kept this food in stock during the dreary winter months when I had a tendency to need such soul-breakfast.

“Last night,” Robespierre began after a few minutes of eating, “I considered at length why I moved through space when I moved through time because I thought that it might have bearing on how to return me to my own time. The place in question has absolutely no meaning to me. It struck me that perhaps it was not the place but the person who was significant. Do you think that it might be possible that you are my descendant?”

I fairly choked on my coffee. I shook my head violently as I tried to regain my ability to breathe. “Impossible,” I gasped.

Maximilien seemed quite taken able that I had so quickly and passionately shot down his theory. “Why is that?”

It was probably best to avoid mentioning that he never had children, so I focused on my own heritage instead. “My family isn’t French, it’s Dutch.”

“You are from Holland?”

“No, but that is where my family was in 1790. I’m from the United States,” I said.

Robespierre was quite interested at that. “The United States of America?”

“The very same. So, you see how I can’t be your descendant,” I steered the topic away from my country of origin, not sure how much history I should let myself get  away with talking about.

“I do, but now I am at a loss as to why I arrived in that place.”

“I think you dismissed the place too easily,” I said. “You were right last night. The Place de la Concorde is the Place de la Révolution. They changed the name later, but that was a very important location during the revolution. The important things just haven’t happened to you yet.” Maybe I should have stuck to talking about the US.

“What might those things be?” Maximilien asked.

“Spoilers,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“What I mean is, those things are in your future. Don’t you think it might be a little unwise to learn them before they happen? What if you don’t like the way something happened?”

He contemplated this over a spoonful of porridge. “Is it not my duty to make the choices that will lead to the best possible outcome?”

“What about all of the people alive today? This is the best possible outcome for them. If you change something, millions of them may simply cease to exist. Do not ask me about anything that may be related to your future, I will do everything in my power to make sure you don’t learn it.”

“How passionate. You sound as if something horrific is about to happen.”

I shrugged, trying to appear disinterested. “It’s a revolution.”

“What does that mean?” 

“You’ll just have to go back and find out.”

My phone began buzzing on the counter. I stood up and went to answer it, grateful for the interruption because, fundamentally against censorship, I wasn’t sure how militant I wanted to be about Maximilien’s information blackout and I was afraid he might push me until I had to draw a hard line. 

My phone’s ID read “Nico”.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Lexi. I was just wondering how you were feeling. You didn’t look so good last night.”

“Nah, it was just a headache,” I said. “I’m fine. You?”

“Perfect,” Nico said.

“Olivier?”

“Nursing his hangover by the toilet.”

Nico and I shared a half-pitying laugh.

“I know it was his birthday, but I never expected him to let loose like that,” I said, recalling the events that led directly up to me getting in the cab that took me to the Place de la Concorde last night, one of which was helping Nico roll his unconscious husband into the back of a different taxi.

“He’s full of surprises like that,” Nico said. “But if you’re ok, then we’re still meeting up for practice?”

“Oh, shit. Yes,” I said. “I mean, I completely forgot.” I looked at Robespierre and grimaced. I couldn’t leave him alone in my apartment, the sheer number of accidents he could get into on his own made my skin crawl. At the same time, it was only two weeks until the competition and I didn’t want to waste one of my last chances to practice with my partner. “Is it ok if I bring a friend? He’ll be out of the way, I promise.”

“Sure. It’s his afternoon to waste.”

“Thanks a million,” I said. “I’ll see you at 2, then.”

We said goodbye and I ended the call. Even if I took Robespierre with me, there was still the question of his clothes. They were beautiful specimens of late 18^th century fashion, which I secretly found remarkably sexy when the peruke was removed from the equation, but they were unsuitable for walking the streets of 21^st century Paris.

I had some band T-shirts that were unisex. They would probably fit him. My pants, however, would not. He couldn’t just go around in a band T-shirt and knee-breeches, though. He might as well keep the whole costume at that point. Then I remembered the jeans that Jimmy had left behind—they had gotten mixed up in my laundry and had not been noticed until he was already back in the States. It felt too convenient, like Fate was mucking with me for refusing to believe in it except sarcastically, but my brother was just about Robespierre’s size and I had chosen for some reason I could no longer remember not to throw the jeans out when I realized it would be more expensive to send them back than for Jimmy to buy a new pair. 

I cleared the table and gave the dishes a cursory washing. Maximilien indicated the table and asked if I wanted it put away. I shrugged.

“We’ll just have to take it out again for dinner,” I answered. I began to think about what we might eat for dinner, but the question was tangled and worried so I stopped. It would sort itself out, then. “I’m going to take a shower. I’ll be right back.”

Robespierre nodded vacantly and I knew he didn’t understand what I was talking about. It struck me that I should give him something to do in my absence, so he wouldn’t get curious and go poking around at anything that might give him a bad shock. I went to my bookshelf and, after some small deliberation, selected Les Trois Mousquetaires. I handed to Robespierre.

“So you don’t get bored,” I said.

He looked the book over, then shook his head. “I do not read novels.” He tried to hand it back to me.

“It’s the 21^st century,” I told him. “Live a little.” I pushed the book back at him and stepped past to go to my room for fresh clothes. 

When I looked into the living room on my way to the bathroom, Robespierre was giving the book the good ol’ college try with an expression that looked absolutely determined to be displeased. Ah well, at least he was distracted and likely wouldn’t be interested in perusing my bookshelf, home to many a novel, including A Place of Greater Safety. I was reassured enough to lock myself in the bathroom for a short shower. 

I emerged again warm, with damp hair, and dressed for practice in athletic leggings and tank top under a wrap dress. It wasn’t the most fashionable, but it was comfortable. I went back to my room and found my old, stretched out “Hold Me Tight or Don’t” long sleeve T. That was less shocking than some of the others and warmer, too. I located the jeans at the bottom of the closet. There was no underwear, but I didn’t think it would be a problem since Maximilien wasn’t used to wearing underwear and Jimmy would probably never see these jeans again. I went back out to the living room.

“Ah, Monsieur…” It felt so awkward calling him “Monsieur”. I had been calling him Maxime and Max and various other pet names that I don’t dare repeat in public for so long that formality felt heavy on my tongue when it came to Robespierre. Anyway, Nico would never buy that he was my friend if I went around calling him “Monsieur.” I cleared my throat and he looked up from the book. “Actually, under the circumstances…”

“You would like to speak informally with me,” he supplied.

“Yes,” I answered, “and may I call you Maximilien? I told my friend that you’re a friend and I’m not sure if he’d understand the truth.”

“It is not an unreasonable request,” Maximilien said and flashed a smile that sent shivers down my spine. Damn. I scolded myself to get a grip. “And I should call you…?”

“Alexis. My name is Alexis Barden,” I said.

“Ah, yes. I believe you said that last night. Apologies. I was somewhat distracted.”

“No, no, it’s understandable. Just one more request: would you wash up and wear these clothes?” I held out the pile of clothes. 

Maximilien agreed and I showed him how to use the shower. I explained everything in great detail, then left him alone in hopes that he wouldn’t mess anything up. I had visions of broken glass and a flooded bathroom, but he emerged from the bathroom without a single problem, except that he couldn’t figure out the zipper on the fly. Thankfully, my brother was a little chubbier than Maximilien, so the jeans were baggy enough to avoid any embarrassing gapping before I explained to him how to resolve the problem. I resolved the bagginess with one of my plain black belts. 

It was strange to see the familiar face in modern clothing. I made him run his hands through his hair until it was satisfyingly tousled to hide the shapeless haircut. There had been no point, I supposed, for it to be anything but functional when he kept it hidden under a peruke every day. He was stuck with his original shoes and winter coat because I had nothing for him there. I shrugged and forced myself to leave well enough alone. I put on my own shoes and coat, grabbed a large cloth bag that sat beside the door, and ushered Maximilien out into the hall.

Chapter Text

When we arrived in the small second-floor practice room, Maximilien was pale and shaky. The métro, it appeared, was worse than a taxi. Nico was already there and trying to hook his laptop up to the outdated speaker system. While he was busy, I set my bag on a little table in the corner nearest the door, took off my coat, and sat down to begin removing my shoes. Maximilien stood next to me, stiff and uncomfortable like a child at a grown-up party. I felt bad for dragging him along with me but it was still preferable to leaving him alone in my apartment.

I got my shoes hooked just about the same time Nico got the speaker system to acquiesce to his commands. He turned around and grinned when he saw me. 

“What do you want to bet on how long it’ll last?” he asked, referring to the speaker system. He chuckled and crossed the room. I stood up. We greeted each other warmly with bisous and then Nico turned to Maximilien. “And you’re Lexi’s friend, right? I’m Nico Florance.” He held out his hand and I held my breath.

I had told Maximilien that he should choose a false surname while we were on the métro. I had explained that Robespierre was kind of a distinctive name and Nico used to study history so there was a chance he might recognize the name and have more questions than we could answer at the moment. It was a stretch of the truth, done for the greater good. Maximilien had nodded seriously and seemed to understand my concerns, but I was now beginning to doubt the wisdom of letting him choose his own pseudonym.

“Maximilien Carrault,” he said, taking Nico’s hand.

Not your mother’s fucking maiden name! I screamed in my head as I struggled to maintain a neutral expression. But Nico did not react at all, instead moving on to ask if he could call Maximilien “Max”. Oh. Right. No one links the name Carrault to Robespierre immediately unless they are a Robespierre nut and, even then, only if the conversation has something to do with Robespierre to begin with. Charlotte lived in almost complete anonymity under the name for more than forty years. I was just being overly sensitive.

Maximilien answered Nico’s request with a highly uncomfortable, “I would rather you did not.” 

Nico shrugged it off without much notice. He only asked because he had a phenomenally bad memory for names. The longer the name, the worse it was. So, everyone got nicknames, the shorter the better, in hopes that it would aid his memory. It didn’t always work but Nico swore it was better than the alternative. That was how he got rights to be the only person to call me Lexi. It would only be matter of time before Maximilien got sick of being called everything from Maximus to Ferdinand and gave Nico permission to use the nickname if they saw each other with any regularity and, if not, then there was no problem. He turned his attention back to me.

“Are you ready to perfect that turn?” he asked.

I wasn’t thrilled at the idea of practicing the passage I could never get right in front of my historical hero, but Maximilien had his book. He probably wouldn’t even be looking, let alone paying attention to where I placed my foot in the second half of a natural turn. He had already retreated back to the chair and settled down.

Within minutes, I was too distracted with the Viennese waltz to care who was or was not watching. Nico was a strict teacher and nothing less than 100% effort would pass muster. By the end of our practice time, we had managed a couple completely perfect run throughs of the routine and I was confident that I would not run into my old problem again. Now, all that was left was to tighten everything up next week. I felt like I could conquer anything. I turned around to face Maximilien and the blood drained out of my face.

Standing next to, chatting with the Incorruptible was a petite woman with long, honey brown hair that was piled on top of her head in a slap-dash bun. She had big grey eyes, a snub nose, and a sprinkling of freckles that made her look a good five years younger than she was, which was thirty. She encouraged this view by dressing the part. She had her sketchbook out and was showing him something at all. No, no, no, no, no.

I tried not to look like I was in a hurry even as I rushed over.

“Elodie,” I said, “hi.”

She looked up at me, as bright and warm as an incandescent light. “Hi. You’ve got a really cool friend, here, Alexis. He’s got such expressive eyes. I couldn’t help doing a sketch.” She turned her book around to show me a picture of Robespierre in her signature cartoony style. “Spitting image, right? He says no.” She gave a pouty shrug in Maximilien’s direction. She turned the book around again and scribbled something in the corner. She handed the sketchbook to me with a piercing look.

But seriously, tho, who is he? it read.

“Just a friend,” I answered. This did not seem to satisfy her, so I changed the subject. “What are you doing here?” Elodie didn’t dance, at least not ballroom, so it was a fair question.

“I came to borrow a car,” she said, then directed her attention at Nico, who was trying to convince the crotchety speaker system to turn off. “Oh, dearest, loveliest brother of mine,” she called, “may I use your car tomorrow?”

Nico replied with a disgruntled demand to know why she needed it, which she answered with a long and convoluted story which I did not completely understand. I took the opportunity to change out of my dance shoes and leave with Maximilien. We made it to the courtyard outside the building before Elodie caught up with us. She fell in step next to Maximilien.

“That’s a cool Fall Out Boy T-shirt,” she said to him. “Alexis has one just like it. What’s your favorite song? I’m not a big fan but I liked ‘Thanks for the Memories’ for a minute when it came out.”

Maximilien looked at her in utter perplexity. He then turned to me for some explanation.

“Stop it, Elodie,” I said.

“I will as soon as you let me in on your little secret,” Elodie said.

“What makes you think it’s any of your business?” I asked.

Elodie paused for a moment, then shrugged. “I’m curious. Where are you going now?” 

“Home,” I said.

“Ooh,” Elodie said with a tone that insinuated sexy things.

“To do research.”

“On what?” Elodie pressed.

I sighed. “Time,” I said at the same moment Maximilien decided to join the conversation with, “Travel.”

“Time travel?” Elodie asked. She gave Maximilien a very long look, too long.

Shit.

“You’ve got it the wrong way around,” I said. “Travel time. We’re looking up travel time to Arras.” Maximilien stared at me with wide, suspicious eyes, but Elodie looked disappointed with my answer.

“Are you going to see the museum again?” she asked me.

Shit, shit, shit.

“Ah…yes,” I said. “The World War I museum. I heard that they made some new acquisitions and opened a new exhibit. I just have to see it.”

“World War I?” Elodie asked, confused because we both knew that the only museum that interested me in Arras was the French Revolution museum that was located in Robespierre’s old home.

“Yes,” I said, “the one about the Battle of Arras.”

“Right,” Elodie said. “You’re into history, too, Maximilien?”

Maximilien looked at me briefly for instruction, but there was nothing that I could do without obviously coaching him. “Ah, yes,” he said, “very much.”

“What era are you interested in?” Elodie asked.

Maximilien paused for a split second and I thought he was going to slip up. “The 18^th century,” he said.

“Oh, like the Enlightenment or the Revolution?”

“The Enlightenment, mostly,” Maximilien answered. 

“Who is your favorite philosophe?” Elodie asked.

“Rousseau.” Maximilien didn’t miss a beat.

“Oh, Rousseau. What did he write?”

“I am surprised you do not know,” Maximilien said. There was something almost playful quarrelsome about the way he said that.

Elodie broke into a broad smile. Of the twins, Nico was the more agreeable, but Elodie’s interests ran more similar to mine. She had a great interest in history and her pet project was making a comic that made history more palatable to the masses—a little like Hetalia but with caricatures of historical figures instead of personified countries. That is, it was her pet project in between work, making graphic homoerotic fan-fiction, and being a general nuisance to those around her. 

“You got me,” she said, then turned to me. “I like this one. He’s a keeper. Well, if you ever decide to research time travel, I know a physicist we can annoy. I’ve got to go this way.”

We had reached the subway and Elodie had to take it in the other direction. She parted ways with us just after we passed the turnstiles. Maximilien and I descended the stairs onto an empty platform. Elodie waved at us from across the tracks, then he r train came and she was gone.

“Do you know me?” Maximilien asked when we were alone.

“What do you mean?” I asked back.

“Did you know who I was before you met me?”

I tried to think back to see if I had given myself away but quickly realized it would take too long and he would be suspicious, so I put on my most confident attitude and asked, “What makes you think that?”

“Arras.”

Oh, that. Yes, I supposed that would do it. “Arras?”

“Why did you say that we were going to Arras?”

“It was the first thing I could think of. I don’t leave Paris often, but when I do, I often go to see battle site from World War I and I’ve been meaning to get back to Arras.”

“What is World War I?” Maximilien asked.

“It was a war from 1914 to 1918 that, as the name suggests, involved the whole world. I was fascinated with it when I was younger and, since one of the fronts went across northern France, I sometimes go back to my childhood interests and visit places related to it.”

“Then you did not know that I am from Arras?” Maximilien asked. 

“No,” I answered. I didn’t like lying to him but I didn’t know how to tell him that I knew almost as much about him as anyone could after two hundred years and I wasn’t brave enough to try. I knew that he would find out sooner or later if he stayed long enough and that the longer I put it off, the worse it would be, but I was a coward. 

Maximilien had nothing more to say for a moment and then our train came, distracting him and cutting off whatever else he might have said until we were safely back in my apartment and he was sitting on the unmade sofa-bed with a cup of coffee in his hands. 

I took my laptop out of the kitchen and plugged it back in in the living room. I sat down next to Maximilien, setting the computer on my lap. I opened my internet browser and went to Google. I searched for “time travel science”. Maximilien noticed that I was up to something and craned his neck to see what I was doing on the small-screened device. 

“I’m researching time travel,” I said. “Do you want to see?”

Maximilien leaned back, visibly embarrassed at having been caught being nosy. “May I?”

“I don’t see why not,” I answered, and caught the HDMI cord that came out of my TV. I hooked it into my computer and sent what was on my computer over to the larger screen to be viewed more comfortably. Maximilien took his glasses out of his coat pocket. Oh, right. He was blind as a bat without them. What, then, was it that he had been trying to see over my shoulder?

I sifted through the less scientific websites to find more credible sources. We read a few different articles, but the French was beyond my capabilities, so I got very little from them. The science was likewise out of Maximilien’s reach and I suspect he got as little out of the articles as I did. Upon reaching that realization, I switched to searching in English.

In English, the articles were dense and opaque but I began to tease out patterns. There was the speed of light theory, a theory that had to do with an infinitely long tube being rotated ridiculously fast, and wormholes. It was all so far-fetched that it made my head spin. Even if it could somehow be made to work in the future, how did someone from the past end up in the present? It didn’t seem like accidental time travel was possible. Was it? 

“Ah! My head hurts!” I flopped back on the sofa-bed and Maximilien jumped.

“Are you unwell?” he asked.

“No,” I told him, “it’s just…” I waved blindly at the TV.

“Perhaps we should speak to that physicist your friend mentioned,” Maximilien suggested mildly.

I sat up on my elbows. “We do not want to get Elodie involved in this.”

“Why not?” 

“Because Elodie will not understand the delicacy of the situation.”

“Meaning?”

“If she does not decide to give you a blow by blow of the rest of your life, then she’ll be telling everybody and their brother who she just met.” 

“But, if that is the only way to send me home, is that not worth the risk?” 

“That’s assuming there is a way to send you back,” I said.

Maximilien looked at the thick wall of English text on the television screen, then back at me. “What do you mean to say? There might not be a way for me to return?”

“Unfortunately…” I said, and trailed off, not sure what to follow that with.

Maximilien looked back at the screen. From my angle, I could see the text reflected in tiny duplicate on his glasses. “No,” he said. “It cannot be impossible. I came here. There must be a way back.”

I sat up and tried to speak gently. “But you have to understand that you came with the flow of time to get here. To go back, you have to go against it. It’s not the same thing.”

“You do not understand,” he snapped, using the formal vous. He’d been using the informal with me since I’d asked and this sudden switch hurt just a little. It felt like the verbal equivalent of a shove away. “I must return.”

I never took well to shoves. It made me want to shove back. “And what if you can’t?” I demanded, sticking to the informal because I wasn’t going to let my words get jumbled up in the conjugation of the vous form, which never came naturally to me. “What happens then? Does the world fall to pieces?”

“Yes,” Maximilien answered to my surprise. “Not, perhaps, the world at large. That was in ruins long before I arrived in it, and Pétion will not find it difficult to fill my place in our attempts restore it, I am sure. But there is a very small world in Arras that will be shattered. My brother and sister depend on me utterly. I cannot imagine what will happen to them if I am gone.”

Even though I found his brotherly affection admirable, I couldn’t help but think Maximilien was selling his siblings short. Both Charlotte and Augustin struck me as brave, resourceful people as far as I could tell from what I’d read. I couldn’t imagine them simply giving up in Maximilien’s absence.

I wanted to say something encouraging, something to reassure Maximilien that everything would be OK, or at least that his family would not fall apart without him. Instead, I said, “The laws of physics do not bend to accommodate your broken family.”

Then, I left the apartment for fresh air. Outside, I walked down the street to a small church that was located on an island between diverging roads. I circled the building three times but did not dare to go in. I’d been an atheist for five years after a childhood of strict Calvinist upbringing, and I just didn’t feel comfortable in churches anymore. 

After I’d sufficiently scolded myself for being too harsh, I texted Elodie. “What will it take to meet your physicist friend?”

Elodie was very forthcoming with the details and we set up a meeting for the next day after breakfast with suspicious ease. Didn’t she need Nico’s car for some reason? I shook the idea out of my mind. Regardless, Maximilien needed to speak to this physicist. 

I wandered around for a while longer, trying to figure out what I would say to make up with Maximilien. Making up wasn’t my strong suit. Sinkholes, that’s what I did best. I remembered an old friend’s advice that I should never try to mend bridges over an empty stomach, so I stopped at the nearest Monoprix for some wine and ordered a pizza, which I picked up from the delivery boy at the bottom of the stairs. It wasn’t 18^th century fare by any stretch of the imagination, but it was the best I could do without access to my kitchen. I knew Maximilien wasn’t known as much of a drinker but it didn’t matter. He could have more fucking coffee if he wanted, I would be drinking wine.

I found Maximilien sitting in the dusky twilight light that came in through the windows, illuminated eerily by the light from the TV. I turned on the lights and set the food on the table. He watched my every move and I found his expression infuriatingly hard to read.

“I’m sorry about what I said before,” I told him. “It was unkind. I cannot begin to imagine what you are going through. I…I made arrangements to meet the physicist tomorrow morning, but there is nothing more that can be done tonight and you have nowhere else to go. I brought food. Will you accept it and my apology?”

Subtly, Maximilien’s face softened. “I was too hasty. I did not mean to dismiss your efforts or your concerns in my desperation to return home. You are the most generous Christian soul I could have hoped to meet.”

He stood up and approached the table. “What is that?” he asked, looking at the cardboard box with a certain level of apprehension.

“Pizza,” I answered, flipping the box open to reveal the cheesy goodness.

Maximilien picked up the wine bottle and examined the label. He said nothing and put it back down.

“I can make coffee for you,” I said. 

“No,” Maximilien answered. “I will have what you are having.”

“If you’re sure,” I said, then went to the kitchen for plates and wine glasses.

Chapter Text

It was interesting to watch Maximilien eat the pizza. He’d never had it before and wasn’t quite sure how to tackle it. I had bought American style pizza from Domino’s because I preferred it to the hard, thin French pizza that would about choke you with salt. That meant, however, that the sauce and cheese slid around when you tried to attack it with a fork and knife, as Maximilien did. I could have told him to just pick it up, but even more than wanting to avoid his look of horror, I found his efforts rather cute.

They say never meet your heroes, but I must have still been in the hero honeymoon phase because I just found Maximilien unreasonably adorable. He wasn’t particularly handsome or sexy—excluding the sight of him in his shirt and waistcoat, which was an affection for the style not his appearance per se. I supposed the disillusionment would come later.

After we finished eating, I put the remainder of the wine in the refrigerator. Drinking wine with any one of my friends, we would finish the first bottle and then maybe wander off to find a second, wine being the only alcohol I could tolerate in any large quantity. Not so with Maximilien. He made a half glass of wine last the entire meal and it made me feel undeservingly like an alcoholic to even think of a second glass for myself. It would have been better if he’d just had coffee.

If I’d thought that sharing pizza and wine would make Maximilien my friend, and I have to admit that I had sort of hoped, I was wrong. We were in some awkward sort of peace, that was all. I got the sense that he didn’t like me very well but was stuck with me because I had taken him home. Perhaps that wasn’t the case. I tend to overestimate people’s dislike for me, but that was the sense I got.

So, after cleaning up and turning off the television, I took my laptop with me and closed myself in my room until morning. I changed into my pajamas and curled up under the blankets. I closed the offending tab relating to time travel and opened a new one. 

Just like the old days, which I would later see as a period of innocence that I could never return to, I typed “Maximilien Robespierre” into the Google search bar. Alongside the first few links was his Google profile. It listed him as a French lawyer which, although technically true, seemed to be comically understating his role in history. 

There was a mosaic of images at the top. Although I hadn’t done this in a while I could still recognize where each came from. One of my favorites was the terra-cotta bust that looked perpetually surprised. It always made me smile. There was also the portait from Arras, the famous one in his brown-striped jacket, and the pastel that was somehow an oil painting. There was a poor-quality reprinting of the lithograph Charlotte said was the most accurate, a photograph of one of his representations in film, and the uncanny valley CG rendering from the supposed death mask. 

It was somehow soothing to play my Robespierre portrait bingo. “My” Robespierre still existed. We hadn’t changed history yet. When I was done mooning over the portraits that called to mind my fiction of Robespierre, I decided to click on “People also search for” just for the fun of it. That Danton was at the top of the list was not surprising. I was amused, however, to find that Saint-Just was located not only after Louis XVI but also Marat. I could imagine my fictionalized Antoine being rather peeved by that. A fan-fic started budding in my mind and I stomped on it. No, no, no. I wouldn’t do that. Not anymore, not with Robespierre himself in my living room. My buzz was instantly killed. I snapped my laptop shut, stashed it on top of the books that were still piled on my bedside table, and rolled over to go to sleep.

That night, I had one of the few truly vivid dreams that I’ve had in my life. I stood at the bow of an ocean liner that was cutting quickly through the fog in the washed-out grey of the early morning. I wore a ring that clinked on the metal railing I was gripping as I leaned forward to enjoy the cool sea breeze. A man stood behind me, but I did not turn to see him. 

“It is very early to be on deck this morning, Madame,” he said.

“I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “Where are we going?”

“To America.”

“Why are we going there? I promised that I would never go back.”

“And yet you got on the ship.”

This upset me greatly. I turned to argue with the man that I hadn’t had a choice, but there was no one there. All I could see were the two hulking smokestacks and four towering masts. The deck was deserted. 

I awoke to the ringing of my phone’s alarm. I let it ring for a minute, then pulled it out from under my pillow, where it had been shoved during my sleep. I looked at the clock and set the phone down without turning off the alarm. It was too early to be awake on a Sunday. I should have pushed Elodie to make it a lunch meeting instead of after breakfast.Then, I sat up and turned off the alarm. I sat there for another moment before getting up and shuffling toward the door. I stopped with my hand on the doorknob, turned around to put on a bra and jeans under my nightshirt and left my room.

Maximilien, dressed once again in his 18^th century shirt, was sitting bolt upright on the sofa-bed in a bleary sort of terror.

“What was that noise?” he asked.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you,” I answered, then yawned. I shuffled into the kitchen. “Coffee,” I mumbled and I began looking through the cupboards for breakfast stuffs, “coffee, coffee, coffee…and bread. Coffee and bread, coffee and bread.”

I located the coffee, the French press, a frozen loaf of bread that was some sort of short baguette variation the name of which I cannot remember, and some strawberry jam. I put the water on the stove and the bread in the microwave. When the bread was warm and the water was boiling, I put the bread on a plate and poured the water into the French press. I carried everything over to the table.

Maximilien was watching me from where he still sitting.

“Well, come to the table, then,” I said.

Maximilien started to get up before he realized that he was not wearing his waistcoat and seemed a little flustered by that. Perhaps it was because his shirt was open halfway down his chest.

“Just come sit down,” I said. “There’s no embarrassment before breakfast.”

Just come sit down he did, and there would have been a fair bit of fan service with the way his shirt billowed and gapped, if this were fiction and if I had been looking at the way the veins spread out under his milky skin, sparse covering of hair, and dusky pink nipples. But, it isn’t and I wasn’t. I was looking at his plate to make sure he was eating because eating is very important, especially when you are two hundred years out of your time and may be slightly depressed from the fact that everyone you have ever known or loved is dead.

But, frankly speaking, if I had to place a moment from which everything went wrong, it would not be the moment when Maxime appeared in my life or even when I decided to take him home. It would be this moment, right here, when I first had unabashedly lustful thoughts about the man sitting across from me that were in any significant way divorced from the Maximilien Robespierre I had carried around in my head for the past seven years. Not that I could have changed it if I wanted to. Time is funny like that—you can jump but you can’t fly. But I digress.

After breakfast, I cleaned up and took a shower, then made Maximilien take a shower. Yes, he had to take a shower. Yes, even though he’d just had one the day before. No, showering everyday was not bad for his health. It was a conversation we had to have too frequently before he stopped trying to reason his way out of it. It wasn’t that he was opposed to personal hygiene, it was just that 18^th century standards and methods for personal hygiene differed in significant and sometimes contradictory ways from modern ones.

At last, he was clean and dressed again in his modern clothes. I wished that I had different clothes for him but it was what it was. We were going to reveal everything to Elodie and her physicist friend anyway. There was no point in trying to feign a modern identity for him, complete with wardrobe, anymore. We bundled up and headed to the café Elodie had designated.

Elodie was already there with her friend, the physicist. He was a tall gangly man, not ugly, whose fashion and demeanor gave off very subtle “nerd” vibes. He stood up to shake our hands when we arrived.

“Pierre Thelin,” he introduced himself.

“Alexis Barden,” I said, and shook his hand. I stepped aside for Maximilien to reach him.

“Maximilien Carrault.” I was a little surprised that Maximilien stuck to his pseudonym, but decided it was probably best if we didn’t lead with the time traveling revolutionaries.

Even Elodie steered clear of the time travel subject for quite a while, long enough that I thought she’d forgotten it and that I might have to bring it up myself. Then, she introduced the subject like this:

“Pierre, chéri, Alexis and Maximilien are curious about time travel.”

Pierre’s smile faded. “Right… And you brought them here, so I could…?”

“Explain how it works to them.”

“Well, it doesn’t work,” Pierre said. “So, if you’re Elodie’s writer friends, I would suggest that you just come up with whatever fits your story because nothing’s going to be realistic.”

“We’re not Elodie’s writer friends,” I said. “Well, I am, but he’s not, and this isn’t about a story. We’re looking for practical application, specifically to the past.”

“I just said it doesn’t work,” Pierre said. “Theoretically, sure, but technologically? Not at all. And biologically? The forces would kill you. It does not work.”

Maximilien had gone quite pale throughout this. I felt bad. I never should have arranged this meeting, but there had been a part of me that hoped Pierre would have a different view on the matter.

“It does work,” I said in Maximilien’s defense. “It has worked already. We just need it to work in the other direction now.”

“What do you mean it’s already worked?” Pierre asked.

I looked at Maximilien.

“I knew it!” Elodie said. “Who is he? Is he famous? Is he someone I’d know? Let me look at you again.”

I met Maximilien’s eyes and I knew his hope was fading. Our only hope was that convincing Pierre of Maximilien’s identity would reveal some hidden knowledge he had. I cleared my throat.

“Elodie, Pierre, may I present Maximilien de Robespierre.”

Elodie let out a high pitched squeal. “No way.” She leaned in uncomfortably close to look at Maximilien. “I don’t know if I should be excited or terrified.” This set off a bout of half hysterical giggled. “Get it? Terrified?” 

“Elodie, stop,” I said. “You’re scaring him.”

This set off more laughter in Elodie.

“I am…” Maximilien took a deep breath to compose himself. “I am remembered by history, then?”

Elodie swallowed her laughter. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Very much. There’s a great big red stamp on history that says, ‘Max was here.’”

“But how do you know that he is really Maximilien Robespierre?” Pierre asked.

Elodie snorted. “Alexis is a Robespierre expert. She wrote a book about him. She knows him down to the mole on his knuckle. If she says this is Robespierre, then it’s Robespierre.”

Maximilien rubbed his hands self-consciously as he looked at me in unadulterated horror. My face went hot and for a moment I considered my best plan of action to be crawling under the table and waiting there until I died. I never should have lied. I never should have lied. I never should have lied. I promised myself that I would never make a bold faced lie to him again and even omissions would be kept to those strictly necessary. But that was only assuming he would believe a single word out of my mouth after this.

It took a lot of convincing for Pierre to buy our story. Even then, the prospects weren’t encouraging.

“Assuming all of this is true,” he said, “we are still living in a world where Maximilien Robespierre was alive after January, 1790, correct?”

“Well, obviously,” Elodie said. “Robespierre didn’t die until—”

“Shut up,” I said. “We all know.”

“Except Maximilien,” Elodie pointed out.

“Perhaps,” Maximilien said uncomfortably, “it is best kept that way.”

“As I was saying,” Pierre said, “he didn’t disappear in 1790. That means there are two viable options, considering we don’t have recreational time machines laying around. Either the multi-world theory is true and Maximilien comes from a parallel universe. In that case, there’s no way back. You just have to get used to living here.”

“And the other option?” Maximilien asked.

“The other option is that you have moved forward within one universe. In that case, you’re necessarily in a stable time-loop and you will eventually return on your own.”

“What about the paradoxes?” I asked.

“In that case,” Pierre said, “they’ll sort themselves out.”

“Just like that?”

“Paradoxes go against the laws of physics as we know them, so logically it won’t be possible to create them. It’s like going against gravity. You can’t just will yourself to float.”

“How will I know which is correct?” Maximilien asked.

Pierre grimaced and shrugged. “When you either return to your own time or you don’t.”

Chapter Text

Maximilien came home with me after we left the café. He had nowhere else to go. We were silent the entire way back to my apartment. I wanted to apologize for having lied about knowing who he was but I couldn’t find my voice. Maximilien’s expression was pensive and closed. I still cannot imagine what he was thinking about.

When we arrived in my apartment, Maximilien went to the sofa and sat down, still lost in thought and I puttered around, not quite sure what to do with myself. The idea of locking myself in my room was too depressing, but I couldn’t exactly sit down and chat with Maximilien either. I found myself in the kitchen, which was often where I found myself when I felt adrift. 

On a normal day, I disliked cooking—it was tedious and paying someone to do it for me at a restaurant usually yielded better results—but, when I felt lost or my mind was doing its best impression of a dog chasing its tail, the necessary attention to detail and tactile sensation grounded me and calmed my mind. Of course, it had to be a simple recipe or my clumsiness would betray me and my frustration would reverse any positive effects.

I looked around my kitchen and considered the things I could make without having to go out to buy ingredients. Coffee. The familiar hot beverage was exactly what a cold winter afternoon like this needed. I took the kettle off the stove and started to fill it at the sink.

“What are you doing?” Maximilien asked.

His voice was so unexpected that I flinched and nearly dropped the kettle. “I’m making coffee.”

“Why?”

I paused. Why was I making coffee? Certainly I wanted to fiddle in the kitchen, but why coffee? I was more of a tea drinker. I kept coffee on hand for times when the days were too long, the nights were too short, or both. I had a lovely green tea matcha blend in the cupboard. So, why coffee? The only thing which he could not pass over was a cup of coffee. That was why.

No more lies. “Because you like coffee.”

“I never said that,” Maximilien pointed out.

No more lies. “I know.”

“What makes you think I like coffee?” he asked. 

No more lies. “I read it in a book.”

“Which book?”

“Your sister’s memoir,” I said.

“Charlotte wrote a memoir?”

“Yes.”

“Should I read it?”

“No, it would upset you.”

This caused Maximilien to pause for a moment. “When did you read it?”

“For the first time or most recently?” I asked.

“Is it true, what your friend said, that you are a ‘Robespierre expert’?” he asked rather than answer my question.

“That depends on what you think a ‘Robespierre expert’ is. I wouldn’t use the phrase but Elodie believes it,” I said.

“But, aside from the experts, everyone knows who I am?”

“For the most part,” I said. “They learn about you in school, but not everyone chooses to retain that knowledge.” I set down the kettle and leaned against the counter because it seemed that Maximilien’s curiosity would continue for a while. Every time I answered a question, he paused to carefully file the information away and presented a new question or comment based on it.

“It concerns me,” he said, “that you said everyone knows when I die.”

“I was exaggerating to make Elodie stop talking,” I said. “I highly doubt most people have a clear idea of when you died.”

“I suppose that it meant to be comforting,” Maximilien said, “but I do not feel it.”

“Consider this:” I suggested, “you do not know why your death is remembered. You seem to be assuming that it is remembered for being tragic or violent. It may have simply been a memorable date. I always remember that Thomas Jefferson died on July 4^th, 1826 because it was the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and I’m pretty sure he died in his bed, surrounded by family. I don’t remember when he was born but, considering he wrote the Declaration as an adult, you can do the math and figure out that he was, well…old. And I don’t even like American history.”

Maximilien’s expression was remarkably unenthused with my theory and I couldn’t blame him when I was having a hard time selling it myself. Oh, how quickly we fall back into our wicked ways. Still, he chose to overlook my lack of charisma and turned his attention elsewhere. 

“You dislike American history?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why?”

“Oh, I suppose it’s because I never found the figures as compelling as elsewhere. Maybe I just didn’t stay with it long enough, but I was rather disenchanted by the blind adulation of the important players, especially the Founding Fathers and every president, except Nixon. Foreigners, on the other hand, were much more likely to get the title of monster. In fact, the only French figure who was portrayed in a positive light was Lafayette.”

Maximilien laughed at that. “Perhaps he ought to have stayed in America, then.”

That struck me as particularly funny for some reason and I snorted and dissolved into a fit of giggles. Perhaps it was that the idea was accompanied by an image in my head of a blushing Lafayette informing Jefferson that he had decided to relocate to the United States and the look of pure joy on Jefferson’s face before they locked in a passionate kiss.

My overreaction must have made Maximilien uncomfortable because he blushed a little. “That may have been ungenerous,” he said, “but he is a frustratingly contradictory character in the Assembly. He preaches progress and then does everything in his power to stand in the way of it.” He looked at me as if daring me to disagree, but I could see where he was coming from, even if it was not the reality of the situation.

“He wanted an American Revolution in France,” I said, “but failed to take into account that France is not America and that the American Revolution was not a revolution at all.” I shrugged. I didn’t know enough about Lafayette to know if this was even remotely accurate, but it was how things looked on the surface, from my perspective. I was personally more interested by the Jacobins than by has-been war heroes trying their hand at politics. Now, I was being ungenerous, but the smile on Maximilien’s face was worth it.

“That’s exactly it,” he said. “I must admit that I am surprised you grasp the situation so completely.”

“I have the benefit of two hundred years’ reflection,” I said with a shrug. “It tends to put things in perspective. But don’t ask too many questions about Lafayette. Like I said, I was never very interested in the people my history teachers only had good things to say about.”

“What does it say about me that you took an interest, then?” Maximilien asked.

“Nothing, other than that my history teachers were wildly mistaken about you,” I said. “You see, I categorize the people my teachers call monsters into groups. There are real monsters like, say, Nero. Then there are the innocents, like Napoléon. That’s not to say the innocents never did anything wrong or weren’t mixed up in anything bad, but they were judged by an unreasonably harsh standard, often harsher than their contemporaries. That is the category to which you belong.”

“Have you considered that perhaps you are mistaken?”

I blinked at Maximilien dumbly, then shook my head. “Do you think you’re such a bad person, or do you just not like being in the same group as Napoléon?”

“Should I know who Napoléon is?”

I paused to run the timelines through my head. “Not…not in 1790, no. I’m sorry, carry on. You were saying that you think you’re evil?”

“That is not how I see myself, obviously, but I am curious how you justify your categorization.”

“Meticulous research conducted over not quite a decade,” I answered. “I’ve read most of your surviving papers…or those that have been rendered in text for the public. Since I’m no longer a history student, I can’t just waltz into the National Archives and ask to see your letters. I’ve also read a couple biographies and some other studies on the era in general, especially those about the Jacobins.”

“Several biographies…?” Maximilien asked.

No more lies. “Well…” I blushed. This was difficult. “Thirty biographies.”

Maximilien choked on his next breath. “Thirty? So many have been written?”

“Oh, more than that have been written. I just chose the best ones. And…I want to emphasize this, I’m not weird or crazy. I read those for an academic paper I wrote while at university.”

“You attended university?” This information was as bizarre and interesting to Maximilien as the fact that there were thirty biographies in existence about him.

“More than once, actually,” I said. “The first time I obtained a degree in French History. Then I had to go back for an English degree because the French History was essentially useless to me outside of the United States.”

“I see.” 

Maximilien fell pensively silent again. I turned back to the sink and the half-full kettle. No more distractions.

“Maximilien?” I said. I turned and met his gaze, then dropped my own to examine the floor in front of him. “I’m sorry I lied to you about how much I knew. I did not intend for it to hurt you. I was afraid of what would happen if you knew. About Arras, I didn’t mean to bring it up but it slipped out when I was trying to distract Elodie from the subject of time travel. I didn’t lie about the Battle of Arras or having been interested in the First World War when I was a child. I have always been a contrary sort of person, so when my friends who liked history said they were interested in the Second World War, I always said that I was interested in the First World War, and I did enough research to understand what I was talking about because I had to defend myself and I couldn’t stand there gaping like a fish when asked why I liked it.”

I paused and glanced up but Maximilien simply continued looking at me. 

“I don’t expect you to forgive me or trust me after that, but would you at least allow me to help you get settled here as an apology?” I peaked up at Maximilien again.

“I suppose,” he said, “it must have been quite embarrassing for you. Thirty biographies is excessive.”

“It was for a historiography,” I protested.

“But who is better placed to help me? Who better understands my position? And who, aside from that single falsehood, has treated me more humanely? I do not have the confidence to navigate this foreign century on my own. Everything I have seen thus far has convinced me that I could visit no land in my own time that would be as exotic as this future Paris. To whom should I entrust myself? To the madwoman, Elodie? To her friend, who believes me mad? To a stranger who does not know my circumstances? Or to you?”

“Please,” I said.

“I dislike lies, but it was a relatively innocent one in comparison with what might have been said, and I must say that you are by far the most agreeable of the people I have met in this time. All circumstances considered, it would be foolish of me not to accept your apology. However…if I should find my trust broken again…I cannot say for certain that I will react the same.”

“I swear that I will not lie to you again,” I said. “And I will only keep the parts of your life that you ask me to keep a secret. I suspect the events surrounding your death is already on the list.”

“Preferably.”

“Perhaps…perhaps it would be best if we avoided speaking about your…future in the past, at least until we are sure you will not be returning. I believe that would be best for your sanity, don’t you?”

“It did not seem that there was any way of telling whether I will be returning or not, from what your scientist friend said,” Maximilien pointed out.

“Not as such,” I agreed, “but I think it is reasonably unlikely that you will be returning after the duration of the revolution has passed. I could be wrong, but it seems like a good starting point until we learn more.”

“How long is that?”

“At minimum…” I calculated the time until Maximilien’s execution, the earliest date I had seen posited as the end of the revolution—too early in my opinion; I saw the 9^th of Thermidor and the subsequent executions as a sort of slowly mortal wound that left the revolution languishing in a slow bed death until Napoléon arrived to put it out of its misery. But that was my personal opinion. I had seen many other theories. “At minimum, four and a half years.”

“So long?”

He sounded so lost and heartbroken over that that I wanted to walk over and give him a hug but it still felt wrong, like a violation of a very clearly set boundary for personal space. I have always been a big proponent of personal space, my own specifically but also others’, so I stayed where I was. 

“Hopefully you return home much sooner than that,” I said, instead.

“To four years of revolution,” Maximilien added with a sigh.

Barely a year in and he was already tired. He had no idea how much worse it would become. All I could think or say was, “I’m sorry.”

Maximilien shook his head. “It was naïve to think it would be much shorter.” After a pause, he asked, “What are we to do now?”

The first order of business was a late lunch. We had not eaten since breakfast and hunger was, as always, the enemy. I don’t remember what we ate, although I think I cooked. Things were a little easier between Maximilien and I as we talked over the food, not easy but easier. We kept the conversation away from history and he asked me about things he had observed in the present, mostly technology which I was woefully out of my depth in explaining. How do you explain the functioning of a smartphone when your philosophy has been to shrug and say, “Eh, it works,” unless it doesn’t, in which case you bring it to a repair shop where the employees know how the device functions for you? Even more so, how do you explain it to someone who has not yet grasped the concept of electricity?

After lunch, it was time to enjoy the last few remaining hours of my weekend. I had work on Monday and this weekend had me so frazzled that I thought I might just go “pop” the moment I walked through the doors and had to confront all the little unpleasantries that hid under every nice thing at work. I couldn’t imagine the stress Maximilien must have been feeling, but I didn’t know what to do for him so I dragged him along for the ride and hopped it didn’t add too much to his unhappiness.

I tore apart his bed and remade it as my sofa. Maximilien tried to help, but he didn’t know what he was doing, so he was mostly in the way. I went back to the kitchen and made him coffee while I made myself some of my lovely matcha tea. As I prepared the beverages, I explained that we would be watching a film and tried to describe what that was to him. Again, words failed me. I got my favorite blankets and pillows and piled them on the sofa. I hooked my computer up to the television and queued up the episodes of my favorite day wasting movie/mini-series: Pride & Prejudice (1995). This was my mother’s favorite film and many a rainy day in my childhood had been dedicated to what was first the punishment and later the pleasure of the six hour marathon. It had become something like the chicken noodle soup or chamomile tea of film for me. I had it so well-memorized that even the stilted early 19^th century English did not prevent me from turning off most of my brain power while watching. 

The film had the added benefit of not being set too far out of Maximilien’s time. It was set twenty-three years in his future, seeing as it appeared the choice had been made to set the film at the time of the novel’s publication and not when the events of the book actually took place. I didn’t hold it against the film—it had done a brilliant job at rendering 1813. 

I applied French subtitles to the film. I already had some soft subs on my computer because I used them to practice speeding up my French reading. I was frustratingly slow at reading in French and the constant flow of the subtitles forced me to move faster. I almost never watched anything anymore without French subtitles unless the audio was in French, in which case I needed to work on my listening comprehension and the subtitles became a crutch I didn’t want.

Maximilien sat stiffly on his end of the sofa. I tried to talk him into relaxing a little more, but he assured me that he was perfectly comfortable. I suggested that he lean back or put his feet up. He turned to look at me in shock but, seeing that I had already tucked my legs up under me, said nothing. I learned later that there were many things which he refrained from saying out of politeness in this first few days. We would eventually come to joke about it. 

We watched the first three hours of the movie, then, as was tradition in my home, took a break for supper. I explained to the best of my ability the concepts of television and film and of historical drama, and described the somewhat nebulous historical setting of the story within the film. Then we went back to watch the second half. Exhausted as I was by the events of the weekend, I fell asleep on the sofa during the second half of the film.

Maximilien must have done the same because the next I remember is waking up on the sofa simultaneously with him to the screams of my weekday alarm telling me it was time to get ready for work.

Chapter Text

I greatly overestimated the ease of caring for my new roommate in that first week of living with him. 

There are things that are obvious, things you expect when introducing a person from the 18^th century to modern life. Toilets, electricity, traffic. It’s all very simple. Even if he forgets again and again…and again and again and again…and I thought teaching my grandfather to use the computer was frustrating. But that was the easy part.

The hard part was when I had to go to work and I was terrified because it’d only been two days and he didn’t know what he was doing and he didn’t have a phone to contact me if something went wrong. He didn’t have a phone and that gave me a sick little knot in my stomach because I was used to being connected with everyone I was remotely close to through that. But even if he did have a phone, he wouldn’t have known how to use it.

For a moment, I considered calling in sick, but I was in the middle of flu season, I worked with children, and my health had never been particularly sturdy. Additionally, I knew that I would want to stay home if, Heaven forbid, Maximilien were to fall ill. 

Vacation days were also off limits because my grandmother’s health was on the decline and every time my mom mentioned her there was the inevitable, “I just don’t know how much longer she’s going to be with us.” So, I needed to be ready to pack up and fly back to the States to say goodbye to the woman who had helped raise me. And if she made it to Christmas…it had been five years since I’d been home and my mom had more than once hinted that my grandma would be over the moon if I went home for the holidays and since it might be the last time… 

I always budgeted my time off from work carefully. The reality was that my home was incredibly far from where my family was and I had not chosen a cheap city to live in. Every day off, every pay check counted. And Maximilien was not a child. He was a grown man and, I assumed, a fairly responsible one at that. So, I explained to him how to get to the main road with restaurants and a Monoprix and I left him with a reasonable amount of cash to purchase food. Then, I left.

I fretted all day at work. I don’t even remember what I did that day. All I remember is thinking about every increasingly horrific situation Maximilien might have gotten himself into. I wondered if it might not have been better to ask Elodie to watch him. She worked from home, so I couldn’t imagine it being too much of an inconvenience to do a little babysitting. Of course, they’d probably end up fighting like cats and dogs. No, Maximilien was an adult. I should trust him. I chanted that in my head whenever my imagination threatened to get the best of me.

When I arrived home, the apartment was dark. Thoughtlessly, I turned on the lights and a startled-awake Maximilien tumbled off the sofa. Once he had reoriented himself, I asked how his day had been. Nothing had happened, quite literally. He had done a little reading but otherwise had spent the rest of the day napping on and off. He hadn’t even eaten. 

It wasn’t as bad as it might have been—several of my day-mares had featured Maximilien getting hit by a car—but it wasn’t ideal. It worried me that he was sleeping so much and not eating. He could have just been tired or bored out of his mind but depression was a real concern. I was afraid that something like that could easily get out of hand and I didn’t know what to do about it.

Dinner was the more immediate problem. I rarely cooked on work nights because I was too tired, usually just munching on bread and fruit before bed, but that wasn’t enough for Maximilien. Living in a big city like Paris, there was an embarrassment of choice as far as restaurants went (so long as one chose to eat at reasonable dining hours). There was a particular Korean restaurant around the corner that I’d been putting off going to because it was rather expensive, even though I’d had a taste for sundubu jjigae for the past two weeks. Suddenly, my mind was reasoning that a big bowl of rice and grilled meat was hearty, healthy, and bland enough for Maximilien. Kimchi was practically a superfood, too, but there was no way I’d get him to eat that. 

Then I was bundling Maximilien up for the five minute walk to the restaurant. Stepping into the small, warmly decorated restaurant wasn’t exactly stepping through a portal to the country that had introduced me to the expat life but the scents that hung heavy in the air recalled fond memories of the place that so nearly became my home. Maximilien grimaced. That would be the kimchi. Somewhere along the way, I’d forgotten that it stank.

It wasn’t quite the same. I had to keep my feet on the floor and there were forks on the table, but the radio was softly playing K-pop ballads. Close enough. Maximilien squinted at the menu, which was half in Korean, half in French and not in overlapping halves: the names of the dishes were written in hangeul and the descriptions thereof were in French. He wasn’t trying to decipher the Korean, though—he’d left his glasses in the apartment. Even if he could have seen, he probably wouldn’t have given the strange lines a second glance.

I ordered for both of us and passed the menu back to the waiter, then added a bottle of soju before the young man left the table. I sighed and looked around the restaurant at the pretty Korean paintings on the walls. Maximilien, the man who didn’t drink, might well turn me into an alcoholic. Maybe I would have been better off if it had been Danton to come through time. At least I would have had a drinking buddy, then. The bottle arrived promptly with two of the requisite little glasses. 

“What is that?” Maximilien asked as I put one in front of me and filled it.

“Soju,” I answered. “Would you like to try some?” I pushed the glass toward him and filled the other for myself. I knocked the shot back as Maximilien took a tiny sip. He pulled a face and set it down very carefully. I was put in mind of the scene from Danton where Danton filled Robespierre’s glass to the very brim with some very pink wine, ignoring Robespierre’s uncomfortable attempts to tell him to stop. “You don’t like it.”

“It is rather…strong,” he answered.

I only smiled as I filled my glass again.

Then the food came. There were beautiful strips of raw meat for placing on the little grill in the middle of the table, a stoneware bowl full of bubbling soup, and a large bowl of rice, as per my order. I pushed the bowl of rice to Maximilien and then lay the meat on the grill with a pair of tongs. As Maximilien picked at his rice, I pulled a pair of chopsticks and a soup spoon out of the drawer that was built into the table. I supposed most people just used the forks and knives that were laid out on the table, but I was stubborn. I wasn’t particularly graceful with chopsticks and I was afraid that if I stopped practicing, Seong-min would notice when I visited Korea next and, with a look of profound pity and concern, ask the waitstaff to bring a fork—humiliation of all humiliations. 

Maximilien paused in his rice pecking a moment to watch me probe around the various side dishes with the twin metal sticks. I tasted a few dishes and then picked up the spoon to try the jjigae. It was hearty and ferociously spicy, just what I’d been looking for. Maximilien did not ask what any of it was or make a move to try anything. It may have been that none of it looked appetizing or that it was just so against the table manners that had been drilled into him from a young age that he didn’t even think to ask. It was probably something of both. He just barely stopped himself from gaping when the meat was finished and I picked up the scissors to snip it into little pieces. I pushed some of the pieces to his side of the grill, but he did not reach for them until I told him that everything on his side of the grill was for him. Then he cautiously skewered one on his fork and tasted it. I had ordered meat that was not marinated, so there was nothing to shock his tastebuds there and he was far less timid about eating the rest of his portion.

On our way home from the restaurant, we stopped at Monoprix for some fruit and bread so that Maximilien would have something to eat the next day that took no preparation. He was very impressed by both the selection and quality of Monoprix’s produce section. I thought it looked a little sad, as produce often does in mid-winter. He chose a bag of oranges which I had to agree was the best looking of the lot that time around. 

I went to bed early soon after we returned home and I can only assume that Maximilien went to bed, too, not long after. Sometime around midnight, I woke to the sound of him being sick in the bathroom. I wasn’t sure what I could do for him, so I told myself that there was nothing to be done, that it was just that the Korean food hadn’t set well and he would be better once it was out of his system. Eventually, I fell back asleep.

 It was only in the morning, when I got up to make breakfast, that I realized something other than indigestion might have been the cause of Maximilien’s illness during the night. He was still asleep, but his cheeks were flushed and he was wrapped tightly in his blankets despite the sweat that stuck his hair to his face. I approached quietly and laid the back of my hand against his forehead. I recoiled. He was hotter than I’d anticipated. I crept back to the bathroom for my thermometer. I returned with the device and placed the sensor against his temple. Either the cool of the metal plate or the soft beep of the device woke Maximilien.

“What are you doing?” he asked, too lost in his fever haze to muster any real concern.

“Shh,” I answered. “Lie still.” 

Maximilien complied, staring placidly somewhere over my shoulder. It struck me that this was the first time I’d been so close to him. He had admirably long eyelashes. The thermometer signaled that it had completed its task. I lifted it from Maximilien’s temple and compared the number on the device to the label’s I’d stuck to the plastic case to give the Celsius readings some meaning. He was hovering somewhere between “You’re sick, stay home.” and “Get your ass to the doctor.” I sighed.

“Is something wrong?” Maximilien asked.

“You’re sick,” I answered.

“I noticed,” Maximilien said wryly. He closed his eyes again and I could tell he was drifting, so I got up and went to the kitchen.

I summoned up my most pitiful sick voice and called work.

“Hi? Marie? It’s Alexis. I’m really sorry to drop this on you, but I can’t come in today. I’m sick. Yeah, I woke up throwing up and I’ve got a fever. No, I think it’s just the stomach flu, but I’ll let you know. Again, I’m really sorry. Yeah. Thanks. Have a good day. Goodbye.” I hung up and leaned against the counter.

I could see Maximilien sleeping on the other side of the room and I wondered if he might really have the stomach flu. Did they have the stomach flu in the 18^th century? Could he have picked it up in the present? I felt my heart drop into my gut. What if it was the modern disease and he had a bad reaction to it and it killed him? I was reminded of my grade school history education which always seemed to linger on the decimation of indigenous American populations by European diseases. It probably worked the same way across time.

I quickly searched the internet for descriptions of stomach flu: incubation period twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Maximilien had been in the present far longer than forty-eight hours now. I found myself typing a panicked text to Elodie, asking if she thought I’d be able to take Maximilien to the emergency room even if he didn’t have any ID.

“Did you let our Maxie get sick?” was her response.

I chafed at the “our”. How was he in any way hers? What had she done other than freak out in his presence and introduce us to her physicist friend who was little better than useless? I swallowed my irritation and answered her, “It’s nothing serious. I just wanted to know for a worst cast scenario.”

“I don’t know.”

Great. I would have to do my best on my own. Lower his fever, keep him hydrated. It wasn’t like I’d never done the same for myself. It would be ok. 

I poured a large glass of water and set it on the coffee table in front of the television. I sat down on the edge of the sofa bed, the very edge. Here I hesitated. I needed to wake him so that he could drink something—it would only be worse the longer I waited—but I didn’t quite dare. Very, very lightly, I touched his shoulder. Thankfully, he wasn’t sleeping deeply and this was enough to rouse him. I don’t like to imagine the agonizingly slow process of intensifying my attempts that I would have gone through if he hadn’t.

“You have to drink something,” I told him. 

He gave me a look of defeated exhaustion and made no attempt to move.

“You’ll feel better if you do,” I said.

This was encouragement enough and he struggled to sit up. The jostling, however, was the last thing his stomach wanted and it turned me into a liar once again. He managed to make it to the bathroom without incident but he refused to touch the water for some time after that.

It was about two hours later that Elodie showed up at the door uninvited with a big bag of over-the-counter medicine, useless and unnecessary. Her visit was not completely pointless, though. She knew someone—of course she did, Elodie always knew someone although I was never entirely sure how—who could make Maximilien a fake identity. Since Maximilien didn’t plan on breaking any laws, she said, her friend had told her it could potentially last a while, long enough, she figured, for him to go home. And since this was her friend, she said, he was making us a deal: he would work on making the ID while we paid in installments. Usually, Elodie informed me, he didn’t start work until he had a full payment. Between the two of us, she figured it would only take a month to get the funds if we dipped deeply enough into our savings. 

The whole thing sounded like a bad idea. I could imagine a dozen ways it might go wrong. It was more money than I wanted to gamble with. And what if Maximilien returned to the past tomorrow? But what if I didn’t do it and he was stranded in the present for the rest of his life, however long that might be with the guillotine out of the picture? Did he deserve to be trapped in one of the increasingly small cracks of society with no access to proper medical care or legitimate work, leaving aside the question of what work he might actually be able to do in the present? In his place, I would want it done for me. I gave Elodie the green light and sent her on her way to get things started. 

Throughout the day, Maximilien made steady improvement, though he still wasn’t keen on solid food by supper. Karma decided she wasn’t a fan of my lie to Marie and I woke up in the middle of the night with the same affliction as Maximilien. Elodie hurried back the next day to play nurse. Her reappearance was short-lived however because, before my fever broke, she called to say that she was trapped in her apartment with the same thing.

I made several notes based on the experience:

1. Carry disinfectant wipes everywhere—Max has little to no immunity in the modern world and will get himself and everyone around him sick at the first opportunity. (My best guess was that he had picked that particular disease up on one of our ill-advised trips on the métro.) 

2. The stomach flu may not be deadly but it will make you wish you were dead, especially when you have to share a bathroom with someone else who also has the stomach flu.

3. Although he may have the best intentions, Max makes a better patient than nurse.

I was well enough again to make my practice with Nico the following Saturday, but my stamina was down. Nico admonished me to take care of my health until the competition. I took his words to heart and, aside from work, Maximilien and I stayed very close to home. 

Over supper one night, I asked Maximilien what he thought of Elodie after her stint playing nurse. I was concerned that she might have said or done something inappropriate or at least rude while I was out of commission. 

“She is a better cook, but you are more agreeable,” was his reply.

To this day, I cannot decide who got the better end of that comment.

Chapter Text

At long last, the day of the ballroom competition arrived, a small reminder that life does go on even when you have had a revolutionary crashing on your couch for the past two weeks. In my memory, those two weeks don’t feel like two weeks, though. It seems like it could only have been two days. But when I think about it carefully, a lot of small things happened during that time. They get skipped over in my mind because they have since been so integrated into my life.

For example, it was during this period that our mutual lack of interest in deciding what was for dinner became an issue for the first time. It would have been one thing back in Arras with Charlotte when she asked him what he wanted to eat and then went to make whatever she wanted when he said he didn’t know. But in Paris with me, it went:

“What do you want to eat?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter. Whatever you’d like to make.”

Eventually through gritted teeth, “I don’t know what I want. That’s why I was asking you.”

We later came up with a comprehensive list of any and every option we had for dinner, restaurant and home-cooked, to use for suggestions when we both failed to have any idea what we wanted to eat. I even met Maximilien halfway by including every 18^th century suggestion he made for which we could find a recipe. I even included them when the only recipe we could find was one of those frustratingly vague period recipes. The vague recipes were saved for Sundays, when I had more time to wade my way through archaic terminology and lack of all meaningful measurement. Maximilien was useful as a translator for the old terms from time to time, but sometimes it was something used strictly in cooking and he would just look at me and say, “Charlotte would know.” Of course she would, but outside of a séance, I couldn’t think of a way to ask her. So, there were times when I would rage quit on a recipe and Maximilien would get a look of dull horror on his face.

“Then, what will we eat?”

And in the style of my grandmother, whose attempts at new recipes occasionally went terribly awry, I would answer, “Pizza!”

There was also the issue that Maximilien could not, and had no interest in learning how to, cook. I could have forced him. There might be other modern women out there who would have. There are almost certainly also those who would have adapted to his 18^th century ways. Instead, I compromised. I told him that he did not have to cook if he did not want to, but every time we ate at home, whoever did not do the cooking would set the table and wash the dishes. As far as I can remember, Maximilien never cooked a single meal but he eventually came to take very good care of my dishes.

This may seem like a lot for two weeks, and it was. This was all cemented much later, but it got its start in those first two weeks, or rather that one week after we were both over the stomach flu. 

Returning to the situation of the dance competition, it was something the lasted all day and I felt guilty about leaving Maximilien home alone all day. After all, that’s what I did all week and he was only just getting comfortable with wandering the neighborhood by himself which didn’t leave him with a lot to do. That was when Elodie swooped in with an offer to keep Maximilien company and show him around town a bit. Olivier would be hanging out at the competition all day with Nico and I, so she had free use of the car provided she paid for gas. Elodie must have seemed better company than Alexandre Dumas (Maximilien had finished Les Trois Mousquetaires and was working on the sequel) because he assured me that she wasn’t so bad when I expressed my concerns about him being stuck with her all day.

It ended up that Olivier and Nico picked Elodie up and then came around for Maximilien and I. We stopped at the competition hall and then Elodie left with Maximilien. I watched them go with an oppressive amount of trepidation. But that was soon forgotten under the stress of the competition to come. Like an idiot, I had signed up for all of the standard dances except quickstep. I wasn’t ready for quickstep yet, but Nico was confident that I could include it in my next competition. He encouraged me, but I was the one dumb enough to take the bait. Now I fidgeted at the edge of the dance floor in my floaty black and white competition dress, staring down a half dozen performances that stretched across the day.

Thankfully, we began with the slow waltz, which had been one of my earliest successes in ballroom and I was the most confident in it. That put me at ease. Everything would be OK even though my dress was distracting and my competition heels were higher than I liked and Elodie had a captive Maximilien in her car. No, don’t think about that. Just dance. That was easy enough to do with the music there to ground me and Nico there to lead me. 

It was harder to do when the other dance styles were up and we retreated to our tables to watch. Nico chatted with Olivier during our breaks. They were a cute couple and still gaga over each other even though they’d been together since lycée. Olivier went to all of Nico’s competitions but never learned to dance himself because he had no sense of rhythm whatsoever. And if that makes you think inappropriate things, you’re not the only one—he got teased about it quite regularly. Sometimes I watched them talk. Sometimes I watched the latin style dancers in their flashy costumes. Sometimes I calculated how much it would cost to get Maximilien a phone because I really wished I could text him right now.

After the slow waltz and the tango, it was time for me to face the Viennese waltz. It was glorious and we were flawless. It was everything I’d imagined when I was a little girl watching ballroom competitions on television with my mom. But of course we didn’t place. It was my first time competing with the Viennese waltz and we were going against much more experienced couples and we had purposefully stayed away from anything too adventuresome because a medal was not worth the risk of a broken ankle when I was still so inexperienced. The goal was to make me fall in love with the dance even more so that I would practice harder and compete again.

When we went back from the light of the dance floor to the dimness of the tables for the spectators, I noticed that Olivier had acquired some new friends. I saw that my seat was still open, though, with my water bottle in front of it, so I didn’t pay them much mind. I sat down with some perfunctory bonjours, picked up my water bottle, and proceeded to turn my attention to the dance floor. I had just settled in when the man to my left, away from the dance floor, chose to speak.

“I am not familiar with this sort of competition, but Elodie tells me you did very well.”

I choked on my water at the sound of the unexpectedly familiar northern accent. When I could breathe again, I swiveled around to face him. “Maximilien?” 

I should have recognized him, even in the dark, but the way he’d looked when we’d parted ways, he should have stuck out like a sore thumb. In the intervening hours, Elodie had taken him for a haircut and bought him new clothes. It’s amazing what hair and clothes can do, but it was still him when I looked closely: he still had the same big, green eyes, the same pert little mouth, the same faint dimpling of old smallpox scars on his cheeks. 

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“After we finished at the barber’s and at the tailor’s, Elodie said that we had nothing more to do and asked if I would like to see you compete.”

“And you said yes.”

“Clearly.”

The rest of the competition went well. I finished on a high note with the foxtrot, another early favorite of mine. I went home with a silver in the slow waltz, a bronze in foxtrot, and nothing else but such was life. 

As we were leaving the competition hall, I pulled Elodie aside.

“What are you thinking, buying that stuff for him?” I asked.

“It’s nothing,” Elodie said.

“How much did it cost?” I tried calculating how much Elodie would use this to insinuate herself into Maximilien’s life.

“It’s just a little gift for my muse.”

“Your…your muse?” I was livid. I didn’t want to hate Elodie or suspect her of ill intentions, but I couldn’t help replaying the moment she found out who Maximilien was in my head over and over. I was afraid that she didn’t see him as a real person yet, that she was using him because she didn’t see how serious the situation really was.

“Yes, meeting Maxie inspired me with a new idea for a comic.”

“What about your old idea for a comic?” I asked.

“Boring. This one will be a rom-com. A revolutionary comes to the present and meets a girl.”

“You mean like Kate and Leopold?”

“What?”

“Kate and Leopold, it’s an old American rom-com about time travel,” I said.

“Never heard of it.”

“Maybe you should watch it. It might inspire you. Then you can leave your ‘muse’ alone.”

I left her with that thought and caught up with the others. Elodie followed not far behind.

When we got home, I helped Maximilien sort through his new things and cleared some space in my closet. My books went under my bed. Certainly, he knew that I had read them but I didn’t want him to actually see one, to be tempted to pick it up and read it. 

As for his clothes, I’d already bought him a couple things from Monoprix, but they were cheap and little more than functional. Wherever Elodie had taken him, it was much nicer. She’d gotten everything down to shoes, as well. That everything had taken so little time made me think she’d gone and scoped out the store beforehand. It was the same with his hair. It was skillfully cut and I had a hard time imagining that a place like that welcomed walk-ins. God damn it, she’d planned this.

I didn’t say a word of my concerns to Maximilien. Whatever thoughts or opinions he had of the situation, I let him keep them. He was a grown man and entitled to his own impressions of the world, even if it wasn’t really his world. It was frustrating, though, because I really didn’t trust Elodie. If I am honest, I never had, but that wasn’t a concern until I had someone so vulnerable under my care.

Maybe Elodie actually did go and watch Kate and Leopold because she didn’t come around bugging Maximilien for the rest of the month. I wired her my payments for his IDs in a timely manner, so she didn’t have than as an excuse to come knocking, either. In fact, the end of January was a very peaceful time for Maximilien and I. 

I worked a lot or, rather, a lot as far as the French were concerned, so Maximilien was home alone a lot. He usually had bread and fruit for lunch but I left him with a little money so he could go out to one of the cafés in the area from time to time as a change of pace and it wasn’t long before he was comfortable enough in the present to do just that. 

As for filling the rest of Maximilien’s empty time, I removed all off-limits books and gave him free reign over my library. I promised him a library card as soon as we got his ID. 

I also created a user ID on my computer for him and taught him the basics of using it. I had a work computer at school, so I usually left my laptop at home anyway. For the most part, he used the computer for the large collection of late 18^th century that I downloaded on iTunes for him. He liked music, but was too busy to spare the time required to truly appreciate it in his time and all he would say on the subject of music in the home was that Charlotte had other talents. Poor Charlotte. He was therefore delighted to find that he could call up almost any tune he’d ever heard and dozens that he’d never heard within seconds. I soon got used to hearing harpsichords and flutes throughout my apartment. I had never much liked 18^th century music, running hot and cold even on Mozart, but I developed a taste for it. In return, I tried to broaden Maximilien’s musical tastes. All things considered, he was fairly amenable to it—preferring mellow tunes such as Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bookends” but not dismissing anything until he’d heard it. Once he made up his mind about something, though, he would not budge an inch. 

Typing was a trial. It was painfully slow and frustrating. He never really developed much skill for it, although he did improve over time. He avoided situations in which he had to do much typing wherever possible. I couldn’t blame him. Instead I bought him notebooks and fountain pens for keeping his various writings. I encouraged him to keep a journal but I am not sure if he actually did because I never snooped in his notebooks. Even if I had been tempted to invade his privacy in that way, his handwriting was too much of a headache to decipher when I was afraid of being caught. I could usually make it out when he left me notes but there were times when I had to ask what he’d written, especially if he’d been in a hurry or distracted while making the note.

In the evenings, we developed a habit of spending an hour or two together after supper. Even when I was burned out and tired after spending all day surrounded by students and other teachers, I made an effort. He’d been alone all day, after all. Sometimes we passed the time in companionable silence, reading or writing. Sometimes we watched films or television shows. Sometimes we talked. 

Those were my favorite evenings, when we talked. I remember reading somewhere that Maximilien had a weak voice for speech making, and I couldn’t really judge because my little apartment certainly wasn’t the floor of the Convention, which, as I understood it, had poor acoustics, but I liked his voice. I even liked his accent; I found it charming once I got used to hearing it. Then again, I wasn’t French and didn’t have the same prejudices about the various regions and their accents. To me, France was France and French was French. I had more trouble understanding his vocabulary than his accent. Sometimes he would say something and I would be unable to do anything but blink at him. With my American accent and sometimes my lack of familiarity with a word, I could produce that reaction equally often in him, so I suppose it was all fair. 

We talked about many different things. Sometimes we talked about philosophy or how the world had changed in the past two hundred years. Sometimes I tried to explain modern life to him. Sometimes he tried to explain 18^th century life to me. Sometimes I asked him about his life and sometimes he was open about it—a historian’s dream. I compared what he told me to what Charlotte said in her memoirs, noting the similarities and differences in the siblings’ interpretations of events. Sometimes he asked me about my life, and I told him stories about growing up in the United States, but we usually got sidetracked quite quickly by me having to explain something which he didn’t understand. 

It was sometime in mid-February, just before Valentine’s Day, if I recall correctly, when Elodie called to say that Maximilien’s IDs were ready except for the photos. We set up a day to go and get the photos taken at Elodie’s friend’s place and have the IDs finalized. 

Elodie’s friend was named Sébastien, called Seb or Sebbi, but only if you were Elodie. I don’t remember what he looked like but there was something about him that gave me the “lives in his mother’s basement” vibe, even though he didn’t. He had a little photography corner in his apartment and it took all of ten minutes to get Maximilien’s photo taken and affixed to the passport and other photo ID card. 

“I could make him a driver’s license, too, if you like,” Seb offered as he set up the printer.

“Absolutely not,” I said before Maximilien could ask what that was.

Seb shrugged and printed the identification papers. 

Maximilien’s face fell noticeably when he got his hands on the documents.

“You changed my name,” he said.

“Well, obviously,” Seb said. “Isn’t that why you came to me?”

“The last name I expected,” Maximilien said. “But did you have to change my first name as well?”

I snatched the papers out of his hands. The documents declared him to be one Maxime Carrault, born May 6, 1991. It wasn’t as bad as I had feared. Seb had managed to keep Maximilien’s mother’s maiden name and the change in the first name wasn’t drastic. I had been worried it was changed to something like Jean or Pierre or, worse, Jean-Pierre. 

Seb huffed, affronted that his expertise had been questioned. “Maximilien wasn’t a common name in ’91. Short names were popular. The more common your name, the longer it will last before someone questions it. Be thankful Maxime was in the top ten. I could have called you Kevin.”

That beat out Jean or Pierre in being completely unsuited to Maximilien. I handed him his documents.

“It’s not the end of the world,” I said and Maximilien nodded. 

I don’t think he was really upset by the change, just uncomfortable that a pet name he had given no one in the present permission to use was now his official name. I would be uncomfortable, too, if my legal name had suddenly changed to Lexi. 

We thanked Seb for his help and left, entering into a brave new world where Maximilien could do things like get a library card and go to the doctor. 

Chapter Text

Since Maximilien’s new official name was Maxime, I began calling him that. I felt more uncomfortable with the change than he appeared to feel. It was frustrating because I’d had no problem with calling him any number of pet names before: Max, Maxime, Maxie, Robbie, ol’ Robes. Actually, ol’ Robes came from my grandmother, who had listened to me ramble on about revolutionary politics during my senior year of undergrad. Whenever she wanted to know how my paper was coming, she’d ask, “So, how is ol’ Robes today?” I thought it was a cute way of referring to him, especially since the question seemed to treat him as a living entity when, at the time, he wasn’t. Eventually, I picked it up. Now, it just felt awkward. 

I don’t remember much discomfort on Maxime’s part at the name change. Then again, I always found him good at concealing his thoughts and feelings, at least from me. He did make some changes as regards Elodie with the new name. After having begun to use “tu” with her, he abruptly switched back to “vous” to keep her at arm’s length and she reluctantly followed suit. 

Interestingly, that change did not apply to me. Aside from the brief period surrounding our time travel argument, Maxime never returned to using “vous” with me. I liked to think that it was because we were close enough that he never felt the need, but that may not have been the case. I had already proven my tenacity in using “tu” with him during that one argument and he may have simply not seen it as worth the struggle to reintroduce the idea. I can’t imagine that he thought I was incapable of properly using the formal because he had plenty of opportunities of seeing me properly navigate formal conversation over the course of the time he stayed with me. 

The first thing to be done with Maxime’s newly forged identity was to make doctor’s appointments. We made three: general, dental, and ophthalmological. Now, since no doctor sees a patient immediately outside of emergencies and even more so when it is a new patient whose visit requires all of the complicated intake paperwork, the first fruit of Maxime’s identity was his cherished library card. 

After that, Maxime became quite the fixture at the local library. It was good for him to get out of the house and have something to do. He wasn’t the sort of man built for an idle life and I knew that the weeks he had spent with nothing more to do during the day than wander to the nearest café for lunch had worn on him. The less he had to do, the more his active mind twisted itself in mazes it never should have entered in the first place. 

On top of that, he was lonely. For more than a month, his only company had been me, Elodie, and Nico and Olivier on occasion. But finances were such that I had all but quit ballroom dance, so we saw Nico and Olivier rarely. Nico was perplexed by my withdrawal, worried that I had been discouraged by my performance at the competition, that he had pushed me too hard too fast. But it was simply a matter of money. Two mouths to feed on one paycheck did not support extravagant hobbies such as ballroom, at least not when that paycheck was mine. 

Regardless, Maxime’s social circle was abysmally small and consisted entirely of my friends. So, he made friends with the outgoing young librarian who had just been hired at the local branch. I still remember how I hated her when I first heard her name: Léa Soulie. I was jealous to be sure. Until that moment, I had been the brightest star in Maxime’s modern life. It wasn’t in a romantic way, just out of necessity, but I had never been anyone’s star before outside my family, outside my childhood, and I chafed at having my spotlight stolen by some sniveling little Léa. It was only made worse by my suspicion, driven by the way he talked about her and the books she recommended, that he had developed something of a crush on her.

The first time I met Léa was in passing. We had little time for anything but hello. I was disgusted to find that she was pretty, friendly, and about my brother’s age. That is to say that, while I was kissing thirty (a fact I was reminded to be self-conscious of every time I heard that all of my younger cousins, including the gay one, were married and having children), she was solidly in her twenties and possessed of a knack for reading people that I had never managed to master. I was usually not bothered by my lack of skill with people—the students liked me well enough and that was all that mattered—except when there was one person in particular whom I wanted and failed spectacularly to impress. 

Then the doctor’s appointments came and there was a moment of distraction. I went with Maxime to all of the appointments and helped him fill out the frustratingly hard to complete paperwork on his medical history. He also signed a waiver for me to receive all of his medical information, so like it or not, I was privy to all the intimacies of Maximilien Robespierre’s health. There’s actually relatively little to tell. Aside from high blood pressure, he was quite healthy. His teeth needed a little work but were, surprisingly, not the worst the dentist had seen. We updated his glasses to some nice modern lenses in sleek black frames. I must now admit that, given the choice between cheap but functional frames and expensive but stylish frames, I hid the price tag and encouraged Maxime to go for the more expensive frames even though I knew it would hit my pocketbook. 

It took a little time to get used to incorporating the new health habits. I hated pills and tried to avoid them where I could but, when it came to Maxime’s blood pressure medication, I made sure that it was on the table with his breakfast every morning. Between the pills and the toothbrush, I felt like an awful nag at first. But the real resistance came with regard to his glasses. I could not, for the life of me, get him to wear them all the time. When I would ask him where his glasses were, he would answer:

“I have told you before. How many times must I tell you before you understand? I cannot wear them for so many hours or I will get the most terrible headache.” And every time, I could hear his mounting irritation in the clipped way he spoke.

I should mention now that Maxime was prone to frequent and severe headaches. Some were caused by his high blood pressure and they were remedied with his medication. Some were caused by stress and there was nothing to be done for those except teach him de-stressing methods. The rest were caused by his eyesight, alternately by wearing his (old) glasses too much and not wearing them enough. I tried to convince him that his new glasses would help with the headaches if he wore them enough but he resolutely refused to believe me and it was some months before he actually began to wear them regularly beyond for reading.

And then Léa Soulie became the bane of my existence again. She liked his new glasses. They had a lovely discussion about a book she’d recommended. He even requested we watch a certain film for movie night because she’d suggested it. Those lovely nights spent chatting were ruined by the mention of her name. I barely paused to consider that he talked about her so much because his social circle was still abysmally small and she was the only person he had to talk about. It was all the more frustrating for me because the only person I had to talk to about my agitation was Elodie and she wasn’t the least bit understanding.

“Aw, have a heart,” she said. “Maxie’s allowed to fall in love if he wants to.”

“But you’re missing the point,” I insisted. “What will happen when he returns to his own time? They’ll be separated forever. And we’ll never be able to tell her where he went and, and, and he’ll be stick living two hundred years in the past.”

“But we don’t know that he will return to his own time,” Elodie pointed out. “He could live here forever.”

“Fine, let’s allow for that. But he’ll never be able to tell her who he is, who he really is. A healthy long term relationship can’t be built on that kind of deceit,” I said.

“And now you’re assuming they want a healthy long term relationship. That’s not for everyone, you know.”

I snorted my derision that Maxime could be looking for anything else in a relationship.

“Of course,” Elodie added with a sly smile, “I doubt you’d be bothered by any of this if it were you that he had a crush on.” 

I was horrified by the insinuation that I had feelings for Maxime that went beyond friendly. Certainly, there was a sort of sexual attraction, but that was summed up in fleeting moments never meant to be acted upon. I would catch sight of him from a certain angle and think, “Damn, he’s sexy.” Or he would say something attractive and I would think that it might be nice to kiss him. But I never thought about it aside from in theory. He was my friend and nothing more. And with a twinge, I wondered if even that title might not be too generous from his point of view. 

But what Elodie said made me think. It made me analyze my every interaction with Maxime. Was I too affectionate? Did I care too much? It would do my heart no good to develop feelings for him if he was just going to disappear into the past one day or run away with another woman if he stayed. I weighed every word I said and calculated every move I made. I read and I researched, how does one know when the heart is moved by something other than friendly affection? I have never been a big believer in the “you’ll just know” principle of love. So, I set up equations and ran calculations. I conducted experiments. Now I spent more time with him, now less. Poor Maxime. How confused I must have made him. I was acting like a madwoman.

Then April drew to a close and Maxime’s birthday approached. I fretted endlessly about what to give him. I bemoaned my lack of skill at choosing presents. Léa would know what to get him, I whined, and she had only spent half the time with him that I had. Not to mention that I had spent the majority of my twenties researching him. I should know what to get him. And yet I didn’t have a clue. In the end, I got him a nice set of Rousseau’s books. I wouldn’t let him have mine because they were from my college days and I was embarrassed of the notes I had taken in them and he couldn’t make his own notes in the library books. 

He was pleased with the gift but it was a quiet, polite sort of pleasure, not the thrill I’d been hoping for. It was in my disappointment that I realized I had gone too far. I was walking down the road toward a sort of affection I did not want to have. Almost immediately, I withdrew.

I had suffocated my feelings before, stamped out flames that had just begun. The cure was abstinence, it was abstinence from touch, from sight, from thought. I couldn’t cut Maxime out of my life like I had done to other men—he relied on me and it wasn’t his fault that I felt what I felt—but I could reduce the time we spent alone together. I shaved it down to almost nothing. We would have breakfast together if he was awake when I made it, but I wouldn’t wake him if he wasn’t. We ate out more often and sometimes I abandoned him completely to have dinner with my coworkers or, worse, to go on pointless dates from dating apps. After dinner, I would immediately shut myself in my room for the rest of the evening. 

When Maxime questioned my new habits, I told him that I was tired. He looked sad and worried at that, sad and worried enough that I noticed it when I was trying not to notice anything about him at all.

“You work too much,” he told me.

I shrugged. “We have to eat,” I said, and then I went to my room.

On weekends, I wandered the city on foot. Paris was balmy in late spring and it was a pleasant pastime. I never once invited Maxime to go with me. I rationalized my abandonment with the idea that he could go see Léa at the library and that Elodie would never turn down the chance to spend an afternoon with her “muse”. He didn’t have to be alone if he didn’t want to be. I don’t know what he did with those days because I had stopped asking and later, when I had gotten past this, I didn’t dare go back over this painful episode.

One evening, in late June or very early July, we had dinner together at home. I had run out of excuses to eat out and I had run out of dates. I made pasta, I think. It was one of the long kinds that have to be twirled around your fork to be eaten politely and I just twirled and twirled my fork, not having the appetite or willpower to do anything else. We ate in silence because we hadn’t had a proper conversation in weeks and all the perfunctory questions and answers had been passed through before we even sat down.

Then, when the silence was the heaviest as if the city itself were holding its breath outside, Maxime said, “I have taken up employment.”

“Oh.” I continued to twirl my fork until his words sank in. My fork stopped and I looked up, meeting Maxime’s gaze for the first time all day. “What?”

“I have taken up employment…as a writer for Elodie’s new comic.”

The first part of the sentence now made sense in some way but the second part still warranted an, “Excuse me?”

Maxime was remarkably patient with me, perhaps thinking that it was a problem with the language barrier that made me so slow to comprehend what he was saying. He therefore spoke slowly and enunciated carefully when he reworded his sentiment. “Elodie was in need of a writer for her new comic. I have taken the position.”

“Why?”

“It came up in conversation that, as Elodie put it, she has all of the talent for art and none of it for writing. It then occurred to her that I might be able to give her work a uniquely realistic tone and she offered me the position. Having nothing better with which to fill my days, I accepted it. I am aware that it is by no means a certain employment and that my skills may well be wholly unsuited to this kind of work, but I would like to try.”

“You know that it’s a romance, right?” I asked.

“I am aware.”

“OK.” I wanted very badly to tell him no, that this was a bad idea, but I felt very keenly that I had given up my right to do so. If not because my feelings were so far from neutral about him, then because I had spent so long avoiding him now that I wasn’t sure what was good or bad for him anymore. 

I went to Elodie about the matter the first chance I had.

“What do you want me to do about it?” she asked. “He was determined to get a job and I thought it would be safer if he worked for me. At least I know his circumstances, you know?”

“He was?”

“What, he didn’t tell you? I’ve been distracting him with all of the requirements for getting a decent professional job, but then I thought he might just get desperate enough to go after any old job, so I told him about the comic. It wasn’t going anywhere anyway.”

“No, he didn’t say a word.” I was a little shocked by how long Elodie made it sound like it had been going on.

“Well, he probably didn’t want to worry you. It sounded like a major factor, aside from him being mind-numbingly bored, was that you’ve been working so much. He’s convinced that you’re going to get sick. What’s your school been doing, anyway, that you’ve been putting in so many extra hours?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I haven’t been.”

“Then, why…? Don’t tell me you’ve been avoiding him.”

I couldn’t answer her.

“Is it because I teased you about having a crush on him? Good God, Alexis, you’re an idiot.”

“It’s not that,” I protested.

“Well, whatever it is, knock it off. He thinks you’re working yourself to death, struggling to put food on the table because of him.”

It was humiliating to hear that, to think that I’d been so caught up in my own personal drama, I’d let things get that confused. Whatever tightness I felt in my pocketbook, it wasn’t to the point where I was worried about food. Whatever tightness I felt in my chest, it wasn’t worth Maxime’s guilt and worry. The damage that had been done was done. It was in the past and I wouldn’t revisit it. From now on, no matter what I felt, I would be Maxime’s friend.

Chapter Text

I did my best to spend more time with Maxime after I made my vow to be his friend. But, of course, he had a job now, a job part of which at least could be done from home with ill-defined hours. And he threw himself into that job with all the fervor of a perfectionist. His time after dinner was now filled with writing. And who was I to complain? “I’ve been avoiding you for weeks but now that you’re busy, I’m going to demand your attention.” I was determined not to be that woman. So, I spent the time in the living room with him in companionable silence. 

Sometimes I read, new books or old books or books I’d never gotten around to finishing. I slogged my way through Les Misérables again even though I grated at Hugo’s penchant for tangents again. I considered asking Maxime to read it because I was curious what he would make of it, but there were too many references to the Révolution and to him in particular. Perhaps I would put on one of the films for movie night if we resumed our movie night habit now that I was being friendly again. They invariably cut out the references to the Révolution, so they would be safe to watch. 

Sometimes I wrote. I had plenty of stories clogging up my brain, but they frequently died on the page. My original stories were always best worked in role-plays where I had someone to inspire new directions but I did not have the will to forge that kind of a relationship at the moment. My fan works were more easily self-inspired but my great muse was out of reach. Any Révolution fic I thought up was dead in the water the minute I glanced over the top of my computer screen at my companion. I had other fandoms in which I could play but my imagination frolicked most freely in the Paris of the early 1790s. And all my saucy little slash fics were shriveled up like the sad, sorry prunes my mother had tried to pass off as candy when I was a child. I bumbled around the landscapes of video games I hadn’t played in years, having sold my PlayStation 4 when I left Korea because I was determined not to let petty distractions get in the way of my studies, not again. After I had graduated, I might have bought another PlayStation but I didn’t see the point because I hadn’t missed it as much as I had thought I might. I watched walkthroughs and cutscenes on YouTube to fill in the gaps where my memory failed. Even then, all I managed to finish was a rewrite of a story begun in high school about Vincent Valentine and I still didn’t like it well enough to post.

Sometimes I listened to music. I turned on the iTunes visualizer and let the sound carry me away to the place where my stories lived, where they didn’t need to be written and they were never too embarrassing or too deep for my shallow skill with words. They danced in images superimposed over the swirls of color on my screen. It was a dangerous pastime, though, because my stories so easily bled into dreams and then I would find myself being woken by Maxime at whatever hour he had decided to put down his pen. He would tell me that it was late and that I should go to bed. He always sounded disapproving, like I should have known better than to fall asleep in the living room. He never scolded me outright, though, which is good because I can’t imagine that would have led to a pleasant memory between us. Sometimes he seemed uncomfortable or even a little embarrassed and I wondered what I might have done to make him so.

Then the Fourth of July came, one of the three days a year when my entire family was gathered and we held a short video call. I set up my computer on the coffee table around 7pm and made sure I looked presentable, but not too presentable because I didn’t want them to think I was dressing up just to talk to them. Then I sat on the sofa and waited for my mother to message me that they were ready for the call on their end.

“What are you doing?” Maxime asked me. 

“I’m going to have a video call with my family,” I said. “Would you like to meet them?”

“Video call?” Maxime knew both of the concepts involved by now but putting them seemed something of a strain on his imagination.

“Yes, a call where they can see me and I can see them,” I said. “Come here.” I motioned for Maxime to sit next to me. 

He came and sat on the far end of the sofa.

“Well, they’re never going to see you like that,” I said, and I made him inch over until we were sitting hip to hip. I felt a thrill of electricity run through me to touch him but I distracted myself with the thought that we would soon be talking with my dear grandmother who would faint dead away if she thought I was living with a man “in sin” and she didn’t really believe that a man and a woman could live together platonically. Oh, that was all well and good for other young people, but her granddaughter was a “lady”. I had to come up with an excuse.

Then my mother messaged me that they were all ready on their end and asked if I was ready. Maxime and I jolted in unison and I typed to my mom that I was ready. The incoming video call box popped up on my screen.

Here I have to apologize to my readers. Things are about to become quite confusing. I have chosen, out of pity for my dear Robespierre, to write everything in English. My French is not up to rendering a story like this and I would probably end up making us all look like buffoons. My choice, however, makes bilingual scenes nearly impossible to portray. In an effort to avoid all of the “in English” and “in French” tags on the dialogue and make things easy to understand as possible, I have chosen to indicate what was spoken in English by underlining it. By using this method, I hope you can understand this and all of the other bilingual scenes that will eventually come to pass as I understood them at the time, in both languages.

I clicked the accept call button and the call window expanded to fill my screen with an image of my mother in all the blurred out, laggy glory of a video call.

“Hi, Honey,” she said. “Can you see me?”

“I can see you,” I answered. “Can you see me?”

“I can see you,” she said. This was our back and forth every time we had a video call, but this time she was staring at me as if I’d grown a third eye. Oh, right, Maxime. I cleared my throat.

“Mom, this is my friend, Maxime. He just stopped by. We’re going out for supper after this.” My mom wouldn’t have cared if I were living with a male friend, but if I was going to lie to my family, I might as well make it the same lie. 

“Oh, right,” my mom said. “It’s suppertime over there, isn’t it?” But she was giving me a significant look that asked, is that your boyfriend? I chose not to respond and she moved on. “Nice to meet you, Maxime. I’m Christine, Alexis’s mom.”

Maxime looked to me when my mom addressed him.

“Go ahead and say hello,” I told him.

“But she doesn’t speak French?” he asked.

“No, not really. But she’ll probably understand you if you greet her in French,” I said. “He’s embarrassed because he doesn’t think his English is very good,” I told my mom, who was still waiting for Maxime to answer her.

She laughed. “Don’t worry about it. You’re English is probably way better than my French. The only French words I know are croissant and baguette.”

An idea struck me. “Do you speak any English?” I asked Maxime. I seemed to recall that there had been an English dictionary among Maxime’s things after he died, so I had assumed that he spoke at least a little. I realized then that I didn’t actually know because it had never come up in conversation, oddly enough. Most people were scrambling at me to play English teacher when they learned that I was from the United States, so I insisted on only speaking French outside of work except when I was calling my family, but it had never come up with Maxime at all.

“Some,” Maxime said, and his tone betrayed his lack of confidence.

“Then, just use what you know and I’ll translate the rest,” I said. “My mother won’t judge you for making mistakes.”

Maxime took a deep breath and said, “Hello, Madame Christine. It is my pleasure to meet you.” It was a little stiff and his accent was that of someone who got very little practice, but it was comprehensible and he managed to unconsciously avoid addressing my divorced mother as “Mrs”, which would have bothered her even if she understood that it was an unintentional mistake.

Then I heard my grandmother’s voice in the background. “I hear French! Are we talking to Alex-girl?”

“Yeah, I have her on the phone here, Ma,” my mom said. “Do you want to see?”

There was some shaking, a quick shot of the ceiling, and then my grandmother’s face came into view. She looked much older and thinner than she had when we’d video called the Christmas before and I felt my mother’s concerns weigh heavily on me.

“There she is!” My grandma grinned to see me. “And who’s your friend?”

“Hi, Oma,” I said with a broad smile to hide my sadness. “My friend is Maxime. We’re going to have supper together in a little while.”

“Oh.” I could feel my grandmother assessing Maxime’s potential as a grandson-in-law from across the world.

“Hello,” Maxime said, hopefully oblivious to my grandmother’s calculations.

“Is my Alexis behaving herself over there in France?” she asked him. 

Maxime looked at me for direction.

“Just say yes,” I told him.

“What are you saying there in French, missy?” my grandma asked teasingly.

“I’m just translating your question,” I answered.

My mom, who knew a little bit of very basic French because I had spoken it so much at home when I was learning, looked on skeptically but didn’t say anything.

“Yes, I believe,” Maxime said in answer to my grandma’s question.

Thankfully, then my grandmother was called away to answer a question about the preparation of the baked beans and the phone was handed back to my mother, who carried us off to find other relatives to greet.

Great-uncle Ken and Great-great-uncle Charlie sat on the deck under a large umbrella, sipping on iced tea and munching on snacks. They were jovial and chatty even though Uncle Charlie didn’t always make much sense. They mostly addressed my mom, forgetting that Maxime and I were on the phone. 

Indoors, I heard my grandmother call out, “Do I hear the flutter of angel wings?”

“Oh,” my mom said, “sounds like Aunt Susan and Uncle Doug are here with Makayla.”

And we were taken back inside. 

“Hi, Christine,” I heard my aunt say.

“Hi, Susan,” my mom answered. “I’ve got Alexis on the phone here. Do you want to say hi?”

“Oh, hi, Alexis,” my aunt said, but barely even looked at the phone.

“Hi, Alexis,” my uncle called from somewhere offscreen.

Makayla took the phone from my mom. “Hi, Alexis,” she said. “Who’s that? Your boyfriend?”

“Maxime’s my friend, not my boyfriend,” I said. 

“Sure.” My fourteen-year-old cousin looked highly unimpressed.

Makayla carried us down to the basement, passing Uncle Gerald on the stairs.

“Hey, Kayla,” he said. “Who you talking to?”

“Alexis and her French boyfriend,” Makayla answered.

I would have called her a little shit, except I couldn’t say that in front of Uncle Gerald, so I just said, “Hey, Uncle Ger.”

Maxime said a weak hello.

Makayla carried us the rest of the way downstairs and out into the backyard where we met “the boys”, Uncle Gerald’s three sons. Will, the oldest, and his wife, Haley, were talking with Nick and Tom. Nick was the youngest and, as far as most of the family was concerned, Tom was just his roommate. Only a select few were privy to the knowledge that Nick and Tom were lovers. Logan, the middle son, was watching his wife, Sydney, and Aunt Brenda slather baby Julian in sunblock. We greeted all of them, giving Maxime plenty of opportunities to practice his hellos in English. 

Then Makayla carried us back inside and handed the phone over to my grandma so she could go change into her bathing suit. We got to say hello to Great-aunt Cheryl then and listen to her say how disgusting she found French hygiene habits and wonder when the stench would drive me home, not seeming to care that Maxime could hear every word she said. Thankfully, she was talking too fast for him to understand much of it. My grandma carried us away before that could change.

There was silence as she checked on something in the kitchen. Then she said, “Oma misses you. Are you sure you don’t want to come home?”

I thought about what I’d just witnessed and the idea of moving back home ran even further away than it had been before I made the call. “I’m sure, Oma,” I said. “But I’ll come visit, I promise.”

“When?” my grandma asked.

“Christmas,” I said. “I’ll come home for Christmas.”

My grandma beamed. “Perfect,” she said. “And you can bring your friend Maxime with you.”

I knew then that she’d somehow convinced herself that Maxime and I were in some sort of serious, long-term relationship, so I was trying to find the best way to express the sentiment of there is no way in hell that is happening in a manner that would be most palatable to her when Maxime spoke up.

“I would be delighted.”

I wanted to shake him so hard that his glasses flew off his face. Did he really not understand her motives behind the invitation? Was he that naïve? Or was he so determined to be agreeable to her? I wasn’t sure which was better.

“Well, Oma,” I said. “It’s suppertime here, so Maxime and I should really get going. I’ll talk to you later.”

“OK, Lambetje,” my grandma said. “Do you want to talk to your mom?”

“Nah. I’ll talk to her later.”

“All right. Goodbye, Alexis. Bye, Maxime. I’ll be expecting you at Christmas.”

“Goodbye,” Maxime said.

“Bye, Oma,” I said, and hung up the call.

“You have a lovely family,” Maxime told me.

I laughed. He really must not have understood Aunt Cheryl, then. 

“I need to go for a walk,” I said, “before I’m tempted to go for a drink. Do you want to come with? We can get some food on our way back.”

Maxime did come with me and we went to wander down along the Seine. My family was a subject which was off limits for the duration of our stroll because I didn’t think I could talk about them for the moment without being reminded of all my grievances with them and I didn’t want to let myself get wrapped up in that. Instead, I asked him how the comic was coming and Maxime was happy enough to talk about his work.

We got food on our way back to the apartment, something relatively fast, but I can’t remember what exactly. Then Maxime had been inspired with some new idea for the comic’s story, so he went straight to work and I fell asleep in my chair listening to music again.

Chapter Text

I would be amiss to tell this story without mentioning the fête nationale. Maxime was quite thoroughly stupefied when Elodie and I explained the holiday to him. As far as he was concerned, the fall of the Bastille had barely been a year ago and yet here it was codified as a sacred national holiday. It is one thing to imagine that an event will ring out through the ages and quite another, I imagine, to see that it had actually done so. I was a little awestruck myself that I would be spending the fourteenth with Maximilien Robespierre.

After living together for six months, the shock of Maxime’s identity had dulled. It’s amazing how people adapt and I mean that for both of us. He had gone from being painfully inept at life in general as far as the 21^st century was concerned to just being quirky from an outsider’s perspective. I had gone from thinking, “Oh, my god, it’s Robespierre,” every time I saw him to only seeing Maxime, my roommate especially in those first two weeks of July. Then the fourteenth rolled around and Maxime’s real identity fell on me like a Loony Tunes anvil. And I went right back to being the jittery, high strung creature I’d been before. The only positive was that, for a little while, I was purged of those feelings I’d been trying to banish for months. You can’t love an icon the way you love a man.

We made plans to meet Elodie and her latest boyfriend to see the parade down the Champs-Elysées. I wasn’t much of a parade-goer and would have just as soon skipped the parade if I were alone but Elodie and I had agreed that it was important for Maxime to go. So, I packed a backpack with headache medicine and plenty of water and we headed down early to make sure we got a good place. Then we waited in the hot sun for the parade to begin. I was dressed up like an ahjumma with a wide-brimmed hat and a large silk fan I’d bought in Korea with which I fanned myself and any member of my group who looked like they were getting too hot. I heard Maxime ask Elodie about my strange behavior, perhaps too uncomfortable to ask me directly. She told him, as I would have, that I did not do well in the heat.

We watched the parade and it was impressive. That had never been in doubt. There was marching, there were bands, there were planes and tanks. It was bright and noisy as all hell. I knew what to expect and just hunkered down in my hat, waiting for whatever was making the loudest noise to pass, but Maxime was caught off guard every time. When the jets flew overhead, he jolted so hard I was afraid he would fall over and I grabbed his arm to steady him. He looked at me and laughed it off but he was white as a sheet even in the July heat and did not pull his arm out of mine. When the next round of plane came, he squeezed my arm. I didn’t try to pull my arm away and we stood like that for the rest of the parade, although the planes had been the worst of it since the emergency vehicles did not blow their sirens they way they did in the US during 4^th of July parades. Elodie made comments to me about it later.

We asked Maxime what he thought of the parade when it was finished, and he equivocated before admitting that he did not much enjoy it. He suggested, though, that it might be more enjoyable next year when he knew what to expect, provided that he was still here next year. Elodie’s boyfriend innocently asked if Maxime had plans to move even as the statement settled like a pall over Elodie and me. 

Maxime answered Elodie’s boyfriend without missing a beat and we went back to my apartment to pick up the food for our picnic lunch, which we ate in the gardens before the Eiffel Tower. Elodie’s boyfriend complained that it was such a tourist thing to do, so I looked him dead in the eye and answered that I would never stop being a tourist. I had lived long enough in Korea, where my very face pegged me as a foreigner, to get over my embarrassment and embrace my tourist instincts. Sure, I did my best to integrate in my day to day life but if I wanted a picnic in front of the Eiffel Tower, then I was going to picnic in front of the Eiffel Tower, damnit.

Lying under the trees on a blanket was a welcome change from the desert of the bare streets. I still waved my fan over me but now it was more of an affectation than a necessity. I had a whole bowl of Spanish blueberries to myself and I alternated by popping them in my mouth to savor their mild flavor and using them as ammunition against anyone whose joking ventured too near a nerve. Mostly it was Elodie who got pelted and she took to catching and eating anything that came her way, but Maxime may have also gotten hit once or twice. One hit him directly in the temple and he turned to stare at me, wide-eyed, before we all dissolved into laughter. I don’t remember what we were talking about but it wasn’t important whatever it was. I remember the feeling of the place better than the actual events—friendly, warm, relaxed. Sometimes I close my eyes and I can still go back there. I can still see everyone lounging in the dappled green shade and Maxime laughing with his eyes closed.

That night, we watched the fireworks over the Eiffel Tower. I might hate parades but I love fireworks and I would have gone even if I had to go alone but Maxime knew what to expect from fireworks, unlike jets, and he was keen to see them with me. We had separated from Elodie and her boyfriend in the late afternoon and we didn’t find them again, even though we had agreed to meet for the fireworks. So, just Maxime and I stood together in the crowd, staring up at the sky. I overextended my balance, leaning back to look up, and Maxime caught me before I stumbled into the people behind me. 

The fireworks display was probably also something of a disappointment to Maxime, though I didn’t dare ask because I enjoyed it so well. To him, though, it was probably poisoned by the modern music that suffused everything. He didn’t volunteer any thoughts on the display. All I had to go on were my stolen glances of his face lit in the colored light of a firework, the sparks reflected in his eyes and a smile on his face. He’d smiled at the marching bands in the parade, too, though, so it’s hard to tell.

When the display ended, the crowd began to disperse and we took the streets back to my apartment rather than risk the métro. We walked with arms linked so as not to lose each other in the sea of people. When the crowds thinned to a manageable level, we let go, though I would have held onto him until we reached my apartment if I could have thought of an excuse. 

The fourteenth was a Friday that year and so we spent the rest of the weekend relaxing after the busy holiday. The following week returned to normal as if the holiday had never happened. My repressed feelings came roaring back with agony and we went back to our busy schedules where an effort had to be made in order to maintain our friendly distance, close but not too close.

It was summer vacation from school but I still had work to do preparing for the next school year and Maxime often went to Elodie’s so they could collaborate more effectively on the story. Things got especially busy for them as they counted down the release of a new chapter. Sometimes, Maxime wasn’t even home for dinner. Usually, when this happened, he was aware that things would be late and would tell me not to expect him but occasionally it would be a surprise and I would wait anxiously for him before calling Elodie to find that they were just running later than anticipated. This had come up a little in the week before the fourteenth and I was discovering that I had very little taste for such surprises when the last straw came the following week. 

Maxime had told me that they had a lot of work and warned me not to expect him home for dinner. So, I didn’t. I stretched out on the sofa to watch some Netflix and planned on ordering in some pizza later. I had decided to rewatch the third season of Blackadder, a poor choice in retrospect. I was almost done with the third episode, in which Blackadder kills the Scarlet Pimpernel twice, when I heard the key turn in the lock and Maxime entered the apartment two seconds after Blackadder finished saying, “…ran to Versailles, where I climbed into Mr Robespierre’s bedroom, leaving him a small tray of milk chocolates and an insulting note.” I fell off the sofa as I fumbled to reach my computer to pause the video. 

I refused to put up with pre-cell phone planning anymore. I was lucky that I hadn’t had anything worse on the television at the time. It was high time for Maxime to get his own phone. I sprung for a smartphone so we could rely on wifi where possible and limit the actual calling plan. I spent the rest of the night just showing him how to use the basic call and texting features on his phone. I told him that I expected a text or a call if ever he was running late or early for anything. Later, I reflected that I might have been a little harsh about the whole thing but at the time I had been too frustrated with the situation and embarrassed by the thought that he might have walked in a few seconds earlier—although it’s questionable how much he would have understood of the passage, I don’t doubt for a moment that he would have caught his own name in it. Elodie apparently spent a good part of the next day teaching him to use the various other features on his phone. She also downloaded several games he never learned how to play. 

I enjoyed Maxime’s phone more than he did, I think. Rather, I liked my new ability to contact him wherever and whenever I wanted. I suspect that he did not like that ability. I suspect this because I had initially expected Maxime’s texting style to be like my grandmother’s. You see, my dearest Oma sent text messages that resembled letters, complete with greeting and closing. Maxime’s text messages, on the other hand, were incredibly terse. 

“Will you be home for dinner?”

“Yes.”

“What would you like for dinner?”

“I do not know.”

“How does couscous sound?”

“Good.”

“Do you know what couscous is?”

“No.”

At that point, I would just give up. I knew I wouldn’t get anything more out of him. Couscous it was for dinner and if he didn’t like that, too bad. 

Then the chapter was published and Maxime came back to spend more time at home for a little while. He wrote better at home, he said, because Elodie was distracting. When I asked for clarification, he said, “She talks too much.”

Having been so busy, Maxime hadn’t had time to go to the library and get book recommendations from Léa. In a small, very small, effort to extend that time a little further, I made a book suggestion of my own. I had noticed that Léa’s suggestions had all been realistic fiction, a safe bet for Maxime, and decided to make my suggestion stand out a little. I handed him Jules Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers.

There was one more problematic day in our busy July. I was determined that Maxime not notice anything different about that day in particular, but it was a hard day for me. I kept myself apart from him some in order to not give anything away. I told him I had to write a report for work—a farce to keep him from interrupting me—and set up my computer on the kitchen table where I clacked nonsense on my keyboard and watched him as he occupied himself with the book I’d given him. I contemplated my indefatigable affection for him and traced it back, long before he’d ever arrived in the present, to when I’d first encountered him in my high school history book thirteen years before. I couldn’t imagine how I would recover if he left me now and I couldn’t imagine how I’d end up lucky enough to keep him.

Eventually, the weight of my thoughts and the pressure of my tiny apartment’s walls threatened to overcome me. I needed to get out and breathe fresh air before I screamed.

“Maxime?” I asked and he looked up at me.

“Hm?” 

“Do you want to go out for lunch? Get some fresh air?” I tried to keep my tone light and unfettered by my inner turmoil.

He considered for a moment, his eyes focused on nothing in particular. “I suppose it is rather stuffy in here.”

“They don’t call it Thermidor for nothing,” I replied under my breath, in hopes of releasing some internal pressure without him hearing. Something, anything to get it out in the air so that maybe it will draw the poison in my mind out with it, all without alerting Maxime.

“Hm?” He heard me anyway but did not understand my comment. What, after all, was Thermidor to him in 1790?

“Oh,” I said. “Nothing. Just that this is the hottest part of the year, after all.” I forced a weak laugh. 

Maxime gave me a look of concern, aware that something was not right but not knowing what to do about it. Nothing, mon cher ami, but stay beside me and avoid dying today. 

I fixed my attitude once we got outside but I was still drawn inevitably toward conflict. I developed an insatiable taste for a little, family-owned burger joint that was across the street from the Catacombs. Sure, they made a mean burger but the city was full of places to eat. Maxime caught me staring out the window at the line that wrapped around the block for the Catacombs.

“What is that line for?” he asked.

“The Catacombs of Paris,” I answered.

He studied my face. “Do you want to go there?”

I shook my head and found myself saying, “Normally, I would go there today to pay respects to some old friends, but…”

“Then we shall go as soon as we are done eating,” Maxime said.

I shook my head again. “As much as I would like to go there with you, I’m afraid there are some ghosts that would be particularly displeased to see you down there.”

And an image came to my mind of being chased through the halls of the Catacombs by the ghost of Georges Danton. As terrifying as that would be in reality, the mental image only brought a smile to my face. And when I thought that it was probably Camille who held the greater grudge, the image shifted to the scrawny journalist chasing after us and I chuckled.

“I’m glad it amuses you that I had such enemies,” Maxime said sourly.

“Not really,” I answered. “It’s a terribly unhappy story, but the idea of how confused and furious they would be to see you alive today is amusing. It half makes me want to take you down there just to see if they appear. But I think I’ve done enough meditating on the dead for today, don’t you?”

“There is no chance that you will tell me who my enemies are?” he asked me.

“Even if I tell you, it won’t help you, Maxime,” I said. “Now, let’s finish eating and go back home. I’ve just thought of the perfect movie for movie night.”

I felt so much lighter on the way back home. Camille and Georges were dead, turning to dust in the Catacombs, but Maxime was alive. He was warm and solid by my side and capable of being thoroughly irritated with me. It didn’t even bother me that I had upset him because dead men don’t get upset. I would have regretted that line of thought the rest of my life if he had disappeared then, but he didn’t so I was safe.

Chapter Text

July blurred into a quiet August. Everything feels quiet in comparison with July every year. As a child, it had been one of my favorite months, all fireworks and camping trips, but it has been a long time since I’ve been able to think about it without feeling dread and horror. 

 August is the French vacation month, so naturally, Maxime and I stayed home. Even Elodie, who hated leaving the city, took a holiday at the country house her parents had bought for their retirement. 

What’s more, the reviews for the first chapter of Maxime and Elodie’s comic came in and they were generally positive. There was a niche audience who was just eating it up and demand for the next installment was relatively high. I read it and made sure to leave a comment on the website where the publisher hosted it. I thought I was being secretive, but Maxime recognized me right away.

“Why did you leave a comment when you could say your thoughts personally?” he asked me.

I tried to play innocent. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

So, he showed me the evidence on his phone. I was mostly just impressed that he knew how to use the internet on his phone.

“Why do you think that’s me?” I asked.

“You always use the same username.”

“No, I don’t. What gave you that idea?”

“Elodie said that it is the same name you use on the website where you write your stories,” he said.

All I could think to say in response to that was, “Traitor,” aimed at the absent Elodie.

“You never told me that you wrote,” Maxime said.

“I write, I dance, I teach young people to speak English. I’m a woman of many talents,” I said.

“May I read your writing?” he asked.

I thought of the website Elodie had mentioned and all of the homoerotic French Revolution fiction which I had posted there. I had explored every Jacobin pairing I could think of just for the fun of it and the majority of them were shamefully explicit. “Absolutely not.” 

There must have been something in my tone or expression because he did not press me further on that subject. Instead, he turned his attention to my other mentioned hobby. “I recall that you danced when I first arrived, but I have not seen you do so since.”

“I stopped,” I said.

“Why?”

I shrugged. “It’s too expensive.”

“Then you may begin again now that I am employed,” Maxime said.

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’ll start again when you’ve gone home.”

Maxime was silent for a moment. “I would like to learn.”

I can’t imagine that he really wanted to learn how to dance or what his exact thought process was there. All I can guess is that he wanted to pressure me into taking up dancing again because he felt guilty that the financial strain caused by his arrival had forced me to quit. I can’t believe that it worked.

So, that Saturday, Maxime and I went down to the studio where Nico worked for the weekly beginner/intermediate classes and social dance combo. I was above the level of the classes, so I usually skipped them to get the reduced, social dance only price. This time, I was obliged to attend both. 

It was our luck that Nico was running the lesson that night. So, I asked Nico if they had any used men's ballroom shoes on hand in Maxime’s size that we could buy. The studio took the shoes that people no longer wanted off their hands and resold them at a much-reduced price from new, provided they were still in decent condition. I wasn’t willing to pay full price for ballroom shoes if Maxime was unlikely to enjoy the activity. I was also hoping that Nico would tell me there were no shoes in Maxime’s size and cut the whole evening short. Again, however, luck provided for us and there was a pair.

The lesson was the waltz. I lined up with the beginner class to be Maxime’s partner. It was a relatively large class and had an even number of leads and follows. Nico began by gauging the level of the class, asking who had waltzed before and who had no dancing experience at all. Aside from me, only one other couple had ever waltzed before and two additional couples knew some form of couple dancing. 

Nico had us all line up in front of the mirror and practice the basic box. Maxime struggled. He was fairly well able to follow the beat that Nico counted but he kept getting his feet confused. He wasn’t alone in that. At one point he stopped and just watched me for several seconds as if trying to crack the secret code of the waltz box. 

“It’s every other,” I told him. I counted it out for him as I completed a box. “Left, right, left. Right, left, right.” I had him try then and kept counting it out like that, which seemed to help some.

Once the assembled dancers were proficient enough at the solo waltz box, Nico taught us the standard frame. He pulled me away from Maxime to demonstrate the proper form. He took me through a basic box to show them what we would be doing. Then he sent me back to Maxime and had everyone frame up. Before he let us start moving, Nico came around and checked everyone’s frame. I adjusted Maxime’s stance myself before he arrived at us, so Nico had to tweak comparatively few things with us. 

Unfortunately, no perfect posture would make Maxime easy to dance with. He was still unsure of the steps and already uncomfortable with the closed position. Nico started counting. Maxime led me in tiny, self-conscious boxes and since he did not know what leading was in dance, he just sort of pushed me in the direction where he wanted me to go with a pressure that felt like manhandling. He didn’t know that was what he was doing, too focused on putting his feet in the right places, but I made a mental note that I would have to fix that straight away if he decided to continue dancing. Being pushed and pulled around the dance floor was one of the least pleasant parts of dancing with beginners, in my opinion. 

Then Nico had us rotate partners. Maxime watched me go with the expression of a frightened rabbit as the old lady beside us shuffled over to take my place. My next partner had the opposite of Maxime’s problem: he used no pressure at all and I was blind as to where he wanted me to go except that we were just doing boxes. We rotated again and again until I had cycled through just about every newbie mistake I could think of and made my way back to Maxime, who had gained a little confidence in the meantime. 

Unfortunately, that confidence was dashed when Nico taught us to travel down the floor. Again, Nico used me as an example and we glided effortlessly along the wall. But with the beginners, it was like slogging through mud. The change steps in waltz had confused me greatly as a beginner and they were doing the same to Maxime. I was back to counting, “Left, right, left. Right, left, right,” for him all the way up and down the floor. I did that for all of my partners when we began rotating.

The lesson ended with a simple hesitation step which we only practiced with our original partners so that the leads had something to do when their follows got tired of being driven around the floor in unadorned circles. Then the lesson was over and the social dance began with a waltz so that everyone could practice what they had learned in their lessons.

I danced the first waltz with Maxime, but quickly found myself swept away by various leads who had recognized me and celebrated my return as one of the better, though by no means the best, follows at the studio. Meanwhile, the older ladies swooped down on Maxime like vultures on carrion. They watched the floor closely and had no doubt seen him dancing with me, so they had high hopes if not for his current skills then for his future improvement. 

I sat out very few dances despite there being more follows than leads because I had bee missed in my absence and everyone wanted a dance. When I did sit out, I didn’t actually sit out, instead teaching Maxime the basic step of whatever dance was playing. Maxime sat everything but the waltzes out because those were all he knew. He would have sat most of those out, as well, if I hadn’t spread word among the vulture ladies that he had just learned the waltz and needed to practice.

At the end of the night, we returned home and I asked Maxime what he had thought of the dancing. He disliked the music that had been played, thought the ladies were too pushy, and did not understand the dance steps at all. If I had thought that was the end of Maxime’s experiment with ballroom dance, however, I had been mistaken. No, he had determined that this was not the sort of activity which was meant to be enjoyed from the first attempt and that further study was necessary.

I might have been pleased with his perspicacity if I had wanted him to learn to dance. I would have been thrilled with his determination if he had been any of the long gone ex-boyfriends I had tried to introduce to the pastime. As it stood, I thought he was being something of a stubborn ass, especially after I told him that he did not have to feel obliged to continue on my account because I would keep dancing whether he did or not.

So, we continued to go dancing every Saturday night and Maxime slowly picked up the basics of every dance offered at the studio. And I had to help him claw his way up from the bottom, all the while trying to deflect Elodie’s assumptions that this was some sort of romantic date night. Whatever romance there might have been in Maxime’s arms was killed by the over-forcefulness of his leading and the robotic nature of his movements. And that was for the best because we were just friends anyway.

That last sentiment was what I couldn’t quite convince Elodie of. Ever since she had started working with Maxime, she had convinced that there was something more going on between Maxime and I. I don’t know why. Maybe she’d flirted with him and he hadn’t been interested. Maybe she couldn’t think of any other logical reason for his ability to write the romance story for their comic. 

I had it worse with my family, though, whom I could no more disabuse of the notion than I could Elodie. My mother had grown rather fond of him and sometimes talked to him when she called to talk to me. He tolerated her teasing quite well, which delighted her. She told me that she thought he was a good match for me and that she was glad I had found him. I wondered what she would think if she knew who he really was. 

Oma was still insistent that Maxime come with me on my Christmas visit. I tried to give reasons why he couldn’t come but he sabotaged me by refuting those reasons when he talked to my mother. This ultimately led to the assumption that I was embarrassed by my family and thus did not want to let Maxime meet them. In the end, I had to take it all back to avoid any unnecessarily hurt feelings.

September rolled around and school began again. I was busier than I had been all year and I was thus able to put aside many of my domestic concerns. Maxime and I still spent our evenings together, still had our movie night, but I was so tired that I would often find myself being woken by Maxime and sent to bed at some point during the evening. The Saturday night dancing continued but I did not dance much with Maxime and, even then, it was less of a punishment to dance with him with every passing week.

The weather cooled, the leaves began to change, and Paris entered into my favorite season. 

Chapter Text

Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved autumn. The beautiful colors, the crisp air, the scent of decaying leaves. A northern autumn with warm-toned plaids and apples. Some of my most vivid childhood memories are of school trips to the orchard—cake doughnuts and hot sweet cider. I grew up on Michigan cider but, although it did not strike the same chords of nostalgia, I’d grown quite fond of Breton cider since I’d taken up residence in France. Perhaps too fond.

One day, upon opening the refrigerator (likely in search of cold water because there were few other reasons why Maxime would invade what he clearly saw as my territory), Maxime called out to me. “Alexis? Why are there eight bottles of cider here?”

“I have no impulse control,” I answered.

Maxime accepted this as true almost immediately and returned to the perusal of the refrigerator’s contents. “Where is the bottle of water?”

He was referring the to the glass bottle in approximately the size and shape of a wine bottle which I kept in the refrigerator in imitation of my host mother from my semester abroad in Nice so many years ago now, partly because it helped me keep a supply of refreshingly cold water on hand and partly because it made me feel fancy. I shrugged in response to Maxime’s question, knowing full well that I had hidden it in a cupboard until such time as enough cider had been drunk that there was room for the water bottle again. “You could drink some cider,” I suggested.

Maxime did not dignify my suggestion with a response at all. I believe he settled for some less cold water from the tap.

Autumn was not only cider season, though. It was also Halloween season. The time of costumes and parties was almost upon us. Costumes had always been the main draw of Halloween for me. Trick-or-treating and parties were always just an excuse to get dressed up in the most outrageous costume I could put together. My most recent project, to Elodie’s eternal cringes, was a set of 1860s full-mourning widow’s weeds. Unfortunately, life having been what it had been for the past ten months, my sewing had taken a backseat (and I wasn’t very good at it in the first place) and the project was simply not ready for Halloween ’23. 

Meanwhile, Elodie was fixated on getting Maxime to go to her Halloween party in the clothes he’d arrived in because wouldn’t that be a joke? No one would know that it was real. I was against the idea and so was Maxime. When he failed to convince Elodie, he turned to me for support. So, I did the best I could and told her that we already had plans to watch some Halloween movies together to slowly introduce him to the spirit of the holiday.

“You know how poorly the fête nationale went over,” I concluded. “I’m afraid a real Halloween party would just be more of the same. Maybe next year.” If there is a next year.

Rather than pouting and being disappointed, though, Elodie gave me a sly smile and said, “All you had to do was tell me you had a date.”

A date. There she went again. As attractive as the thought of curling up under some blankets with scary movies and Maxime sounded, I couldn’t let myself get carried away by a fantasy. Maxime and I were as happy as we could reasonably be with our circumstances and I didn’t want to screw that up by letting myself get wrapped up in my own head about feelings I had no control over again. I was glad Maxime was my friend and I hadn’t felt jealous of Léa in weeks. If things continued like this, maybe my feelings would cease to be a problem. If only Elodie would drop the subject.

Halloween was on a Tuesday, so the day started out with work. It was an unremarkable day, Halloween not being celebrated in France the way it is in the United States. My classes were uneventful and I believe the weather was fairly nice. I went home and made dinner in the oven—an appliance I had never so appreciated as when I finally had one again after two years without. So, we ate a cozy meal, possibly a variation on one of the old church recipe book casseroles I’d grown up on—comfort food in a can or, as the case may be, seven.

After dinner, we set up the sofa the way we usually did for movie night. The exception was that tonight would be a double feature. We started out with the requisite, the unavoidable The Nightmare Before Christmas. It was my own personal tradition, crafted to take the place of some of the holidays for which my family did have traditions—for example, I do nothing for Easter. It was what it always has been, a cute movie that has been gilded in my memory so that I always imagine it as better than it is. I enjoyed it. Maxime, less so. After the movie, we got up and stretched our legs, took a bathroom break, fixed some snacks. Maxime avoided my questions about what he thought of the film, probably to spare my feelings.

Then we settled down for the second movie. It was a horror film, but I can’t remember the title. Elodie recommended it. I’m not a fan of horror. Either I’m not scared by the film and end up bored or I do feel fear but it’s not enjoyably cathartic. It probably goes hand in hand with me not being a thrill seeker. That heart-pounding shot of adrenaline doesn’t make me feel alive, it just makes me feel nauseous. It was in this way that Maxime managed to get through ten months of movie nights without having once seen a horror film. I explained the genre to him as best as I could while I set the film up and then settled in for a mediocre finish to my unremarkable Halloween. 

The film was on the more enjoyable side of horror, but it was no match for a long day at work and the prospect of another tomorrow. I soon felt myself drifting and I lost the train of the movie completely before slipping into a slumber that was completely unperturbed by the images on the screen in front of me.

The next thing I knew, the lights were on and Maxime was leaning over me with an arm wrapped under my shoulders. 

“What are you doing?” I asked blearily before anything really sank into place.

Maxime recoiled immediately and retreated more than an arm’s length away. “I tried to wake you several times but you fell back asleep,” he reported.

I couldn’t remember that at all, so I must not have made it very far into the realm of wakefulness. “So…you were going to…carry me to my bed?” I asked, the words sounding ridiculous to me as they left my mouth.

“Well, I cannot go to my bed so long as you are sleeping on it,” he said in lieu of answer.

“My bed’s empty,” I said. “You could have left me here and used it.”

It wasn’t that I disliked the idea of Maxime trying to carry me to bed, perhaps I liked it too much, but I didn’t want him to feel obligated to drag me across the apartment every time he couldn’t get me to stay awake. Anyway, he gave me an odd look that suggested he’d long since considered and rejected that idea.

“I’m awake now,” I continued, “so I’ll take myself to my bed.” I dragged myself up from the sofa. “There. Your bed is free from sleepy Americans. You may use it again. Sleep well.”

“I doubt very much that I will do so,” Maxime replied. 

“I’m sorry about the horror movie,” I said and patted Maxime on the shoulder as I passed. The act, which looked so natural when I watched it, felt so uncomfortable when I performed it that I shoved my hand in my pocket to hide the offending appendage from view as I slunk back to my room and my cold bed.

The next morning, I discovered that my sleepiness the night before had been justified by the arrival of my yearly throat infection. It seemed that, like clockwork, near the end of October or the beginning of November, I would catch some infection or other from the students and it would settle in my throat. And since I could not possibly get sick without infecting Maxime as well, we ended up shivering together from fever under blankets on our respective ends of the sofa, sipping hot honey tea between fitful naps until the antibiotics killed enough of the bacteria to set us right again. It wasn’t the curling up under the blankets my imagination had conjured but Elodie still managed to make up her own story about it. 

Chapter Text

As December grew nearer and having failed to convince my family, I tried to convince Maxime that it was not a good idea for him to come with me to the United States for Christmas but he was oddly determined to join me. If the weeks-long argument were to be distilled down to one conversation, it might look something like this:

“You know that you don’t have to come with me, right?”

“But your grandmother invited me.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“It would be rude, seeing as I have already told her that I would be there.”

“She won’t care.”

“I would like to see America.”

“It’s not that impressive.”

“I have never left France.”

“Then why start now?”

“I may never have another chance to go.”

“You might not even be able to go with your fake identity.”

I asked Seb about this matter in hopes of quashing the argument at that idea, but he scoffed at my doubts, to Maxime’s victory.

“I suppose I can go, after all.”

“You know we’ll have to fly, right?”

“I am aware.”

“Over an ocean.”

“Yes, the Atlantic.”

“How’s your English?”

“I’ve been practicing.”

“Good. Then we can speak English at home until the trip to make sure you’re used to it.”

“I will be alone for Christmas if I do not go with you.”

“Elodie invited you to dinner with her family for Christmas.”

“I want to go with you.”

In the end, I had no answer to that. I knew it would be a mess of proportions unlike any we had yet seen but I wanted him to come with me, too. Since Maxime had arrived in the present nearly a year before, I had not gone a single day without seeing him. The idea of being separated from him for two weeks was gut-wrenching. What if he went back while I was away? What if I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye? So, I relented.

I purchased the plane tickets before Thanksgiving so that I could assure my grandmother that I had them during the second family video call of the year. And so it was settled. Maxime would be coming with me to the United States for Christmas.

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas fell my thirtieth birthday. I had not told Maxime when my birthday was and I made sure not to remind anyone of the day who already knew about it, so I felt fairly secure in my delusion that it would pass unnoticed. Sure, Facebook reminded people of my birthday, but they were all far from me and not in any danger of feeling obliged to actually celebrate. I was terrified that Elodie would try to throw some kind of surprise party or something. I was self-conscious enough about turning thirty as it was and I didn’t need my nose rubbed in it.

My birthday was on a weekday, a Friday if I remember correctly, so I had work first. I told my students about my birthday and they teased me for being old, but I didn’t care because they were thirteen and what they thought about me didn’t really matter. I even thought it was funny. Then one of the girls asked me if I was going to spend my birthday with my boyfriend. I told them that I didn’t have a boyfriend and was promptly declared lame. Then they lost interest and we went back to studying English.

Maxime was home when I got home, which was a little odd because the deadline for the next chapter of his and Elodie’s comic was approaching and he usually worked late at times like this. So, I stood dumbly in the doorway for a few seconds while I tried to conjure an explanation for this that did not jump to conclusions.

“You’re home early,” I said at last.

“My apologies,” Maxime said. “Should I have sent you a text message?”

“No,” I said. “It’s fine.” And I took off my shoes.

“I think we should go to a restaurant for dinner tonight,” Maxime said.

I stared at Maxime and thought about the remote possibility of him having contracted a disease or parasite that would alter his personality. When had he ever been so decisive about dinner? “Do you have a fever?”

Maxime was clearly confused. “Pardon?”

“Nothing. It’s fine. We have food here. I’ll just make spaghetti or something,” I said.

“I would rather go to a restaurant,” Maxime said.

“What? Have you got something against my spaghetti?” I teased.

“Not at all,” Maxime answered seriously. “It is just that I know what I would like to eat tonight.”

“Which is…?” I asked.

Maxime was silent for just a little too long. “…May I surprise you?”

“OK, now you’re acting downright suspicious,” I said. “What’s up?”

Maxime was reluctant to answer for a moment, but then said, “It is your birthday.”

I sighed. “Who told you that?” 

“Your mother.”

I was prepared to tell Maxime that Elodie didn’t know what she was talking about, but I couldn’t exactly say that about my own mother. I couldn’t wrap my mind around when he might have heard that from her, either. I tried not to venture out of earshot when I let him talk to her in case something went sideways. “Oh,” was all I could conjure as an answer.

“As it is your birthday, may I take you to dinner?” Maxime asked properly this time.

I hesitated but the cat was already out of the bag and it was better than a surprise party. “Fine,” I said. “Yes, you may take me to dinner. Lead the way.” And I ushered him to put on his shoes and coat and exit the apartment ahead of me.

We descended the many flights of stairs, exited onto the street, and then walked for a few minutes while I tumbled the thought of Maxime’s mysterious contact with my mother over in my head like a rock polisher.

“Have you been talking to my mother while I’m not around?” I asked at last.

“Yes,” Maxime answered. “She is helping me practice my English.”

“But how…?” I tried to think of how he would have gotten her contact information.

“I use this app here to talk to her,” he answered my unfinished question and took out his phone to show me the icon.

“But that’s Facebook Messenger,” I said. “You have Facebook?”

“I do…? I do not know,” he said. “Elodie helped me with this so that I could talk with your mother.”

“Oh.” I felt very out of the loop on all of this and I tried not to let it get to me, but I ended up a little sour. I didn’t have anything else to say to Maxime on the way to the restaurant, even though I usually asked him about his day or told him about mine after we decided on dinner.

The restaurant we ended up at was nice but not fancy. I can’t remember what it was called anymore and I don’t think I ever ended up going back there. I don’t recall there being any problem with the food or service, but times changed. I was in a different situation by the time my next birthday rolled around.

As we finished eating, Maxime took a small bag from his coat pocket and placed it on the table in front of me.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Happy birthday,” he said.

I opened the package to reveal a delicate necklace—a rose pendant with a white stone in the middle. I had been around fine jewelry long enough to quickly peg it as sterling silver and cubic zirconia. In other words, cute and inexpensive. And I would wear it every day until it literally fell off my neck and rolled into the street, where it was promptly crushed by a car.

“Thank you,” I said, touched. Maybe a little too touched considering it was likely just an obligatory gift in return of the one I’d given him for his birthday. 

Also, I rarely wore jewelry. If it had been a gift from anyone else, the necklace would have gone straight into my jewelry box and then not seen the light of day again for many months. At least he’d given me a necklace, the only item I consistently chose when I did wear jewelry. Maybe he’d noticed that…or maybe someone, like my mother, had told him. 

When we left the restaurant, it was snowing. The first snow of the year.

“Ah, my birthday snow,” I said and looked at Maxime. “It always snows on my birthday.”

But that was a lie. It might have been true during my childhood in Michigan, or at least it was close enough to being true that I remember it that way. Ever since I was a teenager, though, it’s become more and more rare to get snow on the first of December, especially in milder climates like Paris.

“It’s so pretty,” I continued. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“It’s freezing,” Maxime answered.

“You won’t die,” I said, and took him by the arm to force him with me.

We made our way to the center of the city and the Seine where the lights were reflected in the water and the snow drifted down lazily.

“You know,” I said when we’d been walking for a while, “I think it was snowing like this when we met.”

“Was it?” Maxime asked. “I can’t remember.”

“You were preoccupied with other things,” I said. “But, it’s hard to believe it’s already winter again.”

We walked on in silence, contemplating the knowledge that it had nearly been a year since Maxime had arrived in the present and he had not returned to the past yet. That wasn’t to say that he wouldn’t but every passing day made it incrementally less likely. And yet this purgatory of uncertainty felt unending. There were three and a half more years of this sentence and he would either be trapped or dead at the end of it. It was a sobering reality and it cast a pall over the rest of the evening.

The next morning, I woke up early, determined to be rid of the dark mood of the night before and follow in what had been a family tradition since I’d been born—Christmas decorating. In my family, we always waited until the first Saturday after my birthday to decorate for Christmas rather than doing so directly after Thanksgiving. It had been important to my mother that we keep my birthday and Christmas separate. So, I always held off my Christmas spirit until after my birthday and then went at it with a vengeance so that I would be so thoroughly sick of Christmas by the end of December that I wouldn’t miss it until the next year.

I warned Maxime that he was not allowed to complain about my Christmas music the way he sometimes did with my regular music or turn it off while we decorated, and then turned on one of my favorites, Johnny Mathis’s rendition of “We Need a Little Christmas”. I lit a pine scented incense and dragged the boxes of decorations out of my closet. I set Maxime to figuring out the mini artificial Christmas tree, the instructions to which I’d lost shortly after purchase, and tasked myself with hanging my over-abundance of Christmas lights. I don’t know what it is about Christmas lights, but I simply adore them. I would run them all year but it seemed like an expensive prospect. So, every Christmas I made up for the rest of the year.

I lined the doors and windows with little multi-colored lights while Maxime struggled with his arborous puzzle. I added garland and tinsel in strategic places while Maxime unlocked the secret to his puzzle and finally assembled the tree. He marveled at his creation a moment once it was complete.

“I would have taken it for the grossest of falsehoods if I had been told last year that I would be assembling a false tree in a strange woman’s home, leaving aside that I would be living two centuries in my future,” he said. Then he gave me a cheeky smile. “It is a handsome tree for all that it is not real, though.”

“You’re just saying that because you’re the one that put it together,” I said, and carefully began to unpack the ornaments. 

The tree decoration took a little while as we tried to balance the lights and tinsel with the garland and ornaments on such a small canvas.

“Perhaps you should invest in a larger tree,” Maxime suggested as we stepped back to take in the baroque masterpiece that was the finished…well, it was hard to call it a tree anymore with so little green showing.

“Eh,” I said with a shrug. “It’s fine.” Then I wandered off to find some hot chocolate.

We went out ballroom dancing that night and, when we came back, the apartment was so warm and cozy looking that I got the urge to make eggnog. I looked up a recipe to make it from scratch, but was too tired follow through on my urge and went to bed shortly thereafter. Poor Maxime was left to hunt through the main room for all the various plugs to the Christmas lights to make it dark enough for him to sleep.

Chapter Text

At some point between failing to convince Maxime that coming with me to America was a bad idea and actually leaving for the continent, I had to have a particularly important conversation with him about the trip. I don’t remember exactly when this conversation happened, so I include it here.

“You know, Maxime, my family thinks we’re lovers.”

At first, this seemed to shock him and he was vaguely accusatory as if I hadn’t done enough to disabuse them of that notion. That peeved me a bit—who had it been to play into their assumptions as I desperately tried to convince them that it wasn’t true every damned time? Regardless, the damage was done and the question was not one of blame but one of “what the hell do we do now?” 

“What do you believe will happen if they discover the truth?” Maxime asked me.

“Perish the thought.” Not only would we face my family’s resentment for having lied to them, but there were also some factions of my family who were too old fashioned to accept the truth of our relationship. There were some who might actually faint if they knew Maxime and I were living together.

“Then we will have to play at being lovers for the duration of the trip?” Maxime sounded hopeful that I would reject the idea.

“It’s only for two weeks,” I answered.

Then we both proceeded to avoid the topic until the trip was actually upon us like we wanted to forget about that aspect of it. I don’t know about Maxime, but I certainly was unable to do so.

About a week before we were set to leave for our holiday in America, I made a list of everything we would need to pack. But first, we had to buy a suitcase. Maxime wanted to get a plain black one, but I was against it because everyone has a plain black one and it would be impossible to pick it out of the crowd on the luggage carousel. After much debate and argument back and forth, we selected a hard-side suitcase with a chunky houndstooth pattern in black and white. My own suitcase was a hard-side with an Eiffel Tower motif—perhaps a little tacky for someone who lived in Paris, but easy to spot amongst the sea of black, silver, and red suitcases. As for carry-ons, I pulled my old backpack out of storage along with my largest purse while Maxime got a new backpack and my old soft-side carry-on.

Two days before we left, Maxime and I went to the store to pick up anything we needed for our trip but did not already have—extra large zip-lock bags for storing anything that might be wet or leaky, snacks for on the plane, etc. I don’t actually remember what was on our list, but my list of things to buy immediately before leaving on a trip never varied much.

The night before we left, we actually packed our suitcases. I showed Maxime how to roll up his clothes so they would take up less space. Since Maxime kept his clothes in my closet, we had the suitcases laid out next to each other on my bed and I kept glancing over to make sure Maxime was packing properly. I double, then triple, checked to make sure he had remembered to pack everything like my mother used to do when I lived at home. 

Then we strapped everything down and relocated the suitcases to the living room where we had a little more space to breathe as we decided how we were going to divide up the Christmas presents for my family. It was a balancing act of weight and space, but eventually, we had it figured out. What didn’t find a space in the suitcases was relocated to the soft-side carry-on. 

Whatever we planned on using during the flight was put in the backpacks—snacks, a blanket heavier than the ones provided on the flight, my laptop, notebooks and pens, books, my noise-canceling headphones, Maxime’s regular headphones, etc. Small necessities such as the apartment keys, wallets, and passports found their home in my purse.

Once everything but the last minute things we would be using in the morning was packed, we went to bed. I don’t know about Maxime, but I did not sleep very well that night. The thoughts of everything that might go wrong kept dancing in my head. What if Seb was wrong about the fake ID and we got arrested? What if Maxime couldn’t handle flying and had a mental breakdown on the plane? What if the plane crashed? What if the airline lost our luggage? I didn’t usually worry so much before a flight but having Maxime with me put me on edge.

When I finally did fall asleep, I had a bad dream. I stood at the bow of an ocean liner that was cutting quickly through the fog in the washed-out grey of the early morning. I wore a ring that clinked on the metal railing I was gripping as I leaned forward to enjoy the cool sea breeze. A man stood behind me, but I did not turn to see him. 

“It is very early to be on deck this morning, Madame,” he said.

“I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “Where are we going?”

“To America.”

“Why are we going there? I promised that I would never go back.”

“And yet you got on the ship.”

This upset me greatly. I turned to argue with the man that I hadn’t had a choice, but there was no one there. All I could see were the two hulking smokestacks and four towering masts. The deck was deserted. 

I turned back to face the ocean again, but something felt wrong in my gut, so I turned back toward the deck, and in the distance, a foghorn sounded. 

Then my alarm rang and I woke up in the darkness. I got up and gathered my clothes from where I had neatly folded them the night before, then went to take my shower. When I was finished with my shower, I woke Maxime up and sent him to take his. 

While he was in the shower, I made coffee and a light breakfast for both of us. I was in the middle of double checking to be sure that everything from my list had been packed when he came out of the bathroom and we sat down to eat in the zombie-like silence of the too-early morning.

After breakfast, I took the last things out of the bathroom and packed them in my suitcase. We went over my list together, determined that everything had been packed, and closed the suitcases up tightly. We weighed them to make sure they were within the weight limit and still had space for our winter coats. We stuck the suitcase weigher in Maxime’s backpack and then checked to make sure everything was turned off and unplugged in the apartment. Then, at last, we put on our coats and lugged our suitcases out the door. I locked the door and tucked the key safely in an inner pocket of my purse.

“Do you need help with your suitcase?” Maxime asked, looking down the stairs.

“Just worry about your own luggage,” I answered, hefting my bag and starting down ahead of him.

We both reached the bottom out of breath and needed a moment to recover before we collected our things and began our walk toward the métro station. We took the elevator up to the platform because Dupleix was an above-ground station and then waited for the train in sleepy silence and blunted cold.

When the train came, we got on an empty train car with all of our luggage and arranged ourselves as comfortably as we could for the ten-minute ride up to Denfert-Rochereau to transfer to the RER. Then we gathered everything up again and struggled our way over to the next platform. All this work almost didn’t feel worth it as I sagged against my suitcase. We climbed up into the second train when it arrived and settled in for an hour-long ride to the airport.

I put on my headphones and turned on my Christmas playlist because my mood had taken a hit by so much lugging of bags and jostling around on trains so early in the morning. I needed something jolly and cozy to remind me why all of the effort was worth it. 

I sat back and watched Maxime look out the window—though there wasn’t much for him to see until we got out of the city center. I couldn’t read the look on his face to know what he was thinking, but I was struck by how much change there could be in a person over the course of a single year—at least externally. Certainly, his clothes, haircut, and glasses went a long way to rendering the man sitting across from me unrecognizable from the man in portraits, but he was also able to sit and gaze out the window placidly on a train as we went to the airport to fly across an ocean while the very mention of the métro had made him go a little pale the January before. Then again, I didn’t know how much it had sunk in that we would be flying through the air in a few hours.

We arrived at the airport and dragged all of our luggage onto the escalator. I looked for the signs directing us to check-in while Maxime looked around at the scale of this new building. We hadn’t been anywhere so expansive since his arrival in the present. It was holiday season busy and the crowd buffeting around us was enough to make me anxious. We’re going to be late. We’re going to be late. We’re going to be late. The words revolved around in my mind, even though we’d taken the earliest trains possible to arrive at the airport with plenty of time.

I led Maxime to one of the ticket printing kiosks and scanned each of our passports to print our boarding passes. I held my breath for a moment after scanning Maxime’s, waiting for sirens to go off and the gendarmes who milled about in the area to come to tackle us. But nothing happened except that the machine spat out the boarding passes. I tried to hand Maxime his boarding pass, but he told me to keep them both so they wouldn’t get lost. I wasn’t sure they were any safer with me, but I tucked them in my purse anyway.

We went to a quieter corner of the hall to take off our winter coats and store them in our checked baggage—one less thing to carry—before checking the suitcases. As we walked up to the checking-in station, I warned Maxime to do whatever the workers asked him to do without question whether he understood why they were asking. We didn’t need him drawing attention to himself like that when he was traveling with false documents. 

I answered all of the obligatory questions and then left my suitcase with the airport employee as she tagged it and put it on the conveyer belt to disappear into the recesses of the airport. Maxime followed suit but seemed reluctant to let the bag go. He had probably never needed to be so far removed from his belongings in the past.

We moved a little more easily without the big suitcases, although I still felt like a pack animal. I followed the signs toward the security checkpoint and Maxime followed me. Security at Charles de Gaulle Airport was not as daunting as it was, well, anywhere I’d been in the US, but it wasn’t the most relaxed I’d ever encountered. As I had anticipated, Maxime did not understand at all why we had to do what we had to do at the checkpoint but the signs clearly laid out what was required, so he followed the instructions and my example without a word.

Luckily, neither of us had required any additional searching, so we put our carry-ons back together and made our way to our gate. It felt like an expedition all its own to find it. For some reason, I’ve never had the luck of getting a gate near the security checkpoint. It’s always on the far end of the terminal and I have to hike past endless shops and a dozen food courts on the way, only to find that there isn’t a shop or restaurant in sight when I get to the gate. And on this trip I had to drag Maxime along with me as he gawked and dawdled, distracted by all the glitz that was meant to catch the eye of a weary traveler. 

We got to the gate and Maxime looked at me expectantly, like I was going to explain the next exciting aspect of the voyage. But there was nothing to explain. We had two hours to wait until the plane started boarding, thanks to the extra time I’d been sure to plan. Maxime could have gone to explore the shops in that time, but it was too early to gather much enthusiasm for such an activity and, once I explained to him the prices he would encounter there, he was fairly well rooted to his chair.

I took out the book I’d packed on the top of my backpack and tried to read but didn’t get anywhere because I always find it hard to get immersed in a story when the real world is full of noise and movement. That was why my selection was the first volume of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, which I had nearly memorized.

I was just at the part in chapter six when the royalists were mocking Robespierre when he took my free hand, giving me such a fright that I dropped the book. I would never tell Maxime what a knack for timing he had, mostly because I was embarrassed by how often I created openings for his impeccable sixth sense.

“What are you doing?” I stammered as I bent over to collect the fallen book.

“Considering that we will have to act as lovers from the time we arrive in Grand Rapids, I think that it would be best if we begin before then so that it might appear more natural.”

I did not believe there was anything that we could do to make our act appear natural and was counting on my reputation with the family as being painfully awkward with other people to carry us through the vacation. Not only did the exercise seem useless, but I was also a little prickly about the shock I’d received. Thinking back, I’m reminded of the article (by Peter McPhee, if I recall) which argued that Robespierre was not asexual or gay but simply too awkward to cultivate any significant romance and the plethora of evidence he’d supplied to support his argument. At the time, I could only think of playful revenge.

“That’s a good idea,” I said and slouched down in my seat so I could press myself up against him and lay my head on his shoulder—not such an easy task when we were about the same height.

Maxime squirmed a little under my touch but, keeping with his suggestion, he did not try to escape me. I wished that he had because, as I was prone to doing when something riled me up, I hadn’t thought any further ahead than that and alarms were going off in my head, saying that this was a bad idea. It was a bad idea on top of the dozen other bad ideas that had led us to this point. 

“We should also probably think of our answers to the standard questions we’ll get asked,” I said to distract myself from all the various points of physical connection I’d created between Maxime and myself.

“Euh…” was the only answer I got from Maxime.

“Like how we met. I doubt anyone would believe the truth.”

“True.”

“But we shouldn’t lie any more than we have to. It’ll get too confusing. How about this: We met at the Place de la Concorde. You had gotten yourself lost and asked me for directions, but the joke was on you because I’m so directionally challenged. We got to talking and then you asked me out.”

“Right.” Maxime sounded so uncomfortable that I felt bad, but I was also too stubborn for my own good.

“Do you have any ideas? You said we should prepare,” I said.

“I will defer to you,” he answered.

“But what if they catch you alone?” I asked.

“I will fail to comprehend what they said in English.”

I couldn’t help it. That struck me as so funny that I laughed harder than it deserved. “Fine, I release you,” I said and sat up, letting him go and freeing myself as much as I freed him. I hadn’t held him long, but I could still feel his warmth where I had touched him. It was then that I got a taste of how much of a misery this trip was going to be. Two weeks of unending self-torture and making Maxime uncomfortable.

Then boarding began and we eventually filed into the metal tube which would take us across the ocean.

Chapter Text

We shuffled up the right aisle of the plane until we reached our row number.

“OK,” I said as I picked up Maxime’s carry-on to shove it in the overhead compartment, “we have the window seat and the center seat. Which would you like?”

Maxime took a little too long to decide, so I looked at my boarding pass. It said I had the window seat, so I went and took my seat and Maxime followed me. I shoved my backpack and purse under the seat in front of me. I fished out the seatbelt from under my bum and fastened it. Maxime watched me and did as I did. I nearly whacked my head into the seat as I reached down to collect the pillows and blankets which had fallen to the ground. I handed Maxime his.

Once we were settled, Maxime started investigating his new environment. First, he examined everything within arm’s reach: the TV screen, the fan, the light, the call button. I showed him how to recline his seat but warned him that every inch he leaned back was an inch less of space that the person behind him had, so to only use it as much as he really needed it.

Then the safety video came on the seat-back screens and I told Maxime to pay attention to it. They tried to make it as fun and lighthearted as possible, but it was still instructions for if there was an emergency and I ended up having to explain to Maxime how incredibly rare emergencies were and that the airline was required to show us what to do but that no one actually expected such things to happen.

It didn’t help that the airplane had started moving during the video. Wound up by the emergency video and probably more frightened of the flight to being with than he had let on, he was done with air travel before we’d even taken off. I simultaneously felt bad for him and frustrated because this was exactly what I had warned him about when I had been trying to dissuade him from coming with me to America.

Thankfully, our timing was such that there was no wait once we got to the runway. I took Maxime’s hand as the engines wound up and he held on to me so tightly that it hurt as if I were some sort of anchor that would keep him safe. Once the plane had leveled off some, I disentangled my hand and fetched Maxime’s book out of his backpack. I handed it to him.

“The time will go faster if you distract yourself,” I said. Then I got my phone and headphones out for myself so I could listen to my music. 

When the flight attendant came around the first time with drinks and snacks, I took some water so I could take my headache medicine because I was prone to pressure headaches on planes. I tried to encourage Maxime to take something but he wanted nothing from the flight attendant or from me. I shrugged and let him go, although I was worried about what would happen over the course of the flight. 

We were given a meal sometime later, and the flight attendant wouldn’t let Maxime turn it down. I had learned better than to try over the course of my flying experience, so we both sat there with food we didn’t really want and picked at it unenthusiastically until the flight attendant came back around to take it away. 

Then the flight attendants made us all shut the shades in the sort of enforced nap time that I hated about the flight from Europe to America. I always had trouble sleeping on planes and watching the clouds pass by was my default distraction on shorter flights. I ended up watching a movie that didn’t really interest me because the plane was just a little too turbulent for me focus on my book.

Maxime read until his headache got too bad. I was distracted enough from whatever it was I was watching to notice the change in his behavior, and once I got it out of him what was wrong, I made him take some medicine and my noise-canceling headphones. He dozed a bit after that and I took his regular headphones. With the sound of the engine, I struggled to hear the dialogue of the movie, so I turned on my music, which I didn’t need to hear clearly, and tried to sleep a little myself.

By the time we landed in Atlanta, I felt about ready to murder someone and Maxime looked about ready to bolt. We both managed to surprise our urges as we gathered up our things and filed out of the airplane.

After a quick stop at the restrooms, it was time to go through customs and we had to separate. I did not want to let Maxime go. I knew that he had to, but I was terrified that he wouldn’t be able to navigate the process and the necessary lies by himself.

“And when you are finished, you have to go down the escalator right away. I’ll probably be waiting for you already, but if I’m not, that’s where we’ll meet. OK?”

Then I let him go and went down the path for American citizens myself. The line was long and everyone was grumpy after their flights, some longer than others. I was usually quite sour going through customs because I was returning somewhere I didn’t want to be: “home”. This time it was fear for Maxime that made me snappish as I answered the customs officer’s questions about how long I’d been in France and why I’d been there. 

When I was through, I went directly down to the baggage claim. Maxime was not there yet. I saw our suitcases and grabbed them off the carousel. Then I waited…and waited, and waited. I checked my phone anxiously every thirty seconds and wondered how I would know if he’d been arrested. 

At last, Maxime came down the escalator. I couldn’t help it; my relief was such that I threw my arms around him when he reached me. 

“Alexis?” Maxime asked, confused.

“I hate customs,” I answered and let him go. I pushed his suitcase toward him and went to the line for the security checkpoint.

We made it through one again without incident, but so much time had ticked away that we didn’t have time to get any food before going to the gate for our flight from Atlanta to Grand Rapids. The second airplane was much smaller. We had the same two seats—window and center—so this time I pushed Maxime in ahead of me to give him the window seat. 

We settled in and the two and a half hour flight felt like up and down in comparison to the last one. Having already experienced it once before, Maxime was much calmer about all the parts of flying. Everything about the second flight was much pleasanter.

Gerald R. Ford Airport was tiny in comparison with Charles de Gaulle and Atlanta, even though it had been expanded since the last time I’d been there. There was only one hall to follow down to baggage claim and there were only six luggage carousels. I knew my home turf and there was no pausing to look at signs as I led Maxime to get out bags.

No one was waiting for us at the airport. I had argued to my mother that it would be best if we rented a car for the duration of our two-week stay and that it would be useless for her to pick us up just to have us follow her back home in a separate car. So, we’d agreed to meet at Monelli’s, my favorite Italian restaurant, a reasonable amount of time after our plane was supposed to land. 

We collected our bags from the second carousel and then paused a moment to take out our winter coats, much in need now that we’d landed. Properly bundled up against a midwestern December, we made our way to the car rental service.

I was glad that I’d renewed my driver’s license the last time I’d been in Michigan, so I could actually rent a car for us. It was a little black sedan that just barely fit us with all of our various bags. It was only when we were in the car and I was adjusting all of the seat and mirror settings, that Maxime chose to question my ability to drive.

I stared at him for a moment. “Would you rather drive?” I asked. 

Maxime looked at the various controls and said, “It is simply that I have never seen you drive before.”

“Just because you’ve never seen me do it, doesn’t mean I do not know how to do it,” I answered.

I connected my phone to the car’s Bluetooth and pumped my Christmas tunes, which I’d been forcing Maxime to listen to all month, through the stereo. Johnny Mathis’s “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” began playing and I turned on the windshield wipers against the fluffy lake-effect snow that was falling on the city where I’d grown up.

Despite my assurance that I knew how to drive, Maxime held onto the passenger side door as if his life depended on it. I couldn’t really blame him, having been guilty of doing the same thing when riding with drivers I didn’t trust. I might have known that I was a good driver, but he didn’t. It was only a twenty-minute drive, mostly on open highway, to Monelli’s and yet, the moment I turned off the car, Maxime tumbled out of his side like he couldn’t get away fast enough.

“Oh, come on,” I muttered to myself, gathering up my purse from the backseat, “riding in a car in Paris is way more stressful than that.” 

But he hadn’t ridden in a car in Paris since the previous January.

I met Maxime at the back of the car and took his arm. “Showtime,” I said.

We walked up to the restaurant arm in arm. I tried not to focus on generating answers to questions that hadn’t been asked yet. Like filling in a notecard for an exam, I would choose to prepare for all of the wrong questions. It was best to answer on the spot. But what if they asked about Maxime’s childhood or family?

My mom was waiting in the entrance area with one of her close friends. 

“Alexis!” She jumped up from her seat and gave me a great big hug. It was just tight enough and long enough to make me uncomfortable. When she pulled away, I could see that her eyes were a little shiny with tears and I wanted to slink out of there like a worm. 

Once she’d had enough of looking at me, she turned to Maxime and I got to see his reaction to seeing my mother in person for the first time. She was a good three inches taller than him and built like her name should have been Helga. And then he got to receive a non-optional midwestern hug.

I didn’t have a lot of time to be amused by Maxime’s quiet panic, though, before Vicky got me. She gave me a big hug, just like my mom had, but she was all big grins and smiling eyes.

Vicky was mixed-race, wore her hair in a great mass of grey frizz, and would have given Danton a run for his money in the height department. And she had a big personality to match. No sooner had my mom let Maxime go than she swooped in to give him an equally big hug, even though she didn’t know him at all.

“Well, look at you two,” she said. “Aren’t you so cute? All match-y.”

It took me a moment to realize she meant our similar long-ish black woolen coats. Then the buzzer in my mom’s hand went off, indicating that there was a table for us and that we were freed from having to respond to questions or comments for a few minutes as we settled in and looked at the menu. 

Once our orders were placed, it was hunting season again.

“How was your flight?” The first question was easy.

“It was good,” I said and Maxime looked at me as if I was a most scandalous liar and that set the two older women to laughing.

“How long have you been together?”

“Since January.”

“January?” My mother was surprised because, if true, that would have made my relationship with Maxime at least three times longer than my longest relationship to date. I felt a little bad because my mom was probably thinking at this point that she was looking at her future son-in-law.  

“What do you do, Maxime?” 

“I am a writer.”

“Yes, for a… How do you say BD in English?”

“Comic,” I supplied.

“For a comic.”

“You can draw?” That was Vicky, quite interested.

“Oh, no. I write only.”

I was so used to hearing French accents in English from my students that I almost didn’t notice them anymore, but I noticed Maxime’s. Perhaps it was because I almost never heard him speak English. Perhaps it was because his accent was a fair bit heavier than those of my students who had already been studying English for some years before they reached me. Whatever the reason, I found it adorable.

We were eventually asked how we met, and I provided the story I’d suggested to Maxime at the airport. It was just enough in character for my mother and Vicky to take it as true and just so sweet—a “meet cute” worthy of a storybook. 

When Maxime was asked about his parents, he said quite simply that they had died, which turned everything awkward for a few moments and discouraged any further inquiry along that line for the moment. As for siblings, he said that he was the oldest of three but that he was not close with them. The result was that my mom and Vicky felt so bad for poor Maxime, all alone in the world, that they were quite determined to adopt him as they had done some seven years before with my homesick Korean friend from university. By the time we had finished dinner, they had made more plans with him (I was an incidental accessory, it seemed) than they actually had time to fulfill, what with work and such.

We left the restaurant and drove around the corner, less than five minutes away, to my mother’s house. We had agreed to stay with her because it was cheaper than a hotel for two weeks and my old room in the basement had been set up rather like its own apartment during my university years. Not to mention, there had been both a twin bed and a futon down there, so we could live fairly comfortably.

Since my brother and I had moved out, my mother had redecorated the house, replacing old carpet with bamboo flooring and changing the furniture, but it was still the home I remembered in size and shape. We had to trip over cats on our way downstairs—the felines my brother had been unable to take with him when he moved to Canada. 

We filed down the long, narrow hallway to the bedroom at the end with curious cats (not shy—my brother’s cats always had interesting personalities) following us the whole way. I opened the door and turned on the light.

“Oh, god.” I had not once considered that my mother would have also redecorated the basement room where she never went. Instead of the very separate twin bed and futon, there was a beautifully made king-sized bed. 

I turned to see Maxime’s reaction. He was just staring blankly into the room, clearly exhausted. I tried to think of a suitable solution, but it felt like all of the good ideas were just out of reach and I just wanted to crawl under the blankets of that soft-looking bed and say, “I don’t care.” That’s very nearly what I did.

“Maxime,” I said. “It’s been a very long day, more than a day, everything considered. I know it’s not ideal, but I think we should put up with it tonight and just get some sleep. We can figure out what to do in the morning.”

Maxime did not argue with me, so I pulled my suitcase into the room and opened it up to find my pajamas. I went to the bathroom to change and, when I got back, Maxime was already in bed and asleep even with the lights on—a testament to how tired he really had been because he was usually quite sensitive to the light.

I turned off the lights and climbed into the bed on my side, keeping myself as close to the edge as I could without falling out. I thought that I might stay awake longer for worrying about the uncomfortable situation I’d unwittingly forced us into, but I was no less tired than Maxime and I don’t remember anything after my head hit the pillow.

Chapter Text

One thing I had forgotten about my old bedroom—how cold it was. In the basement with concrete walls and floor thinly insulated by carpet and drywall, a huge daylight window, and insufficient vents, it was the coldest room in the house during the winter. It should have been unsurprising, then, that when I was woken to the sound of one of the cats trying to dig its way into the room, I discovered that I had rolled away from my edge of the bed in search of greater warmth. It appeared that Maxime had done the same thing and we had met in the middle. 

I took a moment and pretended that I hadn’t heard the cat, that I hadn’t woken up, so that I could remain close to him without justification. He was still asleep, but if he were to wake up and find me already awake… So, I pretended. I pretended and I enjoyed his warmth, almost too warm under the heavy layers of blankets and comforter, and his scent, a little strong after our long journey the day before but not unpleasant, and the general solidity of his body against mine.

But the cat was persistent and the door was a little loose in its frame, stuttering back and forth as it was struck by curious paws. With a sigh, I carefully disentangled myself and got up. The shock of the bedroom’s cold air was unpleasant, so I hurried around the end of the bed to the door. When I opened it, I found Loki sitting on the other side, two yellow eyes in a great mass of black fur.

“What a big, needy fur-baby you are,” I grumbled as he slowly got up and meandered past me into the room. 

I turned around and nearly jumped out of my skin. Maxime was sitting up and watching me, but he’d moved so silently that I hadn’t heard him.

“Good morning,” I said when I’d recovered.

“Good morning,” he echoed.

There wasn’t any uncomfortableness about him which I figured was a good sign, probably. I crossed back to my side of the bed and sat down, pulling my legs up under me. I checked my phone.

“There’re still a couple more hours until the alarm I set,” I said. “We could get up now, but it might be better if we go back to sleep and try to keep a more regular schedule.”

As if to punctuate my point, Loki jumped up on the bed and settled himself on the warm spot where Maxime and I had been lying. Maxime followed Loki’s cue and settled down back under the covers. As for me, it felt like a punishment to slide down on my cold edge of the bed, but it didn’t take very long for me to drift off. Loki must have gotten sick of his spot fairly quickly because, when my alarm went off, Maxime and I were stuck to each other in the middle of the bed again, this time boxed in by all three cats.

Neither of us said anything about it, not about sharing the bed, not about waking up pressed against each other and surrounded by cats. I got up, disturbing the felines, collected some clothes, and went to take my shower. When I was finished, I showed Maxime how to work the shower and my incorrigible mind remarked what a pity it was that we were not in fact lovers because the basement shower at my mother’s house was the perfect size for doucher à deux.

I quickly escaped the bathroom then and expended my energy on making the bed. It was quite the game because the cats did not want the bed to be made, the perfect distraction from thoughts I was better off not having. 

My mom was already gone to work by the time Maxime and I emerged from the basement. I took one look at the kitchen and decided to take Maxime to my favorite local diner for breakfast instead. So, we bundled up, said goodbye to the cats, and made our way to the 44^th Street Diner, located on, you guessed it, 44^th Street. 

I ordered my favorite omelet and I believe Maxime got the eggs benedict, but I could just be making that up. We both had copious amounts of coffee. When we spoke to each other, it was in French because that was more natural for us and more comfortable than trying to force Maxime to speak English. The longer we stayed at the restaurant, the more I noticed the subtle staring of those around us. I couldn’t help but wonder if they were judging us—“This is ‘Murica and we speak English.”—and I was ashamed of myself for having so little faith in my fellow countrymen. I decided to focus only on what Maxime was saying.

“This is where you grew up?” he was asking me.

“Well, from the age of six to twenty-three,” I answered.

“And before that?”

“There’s a little town called Allendale,” I oriented myself and pointed, “in that direction.”

Maxime was quiet for a moment.

“What are you thinking?” I asked to prompt him to speak again.

“It is not what I expected,” he answered.

Before I could ask him to clarify, my mom called me. It was Christmas Eve and she had forgotten to buy the ingredients for the dishes she had been requested to bring for the big family Christmas dinner, so could I quickly pick them up if it wasn’t too much of an inconvenience? It was just like old times. I offered to make the pies—coconut cream and butterscotch—because I knew how to make them and they weren’t difficult, but I would leave the sweet potato dish to her. 

With our new task to complete, Maxime and I paid our bill and left the restaurant. As we got in the car, though, I realized that it wasn’t such a pressing matter. It seemed so depressing to come halfway around the world only to spend Christmas Eve at the grocery store and then, what? Lounging around the house? There was unfortunately little to recommend my hometown in winter, though.

“Do you want to go for a drive?” I asked, thinking that we might get to see some pretty winter scenery at least.

Maxime expressed an interest in seeing the landmarks of my childhood. How dull, but at least we wouldn’t get lost. 

We drove west through the suburbs of Grand Rapids, and I pointed out the things that I remembered and the things that had changed. There was the mall where I had hung out with my friends. There was my brother’s favorite Red Robin restaurant. If we turned right there, we would pass my elementary school. If we turned right there, we would pass my junior high school. But we’ll turn right here and go up to Jenison to see my high school. There it is. No, that’s the fine arts center, behind it is the school. Down that road is where my grandma lives. We’ll be going there for Christmas dinner tomorrow.

We kept driving until we had shed suburbia for the countryside, albeit the tip of the countryside which kissed suburbia. We drove until we hit a three-way stop and I turned down a road whose very name had given me nightmares once upon a time. We continued down that road until I could see a white house with green trim set in a wide expanse of snow-covered lawn. 

“That,” I told Maxime, “is the house where I lived until I was six-years-old.”

Maxime seemed to take a great deal of interest in that. “Could we stop?” he asked.

“No,” I answered and kept driving.

“I wonder who lives there now,” Maxime mused once we were some ways past the house.

“My father lives there,” I answered and kept my eyes on the road, too much a coward to see Maxime’s reaction.

We drove to the end of the road of my childhood nightmares and took another right, leading us back towards town on the road that passed my university. I wasn’t sure if it was sad or fitting that the places I remembered best about my hometown were the institutions of education. We didn’t drive around on campus, though, because the university had already been changing so fast while I was a student that I was certain I wouldn’t recognize much. Instead, we continued on and passed the studio where I’d first learned ballroom dance.

“They’ve moved since then,” I said, “but they still have Friday night social dance, so I’ll have to stop by on Friday to see everyone.”

Rather than take us all the way downtown, though, I turned up a less traveled road through some more forested areas and back toward my mother’s home. We stopped at the nearby Family Fare and picked up the requested items, along with our family’s traditional orange rolls because if my mother had forgotten the yams, she had also forgotten the orange rolls.

At last, we went back home and I turned on the TV for Maxime (ABC Family’s 25 Days of Christmas) before going to re-familiarize myself with my mother’s kitchen. I put together the pies and then stored them in the refrigerator until the next day. 

After cleaning up the kitchen, I joined Maxime on the sofa just in time for the puppet Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer movie to start. We sat together in what was supposed to look like a comfortable, loose embrace in case my mother surprised us because I couldn’t remember exactly what time she got off work.

In the end, she didn’t surprise us. She called me, saying that she was stopping by the Thai place around the corner and did we want anything. Of course, we hadn’t eaten anything since brunch at the diner, so that was a yes and we ended up eating Thai takeout at my mother’s dining room table for Christmas Eve.

Taking advantage of the more intimate atmosphere of eating at home, my mother decided to play “Dad” and grill Maxime on all of the pertinent questions regarding his suitability as a potential future son-in-law. Maxime answered her questions admirably, although he had the advantage of me being able to coach him in real time using French under the guise of translating questions he did not understand. It helped that there were some questions which I really did have to translate.

There was one question that I did not expect my mother to throw at him, however. We’d joked about it being the true test of suitability for any long-term partner of mine years ago, when there hadn’t been any risk of me having a long-term partner. I believe she threw it in at the end as a joke to lighten the mood because she’d been impressed with Maxime’s answers thus far because there were things she didn’t know and there were things, knowing me, that she probably assumed we’d talked about.

“What are your feelings about Robespierre?” 

Maxime went quite white and I choked on my noodles.

“I, I beg your pardon?” Maxime stammered to buy time as I struggled to clear my windpipe.

“Maximilien Robespierre,” my mother specified, blithely innocent, “from the French Revolution.”

If I hadn’t already been red from all the coughing, I would have gone as red as a cherry tomato from embarrassment at my mother’s unwitting butchering of the pronunciation of Maxime’s name to his face.

“Well…” Maxime said slowly, still stalling, “I believe that…depends…on…if you mean…his politics…or…”

“Does it matter?” I demanded, finally finding my voice. They both looked at me, probably not sure who I was addressing, so I clarified, “Does it matter what he thinks about Robespierre?”

They both continued to stare in semi-shocked silence. So I continued, “It doesn’t matter to me. He could agree with Carlyle and it wouldn’t change how I feel.” Then I went back to eating my noodles.

My mother gave Maxime a “you’ve impressed me” sort of look. I doubt she knew who Carlyle was or what he’d written, but she could guess based on context. She probably figured that if Maxime could cut through my infatuation for Robespierre to that extent, then he really was a keeper. If I’d liked him less, I would have made him answer, is what I assume she was thinking. Too bad for her that Maxime really was Robespierre, otherwise she might have been right.

My mother did not have any more questions for Maxime after that. We finished eating quietly while the cats wandered around the table like fuzzy sharks begging for scraps. They got nothing.

After dinner was cleared up, we exchanged gifts. Maxime and I got my mom some of the knock-off pashminas that were sold by the foot of the Eiffel Tower because they were surprisingly cheap, she thought they were pretty, and she didn’t care if they were cashmere or not. In return, Maxime and I got some of her knit work. Maxime got a matching hat and scarf and I got a wrap.

We watched a little of whatever show my mom was into at the time to “socialize” and then Maxime and I went downstairs.

“I’m sorry about my mother,” I told Maxime as I folded my wrap and put it in my suitcase. 

Maxime was quiet for a moment. “About dinner?”

“Yes.”

Maxime was quiet again for several seconds. “It was surprising, though.”

“What?”

“That your prospective suitors are judged on their disposition toward me.”

There was something in his tone that made me think he was mocking me, so I picked up one of the decorative pillows from the bed and hurled it at him. The stunned look on his face was satisfying, but that reminded me that we still had not solved the bed situation.

“What should we do about our sleeping arrangements?” I asked.

“I see no reason not to leave them as they are,” Maxime answered.

I was quite surprised. I had assumed that Maxime would be foursquare against sharing a bed and I wasn’t sure what to do with the ball back in my court. Did I want to share a bed with Maxime? …Yes. Should I have wanted to share a bed with Maxime? Probably not. But what were my other options? I could sleep on the floor, carpet over concrete in the coldest room of the house or I could sleep on the sofa, cramped and uncomfortable with the risk of my mother finding out. It wasn’t much of a contest.

So, I shrugged. “All right. I just wanted to make sure.” I pulled my pajamas back out of my suitcase. “I think I’ll be going to bed now, then. We’ll have to be up a little earlier than today to make it to Oma’s house on time for dinner.” Then I went to the bathroom to change. 

When I came back, I had been intending to invite Maxime to leave the lights on if he wanted to stay up later because I could sleep perfectly well in the light, but he had gathered his own pajamas and followed my lead in preparing for bed. Then we climbed into bed and said a platonic goodnight.

Chapter Text

Morning came too soon. I wasn’t ready to be awake and be parted from the warm bed covers or Maxime’s side. But with the alarm having gone off, there was no way to extend the time. I got up as quickly as I could and fetched some comfy clothes on my way to the bathroom for my shower. When I got back, Maxime took his turn in the shower and I made the bed just like the day before. 

Once we were both washed and dressed, we made our way upstairs to find my mother putting the sweet potato dish together at the very last minute to the tune of Bing Crosby’s Christmas album. The kitchen smelled of coffee and orange rolls. 

“You’re just in time,” my mom said. “I was just about to call you two up for breakfast. The orange rolls just came out.”

Two plates were already set out on the counter with the monster orange rolls my mom Frankenstein-ed together every holiday for breakfast. Maxime followed me into the kitchen for the food and I entrusted him with both of the plates before going to the cupboard for some coffee mugs.

“Merry Christmas, Ma,” I said as I passed my mother.

“Merry Christmas,” she said back and gave me a familial kiss on the cheek, then she turned toward Maxime, who was settling down at the table. “Merry Christmas, Maxime.”

“Merry Christmas,” Maxime replied.

“How do you say that in French?” my mom asked, as if she had not already asked me dozens of times and received an answer dozens of times in the past. 

Maxime told her and she repeated after him. He corrected her once when she butchered joyeux, but only once as she said it exactly the same way as before when she said it again. I took the coffee to the table and sat down next to Maxime.

“Did you tell Maxime about the holiday rules?” my mom asked after a moment. 

“They’re not really rules, are they?” I answered and my mom gave me a look. I sighed and addressed Maxime. “Politics and religion are forbidden topics at the dinner and, no matter how much they try to bait you, you must not engage in an argument because it upsets Oma, even if she was the one who started it. Not everyone abides by these rules but my mother likes it better if we do.” I looked back to my mom. “There, I told him.”

My mom looked at Maxime.

“I understand,” he told her. “No politics, no religion, and no disagreement, yes?”

My mom nodded. “Yes.”

Once she had the sweet potato dish in the oven, my mom took her own orange roll and joined us at the table. We ate for a few moments in silence before my mom struck up some conversation.

“So, you never answered my question about Robespierre last night, Maxime,” she said. 

“Mom,” I began, but then Maxime started speaking.

“I think that he was full of good intentions, but some others may have better understood the will of the people,” he answered calmly. I could only reason that he had considered his answer to my mother’s question the night before after he’d been freed of answering. 

“Like who?” my mom asked.

“Ma,” I said, “You don’t know the difference between Bailly and Billaud-Varennes. What do you care?”

“Oh, but you would,” my mom answered, “and you probably have about twelve reasons why he’s wrong.”

“Are you…are you trying to make us fight over Robespierre?” I asked.

“No, I’m trying to make sure that you don’t,” my mom answered. She turned to Maxime. “Normally, you could get her to go on a two-hour rant about Robespierre without even trying.”

“Ah, we already talked about Robespierre, so it is finished,” Maxime supplied, trying to be helpful. 

My mother looked unconvinced, so I reminded her, “I told you, he could agree with Carlyle and I wouldn’t care.”

“Who’s that again? Another revolutionary?” my mom asked.

“He’s the one who claimed Robespierre was green,” I said.

“Oh, him,” my mom said as Maxime gave me a look of horrified confusion.

“I’ll explain later,” I told him, even though I didn’t know what I was going to tell him.

After breakfast was cleared up, I went back downstairs and changed into some dressier clothes and put on some makeup for the Christmas dinner and Maxime changed his clothes as well. My mom was still getting ready by the time Maxime and I were prepared to go, so I offered to take the pies and go ahead with Maxime so she would only have to worry about herself.

Maxime and I were not quite the first to arrive at Oma’s house. Maxime was quite surprised and maybe a little overwhelmed by the size of my grandmother’s house. I had to prod him toward the door from behind as he stood still, taking in the expanse of red brick facade. 

“Hi, Oma!” I called as I stepped inside. 

“Alexis!” she cried from the kitchen and hurried to the front door as quickly as she could. She took the pie I’d been carrying and set it on the nearest table so that she could hug me. 

“Merry Christmas, Oma,” I said. 

“Merry Christmas,” she answered, rubbing my back. After a minute, she let me go and noticed Maxime beside me. “And you must be, Maxime. Come here.”

I took his pie so that she could give him a hug as well. He still looked quite uncomfortable with all of the hugging, but no one turned down an Oma hug. 

“You’re part of the family now,” I told him as Oma took my pie and puttered back into the kitchen. I took off my boots and then took the other pie to follow her. Maxime removed his shoes as well and followed me.

Aunt Cheryl and Uncle Ken were already in the kitchen, helping Oma out with the last minute preparations. I gave them each a hug, but my great-aunt and great-uncle felt sufficiently removed from me to not give Maxime hugs, for which I’m sure he was grateful.

Over the next half hour or so, the various branches of the family arrived. We greeted all of them and there were many hugs to be had and questions about the condition of life in France to be answered. Eventually, everyone was present and we all settled down around the table to eat.

In the absence of Opa, Uncle Gerald said the prayer as the new head of the family. I didn’t believe but I gave my lip service by closing my eyes and bowing my head. As soon as the “Amen” was said, the table exploded in a couple of minutes of activity as dishes were passed and plates were filled with food. I spent much of that time explaining the non-obvious dishes to Maxime in French. As un-picky as he was, though, I doubt my explanations had much effect on whether he tried the food or not. I noticed Oma appraising the state of Maxime’s plate and she seemed satisfied for the moment that he’d filled it up. 

Once everyone had settled down, the conversation began. Many questions were asked by the elders to Maxime, but among the chatter of nearly twenty people around the table, any conversation with him was slow and labored. There were also quite a few questions directed at me about my satisfaction with my job and my life in France in general, though the questions about wanting to return to America permanently were much reduced in the presence of my French boyfriend—they didn’t want to encourage him to go after a fiancé visa because some of them were quite convinced that he must be dating an American in pursuit of a life in the US.

“Well,” I said at one point in response to a question about my life in France, “I’m eligible to apply for French citizenship this year.”

That made quite the little splash.

“What’s wrong with your American citizenship?” Aunt Cheryl asked.

“Nothing,” my mom answered for me, with a look that was not particularly happy with me for bringing up such a sensitive topic. “She’ll have both American and French citizenship, right?” She shot me a look that said, Don’t you dare say no. 

“Right,” I said.

“So, are you going to marry Maxime, then?” Aunt Brenda asked, all innocence.

Maxime heard his name and turned away from Uncle Doug, with whom he’d been speaking about something or other. “Hm?”

“This has nothing to do with marriage,” I said, feeling myself go red.

“What do you think about this, Maxime?” Aunt Cheryl asked.

“I, ah… Pardon? I…” He looked at me to translate.

“We’re discussing me getting French citizenship,” I explained, “and Aunt Cheryl wants to know if we’re going to get married for it.”

Maxime went a little pale. “What should I tell them?”

“We’re not getting married.”

“We will not marry,” Maxime told the aunts. 

The way he said it struck me as so funny that I nearly choked on my mashed potatoes in a fit of giggles. But the aunts were less amused.

“You’re not having one of those European relationships, are you?” Aunt Cheryl asked.

“What does that mean?” Maxime asked me.

“She wants to know if we are going to live together without getting married,” I explained.

“But we already live together.”

“We don’t live together,” I told Aunt Cheryl, “and Mom has us sleeping on separate floors of the house. Isn’t that right, Mom?” It wasn’t a particularly convincing lie because my mother had “lived in sin” with a Dutch man the summer before I began high school, but it was keeping to the letter if not the spirit of my mother’s rule.

Soon enough the main event of dinner was over and it was time for dessert. I got up with the rest of the women to clear the dishes and prepare the desserts. Maxime did not want to be left alone at the table with the other men and no one to translate, but I left him there. The factional conversations had already begun and he was fairly well being ignored by that point anyway. 

Once the dessert menu had been established, I went back to the table and took Maxime’s dessert order specially in French while Makayla played waitress for all of the other men around the table. I brought Maxime’s order back to the kitchen and Makayla brought the food out to him as I found myself stuck on whipped cream duty. There were too many women in the kitchen and the numbers eventually thinned as they took their own desserts and returned to the table. I was among the last as a female “of the blood” so to speak and properly trained in the ways of the family. Maxime relaxed visibly when I took my seat beside him again. 

Dessert was fairly short-lived, as usual, and then it was back to the kitchen with the dessert dishes while the men made their way to the living room. When I made it there myself, I found Maxime engaged in conversation with Will, whom he had just discovered was fluent in Latin, which greatly aided their communication. They shuffled toward the center of the sofa so that Haley could take her place next to Will and I could sit beside Maxime. 

Conversation was briefly halted so that Makayla and Julian could open their presents. As he was barely more than a year, though, Julian let Makayla open most of his presents as well. I wondered how Makayla was handling no longer being the baby of the family, but she was nearly fifteen years old, so I imagined that it wasn’t such a hard thing for her.

Since I had been so long removed from family affairs living across the world, I was thankfully free of much conversation now that all of the questions about France had been exhausted, so I settled against Maxime and listened to him talk to Will, even though I couldn’t understand half of what they were saying. 

It was warm and comfortable against Maxime’s side and I thought I might start drowsing when Oma got up to prepare the late afternoon snacks. Haley jumped up to take over the task from my ailing grandmother and, when Oma expressed her concern about Haley handling it by herself, I got up too. Maxime caught my arm as I rose and pulled me back for a quick peck on the lips, possibly something he’d observed Logan and Sydney doing and so incorporated into our act. The action was so unnervingly natural, though, that my mind could not process it immediately.

“I’ll be right back,” I said, still numb.

I was about halfway to the kitchen when my brain started screaming at me. Where was the Maxime who was so painfully bad at romance that women just stopped responding to his courtship letters? And yet I had to hide my internal panic from Haley as we put chocolate covered pretzels on a tray and took the pitcher of Irish cream out of the refrigerator.

“I never thought I’d get to see Will chat in Latin,” Haley laughed.

“It is a skill I doubt Maxime thought he’d be putting to use today,” I agreed. 

“They’re like peas in a pod, aren’t they?” 

“Yeah,” I agreed, pleasantly surprised that the tone of the conversation had calmed me down. “I’m relieved. I was afraid Maxime wouldn’t have anyone to talk to besides me here.”

Just then, Makayla stuck her head into the kitchen.

“What you guys doin’?” she asked.

“Makin' snacks,” Haley answered.

“Can I help?”

“Go ask who wants Irish cream,” I said.

“You know,” Haley said, when Makayla had disappeared back into the living room, “maybe Will and I could visit you guys in France, someday.”

“That’d be nice,” I said and realized I meant it. Will was my favorite cousin, as unsociable as he usually was, and I didn’t really know his wife but I didn’t dislike her so far. Too bad Maxime and I were lying about our relationship.

Makayla came back with the number of Irish creams and I realized by the count that Maxime had ordered one, probably not understanding the question. 

“Plus one for me,” Makayla said.

“Excuse me,” Haley said. “How old are you? Your mother will kill me if I give you one.”

Makayla pulled a face and I beckoned her over. 

“You can have mine,” I whispered to her and her face lit up. I pressed a finger to my lips in a sign of secrecy and she did her best to regulate her expression.

We poured the Irish creams and brought the trays into the living room. We passed around the drinks and then settled back into our seats. I pressed myself close against Maxime when I sat down so there would be room for Makayla on my other side and I beckoned her over. Maxime pulled a face upon taking his first sip of the drink—it was too boozy for him—and handed it to me. Then (oh, dear, whatever shall I do? I have two drinks) I passed my drink to Makayla. Aunt Susan looked about ready to explode, but what did I care? I would be back in France in two weeks and free of Aunt Susan’s rage. 

After drinks and snacks, things started winding down. Uncle Gerald and those belonging to his family had to drop by Aunt Brenda’s family for supper, so they left. Aunt Susan was pissed off, so they left shortly thereafter.

“I like Maxime,” Makayla told me as she was leaving. “He reminds me of Will.” She and Will had a close sibling-like bond from a long time ago, so that was high praise from her. Then she had to go and add, “You should marry him.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I told her as I gave her a goodbye hug.

But the only thing that was on my mind from that moment on was that Maxime had kissed me. Where had he gotten the mad idea to do that? What had possessed him to think that was a good idea? Yes, we were acting, but we weren’t over-acting. We’d been perfectly convincing up to that point. There had been no reason to do something like that.

I stewed over it as I said goodbye to Aunt Cheryl and Uncle Ken and as I helped my mom make sure there wasn’t too much of a mess left over for Oma to clean up once we were gone. I stewed as I said my goodbyes to Oma and promised to see her again before leaving the States. My mind tossed the problem over and over as I started the car and brushed the snow off of it. 

By the time Maxime and I were buckled into the car, had waved goodbye to Oma, and pulled out into the road, I could bear it no longer.

“Why the hell did you kiss me?”

Chapter Text

It was silent in the car for several moments after I asked my question. I had not yet turned on the music, so the only sounds were the hum of the engine and the whirr of the windshield wipers clearing away the saltwater spray from the road.

“I am sorry,” Maxime said at last. “I did not intend for it to upset you.”

“Upset me,” I repeated. “I’m not upset. I just don’t understand why you thought it was necessary.”

“I believe it was a part of our act.”

“It was unnecessary!”

“Perhaps we should have come to an agreement about what was and was not necessary before beginning the charade.”

He had a point, so I fell into a sullen silence for a minute. “But why did you think it was necessary?” I asked. “It’s not like Will and Haley were doing that or anything.”

“I am not Will; you are not Haley,” Maxime replied.

“So now our fake relationship has a character?”

“Why should it not?”

“Because it is fake!”

“Why does it upset you so?”

I didn’t have a good answer for that except to say that I was not upset again and that was losing traction as a reasonable answer, so I fell silent once more. I should have kept my big mouth shut in the first place, but he could have kept his mouth to himself. It all felt so complicated at the time.

I wasn’t winning the argument, though, and I wasn’t completely in the right, so I didn’t feel much like continuing it anymore. I turned on the music, fed from my phone through the car’s speakers, and turned it up so that I didn’t have to think. Maxime promptly turned it down. We proceeded to have a volume war until we had reached a volume that was equally unsatisfactory to us both. 

I felt stupid for being as bothered as I was. The more I thought about it, the less it seemed like a kiss worth being concerned over and yet I still had myself all worked up over it. I didn’t say another word to Maxime for the rest of the drive back to my mother’s house.

“You want some pie?” my mom asked as we walked through the door.

“More pie?” Maxime asked.

“Yeah, and put on a Christmas movie or something.”

This was the normal routine of things, but I just didn’t feel up to it after I’d let myself go so far over a stupid kiss. 

“You guys go ahead,” I said. “I’m kind of tired, so I think I’ll go to bed early.” Maxime looked conflicted like he felt obligated to follow me, so I added, “Enjoy your pie.” Bad Maxime. Sit. Stay. 

I started downstairs but, in my eagerness to escape, I lost my footing and the next thing I knew I was at the bottom of the staircase with Maxime halfway down after me, about as white as a sheet.

“Are you all right?” he asked me.

“Ow,” I said and laughed weakly. I tried to get up, with Maxime’s help, but the world did a half turn and I settled back down. “On second thought, I’ll stay here.”

“Are you all right, Alexis?” my mom called from the top of the stairs.

“I just think I’m gonna stay down here for tonight,” I called back. Then Maxime and I exchanged a look. “I’m speaking French, aren’t I?”

Maxime nodded.

I tried to focus on speaking English, but I couldn’t. The words were there, it wasn’t like I’d forgotten them, but they slipped through my fingers when I tried to string them into a sentence—just like when I’d tried to speak in my high school French 1 class. 

“I think I hit my head,” I said.

“What did she say?” my mom asked.

“She hit her head,” Maxime translated in this odd turn of events.

“Well, get her up here,” my mom said. “I guess we’re taking a trip to the med center tonight.”

Maxime pulled me to my feet and helped me up the stairs one at a time. My mom had packed the pies away in the fridge and fetched my coat from the closet by the time we reached the top. She kicked some of her slip-on shoes at me.

“Put those on,” she told me.

We wore the same size, so it wasn’t a big deal, and I didn’t really want to bend over to tie my boots, so I placidly did as she said. She held up my coat to help me into it and I balked.

“Geez,” I said. “I’m fine.” I shook off Maxime’s arm that was around me, but the minute he let me go I started listing to the side and he caught me again immediately. So, I had to stand still and let my mom put my coat on me. 

My mom put on her own coat and then held me upright while Maxime put on his. Then we all got in my mom’s car, Maxime and I in the back. The back seat was a bench seat, so I moved in only as far as needed for Maxime to sit next to me. I leaned against him because it was a chore to keep myself sitting up on my own. He put his arm around me.

Somewhere in my mind there came the thought that now was not the best time for keeping up our couple act but it was a quiet and far away thought, so I chose to ignore it.

“You scared me,” Maxime said softly.

“I bet,” I said. “What would you do if I broke my neck, died, and left you stranded in this strange land?” I chuckled.

Maxime’s arm tightened around my shoulder.

The nearest med center was not far from my mom’s house, so it did not take long to get there. I was already much steadier on my feet when we arrived, though. Maxime wouldn’t let go of me, however, which was probably for the best because the parking lot was a bit icy.

We got me registered at the front desk and found that my English had come back, then went to the waiting area and sat down. I sat between Maxime and my mom. I leaned against Maxime even though his shoulder was the sharper, bonier option, but I blame the fact that he was holding my hand for pulling me in that direction.

When the nurse came, all three of us went back with her. I was the injured one and we suspected I might have a concussion so I couldn’t go alone because I might forget or not understand something the doctor said. That was why my mom came with—she was fluent in English and wouldn’t miss a word the doctor said. Maxime wasn’t really needed, but he wasn’t letting go of my hand, either. My mom wasn’t going to tell him to stay behind, that was my job as his girlfriend and as the injured one, but I wasn’t in a state to do my job, so he came along too.

The nurse took my vitals, then sent us back to the doctor, who checked my head and asked me questions to check my cognitive abilities including, “Who is the president?”

I was enough myself to be a smartass and give the French president’s name. My mom gave me a look while the doctor laughed it off.

“What?” I asked. “She didn’t specify the president of which country.”

I was diagnosed with a mild concussion and was sent home with the following orders: rest, do not drive or do anything physically or mentally exhausting for 24 hours after the symptoms stop, and have someone keep an eye on me for the next day or two to see if I get any worse. Well, my mom had to work the next day so Maxime was designated my nurse. He did an admirable job of it, too, getting me down the stairs and tucked into bed when I could barely keep my eyes open. I don’t really remember much of what happened after leaving the med center a couple hundred dollars lighter than I had arrived. 

The one thing that stuck in my mind was this exchange between my mom and Maxime on the car ride back to her house:

“Are you sure you want this one, Maxime? She’s kind of a defective model.” My mom chuckled.

“I am sure,” Maxime replied.

I only know that this was not part of a dream because I asked Maxime about it later and he remembered it.

The next morning, I woke up and there was nowhere to go, nothing to do. My mom had to work and I couldn’t drive. Maxime and I had leftover pie for breakfast and just kind of lounged around. The key to my speedy recovery was to rest and not do anything too complicated. 

We set ourselves up on the sofa and I turned on The Princess Bride, which I had memorized as a child. There were no French subtitles available on the streaming service my mom used and we didn’t have the HDMI cable to hook up my computer, so Maxime just had to deal. The dialogue was fast-paced and he didn’t understand a fair bit of it but he claimed to have enjoyed it.

“I’m sorry I messed up our vacation,” I said as I flipped through the classic children’s movies, looking for our next film.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Maxime answered.

“But still, I’m sorry you have to take care of me when we could be doing other things,” I said. 

“Do not apologize,” Maxime said. “Je le fais car je t’aime.” I do it because I love you.

Those words are so well-branded in my memory that it felt wrong not to include the original. I can still render them in my mind as he spoke them, the very slight vowel shift and the softness of the j’s in his northern accent. He did not look at me as he spoke them and, thinking back now, I wonder how long he meant to tell me, how many times he determined to say it and failed. 

As for me, I tried to tell myself that I’d misheard, but there wasn’t much for me to do with that. We were not sitting far apart and the room was quiet. I tried to blame his accent, but that was just as flimsy. I spoke to Maxime as much or more than anyone else and, so long as he didn’t use archaic terminology or (Heaven forbid) ch’ti, I understood him just as well as the Parisians who normally surrounded me. My last recourse was the ambiguity of the verb aimer. That didn’t stand up, either. You don’t just go around saying je t’aime to people, not without the de-escalating bien, unless you mean it that way, not when you’re as careful with your words as Maxime.

I couldn’t think of anything to say immediately. I’d never been confessed to before and certainly not like that. A part of me wanted immediately to spill my guts about the feelings I’d been bottling up for so many months. Another part of me reverted to my old instinct of crushing any relationship that was growing beyond my ability to control it, but I quickly recoiled from that idea. The thought of hurting Maxime was painful. The only option, therefore, was to answer Maxime’s feelings with my own. 

Maxime must have judged me as having been quiet for too long, however. “Forgive me,” he said. “I have said something that should have remained unsaid. It is inexcusable.”

“That is unfortunate,” I answered, disheartened to have been preempted in such a way. “However, words are not so easily taken back.” 

Perhaps I should not have done that. I had lashed out against being dismissed but, in the process, I had caused Maxime to believe that not only did I not return his feelings, but I also wouldn’t forgive him for having them. I am no great reader of expressions, but even I could see the way he sank upon hearing my words. That had not been my intention in the slightest.

“It is a good thing,” I added, in hopes of repairing my own idiotic damage but speaking quickly so that I wouldn’t regret my decision halfway through and stop before I said the important part, “that I love you, too, or we might have a very serious problem.”

Maxime looked at me then. I did not know what he was thinking, but I let him think. I had nothing to follow that up with, anyway. The ball was in Maxime’s court now. 

The anxiety of waiting made me try my very weak hand at reading expressions and I was alarmed to find that he did not look ecstatic or even particularly pleased.

“Maxime?” I prompted gently, trying to dismiss all of the misgivings rising in my mind.

“Forgive me,” he said at last, “if I am doubtful.”

“What?” The word was out of my mouth before I had time even to consciously process what he had said.

“It is possible that you have mistaken your respect for who I was in the past for affection toward me in the present.”

I was speechless. It seemed so ridiculous from my end. How could I mistake my respect for the historical Robespierre, for whom little more than politics and lies remained in the record of his life, for the feelings I had for the living, breathing man I had shared my home and my life with for the past twelve months? 

If that was the route he wanted to take, I could equally as well accuse him of mistaking his gratitude for the person who had taken him in when he was lost in the present for affection toward me. But I had always found that feelings were too subjective to be mistaken by the person feeling them. It was usually someone else, wanting to reject a person’s feelings who claimed they were mistaken or someone whose feelings had changed wanting to deny that they had ever had those feelings in the first place. 

“I suppose,” I said at length, “the question now is if you trust me or not because I don’t believe my feelings will ever be proven one way or the other. And you were the one who began this.”

“So I was,” Maxime said softly.

“Do you trust me?” I asked.

“I do,” Maxime answered. But, really, what was he going to say? That after all we’d been through he didn’t trust me?

We sat in awkward silence for a good half minute, each on our own side of the sofa. What was this now? A happy ending? No, there isn’t much of a happy ending to be anticipated when you are in love with Maximilien Robespierre, but I was quite content to settle for a happy middle.

I slid part of the way across the sofa and reached out to Maxime. I pulled him to me and gave him a kiss that might not have blown away the most passionate and pure kisses like in William Goldman’s story, but to me felt wholly as sweet as the closing scene of the film we’d just watched.

“I thought that you did not want to kiss,” Maxime said when we parted.

“Yesterday?” I asked. “No, I did not want to want to kiss, but I did.”

Maxime gave me a look of incredulity. Instead of explaining myself more clearly, however, I simply gave him another kiss.

Chapter Text

I had imagined what it would be like to kiss Maxime so many times. I had drawn and redrawn conclusions about how it would feel. Of course, as is often the case with imagination, none of my simulations quite matched reality.

I have heard that there are some people who stop thinking in these situations and only feel. I’ve never been able to achieve that sort of disconnect from my thoughts, but I came close to that sort of anchoring in the physical. At the imperative of my mind, I cataloged every sensation for future recall.

I memorized the texture of his lips, the taste of his mouth, the shape of his teeth. I noticed the grain of his stubble and the angle of his cheekbone under my left hand and the warmth of his arm within the soft cotton sleeve of his shirt—he was wearing a dark blue one that day—under my right. I felt the pressure of his hands at the small of my back, one slightly above the other, and our knees knocking together as we sat side by side, turning our torsos to face each other.

I did everything in my power to never forget that moment and, with any luck, I never shall.

When we broke the kiss, we barely parted. We gazed into each others’ eyes and…and I got distracted. I don’t know what Maxime was thinking, but I was thinking about his eyes. I have always found eyes to be the most interesting part of a person’s face. I suppose a lot of people think that way, the window to one’s soul and all of that, but I just think they’re so colorful and pretty. I wish I had a deeper, more philosophical reason than that.

I would have loved Maxime’s eyes for simply being his, but I was lucky because they were also green. Green has always been my favorite eye color. As a child, I had wanted to have green eyes with the same fervor with which Anne Shirley of Green Gables had wanted black hair. My eyes, unfortunately, were and still are hazel with a tendency to look more brown than green and brown eyes were to me what red hair was to Anne—the worst color possible. Every time someone complimented me on my “pretty brown eyes” I chafed. The biggest compliment I’ve ever received about my eyes was when a student initiated a staring contest with me and said, “Your eyes aren’t really brown.” So…I’m still not keen on my eye color, but I’ve learned that unless I intend to be Narcissus, I get more green eye appreciation time out of having a green-eyed lover.

Anyway, if we had been intending to kiss again, we took too long to decide because Lucy, one of the three cats, loved to rub on faces and, seeing her chance to get two faces for the price of one, climbed on the back of the sofa and interposed herself between us at face level.

Choked on cat fur, we both leaned away and I scooped the offending feline up.

“Lucy,” I scolded, “you need to find a better way to ask for attention.” But she just wormed her way out of my grasp and onto my shoulder. The moment was gone and I turned my attention back to the films I had been scrolling through.

I selected a film and we carried on as if nothing had changed until my mother got home from work. What were we supposed to do? Keep kissing? Have sex? Talk about our feelings? It felt more comfortable to just go back to what we’d been doing for the moment. We sat closer, legs touching, and that was enough.

When my mother got home, she brought pizza from one of my favorite local pizza places and Maxime and I resumed our act. Well, I say resumed, but it wasn’t quite the same act as before. There were different things that were false now that we had acknowledged our mutual feelings. I was afraid that my mother would notice that something had changed between Maxime and I but she did not mention anything. After dinner, we watched some TV and then Maxime and I went downstairs.

For the first time, Maxime balked at our shared bed.

“Perhaps I should ask your mother if I may use the other spare room,” he said.

“She’ll be confused,” I told him. “She’ll think we fought. Do you want to spend the rest of our vacation pretending that we fought?”

“No,” he answered, and made no more argument, although he still looked unsatisfied with the arrangement.

I had an inkling as to why he balked, but I didn’t want to push him to find out because I was afraid that if I was right we would start bickering over whether it was a legitimate concern or not. I did not want to bicker, not so soon after we’d made our confessions, not when I still worried that he doubted my feelings.

So, I took my things to the bathroom and got ready for bed. When I returned to the bedroom Maxime was in bed, pushed to the very extreme edge of his side and asleep, or at least pretending to be.

Fine. That was fine. We had gravitated to the center of the bed every night, so I’d likely be able to get my cuddling done in the morning. Besides, I’d found in past relationships that the body heat could get too intense for me to sleep when I was pressed up against my lover, so it was probably better like this. I climbed into bed on my side and eventually fell asleep myself.

That night, Maxime vanished into the past. I only in the morning when I woke that he was gone. I might have thought that he was just awake and moving about the house, but everything was dead silent in the early dawn. Even the cats chose that moment to settle down and make no noise. The bed was cold on the other side and, from what I could see in the demi-light as I surveyed the room from my perch on the bed, none of Maxime’s things had been touched.

I did not want to believe it. As long as the house slept, I could imagine that I was wrong. He wasn’t gone. He had just crept upstairs to read his book because he didn’t want to turn on the lights while I was asleep. I didn’t dare leave the room to determine the truth. But the sound of my mother getting up to prepare for work disproved this notion. She would have spoken to him if he were there and I only heard her address the cats.

I couldn’t get past that thought. He’s not there. It didn’t sink in. My mother moved up and down the length of the house. She took her shower. She made her lunch. I floated, numb. The cats play raucously. My mother scolded them. Then she left. The back door slammed behind her. I was alone in the house.

I dropped. I dropped down into a raging sea. I couldn’t swim against the waves or the undertow. No matter how I told myself that this was always going to happen, that I had prepared for this, I couldn’t get on top of my feelings. I couldn’t breathe. When I lost my strength and could not fight anymore, when I slipped beneath those thrashing waves, that was when the tears came—hot and silent—and they did not stop until, exhausted with grief, I slipped back into sleep.

When I woke, I was disoriented. It was dark, the middle of the night, and I was cocooned warmly in my blankets. My face and pillow were cold, wet. I held my breath and heard the soft sounds of someone sleeping beside me. I carefully turned over and saw that Maxime was still there. He had never left. It had been a dream, a nightmare so vivid and well-remembered that, for a few moments upon waking, I had mistaken it for reality.

My relief was so immense that it was painful. I could feel a fresh set of tears coming on, so I got out of bed to distract myself. I went to the bathroom, considering it to be a reasonable escape. I collapsed onto the toilet and pressed the heels of my palms to my temples. I told myself that I was going to calm down and get myself under control before I went back to bed.

I started by breaking down my problem. What had upset me? The dream. What was the dream about? Maxime leaving. Would Maxime leave? I was about eighty percent sure, even though the physicist had cast it as a fifty-fifty sort of thing. Could I accept that? I wasn’t sure.

I supposed that I had two options. I could either continue down the path I was on and face the reality that I would lose Maxime someday, sooner rather than later, unless some rare bad luck took me from this life first (which, all things considered, would probably be a worse fate than losing Maxime), or I could distance myself from him to save my heart, but I would have to do it properly this time by cutting him out of my life completely or it wouldn’t work just like last time.

Well, I didn’t have the stomach for that. I couldn’t make myself push Maxime away. I’d end up botching the whole thing by getting cold feet partway through. I knew myself well enough for that. I was never very good at accepting a small pain now to avoid a bigger one down the road. I was more of a “we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it” sort of girl.

As if to mark my coming to a decision, Loki, the bathroom cat, realized that someone in the house was on the toilet and came to bug me for face-pets. I let him into the bathroom and scratched his ears. His purrs and simplicity helped me to a sense of resignation if not inner peace about my situation.

I returned to the bedroom shortly after that. As soon as I stepped over the threshold, I heard Maxime say my name.

“Alexis?” he said. “You let the cats in.”

It occurred to me then that I had left the bedroom door open when I had gone to the bathroom. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I also noticed that Lucy had installed herself in the curve where Maxime’s neck met his shoulder and that Mo had likely walked across Maxime’s stomach to get to the place where he was now lying—in the middle of my spot.

“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’ll get rid of them.”

There must have been something in my voice that didn’t ring quite right to Maxime because he asked, “Are you all right?”

I hate that question. I hate it because it makes me doubt myself. It makes me think that someone has noticed something about me that I haven’t noticed myself. I hate it because no matter what the answer was before the question was asked, the answer after it was asked is always no.

“Yes,” I lied, and this time even I could hear the wrongness in my own voice.

“Alexis?” he asked.

“It was just a stupid nightmare,” I explained. “I’m fine.”

I went to the head of the bed to collect Lucy, and Maxime sat up. Disturbed, Lucy bounded away. Maxime looked at me in silence for a few moments and I don’t know what he saw because he wasn’t wearing his glasses and I could barely make out his features in the dark with my good eyesight. But I was terrified that he would notice that I had cried in my sleep, even though I’d checked to make sure it wasn’t noticeable before I left the bathroom.

Maxime touched my hand and a dam I didn’t even realize I’d put up burst. The tears started spontaneously and Maxime flinched back violently.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

I didn’t dare answer for fear of sobbing, so I just shook my head.

After a few seconds, Maxime put his arms around me. It was a very awkward hug—partly because he was sitting on the bed and I was standing and partly because my tears made him quite clearly uncomfortable. Thinking back, that was probably the first time I’d ever cried in front of him. I don’t cry often, but when I do it’s quite the spectacle.

After a little while, when I trusted my voice again, I asked Maxime to move back a little so I could get on the bed, too. He let go of me and moved about two inches before stopping.

“There’s a cat.”

I reached over Maxime and picked up Mo, who did not resist much because he thought I was going to pet his face. Instead, I set him on the floor, while Maxime made room for me on the bed.

I climbed up onto the bed and under the covers, which were warm from where Maxime had been lying. He might have continued retreating all the way to my side of the bed, but I caught him and pulled him close again. He came back to me easily. I knew it was only because I was clearly upset and therefore must be in need of comforting. I found it hard to imagine that he would let me cling to him like that if I had not just been crying.

We shared his pillow, it was a long, king size pillow for the king size bed, so there was plenty of room for both of us. It smelled like him, which I liked, but what I liked more was that, with my arms around him, I felt quite certain that I would wake up if he disappeared and not be left to find out in the morning.

I fell asleep shortly after that and had no more bad dreams that night or for a long time after.