“It’s for you,” she says, handing it to me with a huge grin on her face and that same teasing glint in her eye that makes me feel simultaneously flattered and wary.

  I take it hesitantly, twisting and turning the monstrosity in my hand. What exactly does she expect me to do with this?

  “Don’t forget the best part.” She twists it in my hands, reaching underneath the base and fiddling with something. There’s a soft click, and the tower lights up like a strobe.

  I blink and pull away from it.

  Madi’s barely holding in her pride and amusement.

  “So you saved Edward Cullen for me.”

  She nods. “I thought of you immediately. It was just too perfect.”

  “Mmhmm.”

  She laughs. “Just look. It’s red, white, and blue. And it has stars—the whole twinkling aspect—and stripes. A great representation of your American side.”

  I cover my smile with a hand and hold the figurine slightly away from myself because the thing is flashing at me in a way that can’t be safe for my vision. “You realize that the French flag is also red, white, and blue, right?”

  “Yeah, but we did it better. We’re red, white, and blue 2.0.”

  “The one who did something first is generally considered the best.”

  “First the worst, second the same, last the best of all the game.”

  I laugh, my brow furrowing. “What’s that?”

  “It’s something we used to say in elementary school. Timeless wisdom.”

  “Okay, but there are other countries who did red, white, and blue after you, which makes you second, which, according to your own cute little jingle, makes you also the worst.”

  She glares at me teasingly. “The point is, we took your red, white, and blue, and we added pizzazz.” She puts out both hands and wiggles her fingers. “We bedazzled it.”

  “Bedazzled?”

  “It’s when you add a bunch of sequins and jewels to something.”

  “So . . . you make it worse.”

  She punches me in the arm, and pain has never hurt so good. “The bedazzling of our flag has meaning, Rémy. The stars represent the—you know what?” She yanks the Eiffel Tower out of my hands. “You don’t deserve this.”

  I fight her for it, though, because I actually do want that ugly thing. She bought it thinking of me, and that’s a souvenir I can get behind. So I wrestle her, and since she has nowhere to hide in this small elevator, she doubles over, protecting the tower with her arms. I wrap mine around her from the back, tickling her until she surrenders.

  My arms beg me to leave them around her, and I do. She doesn’t resist. Her hair is mussed from our struggle, and it smells like shampoo and a mixture of scents from the market. She turns in my arms so that she’s facing me, and, taking the collar of my sweater, she pulls me down to her.

  My eyes close, but the flashing of that dumb Eiffel Tower lingers, acting like a warning. Even the souvenir knows this isn’t a smart move.

  Mustering all my willpower, I pull back, rubbing my lips together in the hopes it’ll stop the way they’re insisting I let them have their way with Madi, with her lips, her neck. I press my eyes shut to get rid of that image and refocus myself. “Madi . . .”

  “Vous êtes là?” The voice of the elevator technician comes from somewhere on the stairs, asking if we’re here. As if we could be anywhere else.

  We talk for a couple of minutes, and he gets my phone number so that he can talk to me while he’s in the mechanical room. It’s not long before he has me press the four button, and presto! We’re on our way up again.

  There’s a whole lot of tension lingering in the air as I unlock the door to the apartment, and even though part of me wants to smack myself for stopping the kissing, the smarter part of me knows it was the right move.

  After unlocking the apartment, I flip on the lamp we bought from IKEA. We both set down our things in silence. No part of me wants Madi to think I stopped kissing her because I wanted to stop kissing her, so I turn as I shrug off my coat.

  “Hey, can we talk about . . . stuff?”

  She smiles. “Yeah, of course.” Okay, so she doesn’t seem to be heartbroken over my interrupting things . . . I can’t decide how to feel about that.

  I lead the way over to the couch, taking a seat and angling myself toward her, my knee resting on the cushion.

  “Listen,” I say. “About back in the elevator . . .”

  “You don’t have to stress about it, Rémy. I’m sorry if I put you in a weird position.”

  “I mean”—I rotate my shoulders a bit to stretch my back—“those bars against my back didn’t feel great, but . . .”

  She smiles at my joke, and I feel a bit better. Is she apologizing because she thinks it’s her fault? If only she knew how much I’ve been wanting to do exactly what we did.

  “You just got out of a serious relationship,” I say. “I don’t want to take advantage of that.”

  “That’s not what’s happening. I promise. I know it seems weird when I say I’m okay, but it’s true. Maybe I shouldn’t be, but”—her thumb taps on her leg—“I think I’ve been expecting that breakup for a while. It’s not like it was a sudden conclusion I came to. It’s been building in me.”

  I don’t even know what to say to that. I mean, I don’t think she should be mourning Josh by any means. I’m genuinely happy for her to be out of that relationship because I don’t think he deserves her, and I don’t think he would make her happy. But I’m unclear what it means about what happened in the elevator.

  “But it’s not just about me,” she says after a second. “I don’t want you to feel like a rebound.”

  I smile ruefully. “I admit, the thought had crossed my mind. But, at the risk of mentioning the elephant in the room . . .”

  “I’m leaving soon.”

  I nod, chewing on the inside of my lip and watching her. Her eyes are on me, exploring my face. I can see her brain working.

  “Probably not super smart to jump into anything when it’s got an expiration date,” she says.

  Expiration date. I hate that, the idea that Madi and I are going to expire like spoiled milk. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true. There is an expiration date on . . . whatever this is, and that date is January 2nd.

  “Well, let’s not make it complicated,” she says, her tone turning more upbeat. “We can be friends. And business partners, since we’ve still got some work to do on the apartment and on the city guide for future guests.” She lifts her shoulders in a careless shrug. “We just keep it light. Nothing serious.”

  There’s nothing light about how I feel right now. I’m the one who brought up this whole subject, but now I’m having to quash an impulse to convince Madi against the “just friends” thing. She notices the delay in my response.

  “Unless you’d rather not.” Her voice sounds so hesitant all of a sudden. Almost embarrassed.

  “No, no,” I hurry to say. I can see the opportunity to spend time with Madi slipping away before my eyes, and even if it’s the dumbest choice out there, I can’t pass it up. I can keep it light, right? I mean, if that’s what Madi wants, that’s really my only choice. And given that she’s leaving in two weeks, it’s the smart thing to do. I just need to realign my priorities and remember what I set out to do in the first place: help out André and make sure Madi’s stay at his place is a 5-star experience. “All of that sounds good to me.”

  “Great,” Madi says, and her tone is at least half-convincing.

  It’s how I feel, too. Half-convinced. Which tells me that it’ll probably be pretty easy to slip back into kissing her if I don’t shore up this decision a bit. I may be able to keep things light with her if I stay on my A-game, but if we keep blurring the lines like we did in the elevator . . . well, I’m only human.

  The silence after her Great says a lot, but we’ve already agreed on the path forward, so I change the subject.

  “Sorry about the elevator breaking. The timing was—” I shake my head at the unbelievable bad luck. Not that it felt so bad being in there with her.

  Not helpful.

  “I told you your city hates me.”

  “She’s just testing the limits of your love, making sure it’s genuine.”

  “Sounds manipulative. But I love her anyway.”

  Why does my mind constantly want to assume that whenever Madi talks about Paris, she’s also kind of talking about me? “You kept so calm in there.”

  “I don’t know if I would say calm . . . .” Her cheeks tinge with pink.

  Come on, Madi. You can’t be looking at me like that if you’re serious about just being friends. This is going to be . . . interesting.

  I’ll just think of it like a willpower Olympics. Easy. I’m running a willpower marathon. With no training.

  It’s a recipe for success.

  THIRTY-THREE

  MADI

  Sleep is for the birds. That’s what my body’s decided. Or my brain, I guess. Every time I close my eyes, determined to sleep, I’m back in the elevator with Rémy, up against him with my hands in his hair and his hands gripping my waist while he kisses me senseless.

  No, not senseless. It’s kind of the opposite of that. It dominated all of my senses, which left zero bandwidth for remembering that we were stuck in a broken metal box five stories above ground.

  Pro tip: if ever you find yourself in your worst nightmare, Rémy Scott will turn it straight into a daydream.

  And a daydream is both how it feels and how it will remain because we’ve agreed to keep it light, keep it friendly. My whole Monica Geller “I’m breezy” vibe worked about as well as it did for her. Probably should have seen that coming.

  Hopefully with both of us sharing the goal, though, it’ll actually be achievable. It’s the right decision. I shouldn’t be mixing myself up in a sticky emotional situation immediately after ending things with Josh, and I definitely shouldn’t do it when I’ll be thousands of miles away soon. Even if kissing Rémy again feels like it’s probably worth the emotional fallout because let me tell you, that. kiss. was. something. else.

  I turn over in my bed for the twentieth time, then surrender to my body’s tyranny and accept that I’m not going to sleep. I clamber down the ladder to grab my laptop and camera, which I take to the itty bitty table and chair under the bed. I can edit Laura’s photos and send them to her until my mind and body calm down enough to sleep. It should occupy me enough that my thoughts don’t wander to the elevator, since I can still feel the press of his chest against mine.

  I touch a hand to my cheeks. Speaking of breezy, I could use a breeze about now. This whole time I’ve been worrying about the teenage girls in Rémy’s English classes. News flash: I am those teenage girls. I’m the one everyone should be worrying about.

  BUT I’m going to be an adult and keep it friendly like we decided. Because unlike a teenage girl, the prefrontal cortex of my brain is almost fully developed, which means I can plan and strategize and control my impulses. In theory.

  A call comes in from Siena as I transfer yesterday’s files from my camera to my laptop. Oh dear. This will be interesting.

  I answer, trying to keep it light and sound totally normal. But Siena is a bloodhound, and she smells something’s up from literally thousands of miles away, so I end up telling her about the elevator incident.

  Siena isn’t breezy either. Not even close. It takes me a few minutes to bring her back down to earth as she hounds me for details.

  “Lemme get this straight,” she says. “You, Madison Allred, who is afraid of small spaces, got trapped in a medieval elevator with the most beautiful human in France and proceeded to make out with him until help came?”

  “A few things,” I say. “First, I’m fairly certain they didn’t have elevators in the middle ages. Second, there’s no solid proof that Rémy is the most beautiful human in France, though I admit I have no evidence to the contrary. And third, we actually kissed before we were trapped.”

  “You’re missing the forest for the trees, Mads. If you got trapped with me in an elevator, do you even know what would have happened?”

  “Well, I definitely wouldn’t have kissed you, if that’s what you’re getting at. But it wasn’t as bad as it sounds.” I shrug, as if she can see me. “Rémy’s pretty good at keeping me calm.”

  “If you can stay calm kissing him, then I don’t know how to relate to you anymore. It would fall under the irreconcilable differences category, which means divorce.”

  I roll my eyes, but I can’t stop a smile as I tap through the pictures of Laura and Luke in my editing software. “Okay, so I wasn’t calm, per se, but I wasn’t thinking about falling to my death or the walls closing in on me. But we talked afterward, and we both agree that it wasn’t smart, and we’re just going to be friends.”

  Siena snorts like an actual pig. “Good one!”

  “It is good.”

  My heart skitters, and I stop scrolling when I come to the pictures Laura took of Rémy and me. And then I stare because this is a new and rare experience, like a blue whale sighting. Laura nailed the pictures. The focus is tack-sharp, the Eiffel Tower is positioned perfectly behind us at one of the rule-of-thirds “crash points,” and Rémy and I are both laughing and looking at each other.

  Just friends.

  I do, in fact, manage to sleep at some point, but it’s not until I’ve edited Laura’s photos and sent them to her. When I wake up in the morning, the room is chillier than usual, and there’s a latticework of frost on my small window. I check my phone to find a teasing text from Siena and a bunch of Instagram notifications. Apparently, Laura already posted a few of the photos I sent her, which she tagged me in and added a bunch of hashtags to. That accounts for the sudden twenty new followers I have.

  I smile. Thank you, Laura.

  I’ve worn most of the clothes I brought, which means I need to do more laundry, so I take the little mesh bag full of my clothes downstairs. I really should wash my bra, but guess what? I only brought two, and the other one is still hanging outside Rémy’s window. I checked.

  Sigh. Guess it’s time to be a big girl and bring it up.

  Rémy isn’t in the living room or kitchen, so I glance at the bedroom door. It’s barely ajar, and my glance coincides with him pulling a t-shirt over his head, covering everything our kissing session hinted at last night. He looks straight ahead, at a mirror, I assume, and runs a hand through his hair.

  Welp. That was one of the least just friends images I could possibly start my day with. I can hear Siena cackling right now.

  I shake it off and head for the kitchen, where Rémy joins me after a few minutes. Every nerve in my body is on high alert because that’s what happens when you spend every single waking minute thinking about kissing someone.

  But Rémy is better at this than I am. He just smiles and says good morning like it doesn’t do things to me just to be near him.

  “I have a confession,” he says.

  “What’s that?” I say it like my nerves aren’t fraying, and I can only do that because I’m focusing on stuffing my laundry into the washer.

  “I did some research last night. Turns out the tricolor French flag came after the American flag.”

  My hands stop, and I look up at him, checking if he’s serious. He is, but he’s also got laughing eyes.

  I cluck my tongue and stand up. “These examples of the French obsession with America are really piling up. It’s getting a bit pathetic.”

  “We simplified it, though. Made it classy. Chic.”

  I can’t really argue with that. But I will anyway. “You say classy. I say boring.” One of the legs of my pants is trying to escape the washer, so I push it back in and busy myself with the rest of the clothes so I don’t have to look at him for the next part. “Hey, so, um, I think my bra fell off my rack.”

  I freeze.

  Oh. My. Gosh. Most unfortunate word choice in history. I whirl my head around to look at Rémy as my cheeks start blistering from the raw heat they’re generating.

  Rémy’s trying valiantly not to smile. UGH. Why does he have to know English well enough to know slang?

  “I meant,” I say very carefully, “that I put it on the drying rack upstairs a few days ago, but it fell down onto your drying rack.”

  He can’t stop the smile anymore. “I knew what you meant. And yes, it’s there. I can go grab it.”

  “I can do it!” I call as he turns. I don’t think it’s good for our newly reaffirmed friendship for me to see him holding my bra.

  “I have seen bras before, you know. I’ll help you open the window. It’s a bit tricky.”

  “Of course it is,” I say bitterly.

  Rémy opens the blinds and then the window, and I admire the way his muscles aid in this process. Good friends should always notice and encourage their friends’ strengths.

  The gust of cold that comes in effectively puts an end to my “platonic” admiration, and I reach out and grab my bra. It’s a popsicle, and it takes self-control not to throw it onto Rémy’s bed to save my fingers from frostbite. There are literal icicles hanging in a few spots—some of them placed very unfortunately indeed—and based on the way Rémy’s covering his mouth but his eyes are crinkled at the sides, he’s noticed it too.

  Looks like I’ll be wearing my current bra another day while this one goes through humiliation detox. I shove the bra into the washer and start the laundry cycle.

  We talk over breakfast about the day’s plans, and I’m feeling a lot more relaxed now that the bra incident is behind me. Rémy isn’t an awkward type of guy. I kind of wish he was. Maybe that would make it easier not to see him the way I’m seeing him now.

  I suggest we do a quick French lesson, take pictures of the apartment, then head out for some more work on the guide book.

  “Unless you have other plans,” I say, realizing I’ve just scheduled out his entire day. Maybe Rémy’s idea of what just friends looks like means spending less time together. That would make perfect sense, but I kind of hope it’s not what he had in mind. Okay, I really hope it’s not what he had in mind. “Because technically this whole guide book thing was my idea, and you don’t—”