At the spa appointment the next morning, Rae was painted, polished, trimmed, styled, waxed, depilated, exfoliated, and considering defenestrating herself if she didn’t get away from all the fuss, when Wulf collected her and took her to lunch. His slow perusal from her pink toenails to her new, layered haircut that brought out her soft curls made the morning worth it.
Rae and Wulf spent their days exploring the glory that is Paris, every twisting street, every park blooming in the spring, the grand palaces and museums, and everything else that Rae had ever read about in books.
For breakfasts, Wulf took her to perfect sidewalk cafes for croissants so flakey that they collapsed when she bit into them. They went to crêperies for snacks, and he dodged into chocolate shops at every opportunity, feeding her nut-sprinkled mendicants and intense little truffles.
They ate madeleines dipped in tea at a tiny café in the Latin Quarter.
Wulf said, “The first time I ate these was at Le Rosey afternoon snack when I was six, though we drank hot chocolate, not tea. Constantin tried to steal mine, but I didn’t let him. He pouted.”
Rae set her hand atop Wulf’s hand, wishing she knew something to say.
Dieter, sitting at another table, glanced over at them. His eyes had widened, and he glanced over at Friedhelm near the back wall, who wore the same, shocked expression. When Dieter saw that Rae had noticed him, he resumed reading on his phone.
Wulf said, “That was a good day, eating cookies.”
“I’ve never had madeleines before,” Rae said, dunking the buttery cookie in her tea. “I guess I’ll always remember you.”
Wulf’s hand turned under hers, and they sat, holding hands and eating shell-shaped cookies.
After a few days, the jittery newness wore off, and Rae’s family’s ultimatum receded in her mind.
Occasionally, tentatively, Paris became real around her.
Wulf’s security guys revolved around them like a swirling bubble while they toured museums and walked the tree-lined streets.
For suppers, Rae and Wulf dined in restaurants with no prices on the menus with the irrepressible Flicka, who quizzed Rae on what she had seen, what she thought, where they had shopped, and how the fittings for her dresses had gone.
Supper took hours every night, which ran counter to Rae’s American expectation of efficiency.
Wulf dropped his head beside her shoulder. “In France, when you reserve a table, it’s your table for the night. They expect you to sit and talk for hours.”
And so they did.
And so did the chattering crowd around them, who never stirred from their tables, either, so it must have been all right.
The first night, when they went to Le Meurice in a hotel across from the Tuileries Gardens, Flicka eventually left to attend to wedding details, and Rae and Wulf made up for lost time and talked about all the silly things they had never told each other, their favorite music, books they had read, and childhood stories.
Rae began feel real again instead of like a weepy bundle of nerves, so she told him stupid stuff to make him laugh, like when she won the county sheep-riding rodeo when she was four, and how the measure of a man’s ego may be taken by the size of his belt buckle.
Wulf still didn’t talk much, just a short anecdote here and there when Rae began to run dry, but he found pictures using his phone’s internet browser to illustrate his sparsely detailed stories.
One picture showed himself and three other men bundled in thick ski clothes. Ski goggles hung around their necks, and they held ski poles and long rifles. Wulf’s skin was ruddy with cold. Wulf was reared back laughing, and they all held bronze medals stamped with the five Olympic rings around their necks up for the camera.
Rae’s jaw dropped yet again. “You were in the Olympics?”
Wulf’s smile was self-deprecating. “Swiss team, four-man relay biathlon, skiing and marksmanship combined. Switzerland is not large, biathlon is not a popular sport, and a school chum was the team captain. He needed one more man for the relay. I had just mustered out of the military, and I have skied all my life. My most pertinent qualification was that I was available. Sadly, it was more nepotism than athleticism.”
Yeah. Right.
While Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, probably never actually said that “Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar,” Rae would have bet that a sniper’s rifle, the gun that killed Wulf’s brother, blew holes through Wulf and his friend Yoshi, and charged Wulf with notoriety, was not just a gun to Wulf, not when he had mastered it to the point where he was demonstrably one of the best marksmen in the world.
She wasn’t sure that she could ever ask him about it, but she saw his pain under that shiny, shiny shell.
Rae took a deep breath and went on with the conversation. “So, the super-modesty thing is because you’re kind of British, right?” she asked.
Wulf paused. “Yes, and German and Swiss. I’ve had a triple dose.”
“Fine. You’re modest. So I’m pressing. Tell me five things about yourself, real things.”
Wulf toyed with the stem of his wine glass. “I’m not sure what to say.”
“Anything. Tell me anything.” Anything that she could hang onto when she remembered him.
“All right,” he said. “On one condition.”
She raised her eyebrows and looked askance at him.
“You must, also.”
Rae nodded, satisfied, though she suspected that her stuff wasn’t going to be nearly as good as his.
Wulf glanced at the ceiling. The pristine plaster crenelations and glittering chandeliers buzzed with the conversations around them.
He said, “I don’t like shellfish. Not mussels, clams, lobster, not any of them.”
“Okay, I’ll count that as one, but I meant awesome things.”
“You did not specify. Your turn. A food you don’t appreciate?”
“Rocky Mountain oysters.”
The confusion on his face was priceless.
“Go,” she said. “Awesome things, this time.”
He kept biting his lip, clearly ruminating on making a run for it. “Before I joined the military, my hair was down to my shoulders.”
Thick, long, gorgeous blond hair? Rae might have swooned. “Pics or it didn’t happen.”
Pics that she could pin up on her wall.
He said, “I’m sure there are photos somewhere, but Ms. Keller and Flicka can confirm it.”
Dang. “I had long hair, too. I had never cut my hair, ever, until I got to college. It was down past my hips, almost to my knees.”
Wulf’s blue eyes took on a predatory shine. “I don’t suppose you’d consider growing it again.”
“I will if you will.”
They were talking as if this week would never end.
Just because he said things like that didn’t make them real.
She said, “Three more awesome, wonderful, Wulfie things.”
He winced at the nickname, and she thought he almost rose out of his chair to flee. “I speak nine languages passably, but Spanish is not among them.”
“And they are?”
He swallowed, clearly uncomfortable. “Alemannic, Arabic, English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, and Russian.”
“That was ten.”
“You kept track.”
“And they were alphabetized.”
“A mind for details. Smashing. Alemannic and German are similar, and I tend to think of them as one in my head, though they are not the same.”
“What’s Alemannic?”
“Alemannic is Swiss German. It’s more than a simple dialect. It’s the language Helvetians speak with each other.”
“An in-group thing.” Her psychology classes came in handy, for once.
“Right.”
“That’s kind of like Border Spanish. I took the real thing in high school, Castilian Spanish, but the lisping sounds snooty to me, and there’s a thing when you speak Border Spanglish with someone, a recognition of shared experience.”
“That’s it precisely.”
“Bueno. Dos mas,” she said.
“Show off.”
“Come on.”
“All right, two more.” He stared at the ceiling and smiled at her, considering. His amused smile, less reticent, easier, seemed like he was almost, nearly, perhaps, basking in her attention.
“If I were to believe in reincarnation, I have thought that I must have been a pirate in a previous life. I enjoy sailing, the openness of the ocean, and I am a bit too attracted to some of the more ruthless tactics in finance.”
Rae the psychology student could dissect that magical thinking for hours. “I always thought I must have been a scullery maid because I still hate washing dishes. Last one.”
He leaned one elbow on the table and covered his mouth with the side of his fist for just a moment.
Good Lord, he was shushing himself.
This was going to be good. Rae leaned in, coming closer to suggest that he could whisper.
He leaned in farther, too. His mouth was near her ear, and his breath brushed her neck. Wulf whispered, “I have a good memory.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed that.” She braced her hand on his shoulder, holding them together.
“It’s better than I let on.”
Rae felt her eyebrows rise. Better than being able to learn ten languages and finish a PhD in economics in three years while attending thousands of concerts? “Really?”
“When I was in hospital, Le Rosey sent a tutor so I wouldn’t get behind in my classes. He decided we should begin multiplication. He explained the concept and handed me a table. I looked at it for a few minutes and handed it back.”
Understanding dawned. Rae said, “Because you’d memorized it.”
Wulf nodded. “His reaction was disconcerting, but it was too late to hide it. We did division the next day, then fractions, then algebra. I was doing simple calculus by the time I left the hospital. Differential equations, by the end of the year.”
“Wow.” The timeline of Wulf’s life, which had seemed inordinately compressed, made sense in Rae’s head.
He sat back, finished divulging secrets. He took her hand from his shoulder but held her fingers below the table.
Rae said, “This prince-thing is kind of the least impressive thing about you, isn’t it?”
His suppressed grimace suggested disbelief. “You’re the only person in the world to think so, and I don’t think all that is particularly impressive. The maths and finance are the same thing. The rest of it is mere memorization.”
The marksmanship wasn’t. The business sense wasn’t.
Rae reached over and took his hand. Her smile was gentle because she wanted to offer him a way out. “You must think I’m a dolt for failing statistics.”
“Not at all.” He shook his head. “I went online a few weeks ago and looked at that professor’s syllabus. He’s teaching it wrong.”
“He is?” Shock popped in Rae’s head. “I thought I was an idiot.”
Wulf said, “You’re not. That class is in shambles. It would confuse rather than teach. An intelligent person would fare worse. If you want to learn statistics, we’ll sit down with your textbook and I’ll have you doing it in an afternoon.”
“I already sold back my textbooks,” she admitted.
Wulf’s startled expression bordered on cold anger for an instant, but he brushed it off. “No matter. Take that credit card when we get home and buy them back.”
Rae didn’t answer him because she didn’t know which side she should argue.
Tuesday night, during the endless supper at Les Tablettes with courses and courses of food but no wine, when Wulf took a phone call away from the table and left his steak unattended, Flicka and Rae sat together on a tangerine booth seat against the wall. Flicka leaned over to Rae and asked if she was all right.
“Yeah. Why?” Rae’s confusion at the question must have shown on her face. She ate a bite of her chicken, sauced with yet another velvety, buttery gravy that she had never eaten before.
“Good. Wulfie can be a bit too intense for some people, sometimes. Also, has he been drinking a lot, lately?”
“Um, not that I know of.” Worry bloomed in Rae’s head. “Why? Has he had a problem with that?”
“Madre Dios, no. God forbid he overindulge in anything and lose control. It’s weird that suddenly there’s no wine with supper, though. He shushed me about it.”
Rae leaned in. If they were going to talk behind Wulf’s back, she got to ask questions, too. “I know this sounds weird, but is there anything he’s not good at?”
Flicka usually giggled prettily, but at Rae’s question, she snorted. “Oh, merde, yes.”
Siblings always know the dirty secrets. Rae leaned farther toward Flicka, until their shoulders touched. “Like what?”
“Music,” Flicka said. “He was technically proficient on the piano and the guitar, practically perfect, but his music had no passion, no emotion. It gave you chills to listen to it. He hasn’t played for years.”
All those concerts, all those symphonies. Was Wulf torturing himself?
No, she had seen him at that concert and again at the symphony he took her to Sunday night. He had thoroughly enjoyed the music. He was generous that way. “What else?”
“He obviously has no fashion sense. Wulfie has a tailor in London who practically tells him what to wear each day and what shoes to wear it with. His only sensibility is understated. He also cannot cook, unless he’s learned. He used to measure the amount of mayonnaise or mustard in milliliters when he made sandwiches for me when I was little, until Frau Keller finally told him that he could estimate. Is he sleeping?”
So everybody knew about his insomnia. “About three hours a night. Four hours, sometimes, before he gets up and works in the living room on his computer.”
Flicka grinned and flicked her hand in dismissal. “Three hours is normal for him. Four hours is utter laziness.”
Last night, Rae had slept in his arms for five whole hours before he woke her up and made love to her yet again.
Every time they made love, because it might be their last time, Rae tried to hold him, to memorize him.
Wulf was at times demanding, ravenous, insatiable, even sweet, and his repertoire and creativity were impressive, but it seemed like he was holding something of himself back, protecting himself, because the end of the week drew nearer each day.
Rae should take that to heart.
She should be happy during this last week, but she should remember that the week would end all too soon.
When it did, Rae had to walk away. She wasn’t sure if Wulf was even flying back to the States with her or whether he was just going to see her onto a plane. Whenever it was, whether she had to walk away from him to board a plane or walk away from his SUV that dropped her off at her dorm, she had to walk, and keep walking, no matter what went on in her head.
And she must not look back.