Ren was a little too eager for the kiss. She tried to cool it, but then she made the mistake of looking at Sacha. His expression was so grave and utterly gorgeous. She lifted her face, a kiss now more important to her than the mistletoe, or the necessity of protecting her identity. He bent his head and her eyes fluttered closed.
The touch of his mouth was everything she remembered and she sank into the kiss, her hands sliding to his face, appreciating the faint, peppery scent of him. God, it was good – the tension in his shoulders, the heave of his chest.
She was just wondering whether the French also called it French kissing, when he eased away. A cheer rang out under the roof of the market and the families clapped and laughed. Ren was glad her thoughts about French kissing hadn’t progressed past thoughts, as she suddenly remembered all of the underage eyes on them. But it was a damn shame.
Mireille showed them the picture she’d taken. Although it was backlit and on an angle, Ren still had to stifle a gasp. Their eyes were closed. His brow was low and his hand splayed on the back of her neck, while Ren was clutching at Sacha as though she would drown if he stopped.
Joseph appeared and clapped them on the back. ‘Bon, vous deux. I suspected already last Friday that you would get to that. Now, do you want some time alone? I can manage here.’
‘No, you can’t,’ Sacha contradicted him, looking pointedly at Joseph’s conspicuously unfestive knee brace. ‘That’s why I’m here.’
‘You aren’t a professional antiques trader, then?’ Ren asked him.
‘No. I would have told you already. Conflict of interest or something.’
‘I could believe you’re a professional garden gnome, the way you’re dressed,’ she said, tugging his hat back down over his ears. ‘Here, I think I bought this for you without knowing it.’ She retrieved Monsieur Gnome out of her handbag and pressed the ugly thing into his palm. Sacha gave her a dry smile, but his fingers closed around the small gift more graciously than it deserved.
‘And you are Charlie Chaplin de Noël,’ he said as he tweaked her top hat in return.
She grinned at him and retrieved her phone to take a selfie. He raised his eyebrows at her. ‘I don’t have any social media accounts on here, thank God. This is just for me,’ she explained. ‘And maybe I’ll send it to M— shit! Malou!’ She saw she had ten missed calls.
She called her friend with a torrent of apologies and ten minutes later, Malou strode into the little market, her eyes wild. She clutched Ren’s wrists. ‘You escaped! You’re going to give me a heart attack!’
‘I didn’t escape! I just got lost and then… caught up. You sound like Grandmama and Ziggy.’
Malou blanched. ‘I always thought they were just controlling, but… you’re a menace, Ren.’ She pulled her friend into a tight hug. ‘What have you got yourself int—’ Ren turned to see what had stopped Malou in her tracks. She was regarding Sacha with deep mistrust. ‘I thought I saw him.’
‘And you didn’t tell me?’
‘We should go. I’ve been looking for you for two hours.’
‘But I’m helping Sacha’s friend Joseph.’
‘His friend, an antiques trader who wants a contact at Asquith-Lewis?’
‘Of course not!’ Ren hissed. ‘They don’t know who I am – except Sacha.’
‘Pute borgne de bordel de merde!’
‘I didn’t quite catch that? What kind of prostitute of shit?’
‘A prostitute with one eye,’ Malou explained with a grumble.
‘I like that one. Can we just stay a bit longer?’ Ren asked hopefully. ‘You could go tell Père Noël what you want for Christmas!’ She settled the top hat onto Malou’s head and held up her camera to snap a selfie of the two of them. Malou gave the camera a dry, Parisian glare at first, but Ren draped an arm around her and smiled such a goofy grin that she gave in with a sigh. ‘Just a heads-up,’ Ren continued as she tugged Malou into the crowded stand. ‘Sacha and I are pretending to be a couple so that no one suspects who I am.’
Malou gaped.
‘Have you run out of swear words? Do I win a prize?’
The market shut at six, ejecting streams of contented faces out into a light fall of snow. Ren ignored Malou’s hints that they should get going and helped pack away the stock on the tables while Sacha moved the carousel horse. One table wouldn’t fit, and Ren volunteered to help Sacha take it out to Joseph’s van.
The table was heavy and she had to stop every few feet. Outside in the dark, the old-fashioned mural on the wall of the market glowed and the shops with their shutters down showed off their full range of graffiti. Snippets of jazz and passionate chansons drifted out of the few restaurants and bars.
Ren expected to feel a ghost of fear, but this darkness was different, when she was just Sacha’s girlfriend Wren. She didn’t feel threatening eyes on her or imagine every car door opening, masked men spilling out to grab her.
By the time they reached Joseph’s van, she was ready to keel over with exertion. She staggered the last few steps, but her aching fingers lost grip.
‘Ouf,’ Sacha grunted and gasped in pain. He managed to wrench his foot out from underneath the table leg despite Ren’s clumsy attempts to help. He waved off her apologies.
After he’d stowed the unwieldy table in the van, his new injury was a good excuse to take his arm as they wandered back, the light snow glinting in the glow of the streetlamps.
‘Tell me about the market,’ she said. ‘When did it start? I bet you know its entire history.’
He glanced at her with an almost smile. ‘It started with these, actually, la poubelle.’ He pointed to the overflowing bin. ‘Imagine we are in the time of the Belle Époque. The Sacré-Cœur is a construction site. A new Paris has been built and destroyed and rebuilt after the Franco-Prussian war and the city is looking out at the world – and taking over large parts of Africa.
‘Art and literature and science all flourish with no war and Paris is at the centre of these movements. The prefect of the city is a man called Monsieur Poubelle who introduced Paris to the concept of rubbish collection, stopping the previous practice of leaving rubbish out on the street.
‘All of this is progress. But at this time, the rich people had all the money and most people were not rich. The majority had no part in science or literature, except sometimes as objects of pity, and their stories are not told. Except here at the Marché aux Puces.’
Except by you, Ren thought to herself. She felt a tingle of understanding, a conviction about her own life that it would be so much easier to keep ignoring.
‘The chiffonniers, the ones who used to look through the rubbish for things of value, their lives changed. They could no longer operate in the city, so they came to this place, just outside the old defences.
‘And now you can buy the beautiful furniture of the bourgeois houses of the Belle Époque here. It is a mixing place, a democracy of objects and a warehouse of history.’
‘A democracy of objects,’ she repeated under her breath. ‘How do you keep doing that?’
‘What?’
‘Ever since I arrived at the market this morning, I’ve been feeling something and you just… you just explained myself to me.’ Her eyes were hot and her nose was aching with cold.
‘You’re thinking about Asquith-Lewis.’
‘Yes. I’ve never seen anything like this and that’s just the way my grandmother wants it. I hate to think that… my whole life has been curated to remove important things. She wants to protect me, but this is… wrong. There is so much… honour in this trade. And passion. And history. You can hear it when Mireille talks about the objects she’s found and sold. My grandmother would prefer I didn’t know that we’re actually just the same.’
‘I doubt she shares your opinion,’ said Sacha. ‘Rather than honour, I imagine she thinks about dishonesty. You’re… not like her, you know. You’re not… like anyone else.’
He meant it as a compliment, but did he realise how lonely it was to be unlike anyone else? She leaned her head against his shoulder for a few steps. ‘What about you? How are you connected to the market? Joseph is an old friend?’
Sacha nodded and his steps slowed. She wondered whether he would dodge the question. ‘He used to do some restoration work at the museum in Saint-Denis, many years ago. He offered to show me his work and… I caught the fever.’
‘You work for a museum? That’s it!’
He shook his head. ‘Wrong again. And in any case, I was only sixteen at the time. I was doing general service work.’
She wondered at his tight tone. ‘General service work? Is that like an internship?’
‘No,’ he said with a cough. ‘It’s… alternative to prison, you know?’
Prison… The word echoed in her thoughts, and unconsciously she stopped walking altogether.
He wouldn’t meet her gaze. She could understand that, given she had no idea what expression was on her face.
‘It’s the only time…’ he began stiltedly, but his voice trailed off. ‘And it was for theft. Not a violent crime.’
She nodded vigorously. For all her vague anxieties about crime, she would never have believed him capable of violence. Her grandmother would assume, on the other hand… But Grandmama didn’t have to know.
Ren couldn’t decide what to say. She had no right to ask and no confidence that he’d answer a well-meaning question, which, from her, would doubtless come across as naïve at best. But she had to say something so he’d understand it didn’t change anything for her – it didn’t change what she felt, what she wasn’t supposed to be feeling anyway.
‘If you were sixteen, your record must have been expunged.’ He nodded. His expression was matter-of-fact, accepting, and even that broke her heart a little. ‘I suppose you can’t expunge something from your memory, though.’
He glanced at her sharply, but said nothing. The streetlamp threw dark shadows over his features as tiny flakes of snow whirled between them. She lifted a hesitant hand and traced the deep groove on his forehead. He blinked, his soft eyes clouding under thick lashes. In a delayed reaction, he caught her wrist and gently removed her hand and she let it drop with a sigh.
‘Thank you for explaining why you’re spending your evenings and weekends setting up Santa’s Belle Époque Wonderland and dressing up as an elf.’
He shoved his hands into his pockets as they turned back to the arcade. ‘You were an excellent co-elf.’
‘They’re lovely people, Mireille and Joseph and Soufiane and the others.’
‘This market is home for Joseph – and for me, too, in a way.’
‘Huh,’ she said, her smile fading. ‘No one would say that about Asquith-Lewis, and yet we’ve worked so hard to preserve it.’
‘Don’t take too much on yourself. You employ many, many people – including your friend, I heard. You have history, like this market.’
‘Yes,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘a long history of hobnobbing with aristocrats. I’m not sure it’s a history I want to repeat.’
‘History doesn’t repeat. We are always writing it.’
‘Can you tell me what the ending is? I always need to know the ending!’
He laughed, then, with a wide smile that was crooked and utterly infectious. He lifted a hand and brushed the backs of his fingers along her hairline and she nearly stumbled at the hesitant tenderness. His smile faded. ‘Malou will be wondering where you are.’
‘Hopefully Joseph has distracted her with more bickering about his stock.’
‘I wonder what he would be doing if he knew who you really are.’
‘Nothing, I’m sure. He’s too good a man – like you. But I’ll tell him tomorrow when we finish up.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘The market is open tomorrow, right? I promise I won’t break anything or undercharge too many people.’
‘If you can find your way back here, you’re welcome to come.’ He took off towards the slanting light from the door of the market.
She scrunched her nose at his retreating form. ‘You think I’ll get lost again.’
‘I have faith in you,’ he called over his shoulder.
‘That makes one of us,’ she said with a sigh. As he disappeared into the arcade, Ren suddenly remembered where she was supposed to be tomorrow afternoon and who she was supposed to be bringing. But she didn’t want to ruin the night by mentioning it.
