We Talked of Paris and Ice Cream

Day 66

“Tell me about Paris,” she said. Her delicate chin rested in her hands, and she looked at me intently, a playful smile dancing in her deep brown eyes.

We were in my bedroom, enjoying a rare late morning in our pajamas. My face was still flushed from the mind-bending sex that had wracked my body — now stretched languidly on the sheets — an hour before. The supple moments stretched on, like dandelion seeds floating in a warm breeze.

I rolled onto my back, feeling the softness of the pillow beneath my shoulder blades. I was young, my muscles bunched under smooth skin; I had no one else to attend to in the whole wideness of existence except for this girl, and here she lay. There was nothing to call me from this warm, white sheet, dappled with the clear sunlight of a languid day.

She kicked her legs slowly, like a cat on a windowsill swishing its tail.

“What do you want to know about Paris?” I asked.

She wrinkled her nose and pushed my leg playfully. “Anything. Everything.” And then — because she was more than vague generalities: “What surprised you the most about it?”

My mind wandered back to the summer before, when I’d spent an afternoon floating along cobbled streets and sipping wine at cafés, marveling at the waiters, who played hard to get.

“Probably… that I had such fun doing the things you’d expect: seeing the Notre Dame (though it closed just as I arrived), looking at the art hung on the iron fences along the Seine, stopping at random cafés and ordering a bottle of wine at each.”

She laughed. “You must have been very drunk.”

I laughed back. “No, it was…strange. There are so many things that surprised me about Paris, and maybe this was one of them: the wine didn’t seem to… you didn’t get drunk on the wine there like you do here. It was… warm and pleasant, instead of harsh. It soothed you, like a… like a lover.”

She laughed again, like hard rock music in a cathedral.

“I’m serious! It did, instead of pouncing on you all of a sudden like a crazy drunk monster.”

“The wine made love to you?” she asked huskily. “Was it…as good as me?” We both laughed, then, and I rolled up onto my elbow, leaning in for a kiss.

“Nothing is as good as you,” I whispered.

She pushed me back, hard, and snorted. “BS! You and I both know cookie dough ice cream in a waffle cone is better than anything else!”

My hurt surprise became a soaring joy. I propped back up on my elbow and looked into her eyes, in a way that I hadn’t before.

“I love you,” I said.

She fixed me with a serious gaze, holding my eyes in hers for a moment. There was, within those deep brown depths of hers, a flash of emotion I could not — dared not — discern. The laughter returned to them, and she pushed herself vigorously from the bed.

“Where are you going?” I asked, disappointment creeping.

“Ice cream for breakfast,” she said, an impish smile dancing.

I tamped the confused disappointment down — way down — and shut the lid; then, I smiled broadly. “Heck. Yes. You read my mind. Grown up perks!”

I jumped from the bed and moved to hug her playfully, but she wriggled from my grasp and, with a shriek of laughter, tore from the room, her dark scent lingering in my ears.

This is but a small piece of my lifelong daily writing practice. If you enjoyed this, you may also like some of my other writing, which includes short fiction, novel excerpts, and other essays.