One Cruel Night

A small gasp escaped my lips. “What? How?”

“Now, we have our own love lock. And I didn’t ruin all your romantic notions.”

He slid the lock into my hand. It was warm from his touch. My cheeks flushed with pleasure, and a sigh of happiness escaped my lips. It was way too soon. Of course, it wasn’t love. I knew that. This was just a symbol of our night. My one perfect night in Paris.

And though I knew it was entirely unreasonable and irrational to feel like I’d just tumbled over a cliff that I had no sense of ever coming back from, I fell anyway.

And I fell hard.

Chapter 5

The Palais Garnier was a stunning piece of architecture at the heart of Paris. Amy and I had hit all the main attractions this summer, but though she had a love for art, she had no joy for opera or ballet. Apparently, her parents had dragged her to one too many performances as a child, and instead of instilling a passion for the performing arts, it had ended up being more like trying to get kids to eat broccoli and killing their taste for it for life.

So, I’d never even seen the palatial building, let alone set foot in it.

But I damn well knew what it was.

As a child, I had been starved for art. My mom used to sing opera before she gave up her career for my dad. Not that she was going to be singing in the Palais Garnier, but she had a voice like a songbird. One winter, when we’d been stationed in San Antonio, we’d gone to see a touring ballet company perform The Nutcracker. For a full year, I’d insisted I was going to be a ballerina—until it was clear that I had two left feet. Or more precisely, a fin and swam like a fish.

But I’d loved the grace and beauty from day one.

And my breath caught when Penn brought me to the Paris opera house. The one place in the city I’d always wanted to go and never had the chance. It was as if the man could read my mind.

“Isn’t it closed?” I asked.

“Technically, yes.”

He had that smile on again. One so full of mischief that I was certain we were about to get in a world of trouble.

“Okaaay…”

“Trust me.” He held his hand out.

I didn’t trust him. I hardly knew him. And yet, I reached out and placed my hand in his. Put my world in his palm as an offering.

We walked around to the side of the building where a rotunda jutted from the main building with long windows cut into the stone side. Penn guided me to a door, and to my surprise, we entered a modern-looking restaurant with white tiled floors and bright red chairs.

The maître d’ shook Penn’s hand vigorously, and they began speaking fluent French, effectively cutting me out of the conversation. I knew enough French to get by, but I’d studied Spanish in high school. Up until this moment, I’d thought I’d get more use out of that than French or Latin.

“Come on,” Penn said, pulling me forward.

“What were you talking about?”

“The chef is an old family friend, and Pierre wanted to know if I’d be having private dining tonight.”

My jaw hung loose. Oh…of course. That was…normal.

“Are we…having private dining tonight?” I asked uncertainly.

He shook his head. “Better.”

Penn meandered us through the restaurant, stepped through a door labeled Staff Only, and then out into the darkened interior of the Palais Garnier.

“Are we allowed to be back here?” I whispered. I didn’t know why I was whispering, except that it felt like we should.

There was no one else on the inside of the building. It was even quieter than outside, and the only light came from soft recessed lighting.

“Define allowed.”

I couldn’t help it. A giggle escaped my lips. I’d never done anything illegal other than speeding and the occasional underage drinking. My father had been in the military, so his punishment for misbehavior was a more fearsome prospect than getting caught by the cops. But my dad was a million miles away, and Penn seemed to know exactly what he was doing. Suddenly, being inside of a theater house at night seemed like a great adventure.

“You know that The Phantom of the Opera was written about this theater?” Penn asked. He confidently walked the halls, as if he was well acquainted with the interior of the building.

“I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah. It was written by an opera critic who claimed that there was a real phantom.” He suggestively raised his eyebrows.

“Write what you know, right?”

“And he did. There’s an actual lake underneath the opera house.”

“Truly?” I asked in surprise.

“Yes. I’ve seen it before. More a pond actually. When they were building it, they kept tapping into the Seine, and instead of starting over somewhere else, they made it a man-made lake and built over it.”