Даниэла Стил - Turning Point

“No one on bicycles wears helmets here,” Tom reminded Stephanie. “Pretend you’re French.” The traffic was insane, particularly at that hour of the morning, but despite Stephanie’s concerns, they got to the office safely in time for the meeting, as the others filed in. Wendy had already said she would go home on the Metro at the end of the day, and Marie-Laure came over to talk to the two women to ask how the weekend was. She said two of her children had been sick and she had been stuck at home. They told her about shopping at the Galeries Lafayette and their visit to the Louvre.

“Maybe you should visit some of the smaller boutiques,” Marie-Laure suggested. “We get a lot of threats on the department stores now. I don’t feel comfortable shopping there myself.” It had occurred to Wendy, but Stephanie had insisted they’d be okay, and the bargains were great. There were sales everywhere, and they had both gotten some things they loved. Stephanie was wearing a new red V-neck sweater, which Gabriel noticed immediately when he arrived. He smiled at her, dropped his briefcase next to a chair, and walked over to her with the same intense expression that had haunted her all weekend. He kissed her on both cheeks, and just standing next to him gave her the same thrill as when he’d kissed her. Everyone in the room was aware of their mutual attraction, which Stephanie found embarrassing, but he didn’t mind at all.

Valérie was the last to come in, and smiled with a particularly wry glance at Tom, who felt weak at the sight of her.

“I had a very hard day yesterday, thanks to you,” he scolded her as she approached, and she was puzzled. “Paul and I visited every bar in St. Germain on Friday and Saturday night. I had a splitting headache all day. If you’d had dinner with me, I wouldn’t have been forced to check out every bar on the Left Bank, where I was shamelessly overserved by evil waiters.” They had progressed from red wine to tequila shots to scotch, and most of Saturday night was a blur when he woke up on Sunday.

“So that was my fault?” she asked, amused. Paul looked rough too. Neither of them had shaved before the morning meeting, but both were handsome men and could get away with it, and it was the current trend in Paris as well as the States. Bill had shaved and looked fresh and relaxed after his weekend with his children. His activities had been more wholesome than theirs.

Paul had wound up going home with some Brazilian girl from the last bar, which he barely remembered. She was an exotic dancer the bar had hired with a samba troupe for the evening. Tom had a vague recollection of dancing on the bar with a half-naked girl wearing a G-string made of feathers. He was sure they’d had fun, what he recalled of it, and had found the G-string in the pocket of his jacket when he woke up in his apartment on Sunday morning. He wasn’t sure if the girl had been there or not, but kept the G-string as a souvenir of a very entertaining evening in Paris. He had other mementos like it at home.

“It sounds like you deserve the headache you got,” Valérie commented, and the others laughed as they sat down at the conference table and got down to business, looking at the schedule for the week. Gabriel sat next to Stephanie and whispered to her occasionally as they studied statistics and descriptions of the hospitals they’d be visiting. They went over a lot of paperwork, and Valérie handed out a synopsis of their post-trauma programs, how they were run, and how quickly they were set up after the incident. The systems in place sounded very efficient, and they had a two-year follow-up program with free therapy for as long as it was needed, and it could be extended on request.

They left with an armload of paperwork at the end of the day. Stephanie already had a stack of papers on her desk at the apartment at the end of the first week, and so did the others. She and Wendy went back to the Left Bank by Metro, and the boys rode home on the Vélib’ bicycles. The four of them had dinner together at the closest bistro to the apartment, and made it an early night. Tom still looked a little rough and suggested he might have a brain tumor as they all laughed at him. Bill thought it might be the tequila shots he had imbibed heavily on both weekend nights. Tom told them about the feathered G-string he’d found in his pocket and they laughed. He was running true to form, and hitting his stride in Paris.

Gabriel had wanted to have dinner with Stephanie that night, but she declined and said she wanted to have dinner with her team. He called her three times during the meal and sent her several texts. He was continuing to pursue her at the same intense pace, and Stephanie was half uncomfortable and half excited by it. No one had ever courted her so avidly, but she didn’t want to stop it either, and was feeling confused about him.

“What are you going to do?” Wendy whispered after one of his texts. Stephanie looked flushed and mildly embarrassed.

“Nothing. I’m married,” she said with determination, but she sounded like she was trying to convince herself. Other than his dogged pursuit of her, he seemed like a sane person. He was incredibly smart and fatally attractive. He was a hard man to brush off, and she didn’t want to, which was what scared her about him. He had a powerful effect on her, almost like a drug.

“Your being married doesn’t seem to slow him down,” Wendy suggested cautiously. “I’m sure you can handle it, and you’ll know what you want to do, but be careful of married men. They’re probably not much different here than in the States. That’s a hard game to win,” she said wistfully, thinking of Jeff. “Sooner or later everyone gets hurt. I don’t know many stories of married men leaving their wives for another woman. I actually don’t know any. It just doesn’t seem to happen. They’re comfortable where they are, and the two women wind up complementing each other, which just makes the guy’s marriage work better.”

“You sound like you’ve been there,” Stephanie said gently, and saw the look on Wendy’s face as she nodded but didn’t explain. There was nothing unusual about her story, except that it was happening to her.

“Just be careful. And don’t throw your life out the window for him yet.” Stephanie nodded. She barely knew Gabriel, it had only been a week since they met, although he made it feel like she’d known him for years.

She talked to her children that night before she went to bed. Andy sounded tired and sad when they talked for a few minutes afterward. He didn’t ask what she was doing and didn’t seem to care. He wasn’t interested in the medical details of what she was learning, only in the fact that she wasn’t there. It made it hard to share her activities with him, and she could hardly tell him about Gabriel. But he had become a big part of the experience in Paris for her, and she couldn’t share that with Andy either. There was nothing left for them to talk about except the kids, which happened to them at home too. Whatever interests they had shared before seemed to have disappeared. Seven years of marriage was beginning to feel like the Sahara Desert, which she had admitted to Gabriel over dinner. He said he had experienced the same thing, and only their children had kept him and his wife together. But his children were older and he had less reason to hang on now. Ryan and Aden were four and six, and needed them both, or so Stephanie thought. And she couldn’t manage them alone with her work. But it seemed like a poor reason to stay married. Even Andy had suggested they take a break, before she left, which had sounded extreme to her at the time but less so now that she had met Gabriel. Maybe it was what she needed. Time away from Andy to figure things out when she went back. Or maybe the time in Paris would do that. She had never felt so torn and confused in her life. Gabriel had already upset the apple cart in a major way, and it had only been a week.