007 First Light

The café was called Café de Flare, she didn't quite grab it and didn't bother to ask the second time.

It was small — four tables inside, two outside on the pavement under a green awning,a chalkboard hung behind the counter, listing the day's roasts in a warm, swirling cursive script adorned with tiny chalk doodles of steam clouds.The man behind the counter was maybe sixty and looked like he'd been making coffee in this exact spot since before Isla was born. He didn't greet them. He looked up, assessed, and went back to what he was doing, which felt less rude than honest.

Theo ordered in French.

He said something short and direct and the man behind the counter nodded and that was that.

Isla ordered a coffee by pointing at the chalkboard and saying un café, s'il vous plaît and the man looked at her for a painfully long beat, blinking as if trying to decipher a completely foreign dialect, making her instantly regret opening her mouth.

They took one of the outside tables.

Paris at six-thirty in the morning was not what she'd expected. She'd expected — she didn't know. Something more performative. A city conscious of being looked at. What she got instead was ordinary in the best possible way. A woman in a grey coat walking a dog so small. A delivery van double-parked outside the boulangerie across the street, the driver carrying trays of bread.

She wrapped her hands around her cup and didn't say anything.

Theo didn't say anything either.

It wasn't the silence of two people who didn't know what to say to each other. But of people who enjoy Silence.She'd had that with Sofie once. She'd forgotten it was possible with someone she'd known for less than a day.

She thought about Sofie's message. Then she put it somewhere else.

"Do you speak a lot of languages?" she asked.

Theo looked at her over his cup. "French and English."

"Is that a lot?"

"It's two."

She considered that. "My French is — functional. Technically."

"I heard."

She looked at him. There was something at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile but the blueprint for one.

"Was it that bad?"

"The pronunciation was fine," he said. "The delivery was very American."

"I am American."

"I know." He took a drink of his coffee. "He understood you."

She looked back at the street. Everything is still the same.,

"My mom is going to ask me if I've been to the Eiffel Tower," she said. Not to him particularly, just out loud, because the thought was there.

"Have you?"

"I've been in Paris for fourteen hours."

He looked faintly amused. "So no."

"So no."

"It's better at night anyway," he said. "First time."

She looked at him.

"Have you been there before?" she asked.

"No."

"Then how do you know?"

He thought about it. "I've been looking at it for years," he said. "On paper. In photographs. The scale reads differently at night when you can't see everything around it." A pause. "It should surprise you."

She turned that over.

"That's very specific," she said.

"Most things are."

She let it sit. She drank her coffee. 

She wasn't thinking about Ohio. She noticed she wasn't thinking about Ohio.

"Why architecture?" she said.

He looked at her.

"You don't have to answer," she said. "I'm just — I'm curious. You could draw anything. People draw people. Landscapes. You draw buildings."

He was quiet for a moment. Considering whether to answer or how to answer.

"Buildings stay," he said finally. "People move. Buildings just — hold. They hold everything that happens inside them and they don't change shape." He paused. "I find that — I don't know. Reliable."

She looked at him.

She thought about writing those sentences down somewhere. Not because they were beautiful, exactly though they were but because they told her something specific and true about the person sitting across from her and she didn't want to lose it before she knew what to do with it.

She didn't write it down. She just held it.

"What about you?" he asked. "The writing."

"What about it?"

He raised an eyebrow slightly. One word, repurposed back at her.

She almost smiled. "It's the opposite, maybe," she said. "Everything in my head is too loud and the writing is quiet. It makes things smaller. Manageable." A pause. "Or it did."

He didn't ask what that meant. He didn't tilt his head and ask her the reason.He just nodded, once, and looked back at the street.

Something loosened in her chest. The same loop of the knot as yesterday on the shuttle.

He was very good at that. Not asking the thing you weren't ready to answer.

They finished their coffees. The man inside collected their cups without commentary. They walked back to the program building through streets that were slowly waking up around them.

They didn't say much on the way back.

They didn't need to.

By the time they reached the building, Camille was in the hallway in a yellow robe with a coffee and the expression of someone who had been waiting to talk to both of them for considerably longer than was reasonable.

"There you are," she said, eyes going between them with barely concealed interest. "I was just about to

come and find you."

Isla glanced at Theo.

Theo looked at Camille with the expression of a man preparing himself.