Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 77018 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77018 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
đź‘Ť
The thumbs-up emoji was a versatile little thing. It could mean “yep,” “okay,” or “sure thing.” Sometimes, given the right situation, it could even come across as a condescending fuck you. The ambiguity of it was exactly why I’d sent it.
I shoved my phone into my purse, then gave up trying to flag down a server and went inside to pay because, as I’d learned throughout the day, getting the check took time in Paris. And time was something I did not have.
I booked it to the nearest metro station. This time I got on the train going in the right direction (yay, me!). No one threw up (yay, people), but by the time I emerged from the station, I only had five minutes to get there. Not that I’d give a crap if my tardiness annoyed Vance. What I didn’t want to do was listen to him complain about it, for God only knew how long. The rest of the trip. Until retirement. From beyond his grave…
I hurried around a café terrace, and there, in the not-too-far distance, stood the glowing Eiffel Tower. Stopping, I pulled my phone from my purse and took a few pictures, and like Vance could sense somewhere in the universe that I was dawdling, he texted.
(205) 555-9072: I’m by the guy selling light-up Eiffel Tower trinkets.
Almost there.
And that was another word that could mean a lot of things. “Almost” was completely subjective.
I booked it down the busy sidewalk, dodging dog walkers and couples linked arm in arm, but the illuminated structure never seemed to get any closer. “How big is the thing?”
I had to be close. God, I had to be because I hadn’t run since my senior year of high school, and a few minutes into my sprint, a stitch had lanced through my side, making it hard to breathe.
I shot across the street and headed toward a park.
With my luck, there was a high probability my body would shut down from overexertion. Wouldn’t that be a way to cark it? In the middle of a Parisian park, right by the homeless man feeding a bunch of rats. There was a headline that could rival the whole carbon monoxide Airbnb: Chronically late travel journalist eaten by Parisian rats after sudden cardiac arrest. Vance would get a kick out of that, I’d bet.
The line of bushes opened to the sprawling, brightly lit swath of the Champ de Mars. I’d made it. Victory was mine. All I had to do was find the single man selling twinkling trinkets, and—I skidded to a stop. There must have been one hundred men with light-up Eiffel Tower souvenirs spread out on blankets. Vance evidently didn’t understand that the word “man” was singular.
Panting, I took my phone with the full intention of sending Vance the dictionary definition of “man,” but before I could finish, a heavy hand landed on my shoulder.
“I have mace!” I whirled around and positioned myself to nail the guy in the balls, dropping my stance when Vance shifted into the light.
“Did you really just make a ninja noise?” he asked, laughing.
Had I? Probably. I had always been a firm believer that people who came across as slightly insane were more likely to ward off a potential attacker than one who just screamed. “Why are you popping out of the shadows like hell’s annoyingly muscular timekeeper?” I touched a hand to my pounding chest just as he threw his head back on another cackle.
He jerked his chin toward the illuminated tower. “We’re late.” He was like a broken record with that.
I started across the lawn after him. “It’s three minutes past time—well, maybe four after you tried to give me a heart attack.”
“Don’t be so dramatic.”
“You should feel my chest. I can promise you it’s five beats per minute away from heart-attack level. And no, that was not an invitation to put your hand on my tit.”
He snorted before taking a sharp turn onto a gravel path that led through small trees and shrubbery.
“Did you, Dickcasso, just snort at the word tit?”
“I prefer content creator, and I snorted because I would have expected a logophile to use a much more poetic word than tit.”
Logophile was a good word. “Like what? Mammary glands?” That sounded about on his level.
“More like bosom…”
“This isn’t the eighteen-hundreds.”
We walked through the rest of the park in silence, both of us staring at the massive iron structure before us. The only thing around for size comparison were the trees that lined the park path, and the tower absolutely dwarfed them.
“I knew it was huge, but…”
“Seeing it in person is a completely different story than seeing it on the Discovery Channel, isn’t it?” He dropped his backpack to the ground and rummaged through it.
I guessed even Mr. Punctual could give into being a little tardy to get a good picture.