July 3rd 2020

Chapter 185
Their Escape to Lights

Lucas stood in the hotel lobby, hands in his pockets, looking up at the impressive sculpture greeting arrivals. When they'd walked in the day before, Maya had stalled and stared at it with wide eyes for several minutes. She'd stopped a couple more times in their zig zag of a tour through the afternoon and the evening, and he fully expected her to come back another time… several times… to sketch it. There was a young man right now, sitting nearby, doing just that. Lucas had noticed him and moved to the side just a bit, ensuring that he wasn't blocking his view, and the man had given him a nod. A minute later, a young woman emerged from the elevator and joined him. The artist had slipped his thin sketchpad in his jacket pocket and led her out of the hotel, and Lucas smiled to himself. So they had both been waiting for their own dates.

Date… Capital D, bolded, italicized, double underlined… Because Paris. Maya had insisted that he should get ready first and head down, so she could do her own preparing and then meet him downstairs. He'd asked if what she really wanted to do was to make him pass out when he'd see her.

"Any chance to practice my French, right?" she'd teased.

He had agreed to her request, and so he'd gotten dressed, putting on the suit he felt most appropriate to what this night was shaping up to be. Maya had been 'hiding' on the balcony, and he let her know he was going down when he was all set. She kept her eyes shut as she nodded to this, preserving her own surprise, even if this was not a new suit and she would have seen it before. As she would tell him, after they'd spent the last couple of days in casual clothes or no clothes at all, it would be a change.

As agreed that morning, they had not left the hotel all day. Breakfast had been enjoyed with all the leisure inspired by their location and the company they kept. Lucas firmly believed that, if she could, Maya would have taken as her sole souvenir of this trip the view from their balcony. She looked into the city with so much peace about her, like she'd always been meant to be here. Lucas vowed, then and there, to bring her back, right here, whenever he could, for all the years of their life together.

It was almost midday, time for lunch, by the time they could be convinced to head back into their room, though it wasn't food which drew them there. Instead they gave in to that ceaseless drive to reach for one another, until time and activity had worked them into finally ordering up something to eat. They had enjoyed this with a bit of French television, which had turned into a bit of hilarity when they had come upon a show that their teacher in high school would show to the class from time to time. This would usually lead to exercises where they would use the characters in their sentences. It was something between a blast from the past and a perfectly timed memory. They sat there on the couch, pretending to be writing their summaries as they used to do, or commenting on what had become of some character or another. These were not new, the series had been over for a while, but they had never exactly seen the whole thing from top to bottom.

"I feel like we owe it to them to find it," Maya declared, when they'd turned off the television and started thinking about getting ready for dinner.

"Because they taught us French?" Lucas guessed with a smirk.

"Exactly," Maya grinned.

So, when he had trailed off from the sculpture in the lobby, still waiting, Lucas had turned to his phone, making a search for some way or another for them to do just as Maya had suggested. There were DVDs, he might be able to get a hold of them… They would need a different player to watch them, or they…

Oh, she had been turning his head for years now, and it had never gotten to feel any less powerful, only strengthened. The first time had been that morning when the two of them and Zay, no longer grounded from their near run to New York, had shown up at school in 'fancy dress.' Other big hits had been the violet dress when they'd gone to their first school dance, or that poor rain drenched dress the night of their first date… It would be very hard to surpass the long awaited wedding dress, but on their first night out in Paris, he could have called it a very close second.

"I better not leave you unattended too long," Maya told him as she swept up to him. "Someone's going to try and steal you away, looking like that," she hummed, looking him over. He'd been making her weak in the knees for all those years, too.

"Guess we'll just have to stick together then," he smiled, leaning to kiss her briefly.

"What a sacrifice," she smiled back at him, taking his arm as he led her out of the hotel. She did not miss a chance to take a passing glance at the sculpture. "Looks like it might rain," she told him as she got a look of the sky.

"It does," Lucas agreed, looking back at her with a smile she read easily as holding a memory of their first date, running for cover under an unexpected shower, kissing in the rush of breathlessness… "It's good luck," he decided with a confident tip of the head.

"Yeah?" Maya smiled.

"It was… not the start anyone would aim for," he explained, "But now we're here, ten years later, going on eleven…"

"You did say we would remember that night," Maya nodded, laughing.

"Haven't forgotten a minute of it," he promised.

"Well, I'm not sure how kind the rain will be to this dress, but if it gets us more of all that, then it will be worth it."

"But if we can find our luck elsewhere…" Lucas suggested, and Maya responded at once.

"That'd be great, too," she nodded and made him laugh along with her. "So, where is this restaurant and how are we getting there?"

"Well, it depends. It's supposed to be twenty minutes on foot from the hotel, so if you'd rather we get a ride we can do that. The reservation isn't for another… almost forty minutes," he explained, getting a look at the time on his pocket watch. Maya considered this as they strolled along, all the while gazing at everything around them. When she turned her eyes back to him, she didn't even have to say it. They were walking.

It was one of the things he loved the most, just to watch her when her eyes took on the wide openness of her curiosity as it was being given constant stimulation by what she saw. And to have it happen here now, it was like she might have gone on overload. He doubted that she felt those twenty minutes go by before they reached the restaurant. They were probably going to be walking back, too, the better to let her catch what she might have missed on the way in.

"So, what made you choose this place?" Maya asked as they walked through the door. She was already scanning her surroundings, and Lucas was sure she'd figure it out in no time, but he told her anyway.

"I saw pictures when I was looking up restaurants, and I saw that," he pointed up. Maya turned her eyes to follow his direction and she discovered the ceiling.

It was a swift face-off between the drop of her jaw and the awareness to rein her expression back in. He had known from the time they had been bare acquaintances, new friends, that she always appreciated a good ceiling, and she had maintained this through the years, declaring that a bare ceiling was okay a lot of the times, but oh when it could be more than that… When she had helped design the Hex, it had been a very important factor for her to give its ceiling something worth looking at.

"Well played," she breathed, turning a smile back to him.

"I'm just glad you didn't see it before," he smiled back.

They were led to their table, where Lucas would find Maya's attention divided between the menu and the ceiling enough that he ended up reading out the options to her. Her discreet sort of smirk confirmed that she was not only listening but also actively amused at the sound of his accent dipping in and out as he spoke French. It went back to their days in French class. As much as she would tease him by putting on an exaggerated southern accent in imitating him, he didn't actually have one of those. But then he'd go and speak French and, according to Maya, his inner Huckleberry would burst out of him and announce itself.

"I don't know, it all sounds great, can you start over?" Maya asked, looking back down to him.

"I could, so long as you don't mind not eating for a while," he turned the pages back to the start of the menu. "Or I could just continue speaking to you in French for the rest of the night," he suggested, switching over. Maya laughed.

"Alright, I can get in on that," she sat back in her chair. Her accent bordered on flawless, which she credited to her singing, her music.

"Do you still need me to read the menu again?"

"No, you just keep talking to me like that," she replied, and he resettled in his chair, ready to talk her ear off if it was what she wanted. He told her about his hunt for the series and what he'd so far discovered. She was very eager to track down those DVDs with him, to bring those back home and finally get 'the full story' once and for all.

"I know we said we wouldn't take too many pictures, like GiGi said, but this was too good not to take," Lucas told Maya as they were waiting for their desserts. He held his phone out to her and she smiled at once, finding the picture he must have taken earlier, as he was reading the menu to her. There she sat, front and center, eyes turned to the ceiling spread overhead and a smile on her lips.

"I can see why you did," she agreed. "Maybe… We can make a… a challenge. We decide how many pictures to take every day. That will help us to really narrow it down, only the big moments."

"I like that," Lucas nodded. "How many per day?" he wondered, and they both thought about it for a few seconds.

"Ten?" Maya first suggested. They both thought about this and agreed without saying that it might have not been enough of a challenge. "Five then?"

"Five," he repeated, considering. When this drew on, she nudged his foot under the table.

"Are you counting?" she asked, smiling.

"Well, five every day makes seventy. I was just thinking… one hundred in total, that might be a nice goal?" Lucas explained. Now that she thought about it, she kind of liked the number, too.

"Alright, well that would be…"

"Seven every day, plus two spares… for emergencies." She laughed at this, liking the idea of a photo emergency.

"Oh, but we didn't do it yesterday, and today's almost over…"

"I took some, here and there," he admitted, "And I'm sure you did, too." She gave an innocent face, but at a look from him she gave in with a chuckle.

"Fine, but we are not looking at those until we're back at the hotel. I did not put this dress on to look at our phones." He gave her a look which needed no translation, and his phone disappeared back into his pocket.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners