Everything was already set for her to go back to Africa and continue her journey, to follow that hunch whispering her in her ear, under her skin, that there's still something there for her, something that will open wide the doors on her power and make her bigger and greater than anyone on earth. Everything was already set for her to become a goddess among men, like a mechanism sparked from the moment she emitted her first cry and was ready to come to its apex now.
Her image in the mirror stares back at her distractedly as she applies her red lipstick. The sun coming from the window doors of the small balcony hits the golden tube of Pirate, and she tells herself she's feeling beautiful today, and sparkly, and so good about herself. Her hair is up in a messy bun, her brown eyeliner is intentionally smudged and her skin is as luminous as this new day in Paris.
Everything was already set for her to go back to Africa but the power pulsating and calling her from that continent felt lonely, and Bonnie has chosen to believe Paris could give her something she was missing. Enzo had promised Paris and love and eternity. He hadn't been able to give her any of those things, and after that stupid, brief moment of weakness with Damon, he hasn't come back to her, no matter how intensely she tried to call him back to her.
But, somewhere in her mind she's sure he cannot refuse her in Paris. Still, it's been four days, and he's never appeared, and she misses him. "Do you? Really? Color me touched," a familiar, sarcastic and taunting voice asks in her mind as she reaches inside her suede bag for the keys to her B&B room, her fingers meeting the cold metal of the necklace Damon left in her bag. She takes a furtive peek behind her, half hoping to see him, her newly married best friend, with a cocky grin on his pretty lips and that soft look in his eyes that she sometimes likes to believe is reserved for her only. But he is not there, nor is Enzo to witness another moment of weakness.
Bonnie sprays her new perfume walking through the cloud of the falling particles.
The spring air becomes a little suffocating every now and then. It makes it a little harder to breathe even if she's wearing a white blouse and the top buttons are undone. It feels oppressive, especially whenever the sound of the piano music from the open balcony can be heard.
Someone in the next building has been rehearsing the same beautiful, horrible, haunting piece every day since she's arrived, a solo composed by Paul de Senneville called "Mariage d'amour". Right, "Marriage of love", how fitting. And every time she hears that song she flies out the door like she can't wait to get away from it.
She takes the stairs and hears a couple of girls giggling quite loudly over her head as she approaches the first floor, and then the clicking of stiletto heels over the marble. She switched to flat shoes and sneakers the moment she arrived, for the most iconic boulevards and squares, like the Champs-Élysées and the Place de la Bastille, and in the narrow alleys of historic neighborhoods like Montmartre, are covered in cobblestones and one could easily break an ankle trying to navigate them in heels.
She's walking Pont des Art, admiring the Seine and suddenly everyone in the world seems to be in love and happy. She feels so alone, sticking up like a sore thumb between all the lovey-dovey couples around her that she starts missing the loud wannabe influencers walking around with cameras, wearing Chanel and Zimmermann like it's nothing, and constantly checking to make sure they are hit by the right light.
She makes a stop at Les Deux Magots, a café in Saint Germain de Pres, in the VI arrondissement, an sits outside on a wicker chair. The place is bursting with people, mostly tourists, as it's the liquoriste café where writers such as Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé met to drink absinthe and talk literature, and later by many more artists like Picasso, Jacques Prevert and Jean Paul Sartre.
It's the second time she's allowed herself this treat since it's not exactly cheap. A cappuccino, a croissant and bread with Poitou-Charentes butter costs 15 bucks, and she enjoys it slowly, observing the colors around her, so different from back home where everything is stronger and louder and larger. She breathes in the fragrant air coming from the bakery as the waiters walk about her with no rush in their pristine black suits.
Everything is so lovely, she thinks, taking a bite of her soft croissant, but part of her cannot help but wonder if what she tastes and breathes in could be sweeter with the right person next to her. It's a melancholic thought that seems to hold back the spring around her and make the romance of Paris feel just out of reach.
She wants to blame Enzo, but when her hand distractedly grazes over the skin of her cleavage where Damon's necklace briefly rested the one time she let herself wear it, she pushes that thought away feeling guilty. And a little ashamed. More than a couple of times she's thought to throw it in the Seine be get free of it.
One day she'll do it. Soon, she'll do it. And if later, as she walks the streets, she reaches inside her bag to let her fingers entangle with the chain of the necklace it'll be just out of curiosity.
Bonnie visits Pont Neuf, the oldest surviving bridge in Paris, admiring the statue of The Vert Galant, King Henry IV, and from there descends the stone steps to enter a small triangular garden named after him, where she eats a sandwich under the shadow of a weeping willow and sits by the river to see the water move with tranquility, hearing the splash of stones thrown into the river and the chatting of people having a picnic. It's just lovely, a tiny park at the tip of an island in the Seine, with gorgeous views of the city, its bridges and landmarks.
She takes her time admiring the stained-glass windows of the Sainte Chapelle, so grand and full of so colors that look like they are held together by lacework in stone. And all around her the walls and columns are so dense and rich in solid purples and blues and gold. It looks like a place out of a story. And in that story the High Lord turned and met her eyes. And as the tall man with dark hair turns in her direction she holds her breath. "He's not even remotely handsome like me," Damon says in her imagination. And she ignores him as she's done many times in reality.
She spends the rest of the day at the Tuileries Palace and happily gets lost in its gardens for a few hours when the sun is finally setting, tired from all the walking but relaxed, smelling of grass and a hint of that pricey perfume she's brought to tell herself she's living her life with no regrets.
When she comes back to her B&B room it's late and she's so tired she barely has time to take a shower before falling asleep in a bed that feels even softer than the night before.
During the night she wakes up with a dry mouth and she has no strength to get up to rummage in the tiny fridge inside her room, so she just grabs the bag she's abandoned next to her bed and reaches inside to find the bottle of water she usually takes with her when she visits the city. She empties it with relief and turns again into her bed ready to go back to sleep. But something calls to her, she turns again, reaching inside the bag, wondering what Damon is doing now, if he and Elena found her gift among all the others, if a kitchen appliance is enough to buy her freedom back and allow them to forget each other. She wants to forget, and forget, and forget. Her hand comes up empty and she turns on the lamp on the nightstand to look inside the bag. She empties it on the bed, her heart beating so fast she feels on the verge of a panic attack. She hasn't felt so scared in so long that she doesn't know how to face this emotion, how to grab it and shut it up. Where's the necklace? Where's her necklace? Damon gave it to her. Maybe he has given his heart and his life to Elena but this single piece of him is hers. She gets off the bed, looking for it on the floor, under the furniture, in the shower, but it's nowhere to be found.
She doesn't even realize it's four in the morning when she leaves her room to look for the lost necklace. The streets are dark, except for a few lights here and there. The thuds the soles of her sneakers make on the cobblestones is almost scary. The lights of a taxi hit her briefly before leaving her alone again. A few male voices are heard laughing as they move in the opposite direction. Her heartbeat is thundering in her ears and in her veins. She's carelessly lighting up the lampposts of streets with the palm of her hand. And so what if they see her? From a parked car with the window down, where a couple is passionately kissing, comes a French song singing, "It may not save me, no, but I don't know what to do without you. Love me as one loves a friend that goes away forever. I want you to love me because I don't know how to love my own contour." She doesn't get half of it but the anxiety is only growing, and so is the panic, like a kid getting lost in crowd looking for their mom. She feels a lot like crying, like screaming into the silence.
She almost slips on the steps to the The Vert Galant, patting her hands on the grass where she'd rested under the weeping willow, tempted to plunge in the water of the river. At such an hour, in the black water she'll probably drown. Her hands raise above the water and lost trinkets start shooting up like a fountain with intricate choreography. Quite a few pieces of jewelry come up from the water — a wedding band, a sapphire earring, a silver bracelet with dangling coins — but none of them is her necklace and she lets them fall in the water again, following the flow of the river. If she lost it in the water it's gone already.
She watches the sun rising from the steps of the Saint Chapelle and with all its beauty coming alive and that willful look of a coquettish lover, for a moment Paris appears a treacherous mistress, laughing at her and forgetting her in favor of the next one to charm and abandon. "This is the extremely sexy pot calling the kettle black, Bon," Damon says sitting at her side on the cold steps. She turns her face to see him and she can picture him so well her heart stumbles in his irises.
Whose fault is this really? She was so sure she could move on, so sure she was above the miseries of human love that she could turn her back and ignore him. Well, she realizes watching Damon's smile, it turns out she can't.
The air in the first hours of the morning is chilly, but it's not that which chills her to the bone. It's the idea that she gave up the only thing that mattered like it meant nothing, and maybe, just maybe, if she had tried, she could have been happy. Maybe she just lost something that was hers because she didn't care to hold on to it.
She walks back to her B&B stubbornly, seeing no one, and when she lets herself into her room the sound of the piano makes her eyes burn. She locks the door to her room, her hand lingering on the handle and her power leaves her palm like an electric discharge, insulating the room.
"Now, if you want to skip immediately to the loud part of this encounter, I'm gonna sacrifice my fine sensitivities on the altar of your appetites and say yes," Damon's voice says at her back.
It's such a typical thing to say on his part, and if she turns around now she's gonna see him, that insolent face and those eyes, playful and so full impure promises. But she's tired of it and now she really has no choice but to move on, because she has lost even the last piece of him she had any right over. And now it's really the end.
She laughs and her tears spill over like she's been on the verge of crying for months, maybe years. She feels the wall of her defense crumble pitifully and she bends her head forward covering her face with both hands.
"No one's ever reacted this way to the idea of having sex with me," Damon says, half disappointed, half scared of such reaction. He reaches her in a couple of steps inside her small room. "What happened?" he asks softly, taking her by the shoulders to guide her against his chest, where she drenches the fabric of his shirt. "Who do I need to kill?" he asks tenderly, for good measure.
"Bon," he murmurs softly dropping a kiss on top of her head, "What's wrong?"
The reality of his touch, of his warmth around her, of his wounding tenderness startles her and she jerks away, taking a step back and accidentally ripping herself from the comforting, unexpectedly erotic sensation of his firm chest under the palm of her hands. The masculine scent of his skin mixed with leather and smoke, something primordial and passionate, makes her tremble a little. Damon's eyes cling to her figure like he's chaining her to the ground, willing her not to run again. He looks handsome, and a bit rough with a light shadow along his chiseled jaw and his firm shoulders and hard chest stretching a navy-blue shirt with long sleeves. The three buttons open at the base of his neck force her eyes to fall on his skin. Bonnie looks at him with wide eyes, trying to decide if she has finally gone mad. She suffocates a hiccough with a hand, which makes her feel even sillier, because he got her scared with how badly she wants him to hold her in his arms.
"Damon?" Her voice, a little strident, makes him sure she's about to start crying again.
"The one and only," he says, and he remembers that time Bonnie said those same words, when she came back from the other side and lifted that boulder that was squashing his heart down in the dust. And he thinks that this, this thing he came here for, should have happened back there instead of telling himself the comforting story of how his unchanging heart was forever bound to a girl he could never show the worst of it to.
Bonnie's reaction is to laugh and even though her tears keep falling she doesn't look desperate and on the verge of calling for her so that's good sign, he supposes. He can work with that.
She brushes away the tears on her cheeks using both hands, reddening her skin further.
"What are you doing here?" Bonnie asks, trying to compose herself. She's tired and confused, but most of all she's so beside herself with trepidation she cannot fathom an answer to that question, because she feels like she's about to come up for air after having been kept with her head underwater and the relief is so overwhelming she might actually think she's going to survive this, though she has no proof to support that theory.
"Well," he begins, hesitantly, "I could ask you the same thing." He looks at her, pinning her down with his blue eyes. "I specifically remember you accepting to be my best man, and be with me on my wedding day." He explains, crossing his arms over his chest.
The idea of his wedding, of him slipping the ring over Elena's finger, makes her skin grow colder, and yet she longs still for his arms around her. A feeling she ignores, like always.
"I was," she replies, with a façade of aplomb.
"A technicolor version of your ghost was."
"Same difference." She raises her chin and shrugs.
He can read in her eyes the bluff she's placing her bet on.
Damon switches his sarcastic act into somberness. His voice gets husky, and his eyes become tender, when he asks, "What exactly was so unbearable about me for you to leave like that?" And the question leaves her stunned.
His voice changes again as he looks for a reason. "My perfume was too strong? Huh? I can change that. You don't like my hair?" he asks, fingers passing through his thick black hair. "I can cut it. Does my wardrobe bore you? You can dress me up like a Barbie doll."
"What?" she can't help but smile at the silliness.
"Is it that I'm kind of an asshole which bothers you so much?" He shrugs. "Well, I can change. I can change it all." He promises despite knowing himself enough not to believe it. But for her, he can try his hardest.
"Don't be stupid," Bonnie says, looking at him patiently and shaking her head. "You like yourself too much to change a thing."
"You're the part of me I like best."
Bonnie bites the inside of her mouth, looking away in fear of giving away too much. He's there baring himself to her and after spending the night realizing her own idiocy, and what she has renounced in fear of losing it, she should be at least able to offer a little bit of honesty. To be finally free of this feeling that weighs her down, of this secret that's eating her up, if anything else.
"I like you too." She says. "There's nothing I want you to change." Not even the fact that he cheats at all the board games they usually play. Not even his maniacal fixation on chores and how he goes on and on ranting about his favorite floor detergent being discontinued.
"So why did you leave?"
"I shouldn't have." She's bitterly aware of the fact that things could have been different now.
"That doesn't answer my question."
"It doesn't matter." She shakes her head.
"I get to say what matters to me, Bon."
She sighs, pushing her hair back with both her hands, too tired to fight him and yet unable to confess the truth.
"Was it my choice of bride?" he asks, looking at her straight in the eyes, watching attentively for any little indication she might give away. Her frozen stance, the way her eyes look back at him, her soft lip disclosed.
"What do you want from me, Damon?" His question cuts through her. It feels violent. It feels violating. Because what if she says that that was exactly the reason why.
"That still doesn't answer the question," he insists.
She turns around to get away from him. "This is stupid." She says, unable to find anything else to say to that question. "You have to stop".
"Is it because you think I don't deserve her?" He taunts her, walking over and grabbing her by the arm to turn her around forcibly.
"What? No…" She finds herself looking up at him as he towers over her, the first bit of sunlight seeping into the room from the half closed blinds making his face look softer, almost angelic, an odd contrast to the tension in his body.
"So why?"
"I just…" She takes a step behind to put space between them, but he follows her. "I just…" He's half the predator he was as a vampire, but a bigger danger than ever. She can't even remember what she wanted to say.
"Tell me the truth, Bonnie," he says, his voice hoarse, deep, dripping between her legs in a haunting manner that makes her breathe hard. "I'm your best friend, you can tell me anything." She hits the wall at her back and pushes him away with both hands. He has enough mercy to let her. And that little space gives the faint illusion of safety.
"Did you like my gift?" he asks, and she suddenly remembers that she lost him the way she lost her necklace. Because she was a coward and kept him at a distance, and even if Damon is with her now, it doesn't matter much because he still belongs to another.
"Please," she says, half desperate the moment she breathes in the smell of his skin. She presses the heels of her hands over her eyes, trying to block him out but he grabs her wrists, pulling her arms back and pinning her against the wall.
Despite being the most powerful being on earth, she feels helpless. And naked.
"That was the closest thing to giving you myself I could think of." He looks down into her eyes with a sort of reverence she's never witnessed before. It's so raw, so stark, she can't think of anything else, not even the words he's saying, which start to drip into her consciousness with strain, long moments after he's articulated them. "I told myself having you back in Mystic Falls would have been enough for me to be happy, but it turned out it wasn't. I am not the kind of selfless man that could give you up for your own happiness, Bon. I am greedy, you know that." His forehead touches her as he lowers his face and continues talking in a whisper. "Dancing around each other won't do now, Bon. I don't have an eternity anymore, just about fifty years if I'm lucky, and I don't want to waste one single minute on anyone else." Damon's breath hits her lips and Bonnie stops breathing, scared he could shatter like a dream if she does. "I want you. Completely. All to myself. Starting now," he says, before kissing her forcibly. Like there's anything she wouldn't give him.
The moment he senses her abandon, he lets go of her wrists to hold her up against his chest and lets her envelope him with her arms and her legs.
Her fingers in his hair, at the base of his head distract him enough to let her interrupt the kiss to ask, "You didn't get married?" The time his brain needs to work the question out. He uses the moment to walk to her bed and lay her down. He doesn't answer, not before kissing her deeply, and letting one hand travel along her neck to find the patch of skin he likes the most and use his mouth on it. "I didn't," he confirms.
"Because of me?" The question sounds so silly. But Bonnie Sheila Bennett, heir to power and magic, strongest witch on earth, is fragile and insecure, and she needs to hear it.
He reluctantly stops kissing her, pulling his head back to look at her. At her glossy eyes, and her young face, and her tormented, puffy lips.
"Because of you," he says, huskily, lovingly. "I couldn't give up on you. Never." He adds, feeling the need to stop talking and resume his kissing, but giving priority to her need to be reassured that she is loved, that she is good and right and perfect.
She swallows the knot in her throat and asks, scared to hear the answer, "What about Elena?"
"What do you mean?"
They are on her bed, legs tangled up, lips burning with desire, talking about his ex-fiancée. And he'll follow this wasteful course of conversation as long as he gets to hold her.
"How is she? Does she hate me?"
What strikes him the most about this moment is the fact that though she's scared of losing her friend, she's not letting him go. Her hands are over his shoulders, fingers gripping at the muscles they find, and her eyes reveal no shame for the way they are laying together.
"No." He shakes his head reassuringly. "She's okay. We care about each other, but we realized were both going through with this terrible plan because we thought it was the right way to honor my brother. She was actually relieved when I told her I couldn't marry her."
"Really?" She smiles, her eyes bright with unshed tears of relief.
"Really." He confirms stamping a kiss on her plump lips.
"She even helped me find a flight to come here and look for you."
"That was nice of her," she says, needing to recognize her friend's merits, especially now that she has all she's ever wanted, even if it wasn't truly at her expense, even if she's taken nothing from her, because Damon is here in this bed even after she abandoned him twice, and gave him every reason to think she didn't love him.
"Very nice," he admits, willingly. "And about that. Why Paris? I appreciate the choice, especially now," he says, offering a playful smirk, "but it is usually a destination for lovers. I never thought I'd find you here and was rather surprised Donovan managed to track you down."
Her face changes and her eyes lower, avoiding him. His finger taps her chin. "Tell me."
"You won't like my answer."
"I bet you're right and you can rest assured I'll probably be petty, and a tad mean about it." And the more he looks at her the more he is aware of the truthfulness of his own words. "I daresay my being a dick will be directly proportional to my jealousy. But that counts even for the number of orgasms I intend to give you." His voice takes a threatening note despite his trying to keep the conversation light. "So, tell me."
He thought she would confess that she intended to find love on this trip, or maybe join a membership for some sex club she had already started to regularly attend since she'd arrived, but not what she answers instead.
"I came here for Enzo."
"I don't understand," he admits confused, grimacing. "He's still dead." His voice is dubious, wondering if she brought him back to life at some point in the last few months and never bothered to tell him.
"Yes," she confirms, "but I pulled him through, from heaven, whenever I wanted to see him. In the beginning I did it whenever I missed him or felt alone, but it started to happen every day. I called to him and he would come, and I would use him to isolate myself from the rest of the world, convince myself there was nothing this world could offer me because everything I wanted or needed was him." She feels the bite of guilt. "He knew I was lying but I was trying to convince him. I thought Paris would make him come back. He hasn't showed himself since…"
"Since what?"
"Since the day we had that fight, after you found out I was go away after the wedding."
"Damon," she calls his name when he freezes over her, eyes moving frantically as his brain works to find the meaning behind that. "Damon I'm sorry but—"
"You talked to him while you were with me?"
"Yes." She observes his hardening expression and feels the pull of his taught muscles under her fingers. She grabs them harder, holding on to him for dear life.
"You were right," he says, voice so tense she thinks he's going to break. "I don't like your answer, at all." She can see the effort it takes him to try to sound calm, though his eyes have gotten icy. His anger comes out in every microscopic expression change on his face, in the way that he's holding her, in the air that surround them. "But we'll have to postpone my revenge and your orgasms until after I've gotten my answers. Do you agree?"
#
Note: I know it has taken me awhile but I hope you've enjoyed it. Please leave a review, they do wonders to push me into writing more. If you want to support me you can do so by buying me a coffee over my profile at [/]paintedwithwords.
The song mentioned in this chapter is a classical piece called "Mariage d'amour" composed by Paul de Senneville who's recently passed, and "Voila" by Barbara Pravi, which is a song about the burning passion of an artist.